Paris Werewolves

Harry's New York Bar in Paris' 2nd Arrondissement has been serving cocktails to ex-pats and other fellow-travelers since 1911. Starting in 1924, way before Americans abroad were able to vote in US presidential elections, Harry's has conducted a straw vote among citizens who stop in for a drink. According to lore , the "winner" of the Straw Vote has lost the "real" election only three times in 96 years.  Being traditionalists living abroad in a very traditional country, we decided to take the métro over to Place de l'Opéra and cast our straw ballots over Manhattans and Daiquiris (the normal, decent kind, no blender abominations here). The voting operation was very professional, with tight ballot security measures and and strict identification requirements--only American citizens who produce their US passport for the serveur are provided a paper ballot and a pen.   Chain-secured, padlocked ballot box, passport mandatory. Oski, the official polling pl...

Our spirit guide through Vienna's Zentralfriedhof cemetery. Wiener Zentralfriedhof is pretty new by the standards of European burial places. Established in 1863 to accommodate the future needs of Vienna's growing population, the cemetery immediately took flak from conservative religious quarters for interring Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Jews on the same grounds (in separate sections, of course). Because the new friedhof was planned with space to expand in mind, it was also located pretty far from town--about half an hour today by tram. This was still a bit à province for fashionable, sophisticated Viennese to contemplate depositing their mortal remains. After all, unlike in the US, in Europe, you don't buy a burial plot. You rent it and hope that your family continues to pay for its care and upkeep in perpetuity. The last thing you want is some distant, as-yet-unborn cousin to slack off for the sake of inconvenience. To sweeten the pot, friedhof p...

Kapuzinergruft , Vienna Vienna is the most beautiful, elegant, sophisticated place for contemplating what awaits beyond the veil of death and in the darkest corners of our nightmares. Amidst the baroque architecture, string quartets and bustling coffee houses serving schnitzels and tortes to tourists and locals alike, you will find more skulls, trolls, and demons per square kilometer than any other place I've ever been.   Anti-war and Anti-fascism monument, Vienna In some respects, this makes perfect sense. The Habsburg Empire, in its many iterations from roughly the 11th century until the end of WWI, encompassed huge swaths of Balkan, Carpathian, and Transylvanian eastern Europe. They likely absorbed the folklore of these lands, which was rife with fantastic beasts and horrific, undead revenants, as subjects and treasure were funneled back towards the seat of imperial rule in Austria. Still, that's not much of an explanation. Monstrous creatures are part of folklore around the...

Chevreuse, à province My latest favorite French expression is à province , which generally denotes everywhere in France that is not Paris. Example: "Habite-il à province?" (Does he live outside of the capital?) "Oui, à Marseille." (Yes, in Marseille) To say " à province" is like referring to rural areas in the US as the boonies or the sticks. Except that in France, it basically applies to the entire country, with the exception of 0.019% of France's European territory (105 km2 out of 543,940) where about 3% of its population lives.  For a factual statement (a person or thing is or is not in the capital), it therefore packs an impressive and revealing degree of snobbery. No place else is in the world can capture the imagination or simultaneously embody so many different things--fashion, culture, gastronomie, industrial innovation, royal excess, revolutionary zeal, intellectual courage, imperial overreach, faded grandeur--as Paris. But why rub it in? 35 ...