"View from the top" Nemorino's Profile

Hello, my name's Don. I'm an American living in Frankfurt am Main, Land Hessen, Germany, where I teach, ride a bicycle and go to the opera.

I have just done another major re-vamp of my Frankfurt Skyline Countdown, where you can find out more than you ever wanted to know about the twenty-six tallest buildings in the city of Frankfurt.

Of course if you come from Dubai, Taipei, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou or Chicago you won’t be terribly impressed, since some of your buildings are twice as tall as ours. But we do the best we can – and our high-powered bankers and business executives do at least as much damage as yours do, even though ours only work on the 58th floor and not on the 88th or the 118th.

So you’re welcome to come along and have a look at some quaint European architecture, and maybe even go up to the observation deck on the roof of the Main Tower if you have a few hours between planes at Frankfurt Airport.

Hannover, Germany

My latest completely new pages here on VirtualTourist are about the German cities of Krefeld and Hannover.

Before that I wrote about three towns in Franconia (northern Bavaria) called Scheinfeld, Markt Taschendorf and Markt Bibart. What these three towns have in common is that they are close to an even smaller Franconian village called Frankfurt in the Steiger Forest.

Other recent pages: Hamburg, Dortmund, Renchen, Liège.

Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre, Paris

My most recent visit to Paris was in January 2012, when among other things I spent a day exploring the Egyptian antiquities department of the Louvre. From this visit I have made seventeen new reviews and have linked them together, so if you just want to see the new ones you can easily do so by clicking on the link at the bottom of each review.

Tân Ba 1964

Although most of my VirtualTourist pages are about cities in Europe, I have also written some pages about Vietnam, where I served as an American soldier (not voluntarily) in 1964/65. Thirty years later I returned with one of my sons for another look.

My Biên Hòa page is actually about a beautiful village called Tân Ba, where I spent several months in the 1960s and received a surprisingly warm welcome when I returned in 1995.

My Tinh Binh Duong page is about our zone headquarters at Phước Vĩnh, where I spent several months working as a radio operator.

My Ho Chi Minh City page is about my fifteen visits to the city that used to be called Saigon.

My small Xuan Loc page is about the place where I spent my last five weeks as an American soldier in Vietnam.

Finally, my Vietnam page is about some places in Vietnam that I was unable to visit in the 1960s but saw for the first time in 1995.

gildapaolina and me at the Frankfurt Opera

So far nine visiting VirtualTourist members have come to the opera with me here in Frankfurt am Main:

• gildapaolina (Gil) from Italy, was here on business and came with me to a performance of Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven.

• American opera buff yooperprof (Chet) has been here twice so far, for the operas Macbeth -- but the one by Ernest Bloch, not Verdi -- and later Verdi's Don Carlos.

• Australian VT member iandsmith (Ian Smith) came along to a performance of Elektra by Richard Strauss, as staged by the German playwright Falk Richter.

• German members tini58de (Christine) and Madschick (Heinz) from Karlsruhe were here for a performance of Mozart's Magic Flute. Christine has posted a nice travelogue about this called 2007: Magic at the Opera.

• Greek VT member sinequanon (Gala) from Athens came with me to see Puccini's Tosca.

• Natrix (Natascha), who lives just up the road in Friedberg, came along to a performance of Verdi's La Traviata.

• Gypsystravels (Janet) from New York came with us -- me and some of the people from my English language opera appreciation course Frankfurt OperaTalk -- to the opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini.

• alza (Lou) from North America joined me at the Frankfurt Opera for a performance of The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach. This nineteenth century French opera features a life-size mechanical doll that can sing, dance, bow, roll her eyes and even speak ("oui"), so it was appropriate that a week before attending the opera we went to the German Mechanical Instrument Museum in Bruchsal and saw hundreds of ingenious self-playing clockwork musical devices, many of them made in Jacques Offenbach's own lifetime (1819-1880).

The Semper Opera in Dresden

Opera Houses in Germany

At last count there were eighty-eight functioning professional opera houses in Germany (more than in any other country in the world, I believe), as listed in the Yearbook of Opernwelt magazine for 2011.

I have seen performances in fifty-six of these opera houses so far -- hope to get around to the other thirty-two in the next few years.

In my album Opera Houses in Germany I have listed the fifty-six that I have been to so far.

View from the upper foyer

Quiz results

Congratulations to the winners of the two quizzes that I conducted when I first joined VirtualTourist to celebrate the Grand Opening of my New Homepage.

As a PRIZE, each winner will receive a free ticket to the Frankfurt Opera (third balcony) for a performance of her choice within the next twenty years -- preferably on a day when I am in town so I can come along.


Quiz #1
The QUESTION for Quiz #1 was:
What is the origin of my member name "Nemorino"?

The winner is lacristina of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, who wrote: Guten tag, buon giorno, and I'm sure it has been a beautiful day in Chicago. Are you fond of Donizetti? And elixers? Do they sing Italian opera in Italian or German in Frankfurt? Have I found you out?

Which indeed she has, since Nemorino is a character in Gaetano Donizetti's comic opera L'elisir d'amore, which I have seen numerous times here in Frankfurt am Main (also in Darmstadt, Gießen, Halle, Paris and Vienna) over the past few years.

Nemorino in this opera is a guy who does everything wrong but gets the girl anyway, which is more or less the story of my life up to now, so I decided that might make an appropriate member name.

Quiz #2
The QUESTION this time was:
What is the origin of my motto?
My motto at that time was: It’s a beautiful day in Chicago!

This one took a bit longer, so I eventually dropped a hint on my Chicago page: "It comes from the most popular program in the history of American radio."

Shortly after that I got some answers, and the winner was tini58de of Karlsruhe, Germany.

A mere two and a half years later -- well within the twenty-year time limit! -- she came to Frankfurt with her husband Heinz (Madschick) and we went to Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. Christine has posted a travelogue about this called 2007: Magic at the Opera.

Back in 2004 she won the prize by writing: I used your pages and hints, google and especially American friends' help from another forum. And this is what we found out: Everett Mitchell, who more than sixty years ago began a radio broadcast with these famous words: "It's a beautiful day in Chicago!"

Yes, indeed. Everett Mitchell was the host of the nationally broadcast NBC radio program called (deep breath here) THE NATIONAL FARM AND HOME HOUR. It came on every Saturday at 12 noon and was broadcast live from WMAQ's legendary Studio A on the twentieth floor of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, with a live band and a studio audience.

The ritual was that after the band had finished playing their opening march music -- The Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), a march better known to us grade-school twerps as Be kind to your web-footed friends for that duck may be somebody's mother -- Everett Mitchell would step up to the microphone and say: