Racing along the fogbound coast of Connecticut — or we may have already entered Rhode Island, I don’t know — and I have to say: the performance of this Amtrak Acela Express train is quite nice. It’s not quite as snappy as the high-speed trains in Europe (we’re behind schedule: surprise, surprise) but it’s cozy, we’re moving now at a good clip and you don’t have any of the airport BS to deal with. Ought to be more of this…
I should have known that coming to all these Olde World cities was going to result in paranormal activity. But after a full day of tromping around Berlin, there’s no escaping our collective past. And in Berlin, that past is even more present than it was in Prague. From the Nazi atrocities to the communist oppression that followed, Berlin is chock full of heinous pasts. And as nice and modern as so much of this city is now, the reminders…
Speaking of eerie vibes: we’re passing through Dresden, Germany, right now and all I can think of is that Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It was here in Dresden on a night in 1945 that Allied warplanes dropped so many bombs at one time that it created a firestorm, incinerating more civilians than we did a short while later with the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. It was an event chronicled by Kurt Vonnegut in his classic novel, “Slaughterhouse…