Starting tomorrow Chiara and I put our mid-summer cultural itinerary into practice and hop the train for Gay Paree. I’ve never been, but that window is closing, and a new, Frencher, Ryan will be climbing through the otherside.

One who has seen the Eiffel Tour, and other Parisian things.

After that it’s friends and family and hopefully a few things I didn’t manage to see during the almost two years I lived in Rome, before taking the ‘sleeper train of the summer’ to operatic Vienna, soaking up the, uh, whatever is in Vienna.

Next it will be some time in Prague to Czech it out (whoo hoo hoo. ha) hopefully with some Scandinavian jackasses who will be there on the whim of coincidence.
Lastly, a night in Dresden, inspiration for Slaughterhouse 5, (So named because that’s where Kurt Vonnegut hid while the Allies bombed the shit out of this strategically irrelevant centre of culture. 2 notes: R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut, and Did you know his brother Bernard was the one who invented the rainmaking technique ‘cloud-seeding’? Now you do.)
Then, German train conductors willing, we’ll be back home two weeks hence for me to jump back into rehearsals.

PS I will have learned all of my lines for the play by the end of our trip. Or else.

There will be some couch surfing going on as well. If all goes according to plan, our new best friend-who-we-haven’t-met-yet will be leaving us his apartment in Montmartre for the self-imposed long weekend.

And we’ll be crashing at the apt. of another friend-who-we-haven’t-met-yet in Vienna.

We’re hostelling in Prague and budget hotelling in Dresden, but hope for a coffee or drink with a local or two thanks to couchsurfing.

There will be updates.