Bücher! Livre! Boeken! βιβλία! 本!

europa books
Originally uploaded by missmaria.

When the price isn't right for adding stamps to the ol' passport, I get my Euro-fix with a $1.75 bus ride to Europa Books, a foreign language bookstore on State Street. Something about being surrounded by words I don't understand makes me happy. There's even a charmingly snooty French dude at the register.

The first floor is stocked with foreign lang mags — familiar titles, mostly in French, Spanish, and German. There are also books for les petits enfants, including no less than a dozen different translations of Mssr. Harry Potter's exploits. These are great when you're learning a language or actually want to enjoy brushing up on one.



The lower level features literature, travel guides, and a bevy of dictionaries, phrase books, and learn-a-language-in-your car discs for everything from Albanian to Thai to Palestinian Arabic. Western Euro lit dominates the fiction shelves, but nestled in the language study section are some non-traditional tomes that are fun in their own right. With my newfound free time, I'm getting back to studying Japanese, so I picked up a refresher: the first volume of Japanese in Mangaland, an "entertaining way of learning the basics."



Also grabbed the latest Paris Match. It's a win-win read: keeping up with the latest Euro gossip while working on my French!

When Art Meets Science

if you haven't been to see the Museum of Contemporary Art's current special exhibition, Massive Change, GO NOW.

the exhibit — open until dec. 31 — presents more ideas than art, with text panels as wordy as a master's thesis, and a science fair-like presentation that wavers between clever and cumbersome. (pictures may say a thousand words, but the curators still threw in all those words just to be sure you get the point.)

yet the exhibit clearly translates into effective visual form well-known but abstract social and environmental facts such as ozone layer depletion or urban sprawl, lending a definite "wow," or at least, "well, how 'bout that" factor to the exhibit. we're all aware of the volume of flights taking off at a given moment — the security lines at o'hare will tell you that much — but a digital map plotting all flights across northern north america shows the synchronized dance between each plane's pattern, and really drives home just how much steel and luggage is skipping across the sky on a daily basis. not to mention the international effort required for such a flawless performance.

at the very least, the exhibit will make you feel good about riding the bus rather than driving to the museum, or choosing paper over plastic at the grocery store that morning. and it just might inspire you to a greener existence.

tuesday is free day, all day 10 'til 8.



(and yes, there's a book.)