Travels with Orange: the honeymoon.

[euphonius]

Moilami! Nice start!

So you are saying your avatar is Urho Kekkonen? It's a great image but only lends to the great mystery about your true identity. I get the feeling we are being educated about your true identity, your Finnish identity, as we read of your travel.

Two images stand out from your many fine pictures, though not so much for their artistry as for their, shall we say, anthropological value.

Don't you just love it when someone like your panhead guy rolls into your life, at just the right moment? Thanks for sharing him and his beast with us.

Is that a chrome-plated cowbell slung between his cylinders?

That pizza brings back amazing associations for me. First, it indeed looks like one of the best pizzas on earth. But for me, it takes me back some 35 years, to my teenage years in northern Bayern -- Drosendorf, Kreis Bamberg, Oberfranken, to be exact. Now Germany in those years was no beacon of gastronomie, with the obvious exceptions of bread, cheese and beer (and I even carried in my pocket a list of all the vegetables I loved in California which seemed yet to have been discovered in Germany). Then I made an amazing discovery, in a strange kegelbahn in Memmelsdorf where the bowling balls were the size of grapefruits and the bahn was a raised bed maybe knee high. In fact, the bowling was uninteresting, but the pizza was divine! It was made not by itinerant Italians, but by Turkish "Gastarbeiter" who far from being guestworkers were already third-generation Germans. My, my, could they make pizza. (The exquisite lager was supplied by Brauerei Drei Kronen.)

Amazing how a picture of cheese on leavened bread can transport you to another place and time.

More!