Ladee's Travels

  Am I in Pennsylvania…or Somewhere Else? If I showed you only the first few photographs from this drive, where would you guess I was? Pennsylvania, perhaps? That was certainly the thought that crossed my mind. After all, look at that first scene: a broad highway running past harvested fields, hedgerows and a rolling landscape beneath a huge blue-and-white sky. Take away the European roadway and it could easily be somewhere along a Pennsylvania highway in late summer. The fields especially caught my attention. They are already golden and harvested, while the trees and shrubs are beginning to show just the slightest suggestion that summer won’t last forever. Against that enormous sky, there is very little here that immediately announces, Paris. And that was precisely what made the drive so interesting. Wait…this doesn’t look like Paris A little farther along, the landscape became rougher. Dense green vegetation crowded the roadside, but below it was dry grass, bare earth and...

The Sounds of Paris: Overheard in a Taxi One of my first impressions of Paris came before I had walked along the Seine, seen the Eiffel Tower, or sat at a sidewalk café. It came from the front seat of a taxi. After arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I climbed into a cab for the drive to my hotel. As the landscape outside the window gradually changed from airport highways to the streets and neighborhoods of Paris, my driver carried on a conversation. I couldn’t understand it, but I was intrigued by the rhythm of what I was hearing. Every so often, a French phrase would emerge clearly from a conversation that otherwise sounded completely unfamiliar to me. So I recorded a small portion of it. Later, I learned that the conversation appears to have been primarily in Wolof , interspersed with French. Wolof is a language spoken principally in Senegal and also in neighboring West African countries. Its presence in a Paris taxi is not particularly surprising. France and Senegal have ...