One observation I have about Europe is how common it is for residents to have cloth napkins at their dinner tables. I don’t mean the thick, rich satin, fine-dining cloth napkins; I mean basic, all-cotton square cloths. Bedsheet material. Most households have holders for them on their tables, like a flat dish or tray, usually …
Category Archives: Travel
Tomorrow’s Naïveté, Abroad
Once upon a time, three months ago, I was reading a Rick Steves’ European travel book from 2012 and having predictive visions of what Europe would be like once I finally got there. And I forgot those memories until just now. And damn, they are quaint memories of the future. They just don’t jive with …
Flow Go
Europe has different things by custom and design. Let’s take the most basic of essentials — toilet paper. In Europe, the sheets are rectangular. Ours are square. It’s an odd thing to notice. Two of their sheets is three of ours. So for smaller tasks with a single sheet, you can actually do more with …
Sojourn
If you haven’t been paying attention on some of my other platforms, you wouldn’t have known that I got back from a two-week trip around northern Europe. But that’s OK if you haven’t, because I’ve been remiss in posting about it here, since Phaysis is my first love, my primary voice, my public face to …
Fi
Despite the fact that I had to drive down to Bastrop on Friday to pick up a SIM card because none of the Best Buys here in Austin had them, the transition from Cricket to Google Fi on Saturday morning was rather painless. All told, took about 10 minutes to swap the SIM, activate the …