Why have a German reunion in Salt Lake City? In 1969, I traveled to Kiel, Germany, for a “junior year abroad” at the Christian-Albrechts University. I ended up staying out of the US for three and a half years, during which time, besides living in Germany, I spent significant time in Sweden, Afghanistan, and India. I returned home at the end of 1972, after the Vietnam draft had been abolished...
As during the past ten years or so, I worked New Year's Eve 2010 at a Reno
casino with a ten?piece band, "The World's Most Dangerous Party Band". We played
for two dinner seatings of "high rollers", i.e. casino visitors who deposit the requisite
minimum amount of money into their gaming (gambling) accounts. Casinos don't
care if a particular customer wins or loses…they just have to gamble. Because when
they gamble, the odds favoring the "house" (casino) will prevail, and so overall the
casinos consistently rake in the money.
Our first trip to East Africa was a great experience. The people were very open and hospitable. The safari logistics were performed without a hitch. But above all, the animals were amazing.
The gallery for this blog features the people, not the animals.
DISCLAIMER
My photo gallery for this blog is of varying quality. That is because many photos were taken from the moving jeep. Sometimes, the subjects were far away, such that expanding and cropping of the subject lowered the resolution. Some of the subjects were not happy with my having taken their photos. I tried to be unobtrusive when possible. Don’t forget to click the photos to expand them and see the short descriptions.
As Susan and I begin the final week of our India visit, in this blog I want to try and describe our day-to-day life during our six weeks here. We have had such a wonderful time, that we hope to return again at the end of this year. We played more concerts in our six weeks here than we have in the past year at home in Reno. The positive audience reception of our Indian audiences was very gratifying.
We spent two tourist days in Rome prior to boarding the Viking cruise ship. Our hotel was located in the Trastevere section of Rome, an older residential area across the Tiber River from the central city, home to Rome’s most famous architectural landmarks.
My travel blogs are intended to provide my readers with the vicarious pleasure of my sharing my travel experiences.
I first visited Sweden in 1970. Since that time, I have visited Sweden perhaps fifteen times, including ten years in a row of music tours with the group Mynta. This current trip consists of a single agenda: meeting my old friends, some of whom I met in 1970.
The cliché is that “you can take the boy out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the boy.”
This blog is about a small area of peace within a conflict zone. I’m referring to the cold war (sometimes erupting into hot-war violence) between Israel and the Palestinians.
The world is a big place…I was picked up at 3am to travel to the Mumbai airport for a 6:40am Turkish Airlines flight, which flew seven hours from Mumbai to Istanbul. After a couple of hours in the chaotic, crowded, and very international Istanbul airport, I flew two hours to the Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv Israel. Met by Susan, we traveled half an hour by taxi to the town of Rehovot, where Susan’s sister and her husband have lived for many years. . .
