Category: Travel
Rasheed Griffith on the economics and aesthetics of Asunción
Yet, on my first visit to Asunción last week none of that was on my mind. What was striking was the total absence of any aesthetic coherence of the city.
There are some economic reasons for this:
Going back to the middle class consumption point. If only around 300,000 Paraguayans make up the domestic personal income tax base then it’s perhaps not a local middle class that is buying and renting the new modern high rise apartments in Asunción.
Indeed, 70% of the new housing supply are acquired by foreign investors as a capital preservation strategy. They are not bought by locals. These are often investors from Argentina, who according to some data account for 70% of all foreign investors. They buy the apartments and then rent them out? But to who?
Usually foreigners who go to Paraguay for work purposes or new residents who take advantage of Paraguay’s quick and easy residency scheme and citizenship program. And the fun part is that these rental contracts are usually in dollars! Not the local currency (the Guaraní, PYG). Of course, Argentines buy property in Paraguay and prefer to receive dollars in rent.
The entire post is excellent There is also this:
There is a lot more that I could say about Paraguay. Like how the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) resulted in the death of 70% of adult men in Paraguay; giving the country the highest male-mortality proportion ever reliably documented for a nation-state in modern warfare.
I have yet to visit Paraguay, but someday hope to. But should this post induce me to accelerate or delay my timetable?
Chantilly destination achieved, the Limbourg brothers are amazing
Commissioned by the Duc de Berry, the enormously wealthy brother of King Charles V of France, this exquisite Book of Hours was begun by the Limbourg brothers, a trio of Netherlandish miniature painters, in around 1411. The Duc and the Limbourgs died in 1416. The manuscript was completed by other wealthy patrons and talented artists 70 years later and contains 131 full-page illuminations. Now, in a vanishingly rare opportunity, the general public has been invited to step into this world.
Until October, visitors to a special exhibition at the Condé Museum in the Château de Chantilly, 55km north of Paris, will be able to view as independent works the 12 monthly calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures, on which much of the fame of this 15th-century prayer book rests. Its importance and influence are contextualised by an exceptional display of some 100 medieval manuscripts, sculptures and paintings loaned from museums and libraries around the world.
…as the renowned scholar Christopher de Hamel, author of the 2016 book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, explains, the Très Riches Heures are so much more than a luxury object. “The staggering originality of the design and composition is overwhelming,” he says. “The full-page calendar miniatures were the first ever made. It marks the very first moment when the Renaissance touched northern Europe.
Here is the full story. This is very likely the best and most important artistic exhibit in the world right now. It is only the third time (ever) the pages of the book have been on display for the public. In the exhibit more broadly, it is remarkable how many of the best works were created in the first decade of the fifteenth century.
All three of the brothers died before the age of thirty, possibly because of the plague.
Chantilly is about an hour north of Paris, and it is a pleasant but fairly extreme town. Think of it as a French version of Middleburg, VA? Or perhaps parts of Sonoma? It is their version of horse country, with non-spicy food to boot. The accompanying castle, by the way, also is interesting and has some wonderful art works, including by Poussin, Watteau, and Greuze. The decor and trappings give you a sense of what eighteenth century French Enlightenment nobles might have considered to be beautiful.
A major goal of this trip has been to get a better handle on the Western European medieval world, and visiting this exhibit has been a big and very successful part of that.
Reims and Amiens
Both cities have significant war histories, but they are very different to visit, even though they are only two hours apart by car.
Reims was largely destroyed in World War I, and so the central core was rebuilt in the 1920s, with a partial Art Deco look. The downtown is attractive and prosperous, the people look sharp and happy, and it is a university town. You arrive and feel the place is a wonderful success. If you had to live in a mid-sized French city, you might choose this one.
The main cathedral is one of the best in France, and arguably in the world. The lesser-known basilica also is top tier. There are scattered Roman ruins. French kings were coronated in Reims from early on, all the way up through 1825.
Amiens is on the Somme, and the 1916 Battle of the Somme, followed by a later 1918 offensive, was a turning point in WWI history. The town is a melange of architectural styles, with many half-timbered homes but also scattered works from different centuries. The town also has France’s “first skyscraper,” renowned in its time but now a rather short and out of place embarrassment. The main Amiens cathedral, however, is perhaps the best in all of France.
The town itself feels like visiting a banlieu, with large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants. It is lively, and it feels as if a revitalization is underway, though I do understand opinions on these matters differ. Real estate prices are at about 3x their 1990s levels. That to me is strong evidence that things are going well.
Restaurant Momos Tibetian has excellent Chinese and Tibetan food. The Picardy museum has some very good works by Boucher, Balthus, Picabia, El Greco, and Chavannes.
Both cities are radically undervisisted. They do attract some tourists, but for the most part you feel you have them to yourself.
My Conversation with the excellent Chris Arnade
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Chris discuss how Beijing and Shanghai reveal different forms of authoritarian control through urban design, why Seoul’s functional dysfunction makes it more appealing than Tokyo’s efficiency, favorite McDonald’s locations around the world, the dimensions for properly assessing a city’s walkability, what Chris packs for long urban jaunts, why he’s not interested in walking the countryside, what travel has taught him about people and culture, what makes the Faroe Islands and El Paso so special, where he has no desire to go, the good and bad of working on Wall Street, the role of pigeons and snapping turtles in his life, finding his 1,000 true fans on Substack, whether museums are interesting, what set him on this current journey, and more.
COWEN: That’s okay. What’s your nomination for the least walkable city?
ARNADE: Phoenix is pretty bad. In the rest of the world, what was the lowest ranked of mine?
COWEN: I think Dakar is your lowest ranked.
ARNADE: Dakar is low.
COWEN: I don’t find that so bad.
ARNADE: [laughs] It was partially the heat. Also, there was a safety issue, which is not actual violence. It’s just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly because when you’re in a neighborhood where they have a slum basically, where you’re one of few white people, it’s not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that there can be miscommunication, like, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” That can spiral out of control if you don’t speak the language. Dakar was really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.
COWEN: Why’s that? I’ve never been there.
ARNADE: Again, these are cities that are not meant to be walked. Locals don’t walk them. People would look at me like I’m crazy. Part of the reason, first of all, you can jump on a hack bus, so why would you walk? The boda-bodas, which are . . . you just jump on the back of a motorcycle, which I won’t do. I did it once, and I’m like, “I’m not doing this. This is a really dumb risk.”
COWEN: Yes, I wouldn’t do that.
ARNADE: I almost got killed the first time I did it, but they do it. Consequently, there’s no walking infrastructure and when you do walk, you’re at risk of being hit by a boda-boda. People will walk out of necessity but there’s just no infrastructure. Absolutely none. Then you can get hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or a motorcycle.
COWEN: Rio, for me, would be the least walkable. It’s very dangerous but on top of that, there are so many places where walks end. There’re mountains, there’re tunnels.
And this:
COWEN: What is it you think you learn least well traveling the way you do?
ARNADE: It’s interesting. I used to be a macro-type trader. I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I’ve gone in too blind. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political situation.
One of the things I’ve learned from my project is, most people don’t talk about politics. It’s because I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing and Shanghai — maybe it’s not the best example because people would say there’s a reason they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think that’s it.
COWEN: No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
ARNADE: Yes, 98 percent of the people aren’t political and they don’t talk about politics. I got beat up on social media when people were talking about, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to be elected. The world hates us.” No, they don’t. [laughs] When that person said that, I was actually in a bar in Kampala with a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. That was a rare political conversation. Most people don’t talk about politics.
In that sense, I could probably do more reading outside of the conversations about politics because I go to a lot of these countries, I don’t know what’s going on politically because people don’t talk about it.
COWEN: What other macro views of the world have you revised due to your walking, visiting, traveling? Obviously, particular views about any individual place, but on the whole, humanity.
And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s Substack, which covers his fascinating travels around the world.
Bordeaux observations
The central core is one of the most consistent eighteenth century cities you will find in Europe. Until the visit, my first there, I had not realized how much of the town’s growth came during that time, in part because of some special trade privileges, and in part because of the slave trade. Here is some 18th century economic history of Bordeaux. The central plazas and radiating streets are splendid, as is the large Girondins monument nearby.
The main museum is subpar, with some good Redons (he is from there), and the main church is pretty good but excelled by other locales. In this sense there is not much to do in Bordeaux. There is, however, some good modern and also brutalist architecture near and across the main river bank. Check out this bridge. I enjoyed these creations, as they injected some element of surprise into my visit.
You can still get an excellent meal at the nearby country chateaus, but if you just stop for normal French food in the town it is pretty mediocre, not better than say WDC. The classic French food traditions are moving more and more into corners of the country, and away from everyday life.
Typically I am surprised by how normal France feels. People want to say “The French this, the French that…” but to me they are fairly Americanized, often speak good English, and have few truly unique cultural habits these days. They also seem reasonably well adjusted, normal mostly in the good sense, and thus of course somewhat boring too.
Walking and driving through the less salubrious parts of town is a useful corrective, but I do not feel the place is falling apart. And the best estimates are that six to nine percent of the city is Muslim, hardly an overwhelming number.
I learned just before leaving that Kevin Bryan was in town too, here are his observations. Bordeaux is certainly worth visiting, but I also am not surprised it is the last major French city I have been to in my life.
Some northern parts of Spain
Salamanca still feels part of the orbit of Madrid, but León does not. Many of the faces are more Celtic, and the mood of the city can be drab in an eastern European way. Deindustrialization can be observed. It is a real city, not much dependent on tourism, though the cathedral is one of the most beautiful in Europe.
Santander, a beach town, was much nicer than expected. There is not much to do there, but it reminds me of how perhaps Nice might have been in 1974. Fully for tourists, but somehow not very touristy? And thus extremely pleasant and charming. Places like that barely exist any more. They are either quite obscure, such as Durango, Mexico, or they are overwhelmed by tourists. Seafood was excellent, and it is a much larger city than I was expecting. Nice promenades on the water.
Hondarribia is a Basque town and fishing village that feels like it should be its own country. The half-timbered homes and unusual colors set it apart from anywhere else in Europe I have been. Small, one day there is fine, but one of Europe’s best undervisited locales?
Supersonics Takeoff!
In Lift the Ban on Supersonics I wrote:
Civilian supersonic aircraft have been banned in the United States for over 50 years! In case that wasn’t clear, we didn’t ban noisy aircraft we banned supersonic aircraft. Thus, even quiet supersonic aircraft are banned today. This was a serious mistake. Aside from the fact that the noise was exaggerated, technological development is endogenous.
If you ban supersonic aircraft, the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft won’t exist. A ban will make technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.
When we ban a new technology we have to think not just about the costs and benefits of a ban today but about the costs and benefits on the entire glide path of the technology
In short, we must build to build better. We stopped building and so it has taken more than 50 years to get better. Not learning, by not doing.
… I’d like to see the new administration move forthwith to lift the ban on supersonic aircraft. We have been moving too slow.
Thus, I am pleased to note that President Trump has issued an executive order to lift the ban on supersonics!
The United States stands at the threshold of a bold new chapter in aerospace innovation. For more than 50 years, outdated and overly restrictive regulations have grounded the promise of supersonic flight over land, stifling American ingenuity, weakening our global competitiveness, and ceding leadership to foreign adversaries. Advances in aerospace engineering, materials science, and noise reduction now make supersonic flight not just possible, but safe, sustainable, and commercially viable. This order begins a historic national effort to reestablish the United States as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation. By updating obsolete standards and embracing the technologies of today and tomorrow, we will empower our engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to deliver the next generation of air travel, which will be faster, quieter, safer, and more efficient than ever before.
…The Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shall take the necessary steps, including through rulemaking, to repeal the prohibition on overland supersonic flight in 14 CFR 91.817 within 180 days of the date of this order and establish an interim noise-based certification standard, making any modifications to 14 CFR 91.818 as necessary, as consistent with applicable law. The Administrator of the FAA shall also take immediate steps to repeal 14 CFR 91.819 and 91.821, which will remove additional regulatory barriers that hinder the advancement of supersonic aviation technology in the United States.
Congratulations to Eli Dourado who has been pushing this issue for more than a decade.
Avila, Spain
The town has amazing, quite intact walls from the 11th-14th centuries, and also three (!) of the most beautiful churches in Spain. It is only about ninety minutes from Madrid, yet I have not seen North American tourists here.
This morning it struck me to see a large number of Avila children reenacting the “lucha entre los christianos y los moros” [fight between the Christians and Moors] with toy swords and costumes, some of them dressed up like Saudis in their full garb. This made an impression on me because the Mexican village I used to visit, San Agustin Oapan, has a very similar fiesta, and here is the history of how the fiesta was transmitted, dating back to the 16th century. Even the dances and toy swords felt familiar to me. How many of them in Oapan even know what “the moros” are? I recall during my second visit to Oapan I was shocked to learn they did not know what China was, or that there was a Pope, even though they were Catholic. That all changed rapidly with the later arrival of satellite television of course.
In any case, Avila, along with the nearby Roman aquaducts of Segovia, is a much underrated visit, underrated at least in North America.
My days collecting Mexican art, part II
Recently I wrote about my quest to track down Mexican amate (bark paper) painter Juan Camilo Ayala, but there is another part to the early story, namely looking for his brother Marcial Camilo Ayala, also a painter.
Marcial no longer lived in Oapan, as he found village life intolerable. So he settled in Taxco (later Cuernavaca), and it was Juan Camilo who told me that when I showed up at his house in Oapan. Originally I was hoping to meet both brothers on that first trip.
When I arrived in Taxco on my next Mexico trip, I had the strategy of asking all tradionally-clothed women in the city center “do you know Marcial Camilo Ayala?” Far from being a needle in the haystack strategy, this yielded results within seconds. All of a sudden I was chatting with Marcial’s youngest daughter, Oliva. She in turn brought me down a steep cobblestone street to see Marcial, who was painting in a dark back room in Taxco. It all felt rather hopeless, at least at first.
Marcial and Juan were quite different. Marcial is by far the most intellectual person from Oapan, as he could speak at high levels about Picasso and Rousseau, Zapata and land reform, Nahuatl poetry, and the late string quartets of Beethoven (alas he passed away almost ten years ago). Juan cannot meaningfully read or write, but he is a corn farmer who knows everything about the rain. Marcial typically is considered the strongest painter from Oapan, and multiple times he had traveled abroad for exhibits of his work.
I now had two reasons to go to the region, namely Juan and Marcial. And so I became patrons of them both, and now have dozens of works from each of them, including some very large six foot by eight foot creations. I kept on returning to Guerrero, and would spend some time in Oapan with Juan and his family, and some time with Marcial, either in Taxco or Cuernavaca, typically talking about ideas and art. I finally started to learn proper Spanish from all the required back and forth.
In my time in Oapan I enjoyed the stars at night, the fiestas and processions, the long hours sitting around talking and joking with Juan’s family, and of course the food. The musty blue corn tortillas are to die for. If you want some fresh fish, great, but they have to go down to the river and catch it for you. The bean tamales and moles with pepitas are incredible. I once commissioned a barbecue meal, $80 for a full goat, cooked underground overnight, as from prehispanic barbeque traditions. Most meals did not involve meat, however, other than the staple of eggs.
Yet life in Oapan is not easy, not even for the visitor. There was no flush toilet or shower. The “bed” was a hard slab, and the evening temperatures inside the room exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The roosters crow at 4 a.m., and then everyone is awake. You can leave, but within the Oapan of that time, dollars could not buy you conveniences. There is an ever-present risk of dengue and sometimes malaria as well.
I got to know the four main amate painting villages (Ameyaltepec, Xalitla, and Maxela are the others), and met virtually all the living amate painters of note. I visited the renowned Alfonso Lorenzo Santos, both chained to the wall in his home in Ameyaltepec and also in the mental hospital in Cuernavaca. (Alfonso was later profiled in The Wall Street Journal, and for that journalist, Bob Davis, I served as Mexico guide and translator.) Occasionally, when looking for new amates, I had to throw rocks at the wild dogs to make my way to the homes on the edge of town.
Over the course of about a dozen years of visits, I built up what is the world’s largest and I would say best amate collection, with hundreds of quite distinct works. I also managed to buy an important early private collection, from the 1980s, with more than two hundred paintings. For years I tracked all the amate painting listings on eBay, snagging many a bargain. Later I served as (unpaid) amate painting consultant to the Smithsonian, when they set up the American Indian museum now on the mall. I am pleased that the assemblage of these works is preserving a significant cultural episode and tradition in Mexican history.
I also collected a good deal of village ceramics, still done with red clay using pre-conquest methods, noting that not all of them made it home intact. The Spanish word “burbuja” — bubble wrap — remains prominent in my mind and vocabulary. Ideally, I would like to do a major “air lift” of traditional pottery out of Oapan, but these days the drug gangs are a major obstacle.
Buying art works from Juan and Marcial also evolved into charity, and I developed my thoughts on direct cash transfers. I wrote those up on MR long ago, and I am pleased to report they had some influence in inspiring the non-profit Give Directly.
Eventually I wrote a whole book on the economy and polity of Oapan, and on the lives of the amate painters. It was published with the University of Michigan Press under the title Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of the Mexican Amate Painters. It has sold the least well of any of my books, by far, but it is one of my favorites and it is quite unlike all the others.
Over the years, there was one amate painter whose works I never tracked down, namely Jesus Corpos Aliberto. Marcial had told me he heard a rumor that Jesus Corpos was living in a dumpy hotel in the middle of Mexico City, Hotel Buenos Aires. I found my way to the hotel, and yes Jesus was there with a big stack of brilliant amates he was looking to sell. They let him stay there in a smelly back room. Sadly he was insane, and would sell the amates only for millions of pesos. During yet my next trip to Mexico City, I returned but the hotel was gone altogether, eliminated by gentrification. I had no remaining links to Corpos. At that point, and following the passing of Marcial, and the aging of the other main amate painters, that part of my life largely was over. And so my story with amate painting ends with the same basic obstacle it started with: a stubborn refusing to sell me something, thwarted markets in everything.
Madrid’s Galería de las Colecciones Reales
Visitors don’t seem to know about this place yet, but it is one of the finest artistic venues in Spain. Taken from the royal collections and opened only a few years ago, it has one of the best displays of 16th century Brussels tapestries you will find, perhaps the best, beautifully hung with plenty of space. The paintings are from Goya, Velazquez, Melendez, Patinir, Mengs, Juan de Valdés, and others patronized by the Spanish rulers. Few bad pieces in the lot. There are also Goya tapestries, sometimes right next to associated Goya paintings. A splendid royal carriage.
This is perhaps my sixth (?) visit to Madrid, and the place never has felt better. Great for walking, and full of young people and small shops. It has absolutely displaced Barcelona as the leading city in Spain. A+ for both dining and art, and now it is the European capital of Latin America as well. It is no longer crazy to put it in the same league as Paris or Berlin, and these days feels more like a work in progress — in the good sense of that term — than either of those other places.
Travel bleg for Avila, Salamanca, Segovia, and other smaller places nearby
Your suggestions are most welcome, thank you!
My days collecting Mexican art, part I
In an earlier post I detailed my history of how I got started collecting Haitian art. There is more to that story, but for now the point is that buying Haitian art led me into buying Mexican art as well.
I was visiting the New Jersey home of famed author and art dealer Selden Rodman, who had lived part-time in Jacmel, Haiti for decades and by then was approaching his 90s. This was in the late 1990s. On his wall I saw some Mexican paintings, from a small Mexican village called San Agustin Oapan (good short video), in the state of Guerrero.
The style of the art was naive, broadly similar to the major trends in Haitian art at the time. Perspective was vertically stacked, as you might find in medieval art. Sun and stars were prominent in the pictures, often portrayed together. You might see angels, a tableau of the village, a procession, or village animals or a local fiesta. Colors would be bright, or black and white.
I tried to buy the paintings, but Selden refused to sell them. I kept on trying, but to no avail. Finally he cackled and spit out “Well, I guess you’ll just have to go there and get some!” As if to get rid of me, which he did.
Not one to decline such a challenge, I began to investigate the matter. I could not find the name of the small village on any maps, including the detailed Mexico maps held in the GMU library. Finally, I called up Selden and he gave me some vague sense where it was. I flew to Mexico City and hired a taxi. We drove several hours to the general area, and then started asking people on the side of the road where the village was. We kept on being redirected, and for a while it seemed fruitless. But eventually someone told us to take an unmarked turn from the road, not too far from Iguala. And so we climbed the hill on an unpaved road, with the 25 km distance taking almost four hours.
The eventual taxi fare was $600, a fair amount in the Mexico of the late 1990s.
Along the way were fantastic cactuses and canyons, another small village, and the occasional person with a burro. It was hot. I was on my way.
When I reached the village, I was surprised by the number of pigs, by the number of drunken men lying in the street, and by the living standards, even though I had been going to Haiti. I later learned that a family of seven might earn about $1500-2000 a year, and if seven children were born perhaps only four or five would survive to adulthood. I thought the place at least would have a shop or a restaurant, but no.
Due to its remoteness, Oapan was still Nahuatl-speaking (the older people did not speak Spanish at all) and had preserved an especially large number of pre-Columbian customs and religious practices. Oapan, by the way, is a Nahuatl word for “where the green maize stalk abounds.” To this day, I consider Nahuatl to be the most beautiful and expressive language I have heard.
I started asking around for Juan Camilo Ayala, the name of the painter whose work I so admired. It turns out there were two people with that name in the village, but eventually I found his home and knocked on the door. I was not expecting to find a corn farmer and a bunch of domestic animals behind the door, but indeed I did. He later related he was shocked that I came to visit, but he responded calmly in a non-plussed manner. “Not many people come here,” he noted in his own broken Spanish.
I showed him a photo of the painting I liked in Rodman’s house, but he did not remember it. Nonetheless he pledged to paint, if not a copy, something in the same general style and inspiration. I asked for a large painting, and was surprised when he cited a price of only $100.
Like an idiot, I handed over an AmEx traveler’s check, and Juan Camilo thought it was dollars. (Later on we straightened that mess out, and I started using Western Union.)
I gave them my address, which they wrote in the rafters of the home, above the screeching roosters, and I headed back down to Mexico City with the cab. Several months later a beautiful picture arrived at the house, in perfectly good condition. It hangs on the stairwell to this very day.
I was hooked, and soon this story was to continue…
How will AI affect cities and travel?
COWEN: In the 5 percent [economic growth] scenario — put aside San Francisco, which is special — but do cities become more or less important? Clearly, this city might become more important. Say, Chicago, Atlanta, what happens?
CLARK: I think that dense agglomerations of humans have significant amounts of value. I would expect that a lot of the effects of AI are going to be, for a while, massively increasing the superstar effect in different industries. I don’t know if it’s all cities, but I think any city which has something like a specialism — like high-frequency trading in Chicago or certain types of finance in New York — will continue to see some dividend from sets of professionals that gather together in dense quantities to swap ideas.
COWEN: Could it just be easier to stay at home, and more fun? I find I’m an outlier, but my use of AI — I either want to go somewhere very distant and use the AI there to learn about, say, the birds of a region, or I want to stay at home. It’s a barbell effect. The idea of driving 35 minutes to Washington, DC — that seems less appealing than it used to be.
That is from my Conversation with Jack Clark of Anthropic.
Has international travel to the U.S. really collapsed?
But despite some ominous signs, a close look at the data shows that travel to the United States is largely holding up — at least so far.
Nearly as many foreign travelers have arrived at American airports this year than during the same period last year, according to an analysis by The New York Times of entry data collected from every international airport in the country.
International arrivals did drop more than 10 percent in March compared with last year, but this was largely because Easter fell unusually late this year, pushing back a popular travel window for European tourists. More recent figures from April show that travel over the holiday looked similar to previous years.
Here is more from the NYT. The main major difference is for Canadians, who are indeed more skittish, and their ticket sales are down 21 percent.
Living in Freiburg, Germany
After two years at Harvard, I had finished all of my graduate school courses and oral (!) exams. Then I had a compulsion for what I should do next, something that at the time appeared remarkably stupid, although it worked out very well for me.
At some critical points in my life I have made key decisions with regard to place, including Mexico, Haiti, New Zealand, and as I will write about today, Freiburg, Germany. Each of those decisions fundamentally reshaped my life. None of those decisions were motivated by rational reasons, or indeed much by traditional reasons at all. I simply wanted to do particular things, and then set off to do so.
After two years of study, a Harvard PhD student would be expected to apprentice with a top professor, “live in the basement of the Science Center” (where the computers were those days), and in general become part of the system. Somehow none of that fit me. I decided instead to study for a year in Freiburg, Germany, at the university there, mostly to learn German but also to run away from a particular kind of fate that most of my peers were choosing. And so I departed from Cambridge in 1984-85, aided by a strong dollar and a small grant from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Other than an Oxford and London summer trip at age 17, it was my first time abroad. I flew over with Kroszner, and we rented a car to drive around Germany for a few weeks before I would settle in Freiburg.
Our first stop was Mainz, which was not too far from Frankfurt airport. I was stunned by everything I saw, ranging from the supermarkets to the food to how the downtown was organized. These days Mainz is regarded as a fairly dull city, but then, for me, it was fascinating beyond belief. Unlike England, Germany struck me as a peer country to the United States, with a roughly equal living standard and in some ways a superior way of life.
Other stops on our trip included the beautiful Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, the “Romantic Road” in Bavaria, and of course Berlin. The one day I spent in East Berlin terrified me. Not primarily because of the living standards (which were low), but because the people seemed so fearful and intimidated. I decided that communism was far worse than I had thought. I was relieved to return to West Berlin, which at the time had that Cold War, party town, otherworldly feel. Try watching “Wings of Desire” some day.
Once I settled into Freiurg I was on my own. I refused to hang out with the other American students, and so I learned German pretty quickly. I developed a morning routine of walking to buy the International Herald Tribune, working on my dissertation in the morning on a typewriter, and going into town for lunch and some shopping and errands. Freiburg was the closest I ever have come to living in a proper city, though at the time the population was a mere quarter million or so. Nonetheless one could go “in die Stadt,” an entirely meaningful notion if you know the layout.
I even ended up with a German girlfriend, and from her I learned German all that much better.
Frequently I would feel claustrophobic, and so I would depart for Switzerland, where I would feel even more claustrophobic. Still, I loved those trips, as the sense of perpetual motion was sufficient compensation. Over time I have managed to see every Swiss canton, and I am fond of all of them. For Erleichterung I would visit the Netherlands, or one time Chris Weber came by and we drove to Colmar for Alsatian smoked meats, yum. For Thanksgiving there was an Italy trip to Bergamo and Verona. Later in the spring I went to Venice and Florence.
I had a January lecture tour in Vienna (freezing!), with the Carl Menger Institute, and in May a week-long stint in Graz. My German peers found it literally unbelievable that someone my age had published papers I could present and talk about, in addition to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on monetary economics.
I also gave a talk at a jazz club in Vienna, the first (but not last) time I experienced talk-giving as a kind of high class entertainment. I mixed German and English, and told a fair number of jokes, and found I enjoyed that. I am thankful to Albert Zlabinger for arranging that evening.
It was that kind of life. There has never been a year that was more exciting or when I learned more about the world.
Art and painting started making sense to me when I visited the Lenbach Haus in Munich, with Blue Rider works, and the Mondrian museum in The Hague. I retain a special fondness for those artists to this day.
Amsterdam probably was my favorite city, though I now feel it is long since ruined by an excess of tourists. To save money, I would sleep on the houseboats there.
Once I tired of German food, delicious though it may be, I started experimenting on the culinary front, at least as much as I could given my location. That was the time in my life when I started trying everything I could.
It simply stunned me how many things in Germany were better, starting with the bread and orange juice and butter, though hardly ending there.
So every day I learned, learned, learned, and was in pretty constant motion.
By the time I returned to the United States, it was clear I would never be entering on mainstream tracks again.