BUCKEYES IN EUROPE -- TEN OBSERVATIONS GREAT AND SMALL

BUCKEYES IN EUROPE 2006 ALL STAR PICTURE WEB ALBUM NOW READY

To view these fantastic shots, go to Buckeyes in Europe All Star Edition.

These pictures, a third of my full arsenal of great shots taken in 2006 on our Buckeyes in Europe tour, include engaging shots of London, Amsterdam, Spain, France and Italy.

It was in Italy, the real destination of my adventure that I rediscovered my Italian heritage by visiting the two small town's in the State of Puglia where my parents were born. My father Michele left the rugged, rocky town of San Marco in Lamis in the Gargano area at age 12, while my mother at age seven left Faeto, a medieval city perched atop a mountain that overlooks the lush, productive plains that stretch to the Adriatic Sea.

Here they met, married and raised three sons in the peaceful, patriot and tolerant City of Springfield, Ohio. Born into the Italian working class, they used their hands, ingenuity and Italian determination to build a successful flora business that thrived despite a World War that pitted Italy against America, which in turn presented difficult choices for naturalized Italians to make.

London and Amsterdam were scrumptious appetizers to Italy, our multi-course main meal, while Spain and France served as two colorful deserts and fine wines. Always on the look out for beauty, whimsy and the distinct, I think the focus of my photographer's eye in these images caught something special. Relax, there are only 300 fabulous shots; let your eyes balls do the driving over this digital pavement so your mind can relax and enjoy. Pass them on to friends and family. JMS

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BUCKEYES IN EUROPE – TEN OBSERVATIONS GREAT AND SMALL

1) GROCERY SHOPPING – Back in my suburban, single-family detached condominium in Columbus in Central Ohio, I find myself walking, not driving, to the nearest big-box grocery store, as I figure out how to continue a style of living we enjoyed and employed in Europe to the suburban sprawl that surrounds us with much space but few shops accessible by walking.

Having made the trek recently to our nearest big-box store to pick up a few needed items, I found myself distinctly let down by the corporate vastness that big-box store shopping has become in the Divided States of America (DSA). Ambling from one department to another within the warehouse-sized venue Americans are accustomed to shopping in today, my sense of adventure and excitement were catastrophically diminished compared to what we experienced in the European Union recently, where a walk down any street, it seemed, would reveal a cornucopia of shops, great and small, that were run by individuals and families. This stands in stark contrast to the DSA’s impersonal corporate systems that thinly camouflage their indifference to individuals by hanging giant paper-thin pictures of grinning actor-employees and by foisting on you at the entrance a person whose says “welcome to…” but whose heart is clearly laboring under the forced expression of kindness.

We saw no such greeters in the EU who “welcomed” each customer to their store like a Disney animatronic might do; and to our great relief, we never once suffered from our waiter [and in the EU, the profession is populated by men] coming to our table every five minutes to ask if “everything was OK.” . .

Any one of the many community markets we saw on our recent sojourn through five EU countries we visited would have put to shame any of the food sections in any of our nearby big-box stores.

Here in the DSA we enter one store that has everything. In the EU, where big-box stores are few and far between [intentionally so, mind you] and decidedly less big than stores here, the excitement of shopping from one store and street to another is not only worth the investment in time but is added to by the thrill of finding more shops of interest along the way.

Walking down from my concrete front porch onto the asphalt-covered street in front of our small, cottage-style home, I am disappointed that my walk, while calming in some ways because it will be along mostly landscaped grassy buffer zones, will not live up to the eye candy of the shops galore we experienced throughout the EU.

In London, Paris and Roma, we found a couple American-style grocery stores that had carts and cashiers like here but the carts were small and the isles were as narrow as the streets outside. And unlike Wal-Mart [some call it China-Mart, for good reason], where some Bentonville, Arkansas, decision maker thinks shoppers should push around Hummer-sized carts so they won’t want for space in which to put all their purchases, the generally modest groceries we visited still had an atmosphere of intimacy to them. Space here seems to be inexhaustible, while there it is finite and carefully considered.

2) FRESH PRODUCE – As I learned across the EU, one fundamental difference between our stores and theirs is that unlike here, where cashiers weigh produce, in stores there the shopper weighs and labels their own produce, which eliminates the need for cashiers to do it. This seems to speed up check out because it creates a shared shopping task between store and the customer.

3) PAPER, PLASTIC OR BRING YOUR OWN -- Likely the result of labor union negotiations with store owners in the EU [where labor unions among some worker groups are still big and powerful], many cashiers in the EU sit down at their posts, whereas retail clerks in the DSA generally are forced to stand as they pass products over scanners and put them in bags. In the EU, putting your purchases in bags was your responsibility. Many shoppers there know to bring their own mesh bags with them, while here we arrive expecting to walk out with as many bags, paper or plastic, as we wish. One of the challenging questions in the DSA today, in addition to how many pieces of pepperoni a pizza top can hold [not unlike the philosophical discussion of centuries past about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin], is whether you want “paper or plastic” to put your purchases in. The correct answer to this Hobson’s choice question is, of course, both. A cashier recently put a paper bag [with no handles] inside a plastic bag [with handles], which allowed me to walk back home and carry my canned goods without fear of one of the bags tearing along the way.

Plastic bags there are considerably thinner than ours and are given out sparingly. Not being an expert on body language, I nonetheless got the message on several occasions when I asked for a second bag that the attendant was doing me a favor by giving me a second one. In stark contrast to the parsimonious provision of plastic bags in the EU, I noticed the never-ending supply of plastic bags in the checkout lane at my local big-box store. Although some may say this is a small inconsequential matter, it reflects the difference in attitude between countries where space is precious and waste is unwise to one where space and waste are considered birth rights by many and keys to the economy and to achieving the American Dream.

4) AUTOMATION NATONS – The EU in general seems to use automation in venues that here in the Divided States of America still use people. With trains still a key mode of transportation there, you can purchase train tickets in a wide variety of locations. From train stations to other venues like tourist offices, automated tickets can be purchased. And now, tickets with confirmations can be printed through the internet as well. Parking garages – parcheggios – operate with ticket machines that dispense and pay for time used. I found this out the hard way in Milan, where not knowing that I should have used a machine to stamp my ticket electronically so all I needed to do was insert it at the exit point, I pulled up to the exit gate and found no one there to take my ticket and money, as would be normal here. With cars starting to stack up behind me, I frantically sought help from passersby who told me what to do. From that learning point on, I came to appreciate the automation built into parking garages.

5) SMALL CARS, GASOLINE, and TOLL BOOTHS – I’m sure you’ve seen the commercial running now about Hummers – military-sized vehicles now being driven as passenger cars in the DSA – whose silly message is that restoring one’s manhood or motherhood can be solved by buying a $60,000 vehicle that only gets 13 miles to the gallon. In the EU, where American-style SUV’s are still a luxury to most and seldom seen, small cars rule the streets. As I’ve posted before, it appears to me that cars there are built to fit their old, narrow city roadways while cities here are built to accommodate the DSA’s appetite for oversized vehicles like the Hummer. Some of the cars we saw were so small that they resembled the tiny cars in a circus from which step out clown after clown to the amazement of all. The Smart Car, now made more famous than it was before by its appearance in The Da Vinci Code as the car of choice for Sophie Neuveu, the book’s crackerjack code breaker, is widely driven and sometimes oddly parked to fit into spaces so small that any American car would never make it.

Gasoline, or as they call it in Italy “Benzine,” is expensive compared to the still-low prices of fuel we see here. Our least expensive gas was $6.05 in USD; while the most expensive, found at a hole in the wall station in the Montparnasse arrondisement of Paris was $7.45 USD. We also learned that many gas stations, especially in small towns, closed like other businesses in the afternoon for the afternoon meal and on Sundays, a day reserved for family and friends. For calculation purposes, there are 3.785411784 liters to a US Gallon and the average gas price was 1.35 euros per liter or about $6.54/US Gallon.

In the DSA we pay few tolls to use our freeways. In the EU, especially in Italy and France where I logged over 2,000 miles of driving, paying tolls was common and frequent, especially on Autostradas. For example, to drive from our Tuscany home of Lucca to Rome cost us about $23 USD. Our drive from Blois to Paris cost us about $15 USD. Unlike here where toll booths are manned by people who give tickets and take money, the EU has a sophisticated toll plazas that accept coins and cash, credit cards and “telepasses,” wireless cards that do all the work for you. Asking a toll booth attendant on the Ohio Turnpike recently why they still don’t accept credit cards for payment, the response given was that it was still a ways off.

6) ROUNDABOUTS – I found roundabouts to be a joy to use and a traffic flow tool that should be adopted in the DSA. In Italy and France, they were well marked and allowed everyone to find their exit without stopping. In growing suburban communities where two-lane roads built for farmer Jone’s tractor are now being inundated daily with bumper-to-bumper traffic, the silly circumstance of four cars coming to a stop at an intersection and watching drivers eye each other as to who will go first, seems quite unnecessary. Such gridlock decision making ould be obviated by a roundabout. While roundabouts might be bad for traffic light salesman, but it would keep traffic moving.

7) ICE – Even though signs of global warming are that our polar ice sheets are melting faster than formerly thought, the EU has yet to adopt ice with the same relish as we here in the DSA do. Grocery stores did not offer giant bags of the crushed or cubed stuff; and hotels and even restaurants were stingy with it as well. When we asked the bartender at our Paris hotel for more ice [no ice machine in the entire hotel], he gave us a glass with two cubes in it. In the modern Holiday Inn we stayed in outside Venezia, there was only one ice machine [a novelty in itself] on the third floor and it was no more powerful than an ice dispensing slot on modern American refrigerators. After filling up our ice bucket twice, it had to rest to make more “glacier.” It seems to me that some enterprising expatriate – maybe us someday – could make a cool million by selling robust ice machines to restaurants and hotels across the continent. And with temperatures this year soaring to records highs, maybe the disaffection held by EUers to the use of ice and air conditioning might be ripe for change.

8) THE INTERNET – While it was a real oddity when I first went to Italy in 1999, the Internet has come to the EU big time. The Italian government says that upwards of half of Italians now use it. But using it often entails going down to your neighborhood “punto de Internet” to log on. On four occasions we had access to broadband in our rooms. Generally, though, we shopped for it like we did groceries – on the street. The cheapest rate we found was 1€ in Rome at a grocery store run by Christian Phillipinos. The most expensive time we encountered was in a small shop in Blois, France, along the Loire River, that wanted about $5 USD per hour. More and more, EUers are going wireless with their phones. So while running cable through medieval walled cities and buildings is a daunting and expensive task, the cell phones that are omnipresent will one day bring “the net” to everyone.

9) BEGGARS, THIEVES AND GYPSIES – You have no doubt been warned by travel books and travel writers to be on guard for beggars, gypsies and thieves, as we were. But in each of our stops across five countries, we encountered no problems from anyone who wanted to harm us or steal our stuff, no matter whether we were walking late at night in a big city like Roma or whether we were sauntering home after hours in the small town of Lucca. We did see beggars in popular tourist places like Venezia and Rome, and on trains, where they were polite enough to either give you a card before hand explaining their circumstances and asking for monetary help or where they left small lagniappes [a small gift] that you could have in exchange for a donation.

10) GELATO – Gelato in Italy is everywhere. There may well be a law for all I know that says every block must have at least one or more gelato stands. Piled high like colorful bouffant hairdos, the creamy and cool delicacy is popular with Italians and tourist like me, who felt deprived if I didn’t have at least one serving every day. We saw gelato stands less frequently in Spain and France, but there were still there for the trained eye to spot.

BUCKEYES IN EUROPE -- HALLELUJAH FOR HOLIDAY INN; DRIVING, WALKING EURO STYLE

HALLELUJAH FOR HOLIDAY INN QUARTO D’ALTINO

When my wife worked for a Cincinnati furniture rental company and traveled through their service regions, our category of choice for lodgers included Marriott Courtyard, Residence Inn, Staybridge and Holiday Inn Express. I cannot recall when we last stayed at a full service Holiday Inn because they always seemed a cut below the aforementioned facilities in quality and service.

When I searched online for Venezian lodging, I was hesitant at first to pursue the Holiday Inn in Quarto D’Altino, located about 12 kilometers north of Venice because of lingering memories of their frumpy style and lackluster facilities. Moreover, knowing little about Venezia itself, I thought staying in the city of canals was where I wanted to be.

Our four-day stay at this Holiday Inn has more than erased memories of a place I summarily lumped in with the worn out lodging chains like Howard Johnson, among others. During their heyday, these nationwide chains were affordable, predictable and widespread. But over time, their quality drifted downward, in my opinion, and settled at the lodging equivalent of what eating at Denny’s is to people whose palate yearns for taste and presentation, not just food on a stark plate.

When I submitted my request for three days at 81 Euros each, a fabulous rate in Europe as any seasoned traveler will tell you, its location in the country outside Venezia was a gamble, made more so because we would no longer have our Fiat Panda, forcing ourselves to ride the rails to and from the Santa Lucia train station in Venezia.

When I first searched for Quarto D’Altino on Google Maps, it appeared isolated in the Veneto countryside, far from the madding crowds that mob the area and keep the ancient city’s coffers afloat. But to maturing misanthropes, which we are, not being in the center of the water logged city was not all bad. When we pulled up to it in our car before dropping it off near Plaza de Roma in Venezia itself, where rental cars are returned and all buses congregate, we were immediately taken with its newness and style, two features we had not heretofore associated with the chain. For the first time in Europe, we stepped on carpet. All previous lodgings offered floors made of wood, tile or marble. Although America seems to be carpeted from coast to coast, a feature that has turned my 1966 classmate’s company Stanley Steemer into an international carpet cleaning giant, Europe continues its tradition of natural, regional materials that can easily endure for decades or centuries.

Being a new Priority Club Member, our young [make a mental picture of Pee Wee Herman] counter clerk presented us with complimentary drink cards [only good at the bar as we learned later] and pleasantly surprised us with an upgrade to a suite of rooms. Sounded good, we thought. It looked even better when we entered our room.

In addition to a second room where four chairs, a center table and executive writing desk were located, we also had two giant bathrooms to boot. One marble bathroom featured a shower so amazing, I wondered whether it had been designed by NASA, Dr. NO or whether it was a modern version of a torture chair I saw in Amsterdam at the Museum of Torture that featured a clam-like contraption made of daggers that, when closed, tenderized the poor soul in it as if he were a cold sandwich being pressed by a hot Panini machine.

Stepping into it to try it out, I drew together the two curved clear-glass doors until they met in front of me, forming a seal. With the water flowing, a dial could be turned that would change the flow of water from the hand-held faucet to the overhead spigot to jets that shot from the rear of the device to a streaming water fall that, when you sat on the tiny seat provided, washed over your head like a mini waterfall. Compared to our en-suite shower in Faeto, which was like washing in a coffin wearing a straight jacket, this advancement in forcing water through different sized holes was truly a miracle of modern hydrology.

But with five rooms in total and two wall-sized flat-screen TVs, the room did not have in-room Internet connections and we and the staffer sent up to work it for us could not figure out to work the pay TV feature. I was told Internet is available in the business center and the per-hour price is five Euros [or $6.35 USD], a steep rate by anyone’s measure.

When a blogger like me has to feed his blog habit, accessing the Internet is critical, which is not always easy in Europe where wireless phones are as common as shoes but where Internet points are found, if at all, in small store fronts, like vegetables and bread. The butcher, the baker, and the Internet maker is the emblematic of small business in contemporary Europe.

It was, therefore, a bitter sweet request to be downgraded to a room with fewer rooms but a high-speed connection line and better TV. My Holiday Inn team came through in quick fashion. In a matter of minutes, we were in a third floor room – fourth up from the street [remember, in Europe street level is “0”] and I was happy to buy 48 hours of continuous hours for 15 euros, which computes to 31.2 Euro cents per hour or about 40 cents USD. This is a super deal for sure. But subtracting sleep time and tourist time, it was no surprise that I was writing furiously up to the last second, when I had to knuckle under and buy yet one more hour to finish my Internet work.

Although it was not my story, Melissa, our new friend from Texas, left a bag on the return train to D’Altino that held her camera and several gifts. Tired from a full day of walking in Venezia, she forgot to grab it as we all dashed off the train at our stop. She broke down in tears at the front desk hoping the staff could help. As we learned on our trip to Murano, it would have been very easy for the staff to shrug their shoulders and tell her to contact Trenitalia, the national train system. But the following day, refreshed and revived, Melissa retold the story of how the counter staff snapped into action and called the next train stop. Amazingly, her bag was retrieved. Her tears of tiredness turned to smiles the next day as she told us how the staff performed in ABCD fashion – Above and Beyond the Call of Duty.

My final story of customer service valor is about locating my wife’s block of Polar Pak Foam Brick, which keeps her medicine chilled while traveling. To keep it frozen from place to place, we have either used the freezer in our room or asked our lodger to keep it frozen in their “frigo.” The evening before check out, I took it to the restaurant manager who directed me to the barmaid. She took it and disappeared. Returning, she smiled and informed me I could retrieve it the next day.

The next day, when I went to retrieve it 30 minutes before check out, the new barman knew nothing of the ice pack. He called his manager who asked me what it looked like. He then disappeared for over five minutes, returning with a blue bottle, which was not mine. After I stood patiently for another ten minutes at the bar watching a gaggle of young Italian girls eat and drink their lunch, I took the initiative. Walking through the narrow passageway leading to the work area behind the scenes, I made my stage appearance in the kitchen. The kitchen staff, wearing white aprons and small white caps as if they were medics in a hospital ward and who walked hurriedly to and fro, looked at me with surprise. After all, this was no place for a guest of the hotel. Over the course of the next ten minutes, I looked in each refrigerator and freezer they had and found nothing of mine, although as a former restaurateur it gave me a chance to check out their inventory.

Asking the manger to call the barmaid from the previous night to ask her where she had put it, he said he had called but there was no answer. He then said he was leaving to drive to her apartment, which was close by. I thought that was a truly diligent thing to do and applauded him for making that decision.

Just as he was ready to leave his post, one of the kitchen staffers came running through the kitchen aisle carrying our frozen foam pack, which I had wisely printed my name on in strong black letters, making it stand out from any cold neighbors it might have. I first tried my simple identification test in Amsterdam, where it worked like a charm. In Faeto, though, it hit a communications pothole, when Concetta, our kind and helpful desk manager, whisked it back into the inner sanctum of the large party house kitchen. Will she be here tomorrow, and if not, will she tell any one where she put it, I asked myself? It was eventually found, which brought smiles to me and the staff.

When I handed my survey of my stay to the manager at check out time, I told her the story and again made it clear that their facility and their high level of staff attention was one we would not soon forget.

To anyone visiting Venezia, my recommendation is to do yourself and your pocketbook a favor and consider the Holiday Inn in Quarto D’Altino. You love it, from its modern style to its convenient location directly across from the train stop there, and the staff will bowl you over, especially if you are from the States, with their customer and language skills.

Driving, Walking Euro Style

DSA versus EU

Back in the Divided States of America (DSA), where I’m driving and walking stateside again after nearly six weeks of country hopping in Europe, the clear difference I see between driving and walking here and there, especially Italy and France, two countries in our five European Union walkabout, is the sharp contrast between the power of the pedestrian there and the rule of cars here.

Everyone it seems walks in the EU; whereas here, hardly anyone does. In every city we visited, big and small, walking is done by the very young and the very old and everyone in-between. In major cities, like Roma or Paris, walking is a necessity to activily living one’s daily life. Used to driving everywhere to get anywhere here, during our nearly 40-day odyssey there, we walked a minimum of three miles nearly each day. We had a handful of travel days when we went intermodal and used planes, trains and buses. On several days, especially in Paris, Roma, Barcelona and Venezia, it seemed as though by not walking, we would miss too much of the local streetscape and the amazing panoply of shopkeepers that inhabit small and engaging space. All toll, and considering we drove a car for at least half of our time there, we realistically estimate that we walked upwards of 100 miles; that's tantamount to the distance between Columbus, Ohio's capitol, and Cincinnati, a southwest city on the Ohio River.

Before a car is needed, lots of secondary transportation choices, such as bicycles, scooters and motorcycles for individuals and Metros, buses, trolleys and taxis, robust and omnipresent, are there for the taking. The nexus of public transportation systems can take you from one end of the EU to the other. In the DSA, recreating, or in some cases building from scratch, an EU-style transportation system – the buzz term for this coordination of transportation systems is intermodal -- is a laudable goal, but I’ll be dead by the time it comes, if ever.

The positive symbiosis and interplay between walking and going intermodal in the EU is what makes it so easy and exciting, like a little adventure, to get around without hassling with a car, as most everyone in the DSA does. Sans car, intermodal is what you do to get to the next walking point on your way to your destination.

Pedestrians across Europe, no doubt, have commanded streets from the animal paths they were centuries ago. And with some streets being primarily pedestrian ways [see 5/29/06 post titled My Pickle in Pescallo], it appears that cars there were designed to fit cities, while cities in the DSA have been designed to fit cars here. Where military vehicles turned passenger car go, pedestrians will shy away from.

Having logged over 2,000 miles of combined driving in Italy and France on this trip alone, I can tell you that when the traffic light turns red [intersections generally have three light configurations: across the road, top of the light stanchion and a small set at driver-eye level], cars stop on a dime and pedestrians bolt forward without hesitation to claim their rightful space. Unlike the DSA, where cars are permitted to turn right-on-red and where drivers, through practice, learn pedestrians are inferiors to be tolerated but not respected, the opposite is generally true in the EU. Drivers there are very aware of pedestrians and always defer to them, notwithstanding the close shaves and near misses given by generally small car drivers who accommodate walkers but sometimes not by much.

Pedestrians make communities come alive, as they did for us in the small, medieval walled Italian city of Lucca in Tuscany, where it took only 20 minutes to walk from the east gate to the west gate. Or In Roma, where gas-powered vehicles and people constantly overlap. Walking on any sidewalk in Roma, for example, you can expect to encounter any or all of the following: a grandparent walking with a cane or a grandchild, kids kicking a soccer ball, a mother riding a bicycle with her child on it, a teenager on a scooter, a young adult riding a motorcycle or a small car, parked.

Here in the DSA, where traffic rules make everyone paranoid to do what is done naturally in the EU, brains and blood would be splattered everywhere because people’s heads could not take the tension that comes with the free flow of people and machines as is customary there. The few driving rules religiously obeyed in the EU are adequate to keep man and machine moving along while the book of driving rules here, which are actively enforced by local law enforcement officials who are constantly cruising roadways like sharks in the ocean hunting for their next meal, seem artificial in their guarantee of safety.

In the DSA, police and police cruises are always on the hunt. While driving in the EU, in its cities and on its Autostradas, I can remember seeing only a dozen or so police. These public officials, looking sharp in the military-style uniforms [a la CHIPS] were either standing with their buddies in traffic circles or were watching the ebb and flow of cars and people with a benevolent attitude of “let the flow go,” or as we might say here, ”no harm, no foul.”

In Italy, all cars are equipped with the same turn signals as cars in the DSA. But Italian drivers rarely use them, preferring instead to go where they want when they want. From my first visit to Italy and Rome in 1999, I learned how cars and civilians coexist and witnessed interactions between the two that were veritable miracles of movement that to me approached walking on water or parting colorful seas.

Walking in Italian urban areas in Centro areas, where history has molded the urban landscape into either narrow channels of brick or stucco or into piazzas so large and august that statues and spouting fountains are the perfect compliment to walkers, I saw first hand and participated myself in the delicate if not fast-paced interplay of man and machine where no one stops for anyone but everyone makes way for the next guy.

Standing on a street corner in Roma, I once watched as two Italian business men, dressed as if they were Marcello Mastroianni in a Fellini movie, stepped from the relative safety of an Italian sidewalk into the streaming traffic speeding around one of the many roundabouts in the city. Without a hint of care for or acknowledgement of the oncoming traffic, the two men, looking at each other as they conversed with language and gesture, strode across the stream of cars, motorcycles, busses, and bicyclists as if they were protected by some special shied of invulnerability. Once on the opposite bank of the traffic stream, they kept walking, not once admitting through gesture any trepidation of the feat they had just performed.

In Columbus, Ohio, where The Ohio State University marching band performs its signature act of uncoiling itself from a tight-knit square into a single stream of musicians who spell out in cursive the state name, the popular performance of Script Ohio is a hometown example of what is done in the EU everyday on a massive scale. The brass band musicians, when they hand write the name of their state, cross through each other at several points of intersection where letters are linked. In style befitting crossing a busy Italian street, the strutting marchers, playing their instruments as they march, never stop but speed up or slow down a micro-second so as not to hit an oncoming musician who was further back in the pack.

On Italian streets, where La Dulce Vita or "the sweet life" is made exciting by at the same time disdaining the powers of opposites while also calculating them, is a rare art that may never be understood or practiced in the DSA. Here, where our biggest public places are often times car parking lots, the exhilaration of walking in fast moving traffic is curtailed by personal paranoia and by an in-bred fear of violating traffic rules. If more people in the DSA walked more, the landscape, which is designed for and ruled by cars, would change to put people at the pinnacle of power, and relegate cars to what they are in the EU, the last choice in transportation.

In a timely report about how more and more aging Americans are being stranded at home because they cannot drive and must therefore rely upon the kindness of family and neighbors and the clear inadequacies of local bus companies, The Columbus Dispatch reports that about "82 percent of Americans 65 and older say they worry that they will be stranded when they no longer can drive, according to a survey last year by the American Public Transportation Association."

In 2005, the paper wrote, "there were 36.8 million people age 65 and older in the country, according to U.S. Census estimates," and "The number is expected to reach 72 million by 2030, representing about 20 percent of the population. The 85-and-older group is the fastest-growing segment of the population." A local AARP [American Association of Retired People] spokesperson addressed the obvious question that will only be exacerbated as more of our aging citizens become more isolated in their homes. Her poignant query of how these people are going to get around is a concern we should all focus on here. The EU, for many reasons, has not forsaken its intermodal public transportation systems and while it takes a bit of work, people of all ages there can live their lives without a car. Is it too late to improve our pubic transportation systems here? The simple answer is no, but the complex answer is that for change to happen here, Americans need to change their attitude about the importance of public transportation and elect public officials who have the political will to invest in system improvements going forward. Otherwise, people, especially seniors, will find life more frustrating as their transportation options dwindle, leading them unavoidably to becoming increasingly marooned in their homes and separated from the world around them.

As local bus systems like the Central Ohio Transportation Authority (COTA) try valiently but vainly to compete against the power of the car, it is little wonder that meager systems like COTA, which is not only financially imploding on itself and but finally if not unfortunately giving up the ghost on years of preparatory work to bring light rail to the area, will never be able to lure enough passengers from the driver's seat of a revving, engineered sanctum world to a passenger seat on a public system that is not comfortable or private and does not contribute to their self-esteem. The lastest Hummer car commercial makes my point, as it implies will happen if you lay down $50,000 and buy a behemoth that only produces 13-miles per gallon. Filling the 32-gallon gas tank of the car brought to American roads in the early 90s through the action-hero proclamations of Arnold Schwarzenegger only costs about $96 a pop at today's $3-gas prices. A small price to pay, surely, to feel like a man, even if you are a soccer mom.

BRUISED BUCKEYE LANDS IN FRANCE, ENDS TOUR IN PARIS

BRUISED BUCKEYE LANDS IN FRANCE, ENDS TOUR IN PARIS

BEAUVAIS to CHARTRES VIA GIVERNY

Our Ryanair flight from Barcelona to Beauvais, a small French town with a small airport about 48 miles north from Paris, took off on time and landed ten minutes early. Our rental car, this time a silver French four-door Peugeot, took us without incident to our night’s stay, a small motel a few kilometers away.

Although the weather between Barcelona and Beauvais was overcast, cooling things off for us in France, the following day the sun rose in a clear blue sky, making our drive through the grain fields that dominate the landscape where Brittany and Normandy meet on the Beauce Plain pleasurable and scenic.

Our destination of the day was the medieval city of Chartres, home to its eponymous two-towered Notre Dame Cathedral, which is one of the largest in Europe and “an unrivaled medieval splendor,” according to our Chartres guidebook. The French roads were enjoyable to drive on and with the roundabouts and clear signage along the way, our itinerary was achieved at each route point.

IMPRESSED WITH IMPRESSIONIST'S HOME IN GIVERNY

But before we would see the twin towers at Chartres, we would amble through and admire Claude Monet's home and gardens in the quiet, small locus of homes called Givern. Monet (1840-1926) is often called the father of impressionism. His beautiful country home is located in Giverny, a small town less than 50 miles from Paris where he lived and painted from 1883 to his death. The price of admission to his home and grounds [5.5 Euros per ticket] is good value because your mouth will water at the splendid display of greenery and flowers that surround his home like a quilted robe made of images from his own paintings.

His home, with its blue and yellow rooms that prominently feature his fascination with Japanese art, which hangs everywhere throughout his home [Van Gough was similarly smitten with the simple flourishes of oriental scenes], offers a view into his world and thus into his paintings. Next to his home is his painting studio, which is awash with natural light and that now serves as a retail shop for all products Monet.

Lunch at a nearby eatery, hugged in flowering trees and well manicured growings of all sizes and coors, was a cool and relaxing respite from our morning drive and self-guided tour of the impressionist's home and gardens, which include the famous pond [very Japanese, no surprise if you have seen the interior of his home] and its even more famous water lillys that he loved to paint.

In this region of France, where the quilt of wheat, bean and corn fields resemble the rolling farmlands of northwestern Ohio, the two towers of the cathedral, started in the 9the century, could be seen for dozens of miles away and served as guiding landmarks into the historic center of the city.

Our lodging for the night, the Chateau de Moresville, was still 20 or more miles away in the French countryside. Preferring not to return to Chartres the next day, we parked the car, walked to the cathedral, where we climbed the 300 stone steps to the crow’s nest at the pinnacle of the north and highest tower. After descending from the dizzying but panoramic heights, our plans called for us to find a boulangerie or chacuterie, where we would purchase bread, cheese, cold cuts, wine and something sweet to snack on overnight and in the morning. Our next day’s destination would be Blois, conveniently located about 48 miles to the south in the middle of the gorgeous, serene Loire river valley, home to a string of famous country chateau’s like Chenensceau and Abroise, where Leonardo da Vinci lived his last days.

NORTRE DAME OF CHARTRES

Acclaimed by our guidebook as “the most complete and well-preserved example of gothic Cathedrals, the climb to the top of the cathedral’s north [and tallest tower at about 121 feet], even 872 years after it was started is no easier now for the faint hearted or acrophobic than it was for the stone masons who no doubt climbed it repeatedly until their work was done. At 6.50 euro each for tickets to the top and with only 45 minutes until closing time, we wasted no time in ascending the narrow spiral stone staircase, which took us to the landing at the level where the tower’s giant metal bells hang silently. From this small landing, we mustered our energy to elevate our corporal bodies up the final flight of steps, which opened onto a narrow balcony that circumnavigated the tower. Looking down at the town far below us, whose homes appeared like tiny houses on a Monopoly board, the sheer height enabled us to see for miles upon miles as we peered out and scanned the semi-flat, agriculturally rich surrounding countryside from horizon to horizon.

60 years after the first stone was set in 1134, history says a fire consumed nearly everything except for the crypt and part of the western faced. I was amazed to learn that a crew of 300 hundred workers, building on what remained, reconstructed the stone structure in only 30 years, which was building quickly in an age when other cathedrals took hundreds of years to complete. The cathedral is registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Walking through the massive, dark stone structure, whose cool inside temperature was a welcomed contrast to the warm air outside, we found ourselves looking at, among many other unique contents, a small but impressive wood and gold case made in the early middle ages to hold the holy relic known as the “Virgin Mary’s veil.” Whether in fact it is her veil is clearly a matter of faith, but reputable scholars, according to a nearby written description of the relic that is folded and hangs behind glass panels, claim it unequivocally is from the Middle East and is dated to the first century A.D.

Once down on ground, we made our way through the town back to our car, which we parked in a conveniently located garage. Recalling how we exited from our parking garage in Milano by first validating our ticket through a machine, we followed a similar routine in Chartres and escaped without further embarassing ourselves or holding up traffic.

I openly confess: I have not walked into a boulangerie or pastiserrie I did not like. Boulangeries, bakery shops laden with bread, baguettes and all sorts of yummy treats, are common in France but not as pervasive as gelato shops in Italy. Nonetheless, we found one open and darted in and out with two small quiches, a loaf of dark crusty bread and a small but elegant tarte de pomme [apple].

OH BLOIS! THE LOIRE RIVER VALLEY, CHENONCEA AND TOURS

We arrived in Blois, which straddles the Loire River and is located about halfway between Orleans and Tours. We easily located and checked into our second Holiday Inn of the trip. Although it was early evening, the sky was still ablaze with pastel colors of sunset and night was still hours away. In Europe, it seems, the curtain of night does not fully descend until after 20:00 [10 o’clock GMT].

Although this Holiday Inn is not the equal of the one in Quarto D’Altino outside Venezia, it had one advantage – our nightly rate is only 65 euros [$83.20 USD], the second lowest of our trip. Conveniently located close to the city center, it was an easy walk downhill past shops, bars and restaurants to the river and the stone bridge that connects Blois nord with sud [north with south].

We checked out the local chateau, impressive with its now-public space and garden area, then enjoyed the evening with a glass of wine and a beer while watching Italy and America play to a 1-1 soccer World Cup tie. For those of us who did watch the game and are Italian, it was clear that Italy scored both goals but one went errantly into the Italian net by mistake when an Italian player, trying to clear the ball downfield, accidentally missed kicked the ball into the wrong goal.

CHATEAU CHENONCEAU

If you have to rule France from somewhere, Chateau Chenonceau is as good a place as any. Clearly, this is what Catherine de Medici [1519-1589] thought after ordering it out of the hands of her husband’s long time mistress and eminence grise, Diane de Poitiers, who was made a present of the picture-perfect structure when King Henry II of France took her as his mistress for 25 years, following the death of her husband, a friend and advisor to Henry. Following Henry’s death, Catherine reclaimed this property to show Diane that her privileged position, made possible only by her relationship to Henry, had come to an end and she, not Poitiers, was ruling it and the country.

The original and smaller structure was first constructed in the 1430s on the lazy, flowing River Cher, a tributary to the more famous Loire River. It came into Henry’s hands when he took it, essentially, for back taxes. Catherine, born in Florence, Italy, to Lorenzo II, used her Italian talents in style and cuisine to, among other accomplishments, become known as the “mother of French cuisine” and to create a style all her own that included the invention of lipstick, which historians say she made from beeswax [for its gloss] and coloring. Catholic by birth, she became also known for using poisons to assassinate her political and Protestant enemies of the day.

Her attention to architecture style manifested itself at Chenonceau when she added several floors of galleries that extended the small chateau to reach the south bank of the Cher. For a while, Catherine ruled France from a tiny room only steps from her bedroom. The chateau, which avoided destruction during France’s days of revolution by removing the “x” at the end of its original name to signal revolutionaries and their compatriots it was no longer a symbol of the ruling aristocracy, is now a tourist magnet with a strong field of attraction. Swarming with the other tourists who come in droves to see where its famous historical residents lived their lives of privilege and wealth, I marveled at its tantalizing tapestries and gazed in controlled awe at the nearby gardens, where Catherine grew orange trees, a popular, exotic addition to the grounds, and at the extensive timbered land where hunters harvested game and where the chateau’s farming operation were sited.

Looking into the chateau’s restaurant in the Orangerie, a magnificently maintained garden which features many orange trees, we choose not to dine there but instead to sit on one of the many benches that line the long path between the parking lot and the chateau that is shaded by the interlocking branches of the trees that grow along side it and eat the picnic lunch we had with us. In Blois that morning, I made crusty bread sandwiches of salami and cheese and tomatoes, which we ate leisurely with Provencal olives and that we coolly washed down with water collected from a public fountain in Blois. Although the weather was spectacular, it was a bit hot. But the breezes that swept through the shaded, wooded area cooled our skin and refreshed us for the drive to Tours and then home to Blois that night.

TOURS

Sunday or Dimanche in France finds most businesses closed, with the exception of eateries and others that choose to remain open. Accordingly, we found our way to the city center, where we walked through a lovely ceramic pottery exhibition in a panhandle park close to Tour’s impressive Hotel de Ville or city hall.

Now the capital city or prefecture of seven cantons comprising the Indre-et-Loire, Tours over the centuries has been a destination for Vikings, who came to sack it, Romans, who came to reorganize a small Christian community there, religious pilgrims who traveled to see the resting place of Saint Martin of Tours and where in the year 732 the northern march of Islam into Europe from Spain was stopped by the Battle of Tours. The name Tours, which in contemporary French means "towers," actually derives from the ancient Gallic tribe called the Turones. Now with a population of about 136,500, the town of Tours, where some way the purest form of French is spoken, prides itself on its moniker as Le Jardin de la France and serves as the ending point in the cycling race known as Paris-Tours.

PARIS IS BURNING

As we now know from the history of WWII and real records and research about the German occupation of France and Paris, one of the world’s most famous cities came within a hair’s breath of being both blown up and burned to the ground. But for one key German solider who uncharacteristically did not follow strict instructions to trigger explosives strategically placed to do great damage to the city’s signature monuments, cathedrals and the like, la Ville Lumiere or the City of Light would not be burning with the excitement, style, culture and cuisine that ignites the emotions of its contemporary residents and visitors today.

Although Paris, a name some say derived from that of a local Gallic tribe, the Parisi, which came to mean the working people or the craftsmen, was not set on fire by the Germans, it nonetheless is on fire each day. It's excitement is ignited each day by over two million residents who create flames of human movement and interaction that spread like wildfire from one of the 20 arrondissements or districts to another. Including the nine million or more residents who live in the banlieu or suburbs, Paris’ pulsating population, over 11 million or about the size of the population of the state of Ohio, is what makes this mega melting pot into a source of heat and light unlike any that could be produced by flames alone.

In our third visit to Paris, we retraced our steps to many of our favorite sites: Notre Dame on Ile de la Cite, Sacre Coeur on Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower and, of course, a leisurely walk up the Champs-Elysees from Place Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, where we again climbed an upward spiraling stairway [284 steps] to the top of the colossal monument celebrating Napoleon's greatest military victories. From this unique vantage point, and with the brilliant pastel colors from the setting sun, we could see a colorized picture of the the 12 streets that converged into it and the outlying areas, like Montmartre, as well.

MONTPARNASSE

During this third visit, which came by car not airplane and gave me a chance to drive in Paris – as exhilarating as Rome, for sure, but without the demolition derby aspect to it – we also were pleasantly surprised by the diversity and cornucopia of offerings we found in arrondissement Montparnasse, home to France’s tallest modern office tower that pointed us to our hotel home like a terra firma North Star.

Hotel Lenox, located midway on the short Rue Delhambre, which boasts a Metro stop at each end of it [and different lines at that; a real bonus in Paris], is a pleasing mixture of Parisians and tourists, with handfuls of ethic restaurants on it and close by it; plus, it has a boulangerie/patisserie, several bars, an Italian food store, an actual miniature modern American-style grocery store and a Laundromat that offers washing and drying machines, a real find according to my wife Kathy who was tiring of our impromptu clothes washing that allowed us to put the standard bidet included in our bathrooms to a new and good use [perfect for underwear and socks].

LA DEFENSE

Purchasing a 24-hour Metro pass [also good for buses, trains and finiculars like the one at Montmarte] for each of us [total = 27 Euros or $34.50 USD], we had our tourist transportation tool in hand and were ready to again conquer the city. Having been on our feet and/or walked on average five hours per day, or a minimum of three miles each day, we estimated that we had trod close to 100 hundred miles on foot, and a good Metro seemed a good deal at any price. Among the new sites we visited was La Défense, Europe's largest business district, that also hosts the head offices of almost half of all French companies, as well as the offices of major international firms and the headquarters of many international organizations such as UNESCO, the OECD, or the ICC, our guidebook tells us.

LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

Close to Montparnasse we found the Jardin du Luxembourg or Luxembourg Gardens, a large, quiet and romantic pubic park situated at the foot of the French Senate, which is housed in the Luxembourg Palace. The palace and gardens, according to information sources, were built between 1615 to 1627 and among the many wonderful, tranquil features featured there is a shallow oval pond where children play with miniature boats. Spread across the approximately 550 acre site are individual and groupings of statutes, fountains big and small and, to our pleasant surprise, an art exhibit or two, as we found walking through it at sunset on our second day in Paris.

INVALIDES

On our list of places to visit for the first time was Invalides, a sort of a Veteran’s Administration Hospital of its time that the Sun King Louie XIV had built in 1671 to house soldiers – about 4,000, historical reports say -- who were wounded in or became disabled from fighting in his various wars. The gold-gilded dome of Invalides, an architectural marvel of its time, is another unmistakable Parisian landmark.

With 15 courtyards in it, the biggest is the cour d’honneur or court of honor, Invalides was typical of its time until the Sun King, on the advice of his war minister, built the church Saint-Louis as an annex. Soldiers who were taken care of there were eventually required to attend daily mass. And at one time, way before Napoleon's remains were brought there, King Louie thought he would lie there in repose for eternity, which accounts for its spectacular splendor inside.

But in 1861 to house forever the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte, which were disinterred and moved from the remote island of St-Helena where he died and was buried in 1821, Emperor Napoleon I’s tomb, started in 1840, was built in the center of church Saint-Louis. It consists of six coffins built from five different materials – iron, mahogany, lead, ebony and granite -- that nest inside each other and are protected by an exoskeleton sarcophagus made of red Finnish porphyry granite, a royal purple stone historically reserved for honoring the likes of Caesars, kings, queens and other noble or famous people, according to audio information offered in a self-guided tour.

As Invalides was built for solidiers, it comes as no surprise that it is also a military museum that displays many unique, historical military items and groupings. One of those groupings consists of cabinets filled from end to end with miniature soldiers from ancient to modern times dressed exactly as they fought, from their headgear to their shields and swords. Keeping an eye on the maneuverings of the partisan political armies back in Ohio, where as a statehouse journalist I came to know the political players controlling the fields of power and those whose goal this year is displace them, one miniature soldier in particular captured my attention as a historical figure that captures the crusading zeal of the man running for Governor of Ohio on the Republican ticket. As an office holder and candidate who has carefully cultivated his relationship with Ohio's Christian Right and who has taken up their banner on the political field of battle, this soldier, to me, perfectly captured what this year's race for governor will be about in the Buckeye State.

ROUSTED AT THE RITZ BUT BUTTERED UP AT MAISON DU CHOCOLATE

My wife wanted to visit Place Vendome to again peer [emphasis on peer] into the extravagent windows of such famed shops as Piaget, Versace and other super-high-end shops whose impressive store fronts line the buildings that surround the square. I also wanted to visit The Ritz Hotel in its original location there and gander at its sumptuous decor.

As we made our way to Place Vendome from the Opera Garnier, where we had enjoyed a true treat on Christmas Eve of 2003 when we surprsingly secured what we thought was the emperor's box as we watched supple, flexible ballet dancers spin and twirl to the music of Tchaikovsky and others on the giant stage inside the dazzling structure, I remembered that the Maison du Chocolate was located nearby. Finding it [the only other one is in New York], we entered the door and gazed at wood-paneled interior and at the variety of exquisit chocolates on display. A chocolate expert soon came to our aid and helped us choose among many selections that would fit our pocketbook, giving us technical information as well as pedigrees of the various beans used to make different confections. We bought some Orinoco [Venezuelan] chocolate and a tin of Poudre de Cacao for those special occasions when only the best hot chocolate is served.

At Place Vendome, whose signature monument is a center-square column with Napoleon atop it and a history in relief of his military accomlishments that swirl upward around it, The Ritz Hotel occupies some very valuable real estate. "The façade was designed by Jules Hardouin Mansart, the creator of the 'mansard' roof...and the building was converted to a luxury hotel by Cesar Ritz; it opened on June 1, 1898 and...together with the culinary talents of minority partner Auguste Escoffier [the dean of French cooking], César Ritz made the hotel synonymous with opulence, service, and fine dining," according to an online synopsis of the world-class facility.

Walking past the doormen who looked impressive in their uniforms, we were spotted immediately upon entering the foyer by a well-dressed man with a wire coming out of his security guard earpiece. Knowing without hesitation that we were merely gawkers, not guests, he approached us as to our business there. When I asked him if we could enter, he said we could not. When I asked him if I could take a picture, he again said that would not be possible. Stranded a few steps from the front doors, I was left to take a mental picture of the elaborate corridor with mirrors, tables, flower arrangements and small seating areas that ran on both sides of it from its front to where it disappeaared beyond my vision. Needless to say, we left; but outside I did snap a shot as we hustled away to our next stop on the road back to our hotel.

OUR LAST SUPPER IN PARIS IN ST. GERMAN DE PRES

Readying itself for a day of music, stages and chairs were being placed in various venues across Paris, from La Defense to Invalides, where Napoleon’s Tomb is found, to smaller venues like the courtyard outside the Iglese at St. German de Pres, a church older than famed Notre Dame, where we would rendezvous with Kathy’s cousin living and working in Paris and sally forth to find a spot for dinner.

The day had started with more dark clouds than we had seen in a while and we hoped our god of good weather would not forsake us on our last day. As the evening approached, the excitement surrounding the city-wide music that everyone was talking about got to us as well, creating a new perfume of adventure for us.

Having scouted our route to the Point Royal RER train station on Boulevard Montparnasse, where we purchased our two one-way train tickets to Aeroport Charles de Gaulle [8 Euros each, compared to a 60 Euros taxi fare] that we would use the next day, we set off for Iglise de Saint-German-des-Pres, where we would hook up with Kristin, Kathy’s first cousin, and her friend Nina, a registered nurse now living in New Mexico.

We arrive early and milled around with the other hundreds of people who had gathered to listen to the musicians who would be playing from the stage in the courtyard of the church. Completed in 588, the church built beyond the city limits of Paris at the time in the pres or fields, was to house the stole of Saint Vincent, which was given by the bishop of Saragossa as reward for the French army relinquishing their siege of his city.

A few minutes before Kristina and Nina appeared, the rain we feared might arrive, did. The musicians retreated to cover inside the church and the four of us retreated into a slender street that lead us deeper into the labyrinth of passageways that spread out like a spider’s web on the Left Bank of the River Seine.

With the crowds thickening quickly, we walked by a head-banger band still playing despite the rain raining on their parade. I thought their Goth eye makeup streaming down their face added a new touch to the black-on-black theme of their act. Turning a corner, we found a row of small eateries. Signaling from the street with four fingers raised high to the waiter whose eye I caught and who nodded approval, we dashed inside out of the rain and happily claimed our table.

Being at its core a Greek restaurant with French offerings, we opened our last supper in Paris with a bottle of wine [24 Euros] and nibbled on the basket of bread our waiter has brought us. In Europe in general, salt and pepper are not sitting on the table as they are in The States, and you need to ask for it. Our waiter, who would first constern us then make us laugh later, arrived to take our orders. Looking at the order of the young man sitting next to me whose order had arrived and that displayed a whole fish, tail to head, with a soufflé dish of mushrooms and peppers sitting along side it, I pointed to it – it was the 12 Euro daily special as well -- and he wrote it down. My other table guests ordered mousakka, very Greek and very good, and a vegetarian salad plate.

Dinner was wonderful. My Dorade, a small Mediterranean fish with tender white flesh that when grilled evokes memories of pompano or red snapper, was delicate in texture and taste notwithstanding the need to filet the fish of its bones on my plate.

Near the end of dinner and the energeteic exchange of information about living and working in Europe, we decided to venture out for doux or sweet desert elsewhere. I asked our vested waiter the check. Looking back at me as he carried dishes from one table back to the kitchen, he acknowledged my request. As the minutes passed and turned into tens of minutes, we tried again to ask for the check. Again he looked at us, nodding that he understood what we wanted. But he continued to take orders and deliver plates to various tables as the small restaurant was now filled with laughing, drinking patrons. Even Kristin, who has lived in Paris now for over eight months and who has lost what ever Texas twang she had in favor of a lilting French accent, pleaded with him for the bill.

Approaching 45 minutes since we first asked for the check, I suggested we stand up, walk away from the table and head for the door, which we did. Either they would come with the bill or dinner would be free, which was becoming an idea whose time had come. Our waiter looked at us with a smile and a slight shrug of his shoulders, as if to say “I’m busy but don’t leave without paying.” Like the well-dressed, goateed villain in The French Connection who waves goodbye to Popeye Doyle with a hand-puppet gesture from the subway as it pulls away, I did the same from outside the restaurant, where the stone pavement was wet from the rain but the crowds were thicker than ever as the Spanish brass band at the end of the street was riling up the walkers with nationalist soccer songs generating that elicited shouts and yells of revelry.

He beckoned me to come back, which I did. In my stunted French, I thanked him for the free dinner and told him how delicious it was. He smiled and apologized for the delay, explaining he was only the order taker and that the owner, a woman with red hair, would make up the bill. Retreating to her small desk at the rear of the stone-walled space and huddling around her as she fumbled through a stack of orders to find ours, I told her the meal was great and that as a former restaurant owner myself, I would be glad to wash dishes because I had no money to pay the bill. She smiled and laughed a bit, then totaled it all up. The bill came to 83 Euros [$106 USD].

The hour was now late and wandering aimlessly for an evening-ending desert was no long an option. We bid our goodbyes to Kristin and Nina as we parted company with them in the Metro station next to our rendezvous church.

The following morning, or later that night would be more accurate, Kathy and I headed out from our hotel at 4:30 am to clatter through the streets to our RER train station, where we would catch the first train of the day to the aeroport and our flight.

BRUISED BUT NOT BATTERED, MY PREDICTAMENT IN PARIS IS A TALE OF TWO HEALTH SYSTEMS

From the first, surprise occurrence in my life of a blood clot [lower left leg] in February of 2005 and the installation of three coronary stents – bloodstream culverts -- later that year on August 29, the day Hurricane Katrina washed away New Orleans, I have been pressed into service as a new paying member of Club Coumadin and have begrudging become a daily pill popper of Plavix. The drug is a good match up with Coumadin by preventing blood platelet’s from “sticking together,” thereby helping to avoid further clot formations that in many cases can cause strokes or sudden death. Coumadin, a French word, is also known by its generic name, Warfarin, a blood thinning drug first used to kill rats by causing massive internal hemorrhaging.

Of all the Paris guidebooks and travel articles I have read over the years, not one of them, discounting for the moment websites like that of our Secretary of State’s that provides more than just classic tourist information, invests more than a few lines to discuss or list Paris hospitals and what to do if you need one.

What is an INR and why am I talking about it in a travel blog? INR is code for International Normalized Ratio, a global standard, like ISO is for manufacturing, for gauging the clotting or coagulating ability of blood. The INR gold standard is between 2.0 – 3.0, unless you have artificial heart valves, which then allows for a higher INR. If the INR reading is below 2.0, either more Coumadin is needed or a change is diet is required; the same applies for readings above 3.0. Coumadin also has upwards of a 72-hour lag time between when ingested and when it becomes active in the blood stream. Vitamin K, the nemesis of Coumadin, works in real time. Before leaving on my trip, my last three INR readings put me in the landing zone as I call the midpoint in the INR Gold Standard.

When your membership in Club Coumadin is granted because of blood clots or other hematological problems that require thin blood, a balancing act or dance commences between your medication and other factors; most especially diet, which affects the fuel mixture as I call it between a drug that thins your blood to prevent future blood clots and foods like spinach, cauliflower and other cruciferous legumes rich in Vitamin K that cause your blood to clot or coagulate, and that may hasten the formation of future clots, which may lead to strokes or sudden death.

On the go as we have been for weeks now, finding and eating Vitamin K foods has been slapdash at best because restaurant menus do not always feature items with spinach, especially in the quantity I needed, and green grocers, which are easily found, often did not have spinach, my vegetable of choice I now look at as I do with my man-made drugs of Coumadin and Plavix. Spinach, as I look at, is not just for Popeye, anymore!

Spontaneous bruising from my growing imbalance between drugs and diet first surfaced in Barcelona. A quarter-sized spot on my left rib cage hurt when touched or when my camera, which I wore under my shirt or CNN flak jacket, bounced against it while walking. A Post-it-note-sized bruise caught my attention in the mirror one morning, but unsure at the time of what had caused it, we went walking as we did each day but made visiting a vegetable market to hunt down spinach [or spinaci in Italian or epinard in French or espinaca in Spanish] a must-do in the day. I was taking the daily regime of pills but my diet was not keeping pace with that dosage.

My bruises expanded, literally and in brilliant blues and purples [bad skin colors] in Blois, where we discussed whether to go to a hospital there or take off a day early for Paris. One night while writing a draft story, I rested my left elbow on the table top and felt a sensation of padding on its tip I had not felt before. Putting my hand on the padding, I realized it was a small sack of blood that had formed over night and was hot to the touch. Also, in Blois, where we wandered into a church garden that featured many culinary herbs and other plants that were grown for their ornamental value, I purloined a couple large leafs of Swiss Chard and chewed on them like a rabbit eating its last meal. Vitamin K is where you find it, and that night, I found it growing in a beautiful container in Blois.

We left Blois for Paris the next day. With great weather again greeting us, we drove the local scenic roads until we came to Orleans, the prefecture of the Centre region of France located about 80 miles southwest of Paris. At Orleans, we joined the streaming freeway traffic and headed to Paris.

Finding our Paris lodger, Hotel Lenox in Montparnasse, and returning our Hertz Peugeot to the Gare [station] Montparnasse, we availed ourselves of a farmacia, where I displayed my bruised arms to the farmacist, who then directed me to a nearby hospital. All important matters having gone our way so far, the fact that we were staying in a hospital district was in step with our luck to date.

Passports, American health cards and international driving license in tow, we sought and easily found Hospital Leopold Bellan, a semi private facility, close by at 19-21 Rue Vercingetorix.

Walking into the emergency room, we approached the front desk, where we first laid eyes on Natalie, our Paris-born nurse who spoke a smidgen of English but whose Spanish later turned out to be the Rosetta Stone of our conversation, and who looked at my passport and wrote down my name and address. When she saw my bruises, which looked like the sugar spots on a too ripe banana, and learned that they were five days old, her jaw dropped slightly as she directed us to take a seat in a nearby corridor with a row of chairs. We did so. But all the while we wondered to ourselves how long it would take for me to be seen or what it would cost and how we would pay for it.

Within two minutes of nestling into our chairs, a door opened and nurse Natalie called for us to enter. Her first instruction was for me to take off my clothes. Following instructions but keeping my undergarment in place, I dawned one of the open-paneled hospital garbs common place in hospitals in America and abroad. In as little time as it took to be seen, my French woman doctor walked into the room. She sat at a desk and started talking with Natalie, who would then try in her pigeon English to translate the doctor’s instructions to me. As someone who is moderately conversant in Spanish and who knocked some of the rust off the language while in Barcelona, I asked in Spanish if either of them spoke it? Natalie immediately replied that she did. She told me that even though she was born in Paris, her parents were Portuguese and for reasons she could not explain, it is easier for the Portuguese to learn Spanish than for a Spaniard to learn Portuguese.

Kathy had walked back to Hotel Lenox, a few streets away, to retrieve my medical records, which we had wisely brought with us, that listed all my medications and included a brief history about them. In the course of the two hours I was told to lay quietly in my hospital bed, Natalie and Docteur Dominique Menez, chef de service, and her team of adjoints or assistants, took blood and ran a full profile report that included an INR reading; they also performed an electrocardiogram and a urinalysis along with a blood pressure reading. Both members of my French medical team told me that I would be kept for two days if needed, to which I made a feeble effort to argue that my trip to Paris would be squandered. I did not argue it forcefully knowing who I was up against. That was not a well received argument, as both their stares told me in non verbal but no uncertain terms.

At the end of the nearly two hour wait, nurse Natalie and Docteur Menez returned and told me I was alright and could go. They downsized my Coumadin dose to 1mg per day and advised me to cut down on walking by using the Paris Metro or its buses. We said we would do that. Natalie then took me to the check out desk, where she disappeared for a minute only to return with an appointment time for a blood test two days later.

The time to pay arrived. The young man serving as the caissier or cashier punched his keyboard as he looked at his computer monitor. He printed our bill and gave it to us. Looking at the bill with a large dose of trepidation, given what we thought such an event might cost in The States, we looked hard at the number at the bottom of the page. We looked at the figure then looked at each other. A small smile of incredulity crept over our faces. For all that had been done, especially to us foreigners who just walked in off the street, the tab was 43.95 euros, or $56.25 in USD. We paid the bill, which could easily have been a bottle of wine and two dinner entrees that evening, with our MasterCard. Natalie, without understanding the system well enough to explain it to us, even in her slapdash English, said that anyone in France who has a credit card has access to health insurance.

What a novel and intriguing idea for the nation with the so-called greatest health care system in the world to consider. But not holding our breath for that breakthrough of understanding or political will, my quest to become an Italian citizen through heritage and the ability to live and work in the EU as a result of it takes on even more significance as health care comes to play a larger role in our remaining years.

When we first looked at the bill, we suggested to our young bursar that in America, where upwards of 45 million people do not have health care insurance to begin with and whose only option is to use emergency room and pay emergency room rates, for those that do, a $100 dollar co-payment would be par for the course and that the cost of all the work they had done could easily have come to $1,200 or more. He looked at us as incredulously as we had first looked at our paltry cost of care. Even though the Paris clay court tennis tournament had ended weeks before, for us in Paris, it was “Game, set, match.”

Not being held hostage for two of my three days in Paris was exhilarating. And now knowing my INR reading count and what spontaneously happens to me when I reach that level through an imbalance created from medication, diet or exercise, I had a vivid portrait in blue and purple of why I need to be vigilant in juggling medicines, diet and exercise to my best advantage.

My next posting will come from "The Divided States of America" and feature a roundup of observations and tips.