Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

  Every single Sunday afternoon for the last 30 years, come rain or come shine, an elderly lady in Harlem opens her home to complete strangers. Within a few hours all of us, sitting on rickety chairs, scattered around her apartment, have become good friends. The woman is Marjorie Elliott and her love project, in memory of her dead sons, is to celebrate life through jazz music.  It started in 1992. Her first son died on a Sunday and the Sunday concerts, which she arranged soon after, were a way for her to live through the pain, sorrow, and grief. - Sundays are the days, I look forward to. They are the reason, I am still alive, she told me when I, many years ago, visited her place for the first time.  Since then, yet another son has died and her third son disappeared a few years ago and has never been found. Still, the celebration of life continues at Marjorie's, and you need no tickets to participate.  There are no door charges nor any drink minimum. You just show up ...

One thing about New York which always amaze us is how it is constantly changing. Look away for what seems like an instant, and - bam - the view has completely changed! Having been away for just a few years, an entirely new part of the city has grown up in the backyard of the apartment in Chelsea, where we have stayed during our last visits. The area is called Hudson Yards and it's the largest private real-estate development in US history spanning seven blocks from 30th to 34th street between 10th and 12th avenue It is still far from finished, but from our windows, we can now see the rising spires in this brand new  area When we last visited New York in 2016 the area looked like this The first tower - 10 Hudson yards - was months away from opening and the rest of the building sites were just marked by the regiments of cranes Now it looks like this - 10 Hudson Yards is now almost hidden behind other highrises forming a tiara of towering glass at the northern end of the High Line park...

Walking into the dark and quite gloomy McSorley's in New York's East Village is almost like returning home.  The old ale house lies just next to the beat-up (and VERY cheap!) hotel, where we - as young kids - used to stay a lot, when we began coming to NYC. Now we're back and even though NYC is constantly changing (and our sleeping quarters  today are mightily improved!), McSorley's remains the same The walls are still filled with old posters, photos, and mementos, most of them put up more than 170 years ago, and the floor is still covered with scattered sawdust to take care of the spills from the large quantities of cheap beer being handed along. And more important. In a world of baffling choices, inside McSorley's the choice is easy - light or dark? Here you don't have to confront the multiple lists of artisan beers you find in many modern brewpubs. McSorley's only serves their own two brews - a light ale and a dark ale We sit at our usual table which soon...

Have you ever dreamt of leading a band of a thousand bagpipers, followed by several battalions of marching soldiers and some hundred baton twirling cheerleaders, while massive crowds were cheering you on? Probably not, but today I actually lived this crazy dream at the huge New York City Saint Patrick's Day Parade.  It happened when I found myself walking down the middle of  Fifth Avenue next to Eric Adams, the recently elected mayor of the city  (Sidebar to Danish readers: While a Danish mayor will hardly be recognized outside city council - a NYC mayor is a mega powerwatt celebrity, who is  constantly appearing everywhere like a political Energizer Bunny - always surrounded by huge crowds of helpers, security people and hangers-on) Anyway. Truth be told - it wasn't just Eric and me marching in front of the parade!   I had followed some fellow journalists through the heavily guarded police barricades and now my colleagues were busy at wor...

During our recent wanderings in Paris, we  - quite unexpectedly - had an apartment 'jumping upon us' when we happened to look at the window of a real estate agent. The displayed apartment was tiny but manageable - and most important: It was in our favorite area of the 18th arrondissement with a rooftop terrace and the most fantastic view across the iconic grey zinc roofs of Paris up towards the Sacre Coeur. We contacted the agent and visited the apartment, we stood on the terrace and enjoyed the view, we talked to our bank at home and we thought hard for the next few days, but -  eventually - we gave it up! It was too nerve-racking to buy the very first Paris property, we had ever looked at. We felt we needed to have a further look around.  Now - weeks later, we fear this apartment might actually turn out to have been the best find we will ever have inside our possible price bracket.  Regardless of possible regrets - 'our' apartment is way gone. In the overheated rea...

  Am I surrounded by crackpots or concerned citizens? Probably a bit of both.  But one thing is certain. The people marching the streets of Paris this Saturday are mad as hell and the throngs of policemen and gendarmes in full riot gear, constantly running and shifting positions, seem ready to attack every moment. The demonstrators, who have taken to the streets every Saturday since the end of July, are opposing the French 'health pass' which is required if you want to access restaurants, museums, cinemas, and inter-city train travel. To get the pass, people need to be fully vaccinated, have a recent negative test, or have proof they recently recovered from the virus.   The marchers, I talk to, say they are here because they do not want to be "guinea pigs" for new vaccines. Some, who had already been vaccinated, see the imposition of the French health pass as a "disguised obligation to vaccinate" and the perceived start of a "control society...

During the summer of the Great Terror - in June and July of 1794 - the guillotine on what is now Place de l'Île de la Réunion,  worked almost day and night. More than 1300 'enemies of the Revolution' were beheaded.  At the time, the fates of the headless corpses were kept secret to avoid outcry, but a brave woman dared to follow the cart, which was transporting her father's body and she found out it passed through a gate into a walled-in, secluded convent garden just a few hundred meters from the guillotine. Here the bodies, men and women, adults and children, aristocrats and commoners, all alike, were dumped together into two vast mass graves.  A few years later the convent garden was bought by grieving relatives and you can to this day walk inside, even though so few people visit that we actually startled the woman, who is guarding the place. While all traces of horror is long gone from the busy Place de l'Île de la Réunion, here in the Picpus cemetery, you can st...

  The last two weeks have been pretty sprinkled with even more pretty. We took off from Paris to visit Normandy and we have now seen untold numbers of romantic villages and towns filled with pastel-colored half-timbered houses garnered with hollyhocks. After having lived in Paris close to Porte de Stalingrad with its graffiti-tagged concrete facades, its elevated metro tracks, and its many drug addicts and heavily armored policemen, it has been almost a culture shock to be surrounded by all this niceness. Our base has been in Rouen, which we before we came to visit, knew almost nothing about - except it being the town, where Jeanne d'Arc was burned at the stake almost six hundred years ago. We did pass the last remaining, forbidden tower from the castle, where Jeanne was held prisoned, and interrogated - and we walked across the Place du Vieux-Marché, where she was burned - only 19 years old.  But, in contrast to its dark past, Rouen turned out to be an absolutely lovely ...