You will occasionally find me at a sidewalk cafe in Paris sketching the inhabitants and environs.
However, I'm gearing up for a Tuscany Spring , one of my favorite haunts.
With all the brauhau about the cost of medicare & such, I would like to relate some of my experiences with medical emergencies in Europe. A few years ago we visited a medievil town in France called Danard. We had a nice lunch at a Pizza place on the terrace but our waitress had a bad case of the snuffles & we didn't like the sight of that. Anyway, we traveled on and found ourselves in Brugge, Belgium and I wasn't feeling so great. We had a room on the 3rd floor of a small hotel just a block from the main Kirk (Church) and square. But I developed such a profound coughing fit that I began to see large bruises on the outside of my stomach. Here we were, in a small hotel with restuarant & bar with 26 local Belgian beers on tap!! and I was too ill to drink any of them. Time to get professional help. Our concierge reccommended a doctor who I called and was able to see us that afternoon. We walked over about two blocks , found the doctor's office and waited for about one half an hour before she could see us. Joy was having similar problems, but fortunately less. There was a waiting room, an examining room & probably a small office. She looked younger than my daughters but did a quick examination of us both, gave us about five different prescriptions , different for each of us. When finished, we asked how to pay for all this, and she said she could charge it, but it would cost a lot of paperwork, but if we paid cash , it would cost 30 Euros each. Really!! We laid 60 E on her and boogied to the farmacia, next door to our hotel. We loaded up on all these drugs, paid about 40 E. each, and began our treatments. In a few days, we both were feeling fine & able to search out Belgian chocalats, Belgian waffles (hard to find) and began tasting some Belgian beers, even visiting/tramping around in a 300 year old brewery. Viva la Belgique!
