Tierra de Tortugas

Summer 2018: Prague

 

We’ve long heard that Prague is a special place in the world and want to find out for ourselves. After all, this is a land of dark satire by Franz Kafka blended with the pious generosity of Good King Wenceslas – along with a heroic backdrop painted by Alfons Mucha and overlaid with the grandest of musical scores by Dvorak. The land of the Czechs is surely a treasure to be savored.

Our train pulls into Praha hlavní nádraží (Prague Central Station) and it’s pretty clear the language will be an interesting challenge. The European Union has 24 official languages (including Latvian, Slovene, Maltese, etc), but English is how many Europeans currently navigate the linguistic thicket they inhabit, and to get by in a world where English has become the language of discourse. That’s lucky for us, because Spanish (our second language) is little spoken in Europe outside of Spain.

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We crossed the border from Germany and we’re no longer in ‘Euro country,’ as the Czechs have their own currency. We might be able to use our pocket full of Euros here, but we’ll likely lose too much value converting them at shops and restaurants. So before hopping the Metro, or doing much of anything else, we’ll draw out some Korun Českÿch. The Czechs call them ‘crowns.’

Next we sort out the Metro line, which takes us to a tram that will get us to the apartment. Every nation speaks in a ‘code’ of some kind, and language challenges are good brain exercises. So we’ll take our time and try to navigate the Czech Republic, and its language, as best we can.

 

We arrive at our nice rental apartment, owned by a friendly young guy named Jan. It’s in the Karlin district, which is only a modest walk to the center of things. And we’re near a transit line, in case we want to ride it around town. There are good restaurants near the apartment, and a food store within a block or so. It’s a fine location for us.

We had asked if there was an elevator so we didn’t have to muscle our bags up several flights. And Jan said, ‘Yes, but it’s kind of small.’ After a few days in town we realized we’d never actually seen the elevator he mentioned. I happened to open a small door in the stairwell and found a very small elevator – actually more of a ‘dumbwaiter.’ Jan was right; it's really designed more for quarts of milk, and not luggage.

Most mornings we’ll enjoy a fine breakfast in the apartment, with foods bought fresh daily. Then we’ll stuff a handful of maps and our rain gear into a courier bag for a day abroad in the streets of Prague.

The first evening is a bit chilly as we wander the streets near our apartment, and we’re glad we packed our stuff-able jackets that can double as pillows. Luckily, we’ve arrived in time for a neighborhood music fest with several good bands playing. Lots of local musical events happen in the balmy European summer and it’s easy to get lucky that way.

 

 

 

After a hearty helping of local rock music we wandered onward. We soon found a good place for drinks and some eats before heading back to the apartment for a quiet night’s rest.

We use the next morning after breakfast to take care of various organizing and internet chores before wandering out to find a good little eccentric place for lunch. The 'sendvič's are huge and delicious.

The streets of Prague are a museum in themselves, filled with constant fine distractions as we stroll more or less toward the center of the city. We could attend a performance of “Carmen;” it was written in French, which we also don’t speak, but the music is great. If we hadn’t just had lunch we could order some food by pointing at the pictures. Or we can simply admire the sheer beauty of this place.

 

We stop for a couple of ’Trdelníks’ (Pronounced Turdelniks?!). They’re a delicious cinnamon-covered roll filled with ice cream, if you can get past the pronunciation. 

 

 

 

The city is alive with the daily life of people going to work, and children on a field trip somewhere. They recycle things here efficiently, as they do throughout Europe these days. Skoda cars, a Czech brand built by the 5th oldest car manufacturer in the world (next to Daimler, Opel, Peugeot, and Tatra, another Czech brand), are a common sight here. Plus, you can buy a novel by Ken Kesey at a well-stocked local bookstore.

 
 

Down near the heart of things we score tickets to a classical music concert in Smetana Hall, one of those old and gorgeous settings that European cities are blessed with. The entryway and the concert hall are dripping with murals and Gothic decoration, and the musicians gave a fine performance.

 

 

After the concert a stairway in Smetana Hall takes us down to the Americky Bar, ‘The Oldest Bar in Prague.’ There’s not much happening in the bar so we go to the restaurant beside it that specializes in traditional Czech food. And that’s where we had one of our best encounters in Prague. It’s a bit of a tourist place, and there are several large Asian tour groups there, but it’s fun and the food is very good.

 

 

A couple of guys are playing Czech music on fine old instruments and singing hearty lyrics in words we can’t comprehend. After a few songs, they ask us where we’re from. We say that we live in Mexico and wait for their reaction, recalling that we were greeted with silence in Germany since Mexico had just defeated the mighty German soccer team in the World Cup.

 

But the Czech accordion player bursts into a broad smile, leans forward with a ‘thumbs up’ and says, “You beat the Germans!”  European memories are long, and ancient rivalries live on. We were instant good buddies, and they played several more songs before giving us one of their CDs. Life is good, out on the road.

 

(A recent article about the supposed mental health of sports fans, says we were sharing the glow of schadenfreude tinged with the essence of gluckschmerz. Just ask Freud.)

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European animosities are as deep as the history is long. I once sat at a bar with a couple of guys I knew, one Hungarian and one Romanian, and made a wise crack about their ancient conflicts. That quickly developed into a loud dispute (“Remember what you bastards did back in 1526?!”). I regretted bringing it up.  

But when I mentioned ancient battles to an Aymara boatman on Lake Titicaca at Puno, Perú, he turned to his Quechua buddy and said, “Yeah, while we were fighting with each other, those damned Spaniards conquered both of us!” 

Octavio Paz said, “Man…is not in history; he is history.” As long as we remain trapped by our childish passions and frettings, we may never rise above our long and tragic history.

Or, as the flawed philosopher Rodney King said in 1992, “Can’t we all just get along?”

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We awake to another fine day for a long walk – meaning, it’s really not raining all that much this morning. And the enchanting streets of Prague are beckoning us onward, to the historic center of things. Actually, just about everything is historic in central Prague, and it’s a term that’s easily overused here. 

But it’s also the non-historic stuff that calls to us from shop windows and sign posts, the sort of everyday detritus that really defines a city and a people. Catchy signs and posters divert our eyes and our attention as we wander in the general direction of a goal we may well reach today. Or maybe tomorrow. Prague is a lot like Paris, gorgeous, wonderfully walkable, and with plenty of things to see and do to keep you marvelously distracted. 

 

 

On such a nicely drizzly day in the city we find a place called ‘Cacao,’ that just happens to serve up the sort of warm and rich beverage we had been craving to ward off the chill.

 

After getting ourselves well fortified, the streets of Prague and her richly encrusted buildings are once again calling us forth. We’ve had no particular grand plan for visiting the city, but there are so many things to do and experience here that our time will go quickly. And we’re content to simply keep our eyes open and let the whole of it wash over us. Maybe the whole of it will end like a Kafka novel – which never really ends and the people never really get where they're going. It could happen to us, and that would be OK.

 

 

An assembly of extravagant cars-for-hire occupies our attention for a while. But we’d prefer to walk and don’t bother to ask for prices. We could also opt to ride the Prague Beer Bike, powered by the beer drinkers aboard (Powered by Beer!), but we pass on that one too. 

 

 

 

A store selling ridiculous floppy puppets grabs us. They’re very light weight, and we buy a couple for the grandkids back home. And so we continue to wend our way onward to – somewhere up ahead. 

  

 

 

We arrive at the big open square, with its carnival atmosphere. And then we lose ourselves for a while among the happy throngs enjoying a cool summer day in the heart of central Europe.

 

 

Actually we did have a loose plan, of sorts – to find the square where the Mucha Museum is located. Alfons Mucha (pronounced ‘Mooha’) was an unsuccessful young artist in Prague who was advised to find another way to make a living. Shortly after he arrived in Paris he was tapped at the last minute to quickly produce a poster for Sarah Bernhardt, and he soon became world famous.

 

 

We’re drawn to the visual and graphic arts, so the Mucha Museum became a destination for us. They were showing a couple of other guys at the Museum (we’ve seen those guys), but it was the astoundingly prolific Mucha who we came to see. (We hiked up the stairs, but couldn’t resist taking the hilariously teensy elevator back down.)

 

 

 

After his success with Sarah Bernhardt, Mucha’s floridly heroic and romantic images would soon be found on everything from book covers, to playbills, to sheet music, to calendars, to postage stamps. His achingly beautiful illustrations of young women would grace biscuit tins and cigarette tins, and the sad and piercing eyes of a Russian mother would beg for donations to help the starving victims of a famine.

He also designed furniture, dinnerware, cutlery, etc, etc….

 

After all that, it was time for another fine dinner and a good night’s rest, before going on to explore more of the city.

 

On a new day we set out to find the John Lennon Wall. John is highly revered here and the memorial wall, near the Charles Bridge, is an enduring testament to his legacy. A singer was doing credible renditions of his work during our visit. And there’s a ‘John Lennon Pub’ nearby if you want to linger over the moment, although we did not do so.

 

A walk over the ornate 600-year-old Charles Bridge – along with several hundred fellow walker-gawkers – is one of the must do attractions of the city. It’s a strolling-party-scene, but the bridge is lined with portrait artists (some of them talented), odd-but-clever musicians, and tall ecclesiastical statuary. Life on the ancient Vltava River below is entrancing, as well as views across the river to the ominous mass of Pražsky hrad (Prague Castle) on the heights at one end, and to the ornate gate into the red roofed Old City at the other. It’s really a joyous experience worth plunging into. 

 

 

 

At the end of the Charles Bridge we lose ourselves in the crowd as it pours through the old gate and into the Staré Mesto (Old Town). This is a place to find Baltic Amber, odd multi-colored sweet things to munch on, lots of tourist trinkets, and even a Mexican Restaurant! (No, we didn’t stop there.)

  

The distinctive kind of architecture to be found in this area keeps a person’s eyes elevated and off the pavement.

 

 

The Apple Museum caught our eye, but we didn’t stop. Still, it looked intriguing.

 

You can take an afternoon break for another delicious Trdlo (’Turdlow!?’), a cinnamon-crusted shell full of ice cream.

And after all that, the day ends well again at a very nice bistro near the apartment. It’s really hard not to like beautiful Prague.

 

On another fine day we happen upon the Jazz Dock, along a canal down by the river. It’s just the kind of place we hope to find when we travel. It looks like a fun spot where lots of local bands perform; but it’s still early in the day, so we make plans to return later.

 

We get back to the Jazz Dock early enough to get decent seats as a good local group starts the evening. The fine chops by the young woman on the sax and the guy on the piano quickly set the good vibes flowing, and the gorgeous flaxen-haired singer beguiled us. The ample food and drink also kept us happy and content.

 

Afterward, we crossed a bridge over the river to the closest tram stop as the quiet of evening settled onto the city and the glow of Prague Castle glistened across the water. It was another good day indeed.

 

 

On previous Euro-trips we’ve spent time following the lives and work of artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. But we also have a particular interest in the work of Egon Schiele, and his mentor, Gustav Klimt; and that’s one of the reasons we’ve traveled to central Europe this time.

A tram near our apartment took us over the river to a park near the imposing grey Soviet-era National Gallery. It’s where a number of Schiele’s important works are shown, and works by Klimt, as well.

 

We first encountered a powerful display of photography from the First World War. And along with that, the cartoons of Josef Lada featuring his hapless soldier called, “My Friend Švejk” – a Czech precursor to Bill Mauldin’s WWII cartoons of “Willy and Joe.” 

 

 

 

Several of Egon Schiele’s provocative works are hung in the Gallery, including his morose “Dead City.” It’s an allusion to the village of Česky Krumlov, where he came afoul of the local authorities, and where his mother was from. And it will be our next destination as we follow the trail of this doomed young artist across the Czech Republic, to Vienna.

Among Alfons Mucha’s more famous works – and certainly his most gigantic – is The Slav Epic (look for it on Google) showing the story of the Slavic people through centuries of historic events. We had hoped to see this work at the National Gallery, but it was no longer on display.

We finally exited the Gallery past a bizarre work that may well be titled “Electrician’s Nightmare,” for all I know. It looked like a lot of work, and I guess it’s ‘art.’ I tend to judge art by whether I’d want it around the house. I’m not fastidious, but I can’t imagine having something around that requires that much dusting. Sorry, it flunks the ‘Dusting Test.’

 

We’ve been to lots of European castles, but after almost a week in town it seemed we should make an effort to at least get near the Prague Castle. Tram 22 goes very close to the Castle and gives a good peak at it from several angles – along with throngs of Asian tourists (they seem to have replaced the classic fat American tourist in Bermuda shorts with a camera and a straw hat). We wanted to climb those steep streets, but not get stuck in those massive tourist crowds swarming around the Castle itself. 

 

We left the tram after the rain quit, and made our way through various byways and alleys toward the Castle. The streets of Prague were again filled with enough fascination, magicians, fine crystal, and sheer beauty, to keep us distracted as we plodded our way uphill.

 

 

The Castle was soon lost to view among the tall buildings, and I was reminded of Kafka’s novel, The Castle, in which his protagonist, named ‘K,’ only views the Castle once briefly from a hill outside the city. After entering the surrounding warren of narrow streets, he never actually gets to the Castle. In fact, he never sees the Castle again. That seemed to be us, as we huffed our way up the hill. The famous Prague Castle is probably still up there, but we got sidetracked, as we do, and lost interest somewhere along the way.

 

And anyway it was getting late. It was time for yet another wonderful dinner with a couple of cold Czech brews, in a fun place with a bunch of locals on another back street, far away from all those tourists.

 

So a glorious visit to the Czech capital has come to an end, and it’s time again to pack our bags for the next leg of the journey. We’re off to a place we’ve never heard of before this trip, and with a link to Egon Schiele – that magical place called Česky Krumlov. You'll definitely want to join us there. — PRW

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Interested in Prague scams? This Czech guy is very entertaining, and he hates all those new Thai Massages popping up around town!

 

Summer 2018: Dresden

The name ‘Dresden’ conjures up the horrors of a two-day fire-bombing raid on February 13 to 15, 1945 – said to have been solely a vengeance act in the final days of the Second World War by more than a thousand British and US bombers. As many as 25,000 people were killed in the firestorm (estimates vary widely). Was all this death and destruction unwarranted?

In 1940 the Germans conducted the Blitz, bombing London, Coventry, and other civilian targets as a demoralizing effort against the British. It failed. The British responded in March of 1942 with a massive firebombing of the historic center of Lübeck in northern Germany to show the effectiveness of incendiary bombs; they followed with the destruction of Rostok in April. The Germans retaliated with the ‘Baedeker Raids,’ targeted against major British cultural sites listed in Baedeker tourist guides. These included Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York, Canterbury, and other places, although little real damage was done. And all this led to the Dresden raid.

By a coincidence of sheer bad luck, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut happened to be in Dresden as a prisoner of war during the raid. He survived, sheltered in an underground meat locker, and wrote of it memorably in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). 

So, who started all this, and who can explain it? The history, the hatred, the totality of European conflict and tragedy is constant and deep – it’s been that way for centuries. Literally centuries. “And so it goes.” – to quote Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five.

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We enjoyed our time in quiet Dessau. But it was time to leave, so we rolled our bags to the nearby bus stop. A friendly bus driver joked with us in German, as we looked bewildered;  and he got us to the train station. Once again, fertile German countryside and quiet villages passed by our train window; and we soon arrived in Dresden, in the southeastern state of Saxony. Given all we’ve heard and read and ‘know’ about Dresden, we approached the city with caution, expecting to see maybe still-blackened remains of the war. 

 

 

We roll our bags out of Dresden’s Hauptbanhof (Main Train Station) and right into a large flag-waving demonstration of some sort. We’d read that neo-Nazis were active in parts of eastern Germany, as much of the country’s current prosperity has passed them by, but these folks appear less like skinheads and more like middle-aged Lutherans heading out for a lunch of cottage cheese on iceberg lettuce (as I recall from my own Lutheran youth). We ask a helpful young policeman, and he says it is a demonstration against extremism. We’re relieved, as it looks like something we’d be happy to join, except we might be deported for engaging in German politics.

 

Carolyn looked up "Widerstand läst sich nicht verbieten" on Google translate. It means "Resistance can not be forbidden."

 

 

We weave around the demonstrators and catch a tram to the Diakonissenkrankenhaus stop (one of those ridiculously long German words), near the apartment we’ve rented. Tall construction cranes are a common sight around central Dresden. Again Carolyn has found us a very nice apartment on a tree-lined residential street in the Neustadt (New City) district, only a little ways over the Elbe River from the heart of the city. There’s a good little bakery in front of our place, and we have a nice kitchen, so making a quick and cheap breakfast each morning will be easy. 

 

 

It turns out we’ve arrived early enough to tune in to the World Cup match between Mexico and the powerful team from Germany, who won the Championship in 2014. We’re as stunned as everyone else when the Germans fail to get anything past Guillermo Ochoa, the outstanding Mexican goalie with that wonderful ‘Art Garfunkel’ haircut, and Mexico actually wins. The ‘El Tri’ fans are going wild in the stands. The German TV newscasters, on the other hand, look a bit ashen.

 

 

After stowing our gear, we set out to explore the hip street scene we’ve heard is just a few blocks away. And it turns out we’ve arrived for the last night of the annual BRN, the Bunte Republik Neustadt (the ‘Colorful Republic of Neustadt’), an alternative fest that fills the streets with revelers from far and wide. There is music on every block, and we’re given every opportunity to drink away the night. An exuberant, very good, and very loud, drumming group snares our attention for a while. Once again, we just seem to fall into these things.

 

 

 

After some raucous revelry, we angle away and find a quiet Irish Pub (Irish pubs are all over the world!) and relax over a couple of pints. We speak no German (or Irish) and someone asks where we’re from. We mention living in Mexico – Mexico has just beaten Germany in the World Cup – and silence prevails. Until we find another topic to discuss. (Maybe poisonous caterpillars in Dessau?) 

 

The streets of the Neustadt have some of the more passionate graffiti we’ve seen since a visit to Valparaiso, Chile, back in 2010. The graffiti in Valparaiso, home of Pablo Neruda, was more literary, and poetic quotes were common. But the stuff in Dresden goes beyond mindless gang-tagging, and rings with German angst. It strongly addresses the current political struggle with the German right wing, which had a sort of rebirth a few years ago in this city. We don’t interview anyone during our stay, but it’s clear the Nazis aren’t welcome here anymore. And let’s face it, that whole Nazi thing worked out really crappy for the Germans last time around – and for the rest of the world too.

 

 

 

 

 Martin Luther is big in Dresden, as in much of Germany. He was born in Eiselben in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, north of here – currently recognized as the most ‘irreligious’ state in Germany.  There’s a street with Luther’s name on it just a few blocks from our apartment. And there’s a church named for him on the Martin Luther Platz (Square). Coincidentally, we have a good dinner and some decent Saxon red wine one evening at a corner cafe where Martin Luther Strasse meets up with Martin Luther Platz.

 

 

After seeing lots of museums in Paris we still have no plans for museum-walking and just prefer to explore the cities we visit. But near the Albertplatz fountain, we pass a Trabant 601 on display, and a big old truck advertising “Die Welt der DDR” (The World of the German Democratic Republic). Yes it’s a museum, in a shopping center, filled with all kinds of stuff that was produced in East Germany. 

 

Inside and up the escalator are models of numerous vehicles, household goods, and artifacts produced in the former DDR. There are cars like Wartburgs, Ladas from Russia, and lots of motorcycles. There are TV sets, typewriters (note the different key layout), kitchen ware, and musical instruments. They even made skis and camping gear.

 

And there are plenty of Trabants on display (trabant means ‘companion’ in German). There’s a video of a wrecked ‘Trabi’ being hoisted up the stairs by a bunch of hefty Saxons, to show the composite body construction using recycled cotton waste and phenol resins. Another one, with a metal body – in post-compactor mode, shows how little material was required to build them. 

 

 

The pink Trabant ‘Tramp’ model captured a very sporty look. And there was a clever ‘camper’ model for those getaway weekends on the cheap.

 

A large poster shows the East Germans even had their own share of cute heartthrob boys to tantalize the teenage girls.

And then a few days later, I even see a Trabi just sitting there parked on an actual city street. It’s a Trabi in the wild, and a nicely kept one at that. So they’re not all in museums yet. I saw only one Trabant back in Dessau, as it rounded a corner too fast for me to get a shot. But Dresden has a funky and fun museum full of them – with an actual one on the street. Life is good. 

 

As we find just about everywhere we visit, there’s much to see and surprises to experience just by wandering the streets of this old city. Like a Platz named for Edward Snowden, seen by many as a modern-day Paul Revere for revealing NSA corruption. Bare-chested guys still get a look from passing girls. There’s plenty of rock music in town to keep everybody awake. And an amusing poster of a horse giving hell to another horse brings a grin, even if we don’t really know what it says. (Actually, Google Translate says it’s advertising a horse show, but I prefer my own version!)

 

 

 

 

 

After a long walk, we find a nice little bakery for a hearty bowl of soup, coffee, and a sweet roll. Some wonderful things, like a good lunch, are the same no matter where you travel. 

Funny German signs appear, like “Schmuckwerk” and “Schmuck.” I always thought when somebody said ‘That guy’s a real schmuck.’ it was a bad thing. But now I find out it means ‘jewelry,’ or ‘adornment’ in German. 

And they have the same problems here as everybody else, ranging from lost cats to venereal disease. (The poster reads, mostly, “That scratch grossing out the girls? Your Doctor can help.”) 

And lots of people still smoke cigarettes in Europe. I can’t even imagine why educated people would do that, but it’s common here.

And once again we’ve wandered long enough to stop for dinner, along with a tall cold Saxon beer, before heading back late to the apartment.

 

It’s been more than seventy years since the end of the Second World War, and today there’s little glaring evidence of the damage remaining in Dresden. The city’s center has been largely rebuilt, with modern architecture replacing much the city’s lost history; although they’ve done an outstanding job since re-unification (with help from western Germany) of rebuilding their most important historical treasures. Towering yellow construction cranes still dot the skyline, and the city is demolishing a few aging and derelict buildings – as in most other modern cities. There are still some large empty holes in the central city, but today it’s easy to ignore the results of the British firebombing raid of February 1945. 

 

The US-sponsored Marshall Plan was an innovative program after the War, a commitment from the US to support European revitalization, and it cultivated a new generation of allies against a perceived Soviet threat. It was a radical departure from the massive failure of Allied policies after the First World War that led Europe and the world into the Depression.

But many economists argue that while the Marshall Plan was important to the post-war rebuilding effort, it only contributed about 0.3% to the overall European economy. Rather, the brilliance of the Marshall Plan was that it required Europeans to put together a workable plan that would be aided by the US. Under the Plan this continent of fractious peoples was required to cooperate, to lower trade barriers, and to foster trade unions in order to build a strong and stable middle class. After the devastating losses of the War, plus a drought and severe winter in 1947, the various countries were faced with starving populations and millions of refugees. With help from the Marshall Plan, it was largely the Europeans themselves who rebuilt the continent. 

For the US and Canada, the end of the War meant a large reduction in Federal spending; so a resurgent Europe brought vast new trading opportunities. It was a Marshall Plan for the Western Hemisphere as well, and a very good example of ‘enlightened self-interest.’  

Today the European economy has surpassed the US in size, and continues to be its largest market. The current arrangement is a balanced and lucrative system that only poorly educated, deluded, and ego-centric leaders would even consider disrupting. 

 

A walk through the historic heart of Dresden shows that most of its bombed-out historic buildings, like the sprawling Zwinger, have been beautifully restored to their former glory – interspersed with modern buildings and an excellent tramway system. We pass a sand volleyball tourney in the now-modern Altmarkt and a Tex Mex Restaurant on our way to the old cobblestone streets at the core of the city. 

 

 

 

The broad Neumarkt Platz is walled in by huge gothic churches, that were rebuilt entirely after the War. We find ourselves in a celebration of Jewish history and culture – for which there’s a choir singing at the base of a large statue of Martin Luther. It’s an odd sight at this monument to the Reformer, who in his later years published outrageous tirades against the Jews. Some of his extremist views later even became the basis for much Nazi propaganda. 

The center of Dresden was destroyed in the bombing, but there’s not much evidence of that today. Here are ‘before and after’ pictures. Many American city centers destroyed by ‘urban renewal’ – and without the tremendous loss of life – may look similar to Dresden today. And the completely rebuilt historic buildings look ancient today, to the untrained eye. The Germans have done a remarkable job of restoring their deepest history. 

 

 

 

There’s a white piano sitting on the street for anyone to play. A big fellow in a T-shirt, who I would peg for a plumber, sits down and plays several gorgeous symphonic pieces that echo off the ancient stone walls.

 

A few minutes later another big guy sits down to play a powerful piece that I’ve heard many times, but I can’t recall the name. He looks over at me and asks with a hand motion for me to name it. I blurt out “Rachmaninoff.” He rolls his eyes in frustration at my ignorance, and angrily yells, “Tchaikovsky.” Well, I least I guessed it was a Russian.

 
 

As night falls, it’s time to leave the center city and catch a tram back to the Neustadt. We need to finish a bit of packing before we leave in the morning. 

Along the way we stop for a final delicious dinner, with plenty of vegetables, at a little corner place near the apartment. It’s a fine way to say goodby to the remarkably resurgent city of Dresden. Tomorrow we’ll be crossing the Czech border, on our way to the magical city of Prague. Stay with us for that one! — PRW

 

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A little afterthought...

The Eurasian Blackbird (Abendgesang, Amsel)

Ever since we stayed in a residential area of Amsterdam in May we’ve been hearing the call of a talkative bird who awakens us each day with a complex and beautiful call. The source of this morning music is not some beautifully colored creature with flowing tails and feathers. It’s only a modest-sized black bird with an orangish beak. 

Think of ‘rock stars’ like Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Steven Tyler – guys who didn’t make it on their good looks – that’s this bird, the Eurasian Blackbird (or Abendgesang - Amsel, in German). We’ll hear them all through our travels in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. With a voice like that, they don’t need to be beautiful to attract the girl-birds. 

Paul McCartney attributed his beautiful “Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night” to the US civil rights struggle. But the bird singing near the end of the original recording on the White Album is this one, and Paul must have grown up hearing these birds greet the dawn. 

The amazing Eurasian Blackbird sings on Youtube, and listens carefully to other birds nearby for nuance and expression before answering back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAtsYwl-wYg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGBJh5jIC3k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnwslHIQXTk

Summer 2018: Dessau

 

From Heidelberg, we catch the Inter-City Express (ICE) fast train out of Mannheim Hauptbanhof. It’s bound for Berlin, but we’ll debark in Leipzig for another train change, to Dessau. We’re going to visit the city where the Bauhaus school, that icon of Modernism, changed the terms of architecture, and much more, back in the 1920s. 

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A Train Story

We boarded the ICE train leaving Mannheim, among a throng of fellow travelers bound easterly, and looked for seats. Carolyn found one while I maneuvered our bags out of an endless file of folks dragging their own bags down the aisle and waited to see if other seats might open up. Soon a lady came to say Carolyn was in her seat and showed her ticket. We took a closer look at our own ticket and found we had seats in ‘Wagen’ no. 2 – and we were in Wagen no. 5. We dragged our bags through three packed cars and luggage to our cabin, but saw no empty seats. When we showed our ticket to claim seats 81 and 82, a young couple left to find something empty elsewhere. 

We recalled the time in 1986 when we left Paris’ Gare du Lyon on an overnight train for Nice:

There were train strikes in Europe and confusion at the station. A friendly ticket agent said our train was on track ‘E.’ When I started for track E, he yelled out “Non Monsieur. That ees ‘E,’ as een Etaly!” And he pointed in the other direction.

When we found our overnight cabin, a wagonlit, with fold-down bed racks, the cabin was full. A young man was adamant that we had the wrong cabin, while his young female companion looked alarmed. We went to check the next voiture and there were no more cars on the train. A conductor came and found that the young couple had no tickets, so he told them to vacate the train. The young man stuffed both their bags through the window, tumbling onto the platform outside, and they headed for the exit. Another traveler said they were just married and heading south for their honeymoon. The last we saw of them, she was sitting on her toppled bag crying as the train left the station. We felt very sad for them, but there was nothing we could do.

The aisles of the train were filled with young men sleeping on the floor. We had to step over them to use the restroom. In the morning, we stopped at a station near Lyon and all the young men filed off the train. Outside the window I noticed a drill instructor in his distinctive campaign hat, like the ones I remembered from my own youth. These young guys had just arrived at boot camp. 

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We settled into comfortable seats on the ICE train to watch the landscape go by just outside our large picture windows, as we passed charming rural hamlets and small towns. Towering wind generators and solar panel installations along the way illustrated Germany’s commitment to move away from polluting power sources of the past and toward a ‘greener’ future.

 

 

 

    Before we get to Leipzig, passengers are into relaxation mode, and some are fully reclined on the floor. Travel in Europe these days is not nearly as formal as some folks may still imagine.

Somewhere about halfway from Mannheim to Leipzig our train passed over the old East German border. I’m not sure what we expected but we saw no old barriers, no barbed wire, no real difference in the small towns and verdant German countryside passing by our window. 

 

Leipzig’s massive station has a train set for kids to play with, and a Starbucks, of course. The main entry hall is hung with banners promoting the up-coming Bachfest Leipzig, a nice reminder that Germany has produced more in history than just the WW2 insanity of jack-booted Nazis. 

A short ride on a local train, along with several bicycles, takes us past more wind farms and green countryside. A smiling girl on a poster bids us a ‘Warm Welcome on Board!’ the S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland (Railroad of Middle Germany).

At Dessau, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt southeast of Berlin, we were picked up at the train station (an unexpected benefit!) by our affable Airb&b ’Super Host’ named Daniel. He whisked us off to the apartment we’d rented, a spacious garret on the upper floor of his home on a quiet residential street, with a nice view to a verdant backyard, and just half a block from a good grocery store. We’re within walking distance along tree-shaded streets in this small town to most of what we came to see here, and with easy bus access to the rest. 

   

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A ’Trabi’ moment

 

 

We were now in the former East Germany, so let’s get the Trabant jokes out of the way (The Trabant was a small and simple car manufactured in East Germany. Over 3 million were produced from 1957 to 1991.): 

• How do you catch a Trabant? 
    Stick a piece of gum to the highway. (It had an under-powered
    2-stroke engine with 2 cylinders.)

• A Trabant can go from 0 to 60 in only two or three days.
     Downhill.

• What does the Model 601 stand for? 
    Holds 6 people crammed in + zero comfort for all + 1 person
    to push. 

• It’s said the Trabant had a rear heater 
    – to keep your hands warm in winter, as you push.

• It’s a 10 minute walk from here to the train station 
    – or 30 minutes by Trabant.

But actually the Trabant, also known as the ‘Trabi,’ was an advanced design when it first came out in 1957, with front wheel drive, unitary construction, and independent suspension, and it served a critical need for transportation in devastated post-war East Germany while producing much-needed jobs. It was also simple and easy to repair, with ‘peasant tuning’ capability. But it suffered from a lack of R&D in subsequent years, as other cars made greater technological changes. And its smokey two-cycle engine could never pass modern European emissions standards, although the last models featured a better Volkswagen engine. 

Even so, the Trabant remains much-loved by hobbyists as a cheap collectible car. And some have even been ‘customized’ by people with too much time on their hands. 

For more Trabi info: 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

• Want your own ‘Trabi?’ Check out “Honest John” in the UK: 
  https://classics.honestjohn.co.uk/cars-for-sale/search/Trabant/

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Our stay in Dessau begins with a nice evening’s walk down cobbled sidewalks along Elballee toward the Kornhaus designed by Carl Fieger, a protege of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. It’s on the banks of the Elbe River, the same river where US and Soviet troops would later meet on April 25 in 1945, at Torgau, southeast of Dessau, cutting the remains of Nazi Germany in half. 

 

In its day, the Kornhaus was a controversial, unadorned, and daring design. But today it looks somewhat uninspired and ordinary, its windows having that modern frame-less pasted-on look. But the terrace restaurant overlooks a quiet meander of the river. 

We enjoy a fine and well-presented dinner, rich in delicious vegetables (an important standard for us), as the sun sets slowly over the quiet river just below us. It’s not such a bad way to begin our visit.

 

In the morning, I walk to the store for fresh bagels, spreads and other delights while Carolyn makes coffee. And we enjoy a quiet breakfast, looking out at the verdant backyard below us. We save money making our own breakfasts whenever there’s a store nearby – which is often, throughout Europe.

      

 

   

 

On a fine warm day we take a good long walk through the quiet and unassuming streets of Dessau to the Bauhaus. As in other German cities we’ve visited, there’s little evidence of damage from a war that ended more than 70 years ago – Europe has centuries of experience at rebuilding after major conflicts. But we came to see everyday German life in this town that dates from at least 1213 AD – a dress shop, an old car, postal workers riding bright yellow bicycles.

 

Frequent street signs point us toward what Dessau is most famous for these days: the Bauhaus, and the fraught design conversation it started back in 1919, while they were still in Weimar. The school moved here in 1925 to escape Weimar’s newly elected Nazi government. The school later moved to Berlin, and lasted until the Nazis closed it in 1933. In that brief time it became an important piece of the modernist art & architectural movement, one that figured in our own educations.

 

We find plenty of worthy distractions along the way to the Bauhaus, including a ’short cut’ through a pleasant park, passing classical monuments, families on bicycles, and a playful squirrel hiding in a tree. There’s a remnant fire-damaged monument that’s a possible casualty of WWII bombing, but no signage to explain it. Taking the most direct route becomes less important than experiencing this community. In the end, it’s all interconnected.

 

 

  We pass an ominous-looking warning sign, but don’t figure it out until later. When I run it through Google Translate (which sometimes gives hilariously inaccurate results) I get:

Infested by oak procession spinner. Touching or inhaling the caterpillar hairs or the nests can trigger allergic reactions 

Lucky we didn't snort caterpillar hairs or nests while in the park!

 

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Dessau is such a tranquil and peaceful place that it’s hard to imagine it was almost completely destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1945, shortly before occupation by the US Army. Today, it’s a modest city of about 80,000 residents with numerous large parks and is thought of as one of Germany’s ‘greenest cities.’ It’s easy to imagine lazy summers for a young kid in Dessau as a German version of Waukegan, Illinois, as described in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine – a place where kids can ride bikes and swim in the river, while Mama makes a brilliant yellow wine from dandelions to cure colds in the winter, because it’s ‘bottled summer.’ 

       

 

 

 

A few German flags hang from windows and car side mirrors because the mighty German football team is returning to the World Cup after winning the Championship in 2014. Hopes are still high this early in the event.  

 

 

Dessau today shows little evidence of the War, with restored buildings and palaces, plus a vibrant downtown area. And the Junkers Museum, located at the airport, tells the story of Hugo Junkers, the pioneering designer who built the world’s first practical all-metal aircraft and whose planes were among the first to provide viable air transport and passenger service in Europe. Junkers aircraft were also flown by the German Luftwaffe in the Second World War, although Hugo Junkers, the founder and a Socialist Pacifist, had been forced out by the Nazis in 1934, and placed under house arrest.

We emerge from the park at a sign reading “Gropiusallee” and soon arrive at the Bauhaus precinct, that sacred ground upon which walked 'giants' of the modernist movement – there’s a tendency among purists to worship the founders as god-like figures. There’s no question that Walter Gropius assembled some of the leading Modernist thinkers of the era who would later make their marks individually as artistic leaders. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Europe has long had major disruptions, from the Industrial Revolution when peasants left stoop-work in the fields for factory jobs in the growing cities, to social upheavals of the mid-1800s that triggered mass migrations to the New World. The Vienna Secession and other artistic rebellions broke with old Romantic traditions, creating Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and other radical forms of art. The First World War caused the collapse of old empires: the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, and the emerging German Empire. But this time the world was ready for radical new ideas. Enter the Bauhaus.

Walter Gropius was an Architect who served as an artillery officer in the German army during the First world War, which he viewed as a catastrophe. Gropius had worked with innovators such as Peter Behrens and Henry van de Velde before the war, and he became the Director of the Bauhaus when it first opened in Weimar, and later moved to Dessau. He gathered an impressive cadre of teachers that included Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joseph and Annie Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy with his talented photographer wife, Lucia Schulz, who documented their work. They, along with later-Director Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, would become the core of a movement that would change modern architecture.

Oddly, given the radical and egalitarian nature of the Bauhaus, bright young men in the program went straight into the Architecture curriculum while young women were shunted off to the Crafts side.

We had come to Dessau to see where it all began.

 

The dictum, “Less is more,” is often attributed to Mies van der Rohe in 1947, but dates at least to Robert Browning’s 1855 ‘blank verse’ poem “Andrea del Sarto.” It has been used to summarize Modern Architecture, and was quickly adopted by developers who saw that ‘less’ could also mean ‘cheaper’ – with no more of that bric-a-brac and those decorative encrustations of the Greek Revival and the Baroque. A buck saved is a buck earned. 

Also, cheap housing was a critical need in the years after World War II. Europe faced a massive housing crisis, as thousands of dwellings had been destroyed by bombing and artillery. Millions of displaced refugees – Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and others – were on the roads, expelled from various newly created countries and shifted to ‘ethnic homelands’ where they had never lived before. And they needed housing. Smug Americans can denigrate the admittedly ugly ’Soviet-style’ housing blocks created, but the US has never faced such a massive crisis in its history.

A few classical touches can save a mundane design, but good minimalism is not easy to achieve. And a masterpiece of modern architecture requires a special hand. There aren’t enough masters of the form to go around, so today’s modern cities have many imposing and uninspiring glass-walled buildings, and very little that’s artful and beautiful, balanced and memorable. 

While I appreciate examples of good modernism as a dramatic form of urban sculpture, I can’t think of a modernist streetscape to love – unlike the streets of so many older cities in the world, cities that were designed and built at a scale to be appreciated on foot, to really see the small details an architect, or just a craftsman, thought to include. 

The debate over the Bauhaus is endless: here’s a link to the post-war controversy in Dessau, and a few comments that follow: 

• A renaissance of the Bauhaus is the last thing we need, we have been living with its teachings and philosophy (Rem Koolhaas being a direct descendent) for the last 50 years. Enough of the Bauhaus already, the only person that managed to put a modern spin onto it was Le Corbusier.
  
  
• Bauhaus is as crucial a part of the legacy of Western art as Sistine Chapel or Stonehenge. The teachings and philosophy behind it will remain relevant forever, in one way or another.
  
  
• Well, Germans do love that box style, look at most houses in Germany, very Bauhaus. And the house as machine for living has gone out of fashion, in the sense Le Corb meant it.
  
  
• FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION. That is one of the things they gave us. 
  
  
• Aren't you being a bit harsh dude?
  
  
• But these are 'playful ... artistic interpretations' not functioning houses. Which surely is a travesty and mockery of the Bauhaus philosophy.
  After being (quite unexpectedly, I must admit) astounded by the Mies pavilion in Barcelona, I'd be keen to visit meticulous reconstructions of seminal Bauhaus works to see what they are really like. But this is something else entirely.
  
  
• Form follows function has nothing to do with the Bauhaus (where they spoke German) and predates its foundation by more than 20 years. It's by Louis Sullivan, and is from his 1896 essay The Tall Building Artistically Considered

 

After a long walk through the Bauhaus district, we come across a Greek restaurant (!) called El Greco, and settle in for some very good food. We’ll get back to the Bauhaus on another day.

 

 

        

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The Masters Houses are where the luminaries of the school actually lived in the products of their brave new ideas. The Houses are clean and bold white cubes, set in a copse of pines standing straight and tall and spare against the whiteness. 

The attention to detail in the concrete work is exemplary, some of it done to rebuild damage after WWII, although the Houses seem colder and more museum-like than actually ‘livable.’ Could I really live in one of these minimalist cubes? Would I actually enjoy it? And if this is such a great idea, why do most people still want to live in something more ‘traditional?’ 

 

 

 

 

 

The tragedies of war give opportunities to rebuild using better ideas and techniques. It’s been pointed out that the Thirty Years War was far more destructive to Europe than World War II, but they rebuilt during the fabulous Baroque era. How can today’s drab post-war Modernist buildings possibly measure up to that standard, despite all the high rhetoric? Look to the disasters of Urban Renewal that replaced so many beautiful older buildings in the US, and led immediately to depopulated and failed inner cities.

And all this brings up another question which must be asked – it also applies to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen West school at Scottsdale AZ – given all the brilliant artist-teachers involved, have there been any brilliant graduates? Or does the process of disciple-ism require the loss of personal radical ideas?

The strong-arm tactics of the anti-intellectual Nazis closing the Bauhaus school in 1933 had the result of spreading their radical ideas widely across the thinking world, much as water tossed into a hot skillet splatters the walls. Gropius moved to Harvard; Mies van de Rohe taught at Chicago, Joseph and Annie Albers critiqued some of Carolyn’s earliest color experiments when she was a student at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale in the late 1950s.

____________________________

The legacy of the Bauhaus was, indeed, the foundation of the design program at SIU, and I was lucky enough to have fallen into it without really understanding what it was all about. I was just looking for a place to study "commercial art," as my high school art teacher had recommended; and I ended up in a revolutionary design education program based on the Bauhaus tradition and dedicated to turning out, in the words of SIU Research Professor Buckminster Fuller, "comprehensive, anticipatory design scientists." 

So, in response to Perry's question about "disciple-ism," I must say that at SIU, while the the Bauhaus "gods" and their work were studied — and some of them even came through the program to hold seminars or do short-term teaching stints — it was more the Bauhaus philosophy of inquiry and critical thinking that was emphasized. We were surrounded by images of the art and architecture that came out of the Bauhaus; but we were taught to question and create, not imitate — analyze and innovate, not replicate. That was surely because of the remarkable innovative design educators, Harold Cohen and Davis Pratt, who left the Institute of Design in Chicago to found the SIU program.

So, as I walked the present-day campus of the Bauhaus in Dessau, I was curious, too, which tradition is being carried on there. What is emphasized — the process or the form? The models and drawings certainly seemed to indicate a continuing focus on modernism and minimalism, but images do not always reveal the thinking behind them. It would have been fun to sit in on some classes and try to answer that question. In any case, I was energized by roaming the studios, walking through the spaces, and seeing student work on walls and desks. It reminded me just how much I loved being a student, then later a teacher. — Carolyn

 

 

 

 

————————————————— 

It’s an endless conversation…..

 

We end our stay with dinner at a place called Taffelspitz. The World Cup games are showing in the back courtyard, with blankets draped on the chairs so the folks of Dessau can stay warm as they get a long-awaited start on summer under open skies. 

 

—————————————————

Next, we’ll travel to the city of Dresden, made famous by a devastating British and US air raid and firestorm in 1945. Stay with us for that one. — PRW

 

Summer 2018: Strasbourg to Heidelberg

Strasbourg

Even after a fine three week stay in Paris there’s still so much we’ve never done in this city. But now it’s time to leave all that for another day. We’re traveling eastbound next to Strasbourg, an old river port nestled into the French side of the Rhine, in the province of Alsace-Lorraine. So it seemed appropriate to enjoy a nice Quiche Lorraine and coffee on our last day before leaving Paris.

We depart from the Gare de l’Est, which serves Strasbourg, Berlin, Vienna, and other points easterly. There’s a restaurant just across the street called “La Strasbourgeoise” in case travelers need a preview of good Alsatian cuisine.

 

 

Our fast TGV train soon leaves Paris behind, and the rural countryside passes by our window. It’s only a little over two hours to Strasbourg on a very comfortable ride – that’s also somewhat sleep-inducing. A huge IKEA store (they’re all huge) flashes past as we near our destination.

 

 

 

We arrive at Strasbourg’s classic old 1883 station with its odd modernist glass front, built a few years ago to welcome the new Eurostar service to London. We take a cab since our apartment is on Rue du Welschbruch, a street that doesn’t appear on our map. In fact, the cab driver’s never heard of it.

 

 

The cabbie makes a few calls and soon we’re on track, passing a street construction project and the city’s Musée Vodou (we’ll skip that one) on our way to a nice two bedroom apartment, an entire floor of a modest home on a quiet residential street. It’s a ten minute walk to a bus line and it only costs €62 per night. (We’re not in Paris anymore, and from here on we’ll stay in good inexpensive apartments near transit lines.) 

 

Our hosts, Elizabeth and Hayati were multi-lingual, as many Europeans are, so no problem there. We spoke English and Spanish, and they had all the bases covered in French, Turkish and Portuguese. With just a few extra hand gestures, everything worked out fine! (We did not attempt to speak Alsatian, which has no written form, and variable pronunciation!)

After we settled in, there was time to smell the flowers on our way out to find dinner. We scored a delicious döner platter from a local Turkish eatery, because we were hungry and they were open. Turkish döners (and anything Italian, of course) seem to be the default foods these days for hungry travelers who are menu-challenged.

 

Over the next several days we’ll hop a bus at the nearby  Schnokeloch stop (Fun with German: say ’Schnokeloch’ three times real fast!) and set out to discover Strasbourg. 

 

We get off the bus at Strasbourg’s well-regarded modern art museum. But after Paris we’re pretty much museumed-out, so we think we’ll take a break from that for a while.

Instead we’ll head into the ancient Petit France section of winding streets, canals, and old buildings to experience the museum that is Strasbourg itself. In so many ways this city is a smaller and more manageable version of Paris, with enough history (Founded in the 5th century! By Merovingians!) to keep us happily exploring for almost a week.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Strasbourg’s main plaza hums each day with activity that spills into the stone streets of the Quartier des Tonneliers, the old ‘Barrelmakers Quarter.’ On a warm summer day we’ll pause for a mid afternoon lemonade. But later the day becomes drizzly and we’ll search out a comforting glass or two from the modern descendants of those same old barrels. 

 

 

 

 

 

These streets of sturdy old timber homes and tall stone buildings have seen the river commerce of the ages passing through the city’s old system of locks, connecting the heartland of Europe to the coast for almost two thousand years. These are the same streets that Gutenberg walked during his early efforts to perfect a printing press, although he had relocated to Mainz when he finally produced his famous ‘Forty-Two-Line Bible' (each page has 42 lines). It was one of the greatest technological leaps of its era, and it brought literacy to millions.

 

 

 

 

 

And our days generally end with a hearty Alsatian meat-and-potatoes platter with a side of choucroute (sauerkraut) and a good local brew.

In the end, as is often the case, our stay in Strasbourg was too brief. We make a point to return here some day to explore the nearby Alsatian Wine Route which so captivated Anthony Bourdain, and where he ended his life shortly after our departure.

But we’re going next across the Rhine into the heart of Germany, to the old university town of Heidelberg, on the banks of the Neckar River.   

_________________________

 

Heidelberg

Leaving the intricate tapestry that is Strasbourg, we took the bus again from the Schnockeloch stop back into the city and rolled our bags to the station, like average European travelers. Our train soon crossed the Rhine into green and forested Germany. It’s what we’ve seen in the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France – and well, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois. The forest-dwellers of northern Europe displaced the native people in the central US, but kept the names they left behind. That’s how invaders, including our ancestors, do things.

 

 

As we roll onward past broad fields of croplands and through the industrial outskirts of large cities, I’m reminded of how productive the Germans are as they power the current European economy, along with the French and Italians.

 

After a train change in Mannheim we arrive at Heidelberg’s main station; posters for the city’s renowned University are hanging from the ceiling, and energy efficiency devices are on display. Colorful trams pass through the square in front of the station.

 

We catch tram no. 11 to the leafy suburb of Rohrbach, to a large efficiency apartment on a quiet street near a park, with a nice view into the neighborhood. It’s half a block from the Freiburger Strasse stop with a large poster reading something like, ‘When your online fling goes offline, don’t forget the condoms.’

 

The local cigarette machine has been burglarized with a pry bar, but it’s hard to feel bad about burglars ripping off drug pushers selling a product designed to be addictive.

It’s a warm day in Rohrbach as the tram passes “Joe’s Rock Cafe Heidelberg” where people are wetting their noses under parasols along the street. After we settle in at the apartment we walk the few blocks back for a couple of tall ones. A neighborhood bar is a good reason to book a small apartment away from the central tourist area.

 

 

The quiet residential streets of Rohrbach, as in Strasbourg, are a nice retreat from the intensity of city life in Paris. It’s a different view into the German culture. They have dandelions and lost cats like the rest of us, and the German flag is hanging out to support their team in the World Cup – before they’re quickly ousted by Mexico(!) and South Korea. One of our first tasks is to Google Translate “Ausfahrt!” (It means ‘exit.’ ‘Einfahrt’ means ‘entrance.’ Whew.)

 

 

Later that evening we’ll find a good nearby place in a garden for a hearty, simple, and inexpensive German dinner to welcome us to town. Generally the food is good at places like this where they rely on their local reputation.

 

We board the tram into the city, heading for the Hauptstrasse, the ’Main Street’ that snakes through the Altstadt (Old Town). This picturesque street has been important since medieval times, a place where students and merchants – and tourists and artists – have mingled for centuries. Window shopping is the main event with displays of everything from modern goods, cuckoo clocks, and beer steins, to traditional outfits for aspiring alpine yodelers. Plus “Italian Underwear.” On this particular day, a student demonstration for animal rights takes place in front of a statue of Robert Bunsen (1811-1899), Professor of chemistry at the University and discoverer of the elements cesium and rubidium. He also invented the Bunsen Burner that most of us used in chemistry class, where we realized we weren’t destined to be chemists.

  

 

 

The Hauptstrasse leads to Kormarkt Platz and a striking view of the jagged ruined castle on the hill called Heidelberg Schloss, looming over the town below. Begun as a small fort around 1225 and expanded over several centuries, this famous castle was destroyed in 1693 by French troops during the War of the Palatinate Succession (Remember that one? It was big at the time.) 

 

We take a ride on the funicular up to the ominous castle, with its sweeping views over the city to the Neckar River and the Alte Brüche (Old Bridge). And a peek at the ‘world’s largest wine cask’ – it can hold 228,000 liters of the good stuff. 

 

 

Various attempts at rebuilding the castle were followed by destructive fires, and it has essentially remained as a picturesque ruin since 1764. It’s been a favorite subject for artists, including England’s J M W Turner. Karl Phillipp Fohr did the ultra-Romantic painting shown here. 

         

In 1838 Victor Hugo wrote of this old castle, “Three emperors…have laid siege to it; Pio II condemned it; Louis XIV wreaked havoc on it.” In 1880, Mark Twain described the vine-covered ruins in A Tramp Abroad: “Misfortune has done for this old tower what it has done for the human character sometimes – improved it.”

A walk over the Old Bridge takes us to a riverside park, with a fine view back to the city and the castle ruins. A women’s sculling team is training in the river below. A park bench over here would be a great place to watch the ‘Schlossbeleuchtung’ which re-enacts the burning of the castle on certain evenings in June, July, and September, ending with fireworks into the night. 

 

             

(Can you possibly think of a better name for this than "Müllschlucker?" — Carolyn)

 

The old city of Heidelberg rests in a scenic wooded notch where the Neckar River spills from the mountains and onto the fertile plain. Early evidence of modern humans in Europe, a jaw bone from ‘Heidelberg Man,’ was found here in 1907. 

Heidelberg University was founded in 1386. (the University of Bologna, the oldest, dates from 1088; Oxford dates from 1096; Cambridge dates from 1209; Harvard dates from 1636.) The University is one of Europe’s oldest and most reputable centers of learning and has produced 25 Nobel Prize winners, the first being in 1905. (From 1935 to 1945, the Nazis banned all German academics from receiving the Prize after it was awarded to the prominent pacifist Carl von Ossietsky.) The oldest sections of the University remain nestled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, and today its lively students make up about a fifth of the population.

We hadn’t really planned to visit Germany, with all its conflicted history. But we made friends a few years ago with a wonderful couple in Mexico City, and they live in nearby Mosbach. Also, Carolyn had long ago considered applying to Heidelberg University for a year of college abroad, but was prevented by family issues from going. A visit to Heidelberg became part of our agenda.

While Heidelberg has seen its share of violent conflict over the centuries, it was one of the few German cities to escape Allied destruction during the Second World War. Meanwhile, nearby Mannheim was heavily bombed due to its important strategic industries. After the war, US General George Patton was badly injured in a car wreck in Mannheim, and he was brought to Heidelberg where he died. His funeral services were held here in the old Christuskirche. The weight of all of this history is still deeply felt in Heidelberg.

 

The sun stays out late in the German summer, and that’s one of the great blessings of Europe’s high latitude. (Almost all of Europe lies north of the latitude of San Francisco, and almost all of Germany lies above the latitude of the US-Canada border.) We finally break for a hearty dinner of brats and potato salad at nightfall, around 10:00 p.m., under a canopy of trees and umbrellas, before taking a late tram back to Rohrbach.

 

 

The more modern buildings of the University are on the other side of the Neckar River. A tram ride and a warm day’s walk takes us through the new campus to the Student Union, and the Biological Gardens. The campus is filled with Europe’s brightest students and plenty of youthful energy. We linger under shady trees in the peaceful gardens near a frog pond. On our way back we find a pedestrian and bicycle bridge, part of a dam over the river with locks and a canal. There’s a ‘fish ladder’ as part of the design, and the heavy old dam mechanism looks well suited to the job. 

 

 

Tram no. 11 takes us back to the quiet streets of Rohrbach, and dinner at a nearby neighborhood Gasthaus. Warm lights glow from the windows of an inviting place called ’Traube,’ on Leimenstrasse. It’s a fine choice, as several platters of well-crafted fare soon adorn the table. The waitress mentions that Boris Becker, the tennis champ, hails from the little town of Leimen, just down the road. We toast his continued good health, while lamenting his years of self inflicted mishaps.  

 

On a different day, another early evening’s walk through the back streets and garden-alleys of Rohrbach takes us to Gasthaus Rotter Ochsen (‘The Red Oxen Guest House’), a family-run place that’s popular with the locals. With our partial Germanic backgrounds, a large platter of bratwurst and a tall beer at this place is like Sunday dinner at grandmother’s house with a bunch of cousins around the table, except we can’t understand what they’re saying. I don’t think they were talking about us because we’re not that important, but so what – we were talking about them, too.

 

  

On our second visit, the owner-chef comes out with a big smile when he learns we live in Mexico (this was before MX beat the Germans in the World’s Cup!) to tell us of his youthful adventures on a bus trip from MX City to Guadalajara. We invite him to visit us in Kino Bay, but that probably won’t happen.

 

  

More Thoughts on Germany

A trip to Germany was an odd choice for us. We tend toward red wine countries like Spain, France, and Italy, and the warm Mediterranean lifestyle. My background is half German, at least as much as anybody is really anything – check your own DNA for a surprise! 

Most Americans with a European family background left the Old Country as peasants, often escaping the endless petty warfare of the royalty. I haven’t been much attracted to Germany, but this seemed like a good time to visit, and maybe learn a few things about the fraught history of these people.  

Back home I have a book called Germany on 50 Dollars. It was written in the 1930s and laid out a trip across northern Germany, or a trip through a southern route – you could take either one for a total of 50 US dollars. In those terrible Depression years, Germans carried bags of almost-worthless money just to buy groceries.

Not to downplay the horrors caused by the Germans during the Second World War, but modern Germany has come a long way from the devastation of massive Allied bombing in World War II, and the destructive worldwide Depression years before that – which were largely a product of Allied vengeance after the First World War, along with inept economic policies, and trade wars. 

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Mosbach

The quaint town of Mosbach is about an hour away from Heidelberg. Our train threads its way up the pretty Neckar valley past numerous riverside weekend getaways and vacation spots. But I was on the opposite side of the train and couldn’t get any good pictures.  

  Our friends, Bernhard Stueber and Maria Louisa Malagamba meet us at the station to whisk us away for a tour of the town. Maria Luisa is from Mexico, she’s trained as a Doctor, teaches at a Mosbach school, and does tours of Mosbach as a hobby. Bernhard is a widely recognized and accomplished artist. He teaches art at the local high school (lucky students!), and it appears he’s done nearly all of the graphics and signage for the city of Mosbach. We couldn’t have asked for more educated and informed hosts.

We marvel at the skinny rooms and the furnishings in ‘the narrowest house in Mosbach.’ The fine craftsmanship of ‘the Palm House’ and other gorgeous sights look like the pictures we’ve seen in calendars and brochures of Germany. 

  

The water spilling from a bronze barrel comes from a nearby spring, one of many along the this part of the Neckar River. I ask Bernhard if there’s a system to pump the water back up to the barrel so they don’t waste it, and he gives me a puzzled look. No, the water just runs down to the river. Like it always has. 

 

We walk a few blocks to the Synagogenplatz where the town’s Synagogue once stood, and a memorial that reads, “Commemorating the Jewish Victims from Mosbach.” It’s a sobering reminder of the tragic days not long ago when jack-booted Nazis marched through this town and the rest of Germany, taking the Jews and others away to be tortured and murdered. The list of names is long for such a small town. Each side of the monument is engraved with them.

A short drive out of Mosbach takes us up to the fields and pastures carpeting the surrounding hills – a fine place for bicycling on a sunny afternoon.

 

   Bernhard and Maria Louisa haven’t said where we’re going, but we soon arrive at a beautiful castle called Burg Hornberg. We relax over some afternoon refreshments on the veranda, complete with a tremendous view over the Neckar Valley. 

 

The ride back to town is equally spectacular, on a steep grade down through the local vineyards.

 

 

Back in Mosbach we enjoy dinner and an evening together in their lovely home where we are surrounded by Bernhard’s impressive work. We discuss art, graphics, and design with Bernhard, and local history and Mexican politics with Maria Louisa, over a fine dinner (that she seemed effortlessly to prepare), until it’s time to catch our train back to Heidelberg. 

We are so grateful for Bernard and Luisa’s hospitality and will look forward to spending more high-quality time with them in our future travels. And we hope they’ll visit us soon in Kino for additional long conversations around the table on our veranda overlooking the Sea of Cortez.

 

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But now we’ve run out of time for this part of Germany. We need to board our next train and move onward, into the former lands of East Germany. We hope you’ll stay with us for that next interesting leg of the journey. —PRW

 

 

Summer 2018: Paris II

Elyse and Rachael have left Paris and taken that younger energy with them, and we are alone together, Carolyn and I, as the evening spreads across a darking Parisian sky (apologies to TS Eliot). It’s a good time to find dinner. And for the next few days we’ll see some things we’ve never seen, even after several extended visits in the past.

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Fondation Louis Vuitton

A big item on our list is the highly-touted Fondation Louis Vuitton, Frank Gehry’s new and challenging creation located in the woods, in the broad Bois de Boulogne. It’s a brisk walk on a fine day through the park from the Porte Maillot Metro stop in Neuilly, and the museum is hard to miss as we draw closer. Gehry makes a statement, although this one, unlike his museum in Bilbao, is hidden in the trees. Perhaps there was no good site available along the Seine, even with substantial Louis Vuitton funding to back it.

 

Gehry’s latest extravagance gives few clues as to what lies inside. It’s an exterior-dominant exercise in sculptural-structural complexity and ‘candy wrapping’ that demands exploration of its artistry, its ‘funhouse’ dynamic before getting to the art on display. Its amorphous ’crumpled tinfoil tossed on the ground’ aesthetic recalls the one in Bilbao, which is highly viewable from various parts of the city, including the riverwalk – and especially from the top of the funicular across the river. But the Paris example is curiously hidden. And as in Bilbao, the artworks on display take second place to the building itself.

 

(Here's a link to our post from Bilbao in 2016: http://wilkeskinsman.typepad.com/tierra_de_tortugas/2016/06/summer-2016-bilbao.html)

 

  Even if the whole thing has a sense of bizarre overreach – or exuberant celebration(!) – it’s difficult not to explore the buildings’ inner workings, its complex spaces, and its artful structural connections before visiting the galleries. One wonders if there’s really any room left inside this confection for galleries. And if Gehry grew up in a warehouse somewhere, filled with random spare parts, assembling curious objects from whatever was at hand. 

Views toward the great city of Paris are rare, with peeks at the modern skyline of La Défense being chief among them. Oddly, little homage is paid to the masterpiece of Gustav Eiffel, a kindred structure, where majestic form and robust connections are proudly shown as a main artistic element. The great Iron Lady is largely ignored here and only visible through a small opening in a remote corner, if you can find it.

On show in several large galleries, the huge and fantastical work of Takashi Murakami, born in Japan in 1962, deserves attention. The large sculpture in the center of one gallery, entitled “Chakras open and I Drown Under the Waterfall of Life, 2017” represents his response to “…the trauma of the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011.” 

 

In other rooms, Murakami’s cartoons and splashing colors, drawn from his work in anime, require a close encounter to fully appreciate the detail involved.

In other galleries, the ghostly presence of Jean-Marie Appriou’s large “Lips and ears, 2018” dominates a room by itself.

Other galleries contain works by modernist masters such as Brancusi, De Chirico, and other notable artists.

 

And a hidden exterior water space provides a bit of whimsy, and a hall for mirror play by wannabe photo-journalists. 

After an afternoon drenched in the challenging Fondation Louis Vuitton, we walk back into the city again, in need of a quiet dinner and a glass or two of good red wine.

 
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Just Being in Paris

Paris is one of the world’s great cities for living and wandering without any plan at all, for stopping at the window of a ‘jam shop,’ or heeding a sign that reads, “Enter! Here good wine makes good moments.” (Except the place was closed.) We check out the fine art in a gallery nearby, notice that Charlie Hebdo is still publishing outrageous political satire – despite a deadly attack by extremists – and consider turning up for an Archie Shepp concert at ‘an undisclosed location.’ I find a jaunty chapeau somewhere to keep the sunburn off my thinning scalp, and now the locals don’t assume I’m American anymore; they think I’m a lost German tourist.

 

There’s time to hang out by the lazy waters of the Seine, or stop by a tempting place that assures us, “Here one drinks and one eats until 2:00 in the morning.” And not far away is another good nose-wet called Le Smiley, with a fine singer in house.

And for breakfast we stop at Le Pain Quotidien for coffee with almond croissants and a view to the street, while Parisian parents deliver their children to a nearby school. On another morning we’ll enjoy delicious buckwheat crepes at La Petite Bretonne, while tradesmen make deliveries to a nearby boucherie (butcher shop). It’s another day in the early morning life of the city.

 

 

 

For us, having ‘something to do’ isn’t necessary, or even desirable, in a city like Paris. We're content to absorb the energy of the streets in a place that has inspired great writers, artists, and thinkers for centuries – with no illusions that ‘greatness’ will somehow rub off on us. But it’s nice to be in a place where that often happens. 

In Paris, iconic images are everywhere, none more so than a modern Parisienne shugged against a wall with a cigarette in one hand and her iPhone in the other.

 

The streets and squares of Paris lend themselves so well to wandering. Wherever you end up, there’s a Metro nearby to get you back where you need to be. And the words of the prophets are sometimes plastered on those Metro walls, with all the catchy ads and notices. And there are good musicians to make use of those fine acoustics in the tunnels.

 

 

And at the end of the day, we’ll return late to the apartment for rich chocolates, a few crispy crapotes (!?), and a snifter of Armagnac. The soft rumble of late Metro trains deep below us in the granite heart of Montmartre lulls us to sleep.

         

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La Cigale

A poster on a wall reads: “Ben Folds and a Piano,” at nearby La Cigale. It’s a well-known Parisian nightlife venue, even if the façade is badly ‘modernized.’ Inside there’s a gorgeous old theatre with intricate cast iron balconies and a stage front to recall the glory days when Toulouse-Lautrec was hanging out a few blocks down the street drawing posters for the Moulin Rouge. 

 

Matt Holubowski, a Quebecois, opened with magic on the guitar, sparks of harmonics, and a distinctive painful voice that’s hard to describe. Later in the lobby, we bought his new CD, and we shared Bob Dylan stories.

But the people were waiting for the manic energy of Ben Folds, who soon attacked a piano waiting in the spotlight. He spoke to the crowd with riotous black and white key work, pain and anger – personal but general, at being screwed by The Man – and they sang with him. After a long and furious crashing set on the piano, Folds assaulted an innocent drum kit – subtlety not a part of his nature – to rumbling applause. The evening ended with a standing ovation and the throbbing, sated, crowd poured out into the Parisian night. 

We walked about a block, to our cosy apartment overlooking the Pigalle.

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Atelier des Lumières

The “Atelier des Lumières was recommended by Catherine, our peripatetic friend and sometime Kino denizen. It was much more than the usual projected movie with an excellent soundtrack. The huge space of the old foundry swallowed a free-ranging audience and wrapped us all in an envelope of visuals that swept the 10-meter walls and carpeted factory floor with color while sound poured over like rainfall, ranging from Beethoven, Chopin, and Wagner, to Etude No 2 by Phillip Glass. It was an immersive and saturating experience into sound and image, like tumbling inside a huge kaleidoscope along with Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, leaders of the Vienna Secession radical art movement, plus the later complex works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Both Klimt and Schiele died young in 1918, victims of the world-wide flu epidemic. Hundertwasser, an artist, architect, and environmentalist, was born a decade later, continuing in the Viennese modern art tradition until relocating to New Zealand. 

Abundant 60s references come to mind as color visions from 140 BARCO projectors swirl the entire space and a seamless sound track resonates throughout. Think, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’; or the Byrds coloristic: ‘…and wander in the forest, where the trees have leaves of prisms that break the light in colors that no-one knows the names of’.’; or Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning, ‘…and the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses.’ Just try to imagine what they could do with this show in Amsterdam….

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Pere Lachaise

 

And after that full-immersion, we plunge ourselves onto the famous slopes and woods of Père Lachaise cemetery, only a block or so away. Here in these leafy grounds, dozens of famous artists, writers, musicians, and performers have found their final resting place, along with dozens of ordinary souls. A raven perched among the markers seems appropriate for such a grey and drizzly day.

 

             

 

 

 
 

 

 

This city of the dead has a long history and the list of permanent residents is noteworthy: Colette, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Balzac, Apollinaire, Georges Bizet, Delacroix, Daumier, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret – even Porfirio Diaz and Benjamin Franklin’s grandson William.

 

 

Numerous sad, crumbling old monuments in this jumbled city of the dead remind us that unless someone comes to attend our graves they too will crumble into soil or succumb to tree roots someday. Regardless, we all return to the fertile land as bio-mass to nurture the future. And our best ideas, if we’re lucky, may pass into what Robert M Hutchins called, “The Great Conversation.” 

 

 

OK, we also did the ‘60s thing’ and stopped by the grave of James Douglas Morrison. Someone said, “You can tell where it is by all the hippies around it.” Jim’s grave is not spectacular, wedged into a small and well-trampled spot between many other burials by a ‘gum tree’ — one of those trees that people stick their gum to for some reason. His tomb seems oddly anti-climactic after his short and flamboyant life.

Many others in Père Lachaise must have led flamboyant lives for their era, but that’s long forgotten as the artists and rogues of each new age concoct outrages of their own. And rarely do graves blaspheme the dead with factual accounts of their lives. That’s for the biographers and novelists and should not sully the headstones of the deceased. A bit of whimsy may suffice, however.

 

And while at Père Lachaise, how could we not go in search of the final resting place for a person listed on the roster simply as ‘Sex Toy?’ Below a large bronze placard emblazoned with “Sex Toy,” the name of Delphine Palatsi (1968-2002) is etched into the cold and mossy stone. Known around Paris as ‘one of the premier female techno-DJs of the 1990s,’ she began her career mixing at Le Scandalo, a club on Rue Keller in Paris. She mixed at venues for Louis Vuitton, l’Oréal, and the Cannes film festival, appeared in several films, and lived her manic life until 2002 when she died of a heart attack at 33 years of age.

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Giverny

It’s appropriate that we’ll depart Paris on a train from the Gare Saint Lazare to visit Monet’s home and garden in Giverny, since he often painted the old coal-chuffing engines arriving from Normandy in this very station. In his day, those giant and powerful machines were strong symbols of a new industrial age transforming much of Europe from its medieval past into a brave new future. The romantic old coal-burners are gone now – and the air is cleaner – but the Gare Saint Lazare still exudes some of its old magic.  

Monet was largely a self-taught rebel, ignoring his father’s wishes to join the family grocery business, and rejecting art classes to study with the masters. Michelangelo, Goya, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso – the list of such artistic rebels is long.

 

Monet was known for his mastery of many subjects besides smoking steam engines. He’s mostly remembered for his peaceful and romantic scenes of canals in Venice and Amsterdam, the sailing boats at Argenteuil, and his beloved gardens in Giverny. His attraction in later life to a peaceful life in the countryside far from the clangor of Paris is understandable.

 

 

In less than an hour from Paris by train we’re at the Vernon station and boarding a bus for the short drive to Giverny. Then it’s a modest walk, on a crowded pathway, from the bus park to the Maison et Jardins de Claude Monet, where he and his family lived from 1883 to 1926.

Oscar-Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionism – the term came from his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise) first exhibited in 1874. He would paint scenes numerous times to capture subtle changes in light and the seasons of the year. He created his own landscape for painting in Giverny, where he lived for the last 43 years of his life.

Along the way to Monet’s home and garden we make the acquaintance of a friendly Chinese couple who are enjoying their own extended retirement wander in Europe. She’s very sprightly and a real spark who used to work for a German company in China. She speaks German, decent English, and Mandarin Chinese. He’s courtly but more quiet, and speaks no English. He was a manager for China Telecom. We find ourselves piloting our way together through narrow lanes to a very long line outside the entry door, but we’ll lose track of each other later, somewhere in Monet’s broad gardens.

 

 

The expansive gardens of Claude Monet are resplendent with flowers, just as we’d expect on such a fine warm day in springtime. The bees stay busy with the abundance of floral choices giving forth their bounty of honey.

 

 

 

Monet’s famous lily pond and arcing Japanese bridge are in a different
section, through a passageway under the rural road that runs beside his home and garden. The lily pond and woods are a fine place with hidden creeks and copses to lose ourselves among (along with a crowd of others) while tracing the pathways leading to the pond and bridge. 

 

 

 

Monet’s modest home is charming and inviting, as if he’s only gone for the day and expected back later for supper. Besides the walls covered with his art and collections, the kitchen is a romantic image of old Brittany. It’s easy to see why Monet spent his final years here.

 

Back in the gift shop, we recline on some very comfortable couches for an informative talk about Monet by Helen Bordman, ‘Executive Volunteer,’ formerly of New Jersey but now resident in France. Helen has collected a variety of stories and impressions of Monet’s life here in the little community of Giverny and she brought those days to life.

(For more Monet & Giverny: https://www.claudemonetgallery.org)

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Alas, it’s time to leave…

And what is it with the French, their art, their wines, their culinary traditions, their language – it’s probably the most romantic of all the Romance Languages. Strategically situated as they are, just across the Channel from those oddly charming Brits and just south of guttural tribes of Germanics, the French remain a fascination.

But in the end we must leave familiar Paris behind, and search out other challenges. Our original loose itinerary has semi-evolved so that we’re now heading through Germany toward the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, and Italy. The old river port city of Strasbourg, lying just on the French side of the Rhine, will be our next stop. We’ll see you there! — PRW

 

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• For more of Paris from 2013 & 2016, see:

http://wilkeskinsman.typepad.com/tierra_de_tortugas/2013/07/summer-2013-sojourn-aaaah-paris.html

http://wilkeskinsman.typepad.com/tierra_de_tortugas/2016/08/summer-2016-paris.html

Summer 2018: Paris I

  After a fine and frivolous week in wonderful Amsterdam it was time to leave that special place behind and move onward. We packed our bags again and returned to Amsterdam Centraal to catch our next train. We were off to Paris on a fast Thalys train through the countryside at speeds of up to 301kph (187mph), with stops at Rotterdam, Antwerpen, and Brussels. 

 

For me, trains recall romantic visions of an earlier age, watching the changing countryside without fighting traffic, and with plenty of leg room. That opening scene from 1974’s ”Murder on the Orient Express” at the busy train station in Istanbul, crossroads to the world, is one of many that embedded un-erasable images of adventure in my memory. Trains are such a great way to travel.

In a few hours we arrived at Paris’s historic old Gare du Nord, dating from 1864. This is one of six major train stations in the city, the busiest station in all of Europe, and home to the London Eurostar. It’s a classic entry to the busy life of Paris, and its towering halls are the right place to begin showing Elyse and Rachael some of our favorite spots in this great city.

Carolyn had booked an excellent and nicely decorated 2 BR apartment just off Rue du Clichy and only two blocks from the Pigalle Metro stop, and we were soon settled in. There’s a fine view from the balcony looking down Rue des Martyrs toward the nice St. Georges neighborhood. And Denisse the owner, was more than charming. People sometimes consider the Pigalle area ‘dicey’ because of the sex shops and nightclubs, but a bit of the grittier side of Paris was fine for us.

 

 

So how does one even begin to explore Paris? There are so many places to start, and for me it’s probably the most interesting city in the world. We’ve traveled a bit, with still plenty of cities and countries we haven’t even been to. And there are times we prefer a quiet and cheap small town to relax in. But I’m often drawn back to Paris, its great walkability, its outstanding museums and parks, its deep history, its many intriguing neighborhoods, lanes, alleys, and squares where you can enjoy coffee or a glass of wine and watch the world go by. This is a special place, and there’s always something interesting to do here.

 

Montmartre

We’re staying just downhill from the old artist colony of Montmartre, so a good walk around on the butte seems like the right beginning. We could climb up several hundred steps, but a majority vote goes for taking the funiculaire. Later, we’ll walk back down by another route.

                 

At the top we bypass the touts selling cheap Eiffel Towers in front of Sacre Coeur and head for the street artists in Place du Tertre before going onward to the Musée Montmartre. The Musée is where Susan Valadon had her studio, and it’s now part of the museum. The studio was also a meeting place for her artist friends Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and others who were crafting the modern art we know today. Her son, Maurice Utrillo, captured the Paris of those days in paint. And her relationship with the composer Eric Satie, who lived nearby, is still the stuff of romantic legend.

 

 

 

  A walk through these romantic streets takes us back to the lesser known Lamarck area where Carolyn and I holed up on our last visit. We stop at a favorite street café near the Lamarck-Caulaincourt station for a refreshing martini blanc (it’s not a ‘martini’) over ice with a lemon slice. We settle into our street-side chairs just as a fashion shoot begins. A handsome young model poses on both sides of the street near the Metro entry as the people of Paris walk by, and as most of the ‘café-istas’ ignore the whole process. When they move to the railing overlooking the city below, I get a shot with our former balcony (that upper one) behind the model.

 

We descend the old butte back toward our apartment, passing Le Bateau Lavoir and other artistic sites along the way. And then we settle in for a fine quiche at Les Artistes, just half a block from our flat, where Samuel keeps us well-fed and attended to. The day has been a fine introduction to Paris.

 

 

 

Champs Elysées

It’s a new day and Rachael needs a long walk, so she and I head out through back streets toward the distant Arc d’ Triomphe. Elyse and Carolyn will take the Metro and meet us there in a couple of hours, as we immerse ourselves into the heart of the city. We show up only about 15 minutes late and ready to proceed down the broad Champs Elysées toward the distant Louvre. Every sort of glamorous and too-expensive store, and some too-expensive cars, can be found along these broad sidewalks.

  

 

There are also plenty of beautiful older buildings and fountains along the way. We put some coins into the pot for a guy making huge soap bubbles at the Place de la Concorde, and consider taking a ‘Retro’ side-car tour of the city on a new Ural motorcycle. And there are still pond boats in the fountains, as I recall from years ago.

 

As we reach the shady and quiet respite of the Tuileries, it’s time for lunch and a cold drink. Afterward there’s a temptation to remain sitting beneath the trees, but we still have some ground to cover.

 

             

And finally we’re at The Louvre, that renowned cathedral of art, which will have to wait for another day. We’ve been too happily sidetracked by the ‘museum of Paris’ itself to spend time inside a major institution. A day later we return.

 

The Louvre

 

Entry into The Louvre, the world’s largest art museum, is through an underground shopping gallery, and past I M Pei’s famous inverted pyramid. We’re here for the Delacroix show – plus the whole experience of just walking these storied halls. 

Eugène Delacroix was considered the leader of the French Romantic School of artists, and later inspired Renoir, van Gogh, and Picasso. His massive, highly detailed, and action-filled canvases cover entire walls. A visit to Algeria and his fascination with ‘orientalism’ brought the color and drama of the Arabic world to the salons of Paris. And his exquisite etching of Méphistophélès for an 1827 edition of Faust showed his wide range of ability. 

 

 

And we can’t overlook his bare-breasted lady in “Liberty Leading the People.” She’s known as ‘Marianne,’ and her image has appeared on French currency, stamps and government documents. The painting honors the overthrow of Charles X in July of 1830. 

 

A comic poster in the museum café lends a bit of humor before we meander through the remaining majestic halls of The Louvre. It’s a walk through the history of Western Civilization expressed in art, divided conveniently into manageable chunks. The sheer number of masterworks on show here can be overwhelming, as they regularly display about 35,000 pieces of their vast collection. 

And of course, Leonardo da Vinci’s timeless ’smiling lady’ can be found among the crowd of admirers pondering one of the oldest questions in the art world: is she smiling really, or is that only a clever shadow on her cheek? 

 

After a long day of museuming we’re ready for another delicious dinner, this time at a nice-looking place called Roberta, in the Abbesses.

      

 

Royal Wedding

After a big museum day it was time for a break, and there happened to be a Royal Wedding going on. So we dressed up a bit and dropped into a friendly local Brit pub for a pint or two on a warm afternoon.  

 

 

We ordered pints of their “Bang Bang” ale, as it seemed to be appropriate – or nicely inappropriate – for the occasion of a wedding. And we settled in for the show.

The Royal Bride arrived in a vintage Rolls Royce as the Groom, and the rest of us, anxiously awaited.

 

          

The beautiful couple mumbled the required oaths and pleasantries, and much pomp occurred. And an African-American preacher gave a pulpit-rattling sermon that will be remembered by the world. Then they were out to the traditional coach and four to wave at the crowds, while the Queen made her own exit.

 

 

It was a long and ale-soaked afternoon when we left the pub behind, heading back to the flat and a good afternoon nap. 

 

The Musée d’Orsay & Eiffel Tower

Another day in Paris, another famous museum. This time it’s the great Musée d’Orsay, standing just across the Seine from The Louvre in the ornate converted d’Orsay train station. The old Paris-Orléans clock still graces the façade, interesting statuary stands out front, and the towering interior lends itself to a great variety of sculptures. Lucky Parisian kids get to study this art up close and personal.

 

This museum is one of our favorites; it seems more approachable than the Louvre as it concentrates on art after 1848. If you wondered where the Courbets, Corots, Renoirs, Degas, and van Goghs are hidden after walking through the Louvre, they’re over here on this side of the Seine.

 

Elyse and Rachael were drawn to the classics, while Carolyn and I mostly stayed in the Āmes Sauvages exhibition featuring surprising art from early modernists in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Many of these artists were referencing the old myths and legends of the Baltic peoples, making them relevant to the present day. Sorry, no pictures allowed. Only the poster image...

Museum cafés can be a fine place to break for lunch (and they often have great views) before heading back to the galleries. 

 

 

 

Closing time finally arrives, and we take a long walk down the banks of the Seine. Late afternoons by the river are like a carnival, as families bring their kids along for some welcome together time. 

 

 

But we’re also making our way to dinner near a large Tower that we noticed somewhere off in the distance. Word has it that the Tower lights up at dusk, and some say it even sparkles. We find the Café Eiffel, only a block from the tower, and it almost has a view. It’s a good place for a sit, as a young couple does their wedding pictures just across the street.

The evening sets, and the Eiffel Tower comes brightly to life. And then it sparkles as 20,000 lights twinkle for five minutes every hour until 2am. It’s an impressive performance, well worth seeing, and a crowd gathers to cheer the Iron Lady every night. Later we pass lots of guys selling miniature twinkling towers on our way to the closest Metro stop, in case we need one of those around the house.

 

 

Saint Germain 

We have tickets for an evening organ concert at Notre Dame cathedral and decide to begin the day in nearby Saint Germain. The old used books and trinket stands along the Seine are a good way to start. Every artist, student, writer, and philosopher of Paris has thumbed through these books and art prints, and found treasures to keep. A dog in a houseboat on the river below is unconcerned and enjoying the world in a comfy spot.

We don’t get far into Saint Germain’s wonderful jumble of streets before we stop for a bite of lunch. Then a young couple doing ice cream shots inspires some of us to do the same. 

 

 

Around every corner in Saint Germain there’s another opportunity for shopping, classical music concerts, and general slothful behavior. It’s a great part of the city.

 

 

 

By the time we got to the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, the afternoon rains had set in. Carolyn and I ducked inside for a couple of cappuccinos, but there was no place to sit or stand. So we sat outside and tried to pretend we weren’t getting soaked. Finally we gave up and stood with the crowd sheltering under the canopy. “I love Paris…when it drizzles.”

 

As the rain let up we wandered on, past The Cavern of the Forsaken, in search of dinner. And then it was time to make our way over the stone bridge to the island where the Parisii first settled here around 250 BC. We were on our way to the imposing gothic cathedral of Notre Dame and an inspiring evening of organ music, ripping and rumbling off her great old stone walls.

 

 

 

Notre Dame

  

David Higgs gently placed his finger upon the soft note that begins David Conte’s Pastorale and Toccata (1991), then he lifted his finger and paused to wait with a patient smile as a sudden and piercing siren faded outside into the Paris evening; a muted chuckle spread through the audience. With silence restored, he lightly touched the organ key again and resumed playing Conte. It’s a quiet piece, in contrast to some of the earlier ‘fireworks’ of Franz Liszt and Calvin Hampton in this evening’s program which ends with the fierce cords of Charles-Marie Widor rumbling our seats and shaking the ancient walls of Notre Dame. Ghostly blue light emanating from tall gothic arches behind the altar added its own element to the evening.

 

 

A concert performed on the 7,800-pipe organ in this fabulous space is not to be missed, and we recall a similar experience here 30-some years ago, with Cesar Franck at the keys. It was recommended by our good friend and organist, Larry Titman, who also mentioned there had been some concern then about damage to this iconic church from over-flights by the Concorde and other modern aircraft until studies showed that Notre Dame’s massive organ had long produced far more decibels than the aircraft.

 

Outside in the night, the ‘City of Light’ provides its own show that never disappoints. Each huge and magnificent building shows even better in the darkness and proudly displays the architectural wealth of this historic city. And also there are the city’s famous rats, nosing about for a bite or two that may have been dropped by a careless, or kind, soul. I only got a few fuzzy shots as they scurried by in the darkness, but luckily I found a batch of the fuzzy rascals in a shop window nearby.

 

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A Pause

At about this point in the trip Rachael says she’s having a hard time getting her head around all the different things we’ve done since leaving Florida on a ship about a month ago. This is our sixth country since then (Bermuda, Açores-Portugal, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, and France) and I understand what she means. But we’ve still got a few more days here in Paris before she and Elyse board a plane back to Albuquerque. Next up: the Centre Pompidou.

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Centre Pompidou

We board the Métro and head off again into the city. After a train change at the dazzling Arts et Métiers station, we emerge at the Rambuteau stop to face the eclectic-crazy and modernist Centre Georges Pompidou. Renzo Piano’s radical design, putting the building’s ‘innards’ on the outside, was a shock to the City of Light at its debut back in 1977, when it replaced the beloved Les Halles central food market. It was called “love at second sight” in National Geographic Magazine. And Le Figaro said, “Paris has its own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness.”

 

 

Back in the early 1980s, when Carolyn and I first visited the museum, it was the talk of the architectural world. But it seems to be weathering poorly these days, a victim of all that boldly exposed structure. The Centre houses the Musée National d’Art Moderne, which mounts major exhibitions every year and sees more than five million visitors annually. A quick ride up the iconic tubular escalators puts us right into the art-surrounded-by-structure concept of the hallways. We duck into the galleries for a wide-ranging tutorial on the past century or so of modern art. 

 

 

 

Later we break for a nice museum lunch on the upper deck, with a look-over at the fun and fantastical Jean Tiguely- Niki Saint Phalle water-activated creations in the Stravinsky fountain far below. Carolyn and I recall having a cognac up here many years ago, overlooking the city.

We look around the charming Marais district on our way back, and check out the Harley Davidson store; but we have tickets tonight for Au Lapin Agile and need to head in that direction. 

 

 

Au Lapin Agile

We stop for yet another delicious dinner – this is Paris, after all – on our way to an evening at Au Lapin Agile, a special place in the city.

A night at Au Lapin Agile puts us closer to a ‘French experience’ than most common tour venues. This is a century-old song hall where Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Satie, Picasso and the other radical Montmartre artist crowd used to hang out over a slug of brandy and sing the old songs.

It’s on a steep and cobbled pedestrian roadway just down from the Musée Montmartre, and there’s a crowd of folks out front in festive wear for picture taking. We thought they were on line, but they wandered off before the door opened at 9;30 p.m. for the evening show. Inside there’s a piano player in the corner, and an empty table in the center. We sit on benches around the edge of the room and sip cherry brandy while the benches fill. 

 

Soon the center table fills with eight people who arrive as friends out for an evening of song, and they commence singing together, in a variety of voices from fine to rough-hewn – and all in French. And sometimes one performs a separate song, while artfully playing a guitar or the piano. One young lady sang while she played the piano behind her back. First time I’d seen that done!

 

About four hours later we spill out into the cool Parisian night, well after the last Metro train has departed the nearest station. We were well-brandied as we trudged slowly upward over the butte of Montmartre, then down past the Bateau Lavoir, and through the labyrinthine Abbesses neighborhood to our apartment in Pigalle. It was about 2:00 a.m., and a night well spent.

 

Annick

We met up with our friend Annick and her youngest two daughters at the Trocadero, a broad plaza overlooking the Seine, with the Eiffel Tower beyond. Annick, a graduate of the Sorbonne, is an economist for the French Government, and it was good to see her and the kids again. Carolyn and I had stayed with her in her home for a week a few years ago.

Annick had tickets for a river cruise on the Bateaux Mouches, a great way to see the city from the Seine. As an old sailor, among the first things I noticed was a pair of beautiful old ‘lee-boarders’ tied to a quay. It’s a common type of boat found in shallow waters, as in the Netherlands, where it’s important to lift the large swing keel quickly to avoid hitting the bottom. 

 

Our trip progressed with spectacular views of the city and other large boatloads of tourists passing by. There’s lots of picture-taking as we pass the Louvre and the d’Orsay, a few oddities, and so many majestic vistas. People wave from historic bridges as we pass beneath.

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile the people of Paris go about their quotidian lives, enjoying their beautiful riverscape to the fullest. 

 

 

 

  Next up was a visit to the top floor of the Tour Montparnasse, the imposing dark office building that erupts from the beauty of Paris like a raised middle finger. It was because of this esthetic violation that space was made available in La Défense, at the edge of town, for modern skyscrapers. I have tried to ignore the Tour Montparnasse, but they say some of the best views of the city are from the top – because none of them include the ugly tower itself! 

I had to admit that I gained a different and valuable perspective from the top, looking down upon Montparnasse cemetery, the city’s intricate network of avenues, plus the Tour Eiffel – which also enraged some Parisians as an ugly intrusion, back in the day.  

 

 

        

It was a fine Sunday afternoon, well spent, in a city that never fails to fascinate. But Annick’s daughters were getting tired of the tourism thing and needed to prepare for school in the morning. Among final embraces, Annick gave us a copy of her recent book on the challenges of raising black children in a white society. We were honored by the gift and we’ll tackle the task of reading it, in French, after we return from our trip. We’re also expecting Annick and the girls to visit us soon in Kino Bay.

 

It’s been a long and memorable trip for the four of us, with plenty of sights seen, and fine extended time spent with my sister Elyse and niece Rachael. But after a month of travel, they needed to pack for their return trip to the US.

 

We top things off by deciphering yet another French menu, for a last fine dinner at Le Vrai Paris in charming Les Abbesses. Followed by ice cream cones!

 

 

And then, in the morning, there are final goodbyes to Elyse and Rachael as a taxi whisks them off to Charles de Gaule airport for a very long flight to the US. Bon Voyage!

 Up next: What will we do in Paris without Elyse and Rachael? — PRW

Summer 2018: Amsterdam

It’s a nice final morning in Bruges, sunny and warm, as we head to the train station and grab a quick breakfast. Signs on the walls look like they’d be a lot of fun to pronounce, if not understand; but both of those are far beyond me.

 

Soon we’re on a fast Thalys train through Brussels and onward past the woods and farmlands, greenhouses, and wind turbines of this productive land. It’s an elegant way to travel. A Belgian lady seated just across from Carolyn strikes up a conversation regarding current politics, and other mass delusions in Europe and the US. 

 

In a couple of hours we’re in Amsterdam’s clean and bustling Centraal train station. From this gorgeous old building we can book trains to just about anywhere in Europe, or hop on one of the convenient and frequent trams that stop just outside the main doors, and watch the charming old city pass by our window. We could search among thousands of bikes parked here daily for one that looks sort of like ours, or we can catch a free ferry to the NDSM-werf to see the old Soviet sub that’s still tethered over there. 

 

 

 

And we can even glance across the river Het Ij to check whether there’s a cruise ship docked in town. That gleaming white ship is sitting where ours was docked last night – while we stayed in wonderful Bruges!

 

   We catch a cab to our nice clean 2br flat on Govert Flinckstraat in the De Pijp district, an emerging area of artists and good food – and ‘coffeehouses’ that don’t specialize in coffee. In fact, there’s a ‘coffeehouse’ about ten paces to the left of our front door, and the Ibiza ‘coffeeshop’ on the corner, two doors to the right. In an emergency, we’d be well supplied, although the evening air often delivers the essence of pungent herb through our open windows for free. And who could have imagined we’d be right close to the European Lubricating Grease Institute (ELGI), if there’s a sudden need for those services. Plus, Rachael — with mom Elyse in tow — just found her most recent ‘favorite bar’ only a block away. And some sort of happy bird sings all day, wonderful, and fortissimo, in the backyard garden. Life is good.

 

 

 

 

Just round the corner there’s a cosy little place called Bij Paul, kinda in a basement, where we can order up a delicious Dutch breakfast with ham, good local cheeses, and fine healthy breads with jam. Paul’s ‘Drive in’ – it’s more a ‘stoop in’ – is that white window shelf to the right with a handy bench for waiting.

 

 

 

The morning after we arrive, there’s a big open market selling just about everything, on the next street over from our flat. Our flat has a nice little kitchen, and we soon overstock it with good food – even if we can’t pronounce a lot of the names!

 

We soon return to Centraal station to board an hourlong boat cruise through Amsterdam’s famous and intricate lacework of canals, passing numerous sites along the way and every sort of craft, from modern, to funky, to historic. Our Captain shows her skills in delicate pirouettes through the narrow bridgeways. For Amsterdammsters, the canals are a linear public park, enjoyed on any warm and sunny springtime day. Artists have long found paintable scenes along these canals.

 

 

  

 

 

 

The streets of Amsterdam are a constant fascination that’s best seen with a good walkabout. The central city is fairly compact, and it doesn’t take long to get most places on foot, with numerous enchantments, oddities, and outrages along the way. And each narrow house has its traditional center beam with pulley; they’re still used for raising furniture and goods to upper floors, bypassing those narrow stairways inside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re somehow feeling compelled to learn Dutch, you can do that here. And maybe you won’t have to tell a judge that you didn’t know what ‘verwijderd’ meant.

So what is it with Dutch, anyway? Why are there are so many different ‘Dutch’ sayings in English: a half-door is a Dutch door, and going Dutch means splitting the cost. A Dutch uncle is that guy who always tricks his nephews, and you might get a Dutch rub across the head if you talk back to your Dad. We haven’t seen Dutch apple pie on a menu here, and nobody around here sells Dutch ovens, either. It goes on and on. But the Dutch are a fun-loving people with their own private language that nobody else even understands, and I think they’re fine with that. But you could take a course and try it!

 

With all those Banksy posters around town it was time for a visit to the MOCO Museum (which name does not translate well into Spanish!). After years as an urban provocateur, Banksy is still anonymous; yet his social commentary and art has earned him a place in the best museums, and a kind of stardom. Pieces of his graffiti on city walls have been carefully removed and restored by art conservators. And now he has top billing in Amsterdam, over the legendary Roy Lichtenstein. Seeing these two graphic masters together and comparing their works up close was a rare treat. 

 

 

 

 

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On the way to the MOCO, we walked through a huge bricked underpass and could hear what seemed to be organ music resounding. Upon getting nearer, we found two young accordianists, playing classics and holding passersby spellbound!

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Our perky Dutch friend Nathaly had the idea of spending a day at the ‘Rollende Keuchens’ (Rolling Kitchens) event in the Westerpark, to savor the current trends in Dutch fun, food, and drink. We’re always ready to drink and eat our way through any new cultural activity, and those fun-loving Dutch even had a frenetic stripper performing ancient cultural dances for us on top of a truck. Right near a fire-breathing dragon! They think of everything. 

 

 

 

The Dutch have been known for tulips ever since the Tulip Mania of the 1600s, so another day trip with Nathaly took us to visit the Keuchenhof gardens. Wandering for hours among 80 acres of every imaginable breed of tulip in the world’s largest ‘bulb-flower’ garden is a special experience. We were there over a long afternoon on the last day they were open for the season, and we didn’t get close to walking the whole place to see every kind of special – and even bizarre – hybrid there is around today. But it was still enough tulips to last me a long while.

 

 

Bikes are heavily used everywhere here in Amsterdam; a bike is the best way to get around, and very easy to park, in this crowded city. Studies in Scientific American say that bicycles are five times more efficient than even walking, based on calories used per mile. And according to various sources, that converts to between 1500 and 3000 miles per gallon. So Amsterdam, with more bikes than people, must have one of the highest transportation efficiency ratios in the world. And maybe the greatest variety of bike bells!

 

 

 

And there’s nary a flabby paunch in sight. At just a glance it appears that bike riding is a very healthy lifestyle, and most of the US could use a good bike to work now and then.

But bike riding here can be challenging and maybe a bit dangerous, if you don’t know all the complicated local rules of the road – and for that you probably need to be born to the skill. In other words, maybe you shouldn’t try it here if you’re not Dutch.

Our 2016 Amsterdam post has more about bikes and other things.

 

Ah, Amsterdam. Where a person can escape the fog of hysteria that obsesses the world, and just enjoy life. Here you can buy a nicely-rolled joint at the corner ‘coffeeshop,’ and enjoy it with your favorite local liqueur. Without fear of correction-Nazis beating down your door.

I have enjoyed a bit of the benevolent bud myself at times – and yes, I always inhaled deeply – but I actually prefer a good cocktail and a decent wine with dinner. We all have our favored escapes; and who cares, if it’s not harmful to others. 

After more than US$1Trillion spent persecuting countless young people and ruining their lives, drugs are now cheaper, more plentiful, and of higher quality than ever before. Yet the Phony Drug War persists. There’s so much money involved, that logic and science are not a consideration. It has become its own superstition, its own religion, and apostates are dealt with severely. 

There are some bad choices in the world, but marijuana is fairly benign (the CDC lists zero marijuana overdose deaths in the US). And it’s the worst sort of hypocrisy to be damning the weed while smoking cigarettes, or drinking liquor.

BTW: Portugal decriminalized all drugs 14 years ago, and has a far lower drug death rate than almost every other country. 

So we’ve had a fine week in Amsterdam, and we almost feel like dancing in the village square – if we could find one around here. But now we need to move onward again. Our next stop will be always-exciting Paris. — PRW

Summer 2018: From England to Belgium

 

Southampton, England

Four fine days at sea, after leaving the Açores, we rounded the Isle of Wight at dawn (I can’t even think ‘Isle of Wight’ without humming ‘When I’m 64’ by The Beatles) and cruised into The Solent, a famous venue for sailors, before tying to the dock at Southampton. On the morning of our 13th day after departing Fort Lauderdale, we had finally reached the far side of the Atlantic – at a port made famous by countless Masterpiece Theatre dramas where crowds waved to relatives leaving for the New World. It was also the departure point for the RMS Titanic in 1912, and this port was home to 4/5 of her deceased crew members. The tragedy is still remembered here. She would make two more stops after Southampton before leaving Europe for New York.

At the dock, a waiting bus hustled us off into the green southern English countryside on a tour to nearby Stonehenge. It was a bright and sunny Saturday morning in May, and it was also a ‘bank holiday,’ so we soon encountered traffic jam-ups as legions of Brits stormed the beaches for a rare day in the sun. 

Our affable driver soon opted for an exit from the traffic crawl to a welcome bypass route that took us through the leafy and pastoral New Forest, with its plentiful deer and its privileged free-ranging cattle, horses, and other livestock governed by Verderers and Commoners law. (It’s complicated but interesting)

 

 

We emerged from the woods near Salisbury, with its majestic cathedral spire (the tallest in Britain) dramatically backlit in the morning sun. There’s even a copy of the Magna Carta inside this towering pile of stone dating from the 1200s. But we’ll have no time for that, as nearby Stonehenge awaits.

 

 

At the Stonehenge parking lot we board a different bus for a quick trip ‘to the stones,’ lying just over the hill. C & I would love to just walk there on this wonderful morning, but we’re in a bit of a time bind on the tour. 

 

 Topping the hill and seeing those iconic stones in the distance is a singular experience. Friends have mentioned being able to walk among the stones ‘in the old days,’ but now we’re restricted to a somewhat crowded pathway at a modest distance from the ancient monument. Upon seeing the visiting crowds, we don’t really have a problem with that. Sometimes you get a much better view from a distance, and the view isn’t crowded with people. A bit of separation helps to bring out the majesty of the setting. One has to wonder what kind of hierarchy, persuasion, religious dictatorship, whatever, it took to get this feat accomplished around 5000 years ago. But, as they say, “Give me that old time religion.”

 

And the local raven clean-up crew hopefully awaits anything edible that may be carelessly dropped along the pathway.

After having scoped out the distance involved, Carolyn and I decide to take a brisk walk back across the moors to the parking lot. Something about the scene recalls that adventure of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I’m glad it’s not a fog-bound and mysterious day. First we pass a ‘Free the Stones’ encampment but don’t have time to enquire about the issues involved. We assume it’s not regarding some infraction by the Rolling Stones, as they seem to have put most of that youthful exuberance behind them in their dotage. Just like the rest of us.

Bright yellow fields of canola (we’re told) shimmer in the landscape. And fallen moss-covered logs in the woods recall childhood memories of similar pastoral scenes from summer visits to cousins in Kentucky.

 

And soon we’re back in Southhampton for a walk-around in the small but charming Old Town center. One can imagine the Titanic here, moored to the dock before its doomed inaugural passage to New York (it’s hard to imagine any inaugural event that went more poorly); and there are poignant reminders here of that last visit.