PUBLIC MARKS from wiredsetman with tag europe

Before I thrill you with my review the Patagonia Freightliner (pictured at right), a quick note about bias. You're going to notice that most of these reviews veer towards the positive. This is not because I am taking kickbacks, or because I am generally a very enthusiastic person, or because I fear that by criticizing others, I am opening the door to criticism of myself. The reason is that I put a serious amount of research--days worth, all told--into determining which items would function best on the road. I'm pleased to report that just about everything performed well above expectations, which is either an endorsement of my research skill, or, more likely, a testament to the constantly improving quality of stuff.

When the Sony Reader appeared on store shelves last September, it didn't make the kind of splash a lot of people expected, and in the months since it hasn't sent waves rippling through the industry. Tech reviewers were less than whelmed by the Readers feature set--no backlighting, no search, no annotation, no wireless web streaming--and they considered the price, $350, to be way too high. Literary types, on the other hand, dismissed the Reader in a rather haughtier manner. They saw it not only as a poor substitute for a book, but as a threat to the hallowed tradition of "the book," another broadside from the over-stimulated, attention-deprived, caffeinated present on the deep-thinking and ever-threatened literary tradition.

Here is my first thought after stepping off the Queen Mary 2 and reuniting, after two long and lonely months, with my family: It is amazing how much weight the human female can gain in a mere 60 days. Especially so if the female in your arms was 5 months old the last time your saw her, and has since aged to the ripe old mark of seven months. Back in Hong Kong, when I bid Greta and her mummy a tearful goodbye, she weighed 14 pounds; she now tips the scales at 18. In the interim, she has mastered several impressive new skills: She can sit on the floor without toppling randomly over; she can stick her tongue out, and at three a.m. she is able to make a compelling and rhetorically sound argument--without uttering a single intelligible phoneme--that a crib is a cruel and unusual place for a baby and that where she truly belongs is in bed between mummy and daddy.

Editor's Note: No time to read the entire blog? Click here for a slideshow of blogger Mark Schatzker's 80 day trip around the world--a journey that involved everything from mud-bathing in Napa to hiking the Great Wall and dancing to bawdy Italian folk songs. What a gig!

Editor's Note: The Queen Mary 2 slipped under the Verrazano bridge at five a.m. this morning depositing Mark in the same location from which he departed 80 days ago. Awaiting him were his wife, Laura, and daughter, Greta, and a couple staffers from Conde Nast Traveler who came under the false impression that doing so would excuse them from going to the office. For a man who has spent 80 days on the road writing blog posts, foraging for food, and pestering people with questions, he looked remarkably fresh. We credit the algae wrap (and the handsome budget). Initially Mark promised to send a post today highlighting his last night on the QM2, but we insisted that he reserve his writing for tomorrow. An unlikely request, but we've been as blown away by the blog as anyone. After time with the family and some shut-eye, Mark will be back online tomorrow (no doubt trying to find out if he can resurrect the budget for a visit to Peter Luger Steakhouse).

On March 5th, my budget was a strong, vigorous and ready to tackle the world. It had known only good times in its short life, (see here, here, and here; ed.) and in those sweet, carefree days my budget's might was exceeded only by its innocence. Seventy-eight days later, my budget was drawn and gaunt, emaciated, starving, dehydrated and on the verge of expiration. It hadn't had sustenance since Mongolia, when my hotel reimbursed me $10 for an inadvertent overcharge. Since then, nothing. Three days ago, its teeth started falling out. My budget had come down with scurvy.

Day 78: A shout out to my man Francis, that rare breed of waiter who knows how to call a spade a spade. Francis demonstrated this exceptional ability last night at dinner. I was flummoxed, unable to decide what to choose as an appetizer, and so I put the following question to Francis: "How about the Atlantic seafood tian? Is it any good?" His answer: "Not really." Boom. An honest answer from an honest man.

Day 77: Over the course of the past 75 days, I have slept on a communal bed in rural China, witnessed the slaughter and butchering of a sheep in Mongolia--a sheep whose liver, kidney, stomach and lungs I helped eat one hour later--and danced with a 76-year-old grandmother in the hills of Cilento, Italy, while her husband serenaded us with bawdy songs on his accordion. These are events we would consider far from the mainstream, and yet, at the time, they didn't feel strange or out of the ordinary. In each case, I was struck by the fact that I had never done any of these things before.

One of the many charming character traits of the English is their attitude towards their own weather. If, as a visitor to England, you experience four days of near-incessant downpour and you happen to make a casual reference to the foul nature of the conditions to a local, they will nod in deep agreement, roll their eyes at the darkened heavens and say, "I can't understand where it all came from so suddenly. Last week was beautiful." Rain, amazingly, takes the English by surprise. They see it as a freak occurrence, the kind of thing most people only ever read about in textbooks.

The overnight ferry from Guernsey arrives in Portsmouth at 6 a.m. I got up, therefore, at 5:30 a.m., and when I looked in the mirror that morning, I thought of one man: Laurent Derame.

Feudalism is dead and long gone, a hilariously primitive system of law and order that vanished, along with plague and chivalry, with the Middle Ages. This is what most people will tell you, and they are wrong. Feudalism is alive and living in quiet, tax-sheltered comfort on a grass-covered chunk of granite in the middle of the English Channel called Sark, though lately it's been doing a bit of soul searching.

While the rest of the world has turned its back on clarified butter, Normandy has not, and for this it is deserving of high praise. This means, however, that if you're going to travel along the coast of Normandy, you may wish to consider a high-cardio form of locomotion, especially if you're going to be doing things like eating a sole that took its final swim in sea of clarified butter.

Bad news was waiting in Burgundy: A wind was blowing. It was a perfect day to send up a kite, and therefore absolutely not perfect for going up in a hot air balloon, which was the reason I had driven all the way from Monaco. I was, in other words, grounded.

I never thought I would say this, but I now know what it feels like to be George W. Bush, seeing as I seem to have annoyed, appalled, and enraged half of Europe with a couple of recent postings. In my defense, I will say only that I only ever report what I see and feel.