Postcard from Europe: Home’s where the boat floats

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Colorful stamp depicting boats on water, with artistic brush strokes and a sunny backdrop.

Above: Houseboats docked along a London canal

Tensions have been rising between the managers of Britain’s canals, others who use them, and the nomadic narrowboaters, revered by some as bohemian travelers and disdained by others as maritime squatters.”

“Britain’s Canalboat Nomads Fear New Rules Will Sink Their Way of Life,” Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post, August 29. 2025

I had seen canalboats before, yet London was the first place I became fascinated with the lifestyle of those who operated them. Clueless as to how the system worked.

Now I know, there are boats with permanent berths, and then there are “travelers,” wanderers required to shove off after two weeks in one spot. Many of these are not short-term vacationers but long-term residents who rove about the canals tying up their houses fortnightly.

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Postcard from Nice, France: Keep diving for pearls of flavor

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A postage stamp depicting an open oyster with a blue background, labeled 'Les huîtres' and marked with a value of 0.50€ from La Poste 2004.

Above: A no. 2 oyster, probably a Charente Maritime, dressed with a dash of vinegar at Le Gambetta

And I had my first oyster. Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity – and in many ways, more fondly….

I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater…of brine and flesh…and somehow…of the future. Everything was different now. Everything. I’d not only survived – I’d enjoyed.”

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, 2000

Anthony Bourdain credits an oyster tasted in France when he was ten years old for propelling him toward a lifetime obsession with flavor. While this Virginia Beach native loves oysters now, it certainly was not love at first swallow. I didn’t learn to enjoy them un-fried or un-Rockefellowed until late in high school.

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Postcard from Catania, Sicily: Ambling about Acireale

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A colorful vintage postcard featuring Mount Etna, with vineyards in the foreground and a bright blue sky.

Above: A version of a negroni created in honor of Mount Etna at Moro Acireale superimposed over a view of the simmering volcano in the distance.

Ambling sounded appealing, and, with a tenth of the population of bustling Catania, nearby Acireale beckoned. The predominant style of its architecture is Late Sicilian Baroque, sometimes referred to as “Earthquake Baroque.”

Then came an earthquake so horrible and ghastly that the soil undulated like the waves of a stormy sea, and the mountains danced as if drunk, and the city collapsed in one miserable moment….”

Account from an eyewitness to the 1693 Val di Noto Earthquake, The Genesis of Noto: An Eighteenth-Century Sicilian City, Stephen Tobriner, University of California Press, 1982

At the start of the new year in 1693, Mother Nature cursed most of southeastern Sicily with a triple whammy: Etna erupted; an earthquake believed to have measured well above 7 on the Richter Scale struck; and a tsunami hit. One way or another, more than 60,000 perished in the disaster.

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