One Way to go

In July, the city of Paris followed a tradition that began in Lyon to put 10,000 bicycles at 750 points around the city for people to use. It's called Velib. With a mere swipe of your credit card you can rent a bicycle for a short trip. Bicycles come equipped with a basket to hold your supplies, a lock, generator-operated light, reflectors and 3 gears! Use requires getting an inexpensive access card that provides 30 minutes of free time. After that, the cost is about E 2 per hour. The goal is to enocourage bike riding for short distances. You can pick-up and return the bicycles at any station. There are regular maintenance checks to keep things in order. There is a service that cruises the locations and checks tires and cleans the bikes. So far, it seems to be a hit with tourists and the general population. We see them eveywhere in central Paris. The plan is to double the number of bikes and locations by year-end. I have trouble imagining anything like it in NY - the closest we have are Zip Cars!

Using typically Parisian logic, the applications for the access card are available at Metro stations an PASTRY SHOPS only at the moment.

Paul and I haven't tried them YET! But it's on Chris' agenda.

It's A Tight Squeeze

In Rome, everything is a tight squeeze--the streets are that narrow and that old! Walking driving and parking present daily challenges that had us often shaking our heads and thankful that it wasn't us negotiating our way in a car. The locals, however, seem to take it all in stride, patiently moving over that extra inch that makes the difference. There's very little horn honking, everyone just accomodates because I'm sure that they've all found themselves in similar circumstances!

Being here reminded us about our first driving trip through Europe and the adventures of Paul negotiating his way backwards down a lane that wasn't meant to be driven on! Needless to say, we prefer pedestrian travel!


September, 2007

Why are you going to Paris again, for six weeks!

Paris again? You're going for six weeks? Why not try some place else?

These are questions our friends ask us and that we ask ourselves. When we were in Rome last week we seriously discussed the possibility of going there or somewhere else instead of Paris. I have a strong bias towards cities and there are a number of world-class cities we could visit. Compared to Paris, cost is not a major issue with any of them. To me, the list of world class cities begins with New York and Paris followed by London and Rome and maybe a few others. After that, there is a break before a large group of nice cities that I would love to visit; but not spend six weeks.

The issue for me is that I want to go away for long enough to really feel like we're living there, not just visiting and sightseeing. I want to get up each morning, not with a checklist of things I to do before leaving, but with the thought that I just want to enjoy the day in the best way I can. That can mean just getting a baguette and a newspaper and sitting and watching the people go by; or it can mean going to see a wonderful show at a museum. It all depends on the day and what's available.

When we arrive in Paris, it's like coming home. We're like kids rushing to our favorite store to buy the bread and cheese we love. We spend hours going over Pariscope to see what's happening at the cabarets, museums and movie theaters and we start going over the Michelin and Pudlo restaurant guides to decide where we will be eating - old favorites and new. And, Chris starts planning her trips to the market - think of 10 Union Squares arranged end to end with incredible variety. They have more kinds of mushrooms, potatoes and beans than we ever dreamt of. We're much more organized here than we are in NY! I can't explain it but it's like being home. We love to walk the streets, miles of them. There's so much to do we feel like we're "bathing" in Paris. We know we won't get to it all, but we're also never bored. There's always next year.

I would be willing to go just about anywhere for a week, maybe two; but compared to New York or Paris I can't imagine staying any longer.

September 20/07

The del Balsos are in Rome

We just arrived in Rome and spent the day walking around and immersing ouorselves in Roma! What a difference from France (or Germany or the UK for that matter)! Here everything just comes at you in waves of smells and tastes and language and TRASH! I've been here maybe 10 times for short stays, mostly on business. Every time I leave with a sense of having been welcomed with open arms. The people you meet just want to help you find what you need or want. There's a strong sense they feel sorry for you that you don't live here and they just want to help the less fortunate.

In France, Germany and the UK everything (or as much as they can manage) is neat and organized and cared for. The paradigm is the neat English or French garden or the German window box. There is also a sense that the visitor is less fortunate, but the effect is more one of disdain than welcoming (NY has some of this sense too).

We are staying in a small Inn near the Spanish Steps (about 10 feet!). It's charming with a lovely roof garden for breakfast and evening cocktails. It's very centrally located in walking distance from all of central Rome and the night noises make us feel like we're in our own apartment. We're on the Via Condotti (the Madison Avenue of Rome) which begins at the Spanish Steps. It's a Saturday and the hordes of tourists are somewhat disconcerting. Everything in Rome is all jumbled up together. You leave the Via Condotti and turn a corner and you come upon the Panthenon, built in 40BC(!) and still open to the public! Another block or two and we're at the 16th century Piazza Navona filled with artists, fountains and cafes (and benches!) then turned the corner and came to the Campo del Fiore (60 BC) where there's still a market every morning. In between these major sites every block was filled with little shops and interesting buildings. Romans still live and work in all these neighborhoods. Chris, of course, had to look into every shop and building along the way. It takes a long time to get anywhere but what great way to see the city.

We're here for only three more days before we go to Paris and are thoroughly enjoing ourselves. It's a real change from New York and Paris. This is like standing in a waterfall with sensations crashing out at you from every direction.

September 15, 2007

BLT Market, again

We went to BLT Market again tonight. It's our second time since it opened this summer. We liked it so much we changed our reservation for today (with Scott and Jory) from one of our other favorites, Sfoglia on the EUS. This will be our last dinner before we leave for Paris on Friday or six weeks . This really made us think about what makes a "good" restaurant--one that we would want to.

At the very least it has to have good food and an interesting menu. BLT Market qualifies on both counts. Chris and I "fought' about whether her Starter of "Soft Shell Crab with Grilled Local Corn" was as good as my "Langoustine with Arborio Risotto" (it wasn't!) or her "Veal and Pork Meat Balls with Garlic Pomodoro Sauce" were as good as my Daily Special "5 Spiced Glazed LI Duckling" (it also didn't cut it). The sign of a good menu is the number of items we want to order but don't - for example they have a delicious sounding "Stuffed Amish Chicken Provencale" that sounds delicious but keeps getting superseded by the daily special. An interesting menu and high quality food is critical, but not enough to make us come back. The restaurant also needs a a really good ambiance. BLT Market has very comfortable tables, windows that open to the street and for right now at least an exceptionally attentive staff. This restaurant has only been open a month but even sow, we probably couldn't have gotten a reservation if it wasn't Rosh Hashanah.

All in all, we think this a really good restaurant. Not fancy, but with an excellent menu, well prepared and served by an attentive staff. This makes the 6th BLT restaurant in NY. We're not fans of the others because they seem too "trendy" and gimmicky. However, tonight will make the third time we've been here since it opened. A good choice before we leave for Paris tomorrow.

BLT Market

Ritz-Carlton Hotel
1430 Sixth Ave. (CPS)
212-521-6125

Tess Gerritsen - The Mephisto Club

Book description

In this brisk, deftly plotted thriller from bestseller Gerritsen (Vanish), Boston medical examiner Maura Isles and police detective Jane Rizzoli look into the murder of 28-year-old Lori-Ann Tucker, whose body is found Christmas morning in her apartment amid an unholy mess of severed limbs, black candles and satanic symbols rendered in blood. "Peccavi," reads one word scrawled across Tucker's wall—Latin for "I have sinned." Isles and Rizzoli must sort sinner from innocent among suspects who can be found on several continents and include a group of sophisticates—scholars, an anthropologist, a psychiatrist—who are either cult members or crusaders against evil straight from the pages of Revelation. Other murders follow, all gruesome, all involving apocalyptic messages. On occasion, the action shifts to Europe, to a young woman running from a man she's convinced is descended from a race of fallen angels. Gerritsen has a knack for stretching believability just short of the breaking point—and for amassing details that produce an atmosphere in which the most terrible possibilities can and, indeed, should occur.

John Harvey - Darkness & Light

Book Description

In Harvey's engaging third British procedural to feature retired policeman Frank Elder (after 2005's Ash & Bone), Elder grudgingly agrees to try to find Claire Meecham, the older, widowed sister of a friend of his ex-wife's. While poking through the missing woman's Nottingham bungalow, Elder finds nothing untoward other than evidence that Claire was not quite so uninterested in sex, and possible new relationships, as her younger sister believed. Soon after, Elder is surprised when Claire turns up in her home dead, looking at peace, carefully dressed and laid out in the manner of a woman who met a similar fate years earlier"and whose killer was never caught. Elder's probe of this murder leads him down several blind alleys even as it forces him to re-examine uncomfortable aspects of his own past. Fans of PBS's Mystery will find Harvey's novel, with its scattering of contemporary English slang, a genial read.

Charles Lohr - The Chess Machine

Book Description...

German writer Löhr resurrects a chess-playing automaton in his generously imagined debut novel. Set in 1770, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen of Hungary, anxious to win the favor of Empress Maria Theresia, builds an engineering marvel: the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton. The Turk, though, isn't exactly as it seems; hidden inside is Italian chess prodigy (and dwarf) Tibor Scardenelli, hired by Kempelen to secretly control the contraption during its debut match in front of the empress. Tibor, a devout Catholic, is hesitant to partake in the scam and insists he will quit after the match. The game goes off without a glitch, but Court Mechanician Frederich Knaus is suspicious of the Turk and convinces his lover, Galatea, to spy on Kempelen. Tension mounts as the Turk gains notoriety and is requested to perform at a ball celebrating the union of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Tibor agrees to a repeat performance (at a higher fee), but when a baroness is found dead after the match and traces of her rouge are found on the Turk, rumors of the "Curse of the Turk" spread and may be Kempelen's undoing. Though the narrative could use a light pruning, Löhr's eye for period detail and cast of eccentrics create an immersive and mirthful experience

Charles Cumming - A Spy by Nature

Book Description...

Loosely based on the author's real-life experience of having been recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1995, Cumming's supremely intelligent and utterly readable debut will delight fans of such British masters of spy fiction as John le Carré, Robert Ludlum and Len Deighton. Alec Milius, a 24-year-old marketing consultant for a tiny London company that solicits business people in central and eastern Europe to advertise in a dubious publication called Central European Business Review, welcomes the chance to join the SIS, which after an exhausting selection process places him as a support agent with a British oil company. Alec initially thrives in his new job, but as he becomes increasingly entangled in his mission, he begins to face unexpected dangers as well as the loss of his identity. Smartly paced and intricately plotted, Cumming's decidedly unglamorous look at industrial espionage provides plenty of elaborate deceits, double crosses and other trappings of a first-class spy thriller.

Barbara Cleverly - The Last Kashmiri Rose

Paul's comments
I love historical mysteries set in interesting places. She does a great job on both India and a credible mystery

Book description

In an impressive debut, British author Cleverly weaves an engrossing tale of serial murder and the impending decline of the British Empire into a well-written fair-play mystery set in 1920s India. Commander Joe Sandilands, a Scotland Yarder completing a stint with the Bengal Police, is on his way back home when the provincial governor asks him to look into the recent death-by-suicide of an army officers young wife. Nancy Drummond, a close friend of the dead woman, reveals that four other officers wives have also died¢apparently by accident or misadventure¢over a period of 12 years, all in the month of March. Sandilandss investigation reveals further disturbing similarities; the cause of death in each case was the victims greatest phobia, and an unknown person has marked the anniversaries of their passing by placing a Kashmiri rose on their graves. With Drummond as his assistant and love interest, the detective probes beneath the surface of a society attempting to replicate pre-WWI England in a very different milieu. The political tensions of the time are more than mere background dressing, while the clash of cultures is instrumental to the plot. The likable and plausible Sandilands and other characters, both British and Indian, come across as living, breathing people. The killers motivation proves to be more baffling than his identity, but the solution is satisfying, as is Sandilandss handling of the ethical issues that his uncovering of the truth has raised. Classic whodunit fans should look forward to Cleverlys future efforts.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Incescription

Barbara Cleverly - The Damascened Blade

Paul's comments

A good mystery set in a fascinating time.

Book description


Devotees of classic Golden Age whodunits will delight in British author Cleverly's third Joe Sandilands mystery set in India in 1922; it evokes, and in some ways surpasses, the work of Agatha Christie. The resourceful and insightful Sandilands assumes a glorified babysitting assignment when a rich and attractive American heiress expresses a desire to tour India's dangerous northwest frontier with Afghanistan during a period of heightened political tension. The heiress and Sandilands end up at a frontier outpost with a motley collection of companions—a Pathan prince and his kinsman, a female doctor en route to serve the amir ruling Afghanistan, a sleazy entrepreneur, an RAF pilot hoping to gain support for an increased military aerial presence and a veteran civil servant advocating a British retreat. When the prince is found dead, evidence suggesting foul play is suppressed. Sandilands is forced to act on his suspicions when the victim's kinsman takes a hostage and imposes a one-week deadline for a solution to the crime. Cleverly does a masterful job of combining traditional puzzle elements, including false endings and subtle fair-play clues, with convincing period atmosphere and characters with more complexity and sophistication than Christie typically provided. This marvelous historical delivers on the promise of the author's first two mysteries—The Last Kashmiri Rose

Ian Rankn - A Question of BloodBloo

Book description

The 14th novel to feature the always compelling (and, as his name suggests, perpetually puzzling) John Rebus begins with what seems to be a uniquely American crime: a madman enters a school and starts shooting, killing two students and wounding a third before turning the gun on himself. But we're in Rankin country-a perpetually damp and morally bankrupt Edinburgh-with Rebus and Siobhan Clarke searching for the real story behind what seems an act of sheer madness. This immensely satisfying police procedural has plenty of forensic science, but Rebus knows that "none of it might make them any the wiser about the only question that mattered....The why." Why did Lee Herdman, a drop-out of the U.K. version of the Special Forces, go on a rampage? Why was James Bell, the son of a self-righteous Scottish M.P., merely wounded? And why are two Army investigators sniffing around the case? A subplot has Rebus himself under suspicion of murder: a minor criminal is found dead, burned in an apartment fire, and Rebus shows up with heavily bandaged hands the next morning. The detectives encounter every stratum of contemporary Scottish society, from angry teenage toughs and petty criminals to the privileged and the powerful. It's a complex narrative, perhaps too much so at times, but the plot is less important than Rebus himself, a brilliantly conceived hero who is all too aware of his own shortcomings. In an essentially amoral society, his moral compass is always pointed steadily towards the truth

Ian Rankin - Set in Darkness

Book description

In the 12th novel in the increasingly engaging Inspector Rebus series (Knots and Crosses; Dead Souls; etc.), Gold Dagger award-winner Rankin has woven a plot grittier and tighter than ever. When a body, long dead, is found on the site of the new Scottish Parliament and is soon followed by another, fresher kill, this time that of a leading candidate for the new governing body, Rebus is convinced of a connection between the two. Det. Siobhan Clarke witnesses a third death, the suicide of a surprisingly wealthy homeless man; the question of where his wealth came from seems related to the other deaths. Clarke, a determined young woman trying to make her way in the male world of police work, is a refreshing, complex addition to this series. Meanwhile, Big Ger Cafferty, arch foe of our hero, has been released from jail; he's terminally ill (or is he?) and apparently wants some quality time with Rebus in his final hours. By incorporating other strong characters, Rankin has saved the series from burrowing too far into the maudlin introspection associated with Rebus's drinking problem. Topical Scottish nationalism and the new Parliament, along with Rankin's consistently fascinating view of Edinburgh's seedy side, give the novel interest beyond its plot. And the plot is worthy of the series: raging and racing and teetering on the edge of falling apart, before Rankin slams the reader with a final masterful twist