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

On the far outskirts of Eastern London, a weathered sign in front of a ramshackle warehouse reads "God's Own Junkyard" in flickering neon letters. Here Dick Bracy, known as 'Neon Man', more than 40 years ago began shaping - and collecting - neon signs in all forms and colors. Many of them for the sex shops and strip bars on the seedier side of London Soho. He even got so famous that some of his signs appeared in movies like 'Eyes Wide Shut' and 'Blade Runner'. Dick Bracy died in 2014. His son now runs the warehouse, which opens to the public on weekends, and when you walk inside you find yourself in an almost impenetrable jungle of humming tubes of light. Old advertising signs share space with sculptures made from discarded neon pieces. Everything is slightly too much, and somehow that is exactly right. Some of the signs are still working. Others have gone dark or are missing letters or are doing something in between that produc...

Last night we happened to find a new favorite hangout in East London. The Bohemia Night Market is a vibrant set of microbreweries, bars, DJ sets, and street food vendors, which has recently settled into some old, gloriously grungy, abandoned garages below the highline at Hackney Central train station.   In the coming weekends, this black-owned market will be filled with mostly young people spinning around to Afrobeats, Dancehall, Amapiano, Funk, Soul,  and more.  And - as was our main focus last night: Having some lovely street food and a few pints of brews. The party probably lasted way into the early morning hours. At that time, though, we were well into our beds.

While Michael is out roaming around Greater London, I spend a lot of time at the locks on Regents Canal, which runs just a block from the flat in Islington, where we are staying.  I often walk along the canal but mostly, I just sit, doing some reading or some knitting. There is always something to look at, ponder about, or be entertained by. Yesterday when I was sitting on my bench, a man set up his fishing gear, threw the line, and shortly after caught what turned out to be a perch.  It was a fight for him to get it ashore, but he put it immediately back into the canal.  When I asked him why, he told me he had been fishing at this bank since he was 12. In his younger days, he needed meals. Now he was just doing it for sport, and he showed me how and where to place oneself while fishing according to the stream, the noise, and the wind. The story of his life came after this information. He was a builder and told me he was quite relaxed. The only people he didn’t like...

Yesterday we embarked on a pilgrimage to London's White Cube Gallery to view the 'Finnegan's wake' - the new exhibition of work by German artist Anselm Kiefer.  Passing through the pristine antechamber of the White Cube, all glowing white plaster and polished concrete, felt like approaching some great cathedral.  Entering the first gallery space, we were plunged suddenly into an ashen underworld.  Kiefer's large-scale paintings hung on the walls like ancient tomb paintings, muted greys and blackened earth tones layered in his signature impasto style.  Moving through the exhibition, we wandered as if lost in a labyrinth made of fire and rubble. Images of scorched earth evoked the horrors of Europe's 20th-century history. Other canvases featured more vertiginous and vaulting imagery, but even these more aspirational paintings were rendered in ashen, elegiac tones as if any dream of transcendence was foreclosed.  Throughout, Kiefer's use...

Un instant de rêve et de pause. This is the text on a signpost in the little village of Antraigues-Sur-Volane in the south of France, where we have a townhouse. Almost every spring, we start our season of travels with a shorter or longer stay, and this year our moments of dreaming and pausing have been plentiful, as we have had almost six weeks of blistering sunny days separated by sudden torrential rainstorms and thunder, which have boomed between the mountains. Yesterday our lazy days were over.  We raced up through France and across the channel with the TGV and Eurostar - and now we are back in one of our favorite megacities in the whole wide world:  Fabulous ever-swinging London! In our mountain village, we have about 300 neighbors and we're on greets with most when we pass them on our daily, leisurely walks Now we are surrounded by millions of anonymous Londoners. Many are hurrying past in the busy neighborhood of Islington, where we are staying for the next several weeks...

  Is there actually a place more beautifully strange than Venice in the winter? The tourists have gone home. The streets are quiet in the way that streets in a city of this size are almost never quiet, and when we walk across the small bridges and along the alleys this weekend, the only sounds are rain on cobblestones and our own footsteps. We are doing the giro d'ombre this evening; moving between the small wine bars that serve cicchetti , the Venetian version of tapas, with an ombra , which is a glass of wine so small it feels like a suggestion. Baccalà on polenta. Calamares. The rain outside the window. We are in no hurry. Walking back along the canals later, the water goes completely flat and the lights from the old buildings sit in it perfectly, upside down, as if there is a second Venice below the surface going about its own business. A city built entirely for tourists turns out to be at its best when the tourists have left it in peace. We are, technically, tourists. But...

After several months on hectic Montmartre, the last couple of weeks have been completely relaxing. We're living on a houseboat on the Seine - nestled in between Ile de la Jatte and Boulevard Boudon - in the northwestern part of Paris. The area - Neuilly-sur-Seine - is among the most affluent in all of Paris and some of the houseboats moored along the quai are almost as big as aircraft carriers, but not our little raft. It is petite, but it has everything you need - a small bath room, an even smaller galley and a bunkbed we can rise up with a pulley, when we need the space for sitting down  - and most important:  It has a deck, where we can stay all day,  sketching and reading and watching the scullers g lide by Everything is constructed by our generous host Captain Bob, who leads an exciting life - half the year on a (somewhat grander) houseboat next to ours, the other half in the Rockies, where he has invented a sport he calls 'Ski Frisbee'  (  https://youtu.be...

For the last several weeks we have lived on Montmartre and when we have walked the streets, we have actually walked in the footsteps of Van Gogh, Modigliani, and Picasso. Even though the most prolific painters on present-day Montmartre are the ones hitting on visitors coming to  the infamous tourist trap Place du Tertre, Rita has found inspiration in this 150-year-old artist community and taken up the water coloring she used to do a lot in her youth Last night, she even went to a live model drawing class in the basement of one of our local dive bars, and before going, she was pretty worried,  that she  would be the most inexperienced in the class: The last time I made drawings of live models was more than thirty years ago, and I felt completely rusty, but it turned out the participants in this class were at all different levels and I actually did some work that I dared show to the others. Our model was a beautiful, slim Bulgarian girl with a lot of curly hair. She w...

Living in Paris for the last months has been living a vast, moveable feast. Spending that much time in one place, you could expect you came to know this place intimately, but we have almost every day walked completely fantastic streets, alleys, squares, and parks which we had never visited before (or even heard of!).  This city - and its possibilities - seems to be endless. While wandering its streets, we found so many hidden, quirky spots, which you rarely read about in guide books, we decided to place our findings on a map.  In this way, our friends, who come to visit Paris, can see suggestions for surprising experiences off the beaten track. Putting them out here will eventually make them not so secret anymore - mais c'est la vie!   https://tinyurl.com/4mhyc7w6 link to our google map of cool, quirkey, often hidden, places in Paris, N.ew York and C.openhagen (the places marked in red will be worth a detour) ----------------------------- E...