Hip to Be Square...Maybe

Over 30,000 users of the American social networking site Badoo.com have rated nations based on their "coolness."  Not at all surprisingly, the U.S. was voted coolest.  But at the opposite end of the scale, to me very surprisingly, is Belgium.  It's now semi-official: Belgium is the least cool place on earth.  Obviously, no one has checked out our weather this summer; otherwise, we'd be right up there with Oslo, Seattle, and maybe Minsk.
Actually, I'm surprised that 30,000 Americans could even identify Belgium.  Fortunately, they weren't asked to place it on a map prior to being allowed to vote.
A local Belgian newspaper has taken issue with the not-so-scientific results and has come up with several areas where Belgium truly is cool.   Among these "assets": Belgium has the world record for the longest stint without an elected government (something like 15 months, but this may actually be coming to an end!), and, my personal fave, Belgium can lay claim to having the world's ugliest city: Charleroi.  Evidently someone somewhere actually votes for such things.

Another New Label

Europeans are famous for labeling requirements on thousands of products, providing you everything from mundane figures for calories and fat in food to exhaust emissions per kilometer driven by new cars.  Now, Belgium has just passed a law requiring that all cell phone advertisements must include the device's "radiation value," which will range from 0 to 2 watts.  Doesn't seem like a very wide range there, but I guess it's the labeling that counts.  Or the passing of yet another new law...

Very Fitting

What do you call an obviously intoxicated jerk who makes a noisy, public spectacle of himself?
See below...

Actually, and this may say quite a bit about the Polish folks, signs such as this one loudly brag about their main product, all over the streets of Krakow, which we visited earlier in the week.

Twilight in Paris

Taken on Saturday evening...

The Scene of the Crime

Or, maybe more aptly put: where it all started.
This is my "school house," the university in Bonn, Germany, where a scared, young kid spent his junior year abroad.   The building is a 17th century palace and the school counts among its graduates and/or professors Karl Marx, Pope Benedict XVI, Nietzsche, Heinrich Heine, and Joseph Goebbels...
Hard to believe, but it's been well over 35 years now.  The school hasn't changed a bit.  I think the student has.

Why Do I Love Germany So Much?

                      Just one look, and I think you'll see...

Quiet Memorial on the Danube

This may be the smallest, most understated Holocaust memorial anywhere in the world.  It is nothing more than about 60 pairs of real shoes, perhaps "iron-ed" and then welded to the bank of the Danube in Budapest, only a few steps from their beautiful Parliament building.  Constructed just 6 years ago, it commemorates a fateful night in January, 1945, when dozens of Jews, whom Raoul Wallenberg had been attempting to hide/save, were rounded up and brought to the banks of the river.  Perhaps unwilling to dig a mass grave in the frozen earth, the Nazi sympathizers simply lined them all up and shot them, allowing the bodies to drop into the Danube and be carried off.   There are all kinds of shoes, including those of small children.  While there is a small plaque nearby, there are no other words, sounds, or markers.  The shoes simply speak for themselves.