Author Archives: arleebug54

This won’t be a travel piece. This will be a homage to two very special people in my life who left the planet in the fall of 2021. If you want to go on a short geographic excursion today, just … Continue reading →

Everyone knows the Brandenburg Gate, that iconic symbol of Berlin, known in German as Das Brandenburger Tor. You can see a detail of it on the front page of this blog. But it wasn’t until I started looking more deeply … Continue reading →

The travel muse has been on holiday for much of the past year, sitting on some tropical veranda sipping some adult beverage and waiting for this challenging season of lockdowns and quarantines to pass. I’ve been applying myself to studying … Continue reading →

If I were to try to explain my relationship with my father, I would have to fall back on that useful and time-honored Facebook status phrase, “It’s complicated.” To his everlasting credit, however, at approximately the mid-1950s time period represented … Continue reading →

It’s December 15th here in Berlin, and tomorrow we start a hard lockdown, or, I should say, we start another hard lockdown, where all shops except basically groceries and pharmacies will be closed up tight. My friends in the Netherlands … Continue reading →

The days are shortening and the temperatures are dropping – on this side of the Atlantic at least. T and I took advantage of a mild early fall and a seeming absence of coronavirus spikes to make a quick trip … Continue reading →