Hi Students and Friends!

Welcome! If you are one of my students from next year, congratulations for checking out the blog. I promise it won't be this boring in future posts! I look forward to meeting you. Feel free to send me an email at kkeating@smschool.us if there is a European suggestion you have for me. 

This is the first post of my famous museums tour of European capitals, with some other sites thrown in. The plan is to hit the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Pushkin in Moscow (holding the famous and mysterious treasure of Troy), the PergamonMuseum in Berlin (containing the Temple of Zeus from Pergamon given to the Germans by the Ottomans), the Louvre in Paris, the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg (Patton's grave), the British Museum in London and then some museums in Ireland. I'll be mostly staying in inexpensive hostels, but I'll try to throw in a nice hotel somewhere. I will from now on throw in pictures of great antiquities from these museums. I will make a bearded cameo wearing a St. Mary's hat in a few of them to scare off the regular public from using my pictures in scholarly journals. 

I was going to write this from San Francisco, but ran into some connectivity issues there. Typical. And I only have thirty minutes here in Paris (enroute to St. Petersburg). As usual I took a bunch of books to read on the flight and watched three movies instead. Gotta tell ya - good stuff. One was a French movie (Les Profs) where they put all of their best teachers in a school and the students still got the lowest scores on their tests, so they decided to bring in the worst teachers in the country and put them all in the school and guess what - great results! Actually some pretty funny stuff. Then Olympus is Down and Les Miserables. Flight flew by (no pun intended). Bottom line on Air France - surprisingly good service and good airline food!

But I'll make up for not reading with my six-hour layover in Paris. Anyway, Au revoir for now (you can look that up - it's French). See ya on the flipside (as the cool dudes used to say in the 80's).

Mr. Keating