"She'll be taking me to three different places, all just outside of Parma..."

"... La Traversetolese -- makers [of] Parmiggiano Reggiano cheese, then the family Conti -- curers of Parma prosciutto (a mother and daughters operation), and finally Picci Acetaia -- the Balsamic House of the Picci family (a father and son affair). Not interested in finding out about what makes this part of Italy hum? I can't even imagine that possibility. You can't just sprinkle cheese on your spaghetti and fake balsamic vinegar on your salad without knowing about what you're really doing or eating. It's not all that it appears to be!..."

Nina's in Parma with pictures of ham-making and cheese-making and important specifics about the right kind of balsamic vinegar.

On the subway in St. Petersburg, "there is no trash, no litter, no graffiti. It is clean down there."

"Remarkably tidy for a nation that doesn't have the reputation for being pristine. And no, I did not see a cleaning squad attending to human slovenliness. I saw an occasional (but rare) guard, that's all," writes my colleague Nina, with excellent photographs.

And I saw a populace that is proud. Too proud to deface what is regarded as uniquely grand, uniquely theirs.

Which brings me to the final point: the metro was built in the years just before and after the death of Stalin. The stations are a work of art. Soviet art. There isn't a better place to come face to face with it than at the metro stations.

Times have changed since the days of Lenin or Stalin. We're back to Russia now, as opposed to the Soviet Union. And Saint Petersburg, as opposed to Leningrad. But although the city name has changed and the commercial face of Russia has surely changed too, moving further and further from the post-revolution communist rhetoric of its leaders, here -- unlike in Poland [where Nina grew up] -- the monuments to those leaders have, for the most part remained in place...

Perhaps this is true to some extent in most countries: we, too, have trouble letting go of glorified images of generals and leaders whose period of governance did not exactly embrace all the values we claim to hold dear. But in Poland, the erasure of a communist past has proceeded rapidly following the return to market capitalism. The changing of Warsaw street names is a prime example of this. Not so here....

"The artist, Andy Goldsworthy, has placed several arches in spots around the globe, but the Striding Arches — three of them — on the hilltops just north of Moniaive you could say are closest to his Scottish heart."

Nina goes to Scotland and tracks down the arches.

At the link, in addition to Goldsworthy arches, archetypal sheep and (in the last photograph) a perfectly idealized farmer.

"I like the idea of Cornwall wild. I'm reading the book 'Wild' at the moment. It does this to you..."

"... it makes you believe you can do more than you think you can do. Here, you have to understand the positioning of St. Ives a bit: the town is on a peninsula: to the northeast, you have the long expanse of beach and coves and coastal life. To the southwest you have the rugged cliffs and wild heath: heather, gorse and scrub and not much else. This is where I'm heading."

Hearty travel-blogging from Nina, about as far southwest as you can get in England.

The book "Wild" is "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail."

"It seems to me that men in France (if employed) are a content lot. I'm not saying that women are not."

"Why do I assign a higher level of contentedness to French men? Obviously not based on scientific data. But do, please look around you when you're in France.... Take this scene from breakfast: he told her stories with animation and passion the whole time I was at the cafe. She barely said a word. But she did nod and smile and give signs that she was listening and that she cared. For better or worse (in my opinion - probably worse), women still do appear to want to please men. They want to look good for them, for instance. You can tell (and literature confirms this). Whereas I can't really recall the last time I dressed with care for Ed's benefit. Women I know back home like to look good for themselves and not necessarily for some guy's approving glance."

Nina writes, from Paris, with a great photo take from behind the back of a man who is receiving the gaze of a beautiful woman who is sitting under a painting of a man with his back turned. Under the table, a dog gazes outward.

"The group before me is Russian and they want to inspect everything, so it's easy to pass them."

"And to have the entire Fontainebleau Chateau to myself. (Are you playing the music?!)"

"I thought if I held on to that bird, the rest would follow. But over time..."

"... I could see the strain on everyone. Older parents with new partners means that not all parties are thrilled to be spending Thanksgiving in the company of that person’s family rather than their own.... And even if everyone is willing to look past broken relationships and accept the emerging new ones across all generations, it doesn’t mean that this unity of purpose — a meal together at Thanksgiving — is necessarily a good thing. There are, for one thing, too many people now. Too many families. Because if my girls want to include mom and dad and their partners, what of the families of their husbands?... This year, I understand that my kids are bearing the burden of a family holiday together. They’re trying too hard to be with everyone in some fashion over a period of very few days allotted to that purpose. It seems to me that the kindest parents are the ones who stay to the side and let the ball fall away from their court sometimes. Maybe even oftentimes. And so this year, I tossed the bird out the window, so to speak..."

Writes Nina Camic (my colleague) in the NYT.

ADDED: I love when doing nothing — especially when it avoids a lot of effort — amounts to the higher path. Virtue in not acting. That applies to a lot more than Thanksgiving. As for Thanksgiving, I always appreciated it when my sons' father wanted them over. Thanksgiving is the last weekend of the semester, and there follows a lovely, long winter break. Thanksgiving is precisely the weekend when I am not looking for more of a workload. So I was glad to step back and let the ex-husband have the boys over. If I got extra points — kindness credit — for letting go, that was nice, but I was always openly grateful for the relief. I was glad to do nothing. It's Thanksgiving, and as they say — and I truly mean it: Thanks for nothing!

"And I realized almost immediately that I knew nothing about today’s birthing or parenting issues."

"I hadn’t tracked this stuff. I hadn’t wanted to presume that it would be relevant to my daughters.... So what good is my wealth of knowledge to her? What can I give her now, when our experiences are so unshared?"

My colleague Nina Camic has a column in the NYT "Motherlode" section titled: "A Soon-to-Be Grandma, Ready to Learn."

"What strikes me as noteworthy is how easy it is to parent certain values in your kid if the whole culture supports a set of imperatives."

"The mom didn't do this on her own. The kids are used to good social behavior because they learned it in school, with friends, at family gatherings. She is just the maraschino cherry on their path in life. Much of the socialization of children takes place in schools and day care centers here, starting with infancy, where good manners, especially table manners are taught as assiduously as nursery rhymes and letters of the alphabet."

From a description of very young French children eating dinner at a restaurant with their mother. You have to scroll past (or linger over) many travel photos to get to this text, which surrounds the last of the photographs.

Blogging from a small place, an experience in triplicate.

My colleague, the intrepid traveler, Nina Camic, is spending a lot of time on the little Scottish Isle of Islay, with lots of photographs, including plenty of stuff about whisky, which wasn't a particular passion of hers as I assume it is for most travelers who hop over to the isle for a day or 2. Go here and keep scrolling and scrolling, and when you get to the bottom, click "older posts" and scroll some more, and click "older posts" again. And if you're up for more intense attention to a Scottish island, here's the 2009 set of blog posts from the Isle of Skye.

I like this approach of really settling into a small place and needing to find more than the hot spots you'd tick off if you followed one of those New York Times "36 Hours in [Wherever]" articles.

It might be quite challenging, and you might get bored — especially if you're the sort of person who goes traveling because you get bored at home. But if you have a blog and the right Spirit of the Blogger, everything you see is triplicated: 1. The basic living-through-the-experience observation that all travelers have, 2. The recognition of bloggability that involves you in taking photographs and making mental notes and fluidly imagining how these things might later take form in a post, and 3. The experience relived as you discover the contents of your camera on your computer screen and compose the writing that will surround it with narrative. With this amplification of experience, a very minor experience like a couple sheep in the road becomes mythic.

"You allow anonymous comments?"

I ask Meade, about his new blog, his all-dog blog, which got an Instalanche yesterday.

Meade: "Yeah, but they're moderated. I only approved them if they're nice."

Me: "But would you allow some comments that weren't nice?"

Meade: "Um, yeah. I said not 'nice' but what I really meant was not mean or nasty. Like I just approved one: 'Yes, but what do they taste like?' So that was funny. Maybe: Don't offend the people who have the dog."

It's an evolving standard, moderating comments. I've only switched to moderation all the time recently (after a period of on-and-off moderation, after a very long period of no moderation because the moderation function was broken), so I hadn't given any thought in many years to allowing anonymous commenters.

Anonymous commenters might be the very people that you delete all the time when you see them in moderation. And in Meade's method, those people could get through, but only if they are nice or funny or whatever suits the evolving standard. It's comment-specific moderation, not name specific. They can't build up a troll persona to get off on.

Trolls aside, there are some people who just can't figure out how to register in an account that lets them comment (either Google or something accepted by Open ID). I get email from such people sometimes. (They always seem to be professors, in case you were thinking they must be quite dumb.) And obviously, some people, even using a pseudonym, are sensitive about having names connected to their comments.

At my colleague Nina's blog, where comments must pass through moderation, anonymity isn't accepted, on the specified ground she only wants to hear from readers "if they feel they can stand behind their words." She adds "I do not seek a free-for-all here. I like camaraderie far more than conflict," and that may suggest that she doesn't want the experience of reading mean and nasty comments, even when she can prevent them from ever seeing the light of blog.

By the way, speaking of Meade's dog blogging, Nina has been doing a lot of chicken blogging, not that hers has become an all-chicken blog.

"If you grew up in Milwaukee and then move elsewhere, surely a return will put you right back into your childhood shoes?"

"I feel that way about Warsaw. Each time I come back, it's as if I am a teen again, with all the angst and worry and rush that is so characteristic of being, say, fifteen. Because Warsaw is for me my coming of age. My eye opener. My adolescence."

"This day! It had everything: a hike, a crazy ambulance ride, hospital visits (two hospitals!), sunshine, kindness..."

"... so much kindness, and finally a gorgeous sunset, and dinner for me, on a tray, at home."

Nina's hiking in Turkey. Skim this post the wrong way and you'll miss the attack of wild dogs. It's one of these travel-photo pieces, and there are no photos of the part with the biting dogs.

Ever worry about traveling abroad because what if you had a medical emergency?

ADDED: Are there packs of wild dogs in the United States? I found this:

As many as 50,000 stray dogs roam the streets and vacant homes of bankrupt Detroit, replacing residents, menacing humans who remain and overwhelming the city’s ability to find them homes or peaceful deaths.

"If I showed you a vignette of this, without any indication of where I am, you could have guessed Turkey, yes, maybe, but also Syria in better times..."

"... or Lebanon or any other country that is so close to where I am that the habits of the people surely don't change just because some years ago a border was drawn between one group and the next."

(Scroll down for the photo of the 2 guys preparing some flatbread concoction.)

"Back at the market, I muse how the photos that I take invariably bring out what I think of as local and therefore interesting."

"You're not likely to find me taking a picture of the Polish guy who was standing on the street with hand extended asking for a few coins. Or of the stores along the main drag -- they have a ubiquitous face to them that could appear anywhere at all: places of cheap clothing, a few tattoo parlors, many barbers and butchers too. I like walking up one, peering into another, but my camera waits."

Weekending somewhere obscure in Ireland, Nina reveals her approach to censorship by photographic framing.

And this says something about why I don't — like Nina — put great effort into traveling to distant places. If I were in that Irish market with my camera, I would frame the discontinuities and weird juxtapositions. I'd be drawn to what would disappoint the traveler who's looking for the old world where things are authentic and true to that particular locality.

Nina's phrase is "local and therefore interesting," but what would seem interesting to me would be the inevitable intrusions of the non-local, the very things that spoil the trip for those who formed their  idea of what they would find if they expend great effort going somewhere from photographs framed as Nina has done.

There are many photographs at the link. It's all very romantic and beautiful in the photographs. Enjoy them. They are probably more enjoyable than taking the trip yourself. But for Nina, I believe that the trip is enjoyable in large part because she is searching for photographs like that, and it's a difficult search that requires a thought and skill. It's exciting and interesting because of the effort it takes to exclude what would not be pleasant to see. I suspect that just outside each frame is something jarring, like a Nike T-shirt or a Miley Cyrus magazine cover.

Think about that before you succumb to the fantasy that travel will be beautiful. These photographs are the lure but also the set-up for disappointment when you see that it's not like that at all, even if it is some non-touristy spot like Ballina by the Lough Derg or Limerick or wherever Nina has alighted.

"And finally we arrive at the Italian Charnel House. Mussolini had it built in 1938 to honor the fallen Italian soldiers from the awful war..."

"... (Kobarid was in these years under Italian rule). As if there would be no other war. As if Kobarid was heading toward a peaceful era, where one could look back and reflect on the horror of past aggressions. Mussolini had moved the remains of 7014 known and unknown Italian soldiers who lost their lives in the Soca Front — taking them from local military cemeteries and honoring them here, in this house of corpses. We walk slowly around the edifice, reading the names, understanding the pain that each death caused to those left behind, feeling the irony of this Mussolini gesture and the exclusive pride in the Italian sacrifice, ignoring the pain felt, too, by Slovenian people who lost lives as well, in addition to losing pasture lands, cattle, a livelihood that had been very much centered on the mountains towering over the Soca River."

Much more here, with photographs, from the mountains of Slovenia.

Human behavior in the year 2013.

(Enlarge.)

That's from my colleague Nina, who was getting off a plane in Milan, on the way to Gargnano.

The line-up of right hands in the distinctive cell-phone half-clench is so funny, and it must be happening constantly, everywhere.

"In a funny twist, Ed whispers how the man at the table next to ours is feverishly working his prayer beads with his hand."

"The man hears us and laughs. Not prayer beads -- he says in decent English -- this is what we do here when we try to quit smoking. You know, keep your fingers busy!"

In 2010, Greece passed a law banning smoking in restaurants, bars and even enclosed outdoor spaces. Let me assure you, this law is completely ignored....

There are a number of good seafood tavernas lining the waterfront and we choose one that has the lovely "no smoking" sing on the door. Except that inside, we see there are ashtrays on the tables and both the owner and the waitress are puffing away. Still, the dining room seems free of smoke and so we settle in at a table that seems relatively protected, should someone choose to light up.

A good lesson about law. What makes people follow the law? Surely, a statute is not enough. There are cultural elements. Some law is passed in Athens, but who's keeping track of what's happening on all those islands? How many islands are there in Greece? Depends on how you count. It could be 6,000. It could be 163. The story above comes from the island of Lesbos. The man with the smoking beads was one of 90,643 Lesbians, who follow the law... who knows how assiduously?

How I spent the winter break between semesters at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

I sat in my Freedom Chair or stood at my motorized desk in front of a wall of picture windows looking out over our snow-covered yard though which a dog occasionally bounded, and — once the blizzard came — went cross-country skiing nearly every day. I ate many delicious meals at home with my beloved husband, and watched some football games on TV. I blogged, read, graded some exams, worked on new syllabi, reorganized a couple closets, and — at long last — burned the rest of the CDs I still cared about into my iTunes.

But my colleague Nina, after going to Poland and back, went to Turkey, and here she is in Alacati attending a fish auction.

We cannot understand what they're saying or how they're bidding, but the very idea of a fish auction is, to me, unusual and therefore cool to watch. The people are keenly tuned to what's on the table.

She can't understand the Alacati fish auction, and I can't understand going to Turkey, let alone Alacati, let alone the fish auction in Alacati.

But that's the thing about the world. There are all kinds of people in it.

"It is shockingly inexpensive to travel within Turkey by plane."

"Take this segment: from Istanbul to Izmir (about an hour flying time) on Atlas Jet, it's $25 (without additional discounts). For this, we get not only the flight itself, but a warm snack (melted cheese sandwich, cake, coffee or a soft drink) and, too, upon arrival in Izmir, free transportation by bus to towns south of us. Including to Slecuk — another hour's worth of travel."

... worth of travel.

Do you understand it?