I was in Budapest for a few days, in March of 1990, to cover the U.S. national soccer team in a pre-World Cup friendly loss, 2-0, to Hungary. (A few days later I covered the Yanks in East Berlin; East Germany won 3-0.) So this was all just the other day. Back then, Hungary already […]

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We spent most of the day on a train. From Prague to Brno (in the Czech Republic) to Bratislava (in Slovakia) to the marvelously named Szob (in Hungary) to Vac to Budapest. It was fairly direct. Not a “crow flies” kinda straight line but one that takes into account that people might actually want to […]

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On October 31, 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther posted on a church door a list of 95 issues he thought the Roman Catholic church should address. That act, just short of 500 years ago, led to the Protestant Reformation — an event which changed Europe irrevocably and next month will be observed in […]

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Much can be said for Prague. It is a jewel of a city, small enough that most of the most popular bits of it can be seen in a single day, on foot, by the energetic visitor. It offers castles, museums, dramatic vistas from hilltop perches, a wide river, shopping from one end of the […]

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So, here we are in Prague, and we have no idea what anyone is saying. The locals, in the Czech Republic, speak Czech. Fair enough. It is a Slavic language spoken by about 10 million people, though it probably is closer to 6 million if 5 million speakers of Slovakian (mutually intelligible but not quite […]

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Not much time today in the Czech capital, given that we flew out of the south of France in mid-afternoon, changed planes in Paris and landed in Prague at about 8:30. (Where the airport is perhaps best known for being named after a poet, Vaclav Havel, who was president of the Czech Republic after the […]

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This is odd. When the French take vacations, they nearly always take them in late July and August, and they overwhelmingly take them in their own country. Which means those of us in the south of the country, where the dependable sun is, can expect a major influx of visitors from the north choking the […]

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No, it’s not just your imagination. Many of the 1.6 million residents of Barcelona can be a bit abrupt. A bit impatient. A bit aggrieved. Those conditions can be the product of decades and decades under the thumb (in their telling) of the Spanish capital, Madrid. More recently, it has been about the inundation, over […]

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I must have missed this. Some time over the past year or two London has become a post-cash society. Yes, a few holdouts can be found, mostly among immigrant-run businesses that don’t like the idea of credit cards. Such as the Chinese noodle house on Wardour Street, in Soho. A pot of tea had already […]

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That is what a person does. You go to London, you eventually make your way over to the West End and settle in at one of those grand old theaters and let someone sing and dance at you for two or three hours. We carried out that plan perhaps too aggressively.

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