A month ago I posted my Notes on Croatia, a list of memories from my long weekend there.

Finally, a month after my spring fling in Europe, I’ve gathered my notes into something respectable enough to post here. I wanted to keep a good list that would need no editing, like my Croatia list, but it just did not work out this time. The things I wrote down were anything that caused me to laugh, smile or frown or really got me to stop and think. They are things people said to me and songs I had stuck in my head.

And now, my Notes on Europe:

• The flight attendant on my flight from Toledo to Detroit: From take off to touch down, we will be in the air for 18 minutes.
• For 6½ hours in Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris, after my flight was diverted there from Amsterdam due to volcanic ash, all I could think of was one song from “Beauty and the Beast”: Bonjour, good day, how is your family … I need six eggs!
• The sign in the crypt of the Capuchins filled with the bones of Capuchin friars at the Church of the Immaculate on via Veneto in Rome: What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be.
• After drinking water from a fountain at Palatine Hill: If I die later it’s because I drank from this fountain. (After many drinks later from fountains across Rome, I was still alive and well, and all these fountains provided great tasting, cold water.)
• The waiter at lunch and the waiter at dinner in Rome: Solo? Why are you in Rome alone?
• I did not have to take my sunglasses off on the subway in Rome. Fantastic.
• Things in Rome I loved: Getting up early, seeing the monuments lit up at night, having a brioche and coffee with the locals, pure chocolate gelato, eating real Italian food, talking to Nedko Solakov at Galleria Borghese, the Apollo e Daphne statue by Bernini, and the Trevi Fountain.
• Vienna always works its magic on me, because after at least seven trips to Vienna, I still have not seen Karlskirche.
• Flight flight arrived late in Amsterdam, so I had little time to get to my trans-Atlantic connection. When running through an airport, I will always sing: Run, run Rudolf / Run, run as fast as you can, which is what was playing when the McCallisters ran through the airport in “Home Alone.”
• What Laura had to say about gnomes: Young people in Austria make fun of them. That’s why the stores don’t have them.
• There was an wonderfully large selection of good movies on the airplanes across the Atlantic. I watched “Invictus,” “Precious,” “A Serious Man,” “A Single Man” and “It’s Complicated.”