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.