The Aerie
Last night while tending the kids I turned to PBS. Now, I'm not one of those PBS-only TV snobs or anything - I'll watch "Heroes" even though it's dead dreadful - but there was, like, nothing else on across the limited broadcast channels we can pick up at our antenna. So anyway PBS featured another Rick Steves travel special, this one about Christmas in Europe.
When I tuned in they were in Paris, and it was fun to see all the places that we had just visited in August, the Eiffel Tower, etc. But, you know, Paris for all its charms is kind of big and impersonal. It's hard to get too nostalgic about it unless you grew up there or something. It's not so unusual to see the Eiffel tower that you would say "Oh! I was there once!" I mean, sure you were - so was almost anybody else who has ever travelled.
But then they left Paris and headed east into Burgundy, to explore French wine country. Good enough, it was nice to see the rural French Christmas.
Then they cut directly away from Burgundy to an as-yet unidentified plaza...
..which I immediatley recognized as the Hauptmarkt, in front of Frauenkirche in Nuremberg!
They even cut for the briefest instant (less than a second) to the Schöener Brunnen in the corner of the market where Gennie and Dante spun the secret ring for luck.
The special showed all the Christkindlmarkt events, and even paused to show the proprietors making a Nuremberger Bratwürste sandwich, basically a small white-bread roll, split, with three or four small (what Americans would consider breakfast) sausages. The boys loved them.
Oh, I was dying. I mean, that was special - there are a lot of towns in Germany they could have visited, but to go right to the city where we had stayed was really a treat. And I wanted to be back there, back on that wonderful vacation, so bad I could hardly stand it. Argh! I have to work! I have to waste my life trapped in a little cubicle! There's a whole planet out there to explore!
I called for the rest of the family and I watched raptly. The kids, not so much - yeah, sure, that's where we visited alright. Ah, how little do they know! Sure we visited Europe, doesn't everybody? Won't we be back there again soon? How could I tell them that it was eleven years between my first two visits, and eighteen years until my fourth?
Can I just travel the world for a living? I'll bring the family...
Posted by Albatross at December 7, 2006 2:08 PM | TrackBack