More Little Things (Schoolkids and Bookstores)
Schoolkids: There is nothing cuter than seeing a whole class of German kindergarteners lined up waiting to get on the S-Bahn. I don't think that there's even such a thing as a school bus here, as far as urban children are concerned; the subway stations are always full of school classes of all ages, taking field trips to somewhere.
Unfortunately, there's also nothing louder than a train car full of kindergarteners. For an extra bonus, my car also had a shouting homeless man. Thankfully it was only a five-minute trip ...
Bookstores: After writing about bookstores below, I got to thinking about the stores that would be on my list of worth-the-trip bookstores, and came up with the following:
- In Orange County: The Bookman (Orange) and The Book Baron (Anaheim)
- In Berkeley: Cody's Books, Moe's Books, Shakespeare & Co., Black Oak Books, Serendipity Books (the last more as a spectacle than as a place to do any shopping; it's the only store where I've found a recent Stephen King paperback sitting on top of a book from the 1600s)
- In Portland: Powell's City of Books
- In New York City: Strand Book Store
- In Boston/Cambridge: the soon-to-be-deceased Avenue Victor Hugo, the MIT Press Bookstore, and the Harvard Book Store
- In Seattle: the Elliott Bay Book Company
- In London, I have no particular names, but I could spend all day going through the bookstores on Charing Cross Road. (And four years ago, when I was suffering from English-language withdrawal after my first three months in Hamburg, I did ...)
Famed bookstores I'd still like to visit:
I don't know where we'll end up living after we get back from Hamburg, but hopefully there's a good bookstore there. And hopefully we'll live in a house big enough that one room can serve as
just the library. (San Jose doesn't do well on either front -- not only do even the smallest houses cost megabuck$, but the best browsable bookstores are up in Berkeley or Palo Alto.)
Posted by Kevin at March 24, 2004 10:45 AM
