Guelph

I flew into Pearson Airport in Toronto, then took a Red Car van to Guelph. My flight was enlivened by a party of about a dozen school teachers from Spain, who were returning after a month of teacher education in Edmonton, at some teaching institute I don’t know about. They were full of fun, chanting a countdown to takeoff and singing little songs together, one of which they’d made up about how great Canada was, then at the end riotously celebrating our successful landing. I got the impression that life in Spain must be full of enthusiasm. I was seated next to a couple of lovebirds who spent the whole flight facing each other, murmuring endearments in Spanish.

Fool’s Gold
As a child, I always enjoyed the inability of Goldie Hawn to make it through an entire joke on Laugh In, so I have followed the career of her daughter Kate Hudson with interest. This movie was primarily about how even a college graduate can’t resist Matthew McConaughey’s naked torso, accompanied with a slapstick checklist of how many ways he could get hit in the head. This says two things to me about the women who enjoy chickflicks that I would probably have been better off not knowing. Donald Sutherland reprised his role as Kate Bush’s father in the music video for Cloudbusting, and we all felt better when the smart girl, played by Kate Hudson, finally told Paris Hilton, played by Alexis Dziena, that we’d like her to act smarter than she does.

Aberfoyle Puppet Idol
I’m not sure I can clearly express the sense of fun I experienced on seeing this sign. I don’t much care for the various idols that have been foisted upon a dissolute public, but a puppet idol might be just the kind of idol I would enjoy going to see. This part of Ontario, also known as “move here to raise your kids dot com” seems to feature all kinds of rural delights, from spreading views to the company’s own water. It seems to me a quiet place, with homey pleasures. The Red Car stopped in a cul-de-sac last night to drop someone off, and we’d gathered a little crowd of onlookers by the time we left.

Canadian Design
I’ve occasionally waxed lyrical on the subject of the design of Finnish, for example, hotel rooms, so I thought it might be interesting to hear about where things could stand a bit of improvement. I’m staying at a very nice hotel chain in a beautiful room. However, the roll of toilet paper is fastened in such a way that a vertical line dropped from its edge would land on the toilet seat. So it actually rests against your ribs when you sit down. There is an elaborate light system with a master switch at the door, but no way to control the lights from anywhere near the bed, meaning you’d better plan ahead, or else you’ll be making a little nervous excursion in a strange room in the dark. The air conditioner has a large vent, the direction of which can’t be changed, and it aims directly at the only chair in front of the only desk with the only internet connection. Fortunately, one of the decorative blankets doubles as a shawl.

Victoria

I’ve been to Victoria now a dozen times, almost entirely thanks to Ray S, who has arranged all kinds of enjoyable and productive activities for me, ranging from guest lectures to summer courses. I have the impression I may even be an Adjunct Professor here at the University of Victoria, which he arranged to make some of the paperwork easier. This time I’m in town for a week-long grantwriting session, and am staying in a dorm room on campus. I love the campus, in large part because it is littered with bunnies. There are often dozens in sight at any given time, and if you are interested, you can feed them, although it takes quite a bit of relationship-building before any of them will let you touch them. I saw Chris S. and Susan L. both manage it last summer when we were here for a thesisfest, and it was quite amazing. Under their influence, I even managed to pet an old veteran myself, which I would have given odds against any other time.

Hummingbirds and Deer
Feral bunnies aren’t the only neighbours you have when you are living in Victoria, and last night we were visited in Ray’s back yard by a hummingbird, who came and went throughout dinner. It was quite a large one, but as mobile as a shot, hovering for minutes at a time, then abruptly hovering somewhere twenty feet in another direction. I even got to see it perched for a while on a wire. Lynn says it is a regular there. Several years ago I was also pleased to meet some deer grazing early one morning on campus, and last night there was a big doe standing beside the road as we drove up. I like the idea that this environment supports all these creatures. As Susan says, the rabbits make it clear that there is a low bar for survival here, which should mean it is easier for us to survive too.

My Blueberry Nights
After I ate my dinner in the student pub, where the excitement included a very good soundtrack and a very dull array of television sets, nearly all of them dedicated to, of all things, watching other people playing cards, I decided to stop by the campus theatre and see if they’d sell me some popcorn. As luck would have it, they were just 15 minutes away from also showing a film I’ve wanted to see—the new one by Wang Kar Wai. So despite the fact that I was still wearing my sunglasses, I managed to round up a very bad latte and a very big bag of popcorn, then found myself a seat near the centre and about two-thirds of the way toward the back. The reviews of this film have more or less stated outright that it is gawdawful, but I wondered if maybe they just didn’t properly appreciate Wang Kar Wai, who does tend to put shit between the camera and whatever it is he’s filming, and he likes the occasional motion blur, and then there was that sequence involving Brigit Lin and all those East Indian guys. Nonetheless, he’d collected a lot of eye candy here, with Nora Jones and Rachel Weisz pretending to be most of the girls I grew up with, and Natalie Portman reprising a poker-playing version of my Aunt Lil. Unfortunately, Jones and Jude Law did contribute a lot of dialogue trouble near the beginning, but if they would only stop talking, I thought, this might be all right. Then they did stop talking, for a reasonable portion of the movie, with Jones just providing the soundtrack instead, and really it was quite good. There were all the broken hearts and homicidal, suicidal off-duty police officers you could hope for, and plenty of waitressing, all wrapped in at best a kind of bildungsroman and at worst a picaresque. I did think not understanding what they were saying would have improved the thing a great deal, but I’ve suspected that for some time now about Wang Kar Wai movies, and really this is the first one where I’ve had to face that fact head on. And, frankly, I do like seeing an actress wearing vintage clothing being poorly reflected in a wet dilapidated wall, and there was plenty of that kind of entertainment to be had. I’d give it three bad lattes and half a bag of leftover popcorn out of five.

What Rabbits Don’t Like
Well, I think they are a bit nervous about a guy wearing sunglasses after dark, which is something you could truthfully say about a lot of people, and fair enough. On the other hand, when I finally did coax somebody over, he couldn’t seem to believe that what I was actually offering him was a delicious piece of salty, buttered popcorn. It was as though I had decided to offer up a rabbit dropping. “If this is how you’re going to act,” he said, “you’re right to be wearing those sunglasses, matey. You wouldn’t want people to recognize you.” And off he went, muttering maledictions under his breath all the way.

Aberdeen

We flew British Airways to Aberdeen, and I have to say it was the hardest landing I’ve ever experienced on a commercial flight. When I took my flying lessons 25 years ago, they told me that the idea on landing a plane is to fly it just slightly above the runway and slow down until the plane settles gently to the surface. In this case, the pilot seemed more inclined to just fly the thing into the ground and trust the tires not to burst. Perhaps they have short runways.

One door, two doorways
The bathroom in our hotel room here in downtown Aberdeen has a feature I’ve never seen before. The room has a somewhat irregular shape, with the sink, toilet, and shower in three separate areas. They are configured in such a way that the door leading into the bathroom swings inward to become the door that closes off the part of the room with the toilet in it. There are two doorjambs, each with a proper strike plate for the latch, but only one door.

The Granite City
Apparently that’s what they call it, and they aren’t kidding. In the same way that Bath is made of pale yellow stone, Aberdeen is constructed almost entirely of pale grey stone. They claim it will glitter in the sunlight, but I haven’t noticed any particular gleaming. Maybe the sun has to be at the right angle. What I have noticed, though, is a hell of a lot of roses. Some of the sidewalks are lined with beds of them, stretching off as far as my eye can see, which admittedly is not that far, but its impressive nonetheless. They also have many different kinds, so that in a single block you might have a dozen colours and smells. To get this kind of intensive rose action in Canada, you need to go someplace like the Bouchard Gardens, not down the street to the chemist.

Bricks and Mortar
I asked one of our cab drivers about housing in Aberdeen. He said there are very few vacancies because of the oil industry. There is also virtually no board construction, but there are cheaper places that are made of grey brick, then covered with a kind of surface he called “herle” or maybe “herel.” You basically plaster the surface of the brick, which is in itself considered too unattractive, then spray pebbles into the plaster. I was also surprised to hear that there is no longer a local supply of granite, since the quarry shut down ten years ago. New buildings either use granite recovered from old buildings, or else they ship it in from places like China. Or maybe he was pulling my leg.

Oystercatchers
These are quite an attractive little bird, about the size of a magpie, with a bright red or orange beak and a loud shrieking cry. They next in the rooftops around the University of Aberdeen, which is something they apparently don’t normally do. We saw one of them roughhousing with a gull, of which there are many in Aberdeen, their voices echoing into the bedroom all night long. Susan also noticed one of the oystercatchers landing in an unusual way, luffing its wings as it got close to the ground, if luffing is the verb I’m after, in order to shed the lift.

London

I flew in from Oulu and spent a night at the cheapest hotel near the airport, a Comfort Inn, for the low discount price of $250. Then I went back to Heathrow in time to meet Susan, Michael, and Marley as they came out from the arrivals gate in Terminal 4. In the meantime, I’d also stopped briefly at Terminal 5, where they have a fountain I liked. It is a 5x10 grid of water spouts that shoot out from nozzles that are flush with the tiles. Each spout is about my height. The system stops them abruptly, so the water all falls to the ground at once with a loud snap. I only wished I could run around in there in my swimming trunks.

The British Museum
I made my maiden voyage to Europe in the year 2000. Since then, I have been to London more times than I can count, but there are still plenty of things I haven’t seen. Most of the British Museum goes on that list, although I try to get there for a few hours on every trip. As you know, it contains a good representative sample of the loot of an empire, so it is really more like conveniently visiting the cultural repositories of a dozen countries than seeing the culture of England itself. We scampered past the Elgin marbles, various winged Assyrian centaurs, a few Egyptian mummies and their cat statues, swords and bits of armour of every conceivable material and state of preservation (I liked the bronze ones best), and even a few dakinis and bodhisattvas. You often have to wonder, however, about the labels. A lot of supernatural Buddhist creatures, for instance, are depicted overcoming their own mental afflictions by trampling on them. The label in the BM says “Dakinis are usually shown standing on corpses.”

The Natural History Museum
This is another of my favourite museums, in part I think because it embodies the Victorian cultural obsession with nature. The arches on the entrances soar up fifty feet or more, and each arch has carvings of some living creature — birds on one, snakes on another — climbing up and over the top and down the other side. There is even one with monkeys. They also have huge ballrooms filled with, for instance, their rock collection, which is admittedly very fine. There's a vault room with some of their favourites, including a meteorite that they know came from Mars, because it had some small pockets of Martian air in it. There’s a huge diamond necklace from South Africa. They also have a fossil coelacanth, which is the only one I’ve ever seen. And in the dinosaur room they have a robot T-Rex. I watched a toddler lurch in, see the thing, and begin to wail. It seemed clear that this was just the sort of betrayal he had been expecting from his parents, who quickly picked him up and reassured him to the contrary.

The Phantom of the Opera
I’ve never been to a theatre in London, but on this trip we decided to find one, and I must say it was a lot of fun. The place was packed, although the Phantom has been haunting it nightly for 21 years now. They sell ice cream at the intermission, and the many stage tricks were just the kind of thing I like. The descent beneath the theatre was managed by having a catwalk lowered one end at a time while the actors walked on it. The Phantom had a stick that threw small balls of fire. The boat was exceedingly boatlike as it sailed back and forth on the stage. There was also singing and a plot of some kind.

Stonehenge, Salisbury, and Bath

We took a day trip on a bus to see some sights out in the country, and we loved them all. There isn’t a lot you can see in a day, and we spent most of it on a bus, but we got to see quite a bit of the countryside, which we’d never seen before, and there was an hour or two at each stop. It was interesting to see how narrow the roads were, and in some cases how close the farm buildings were to the road: right up to it, more or less, with just a couple of tufts of grass separating a stone barn from a two-lane highway.

Stonehenge
On the way to walk around Stonehenge, you pass a picket line of ancient people wearing the original hippie regalia. Our guide called them “a congregation of all the crusties of England.” They are standing with hand-painted banners that object to the site being treated as a tourist destination for other people who lack proper reverence. I admired their gameness in the face of absurdity, and they certainly looked like they could use a little help. They seemed to me a kind of grimy rearguard action from the few surviving souls of the original boomer flowering. It was hard not be reverent, though, because as Susan says, you stand in this vast empty plain and suddenly there’s a Neolithic monument, then more vast empty plain. The plain itself is attractive enough to a boy from Balgonie, but of course something made out of very large stones is even nicer. I wonder how they’ve managed to keep it from being completely soaked in colourful graffiti. The area is roped off, but only for the past ten years, when it became a real problem that people were chipping off souvenirs. So you walk the perimeter and take photos from every side, and you wonder about the ditches and try to guess what useful kind of shadows the heal stone could possible cast, then someone sold me a very good ice cream cone on the way out.

Salisbury
Salisbury struck me as a charming little city. It is inhabited, we were told, by 100,000 souls, quite small for a city, but they get the designation unequivocally because they are periodically host to a circuit judge. Now that I type that out it sounds unlikely, but that’s what I heard. One of the things they are famous for is a beautiful Gothic cathedral, which was quite a sight to see. Ruskin, I am told, once described Gothic cathedrals as “stone in bloom” and I could see his point. The place was littered with small surface features that seemed very organic against the square mass of the building itself. Inside said cathedral are many wonderful things, including various arches and sculptures and tombstones that you walk on, which made me a bit twitchy, truth be told, and also one of the copies of the Magna Carta. I’d expected something illuminated, God knows why, but in fact it was just a big sheet of vellum almost completely covered in lines of small black text. It was quite clearly a working document, a contract, rather than a display piece. Unfortunately, on the day we were in Salisbury, it was raining like the Dickens, and no ice cream anywhere.

Bath
In the 18th and 19th centuries, this was where you went to stand around in pools with your fashionable pals, and drink bad water to encourage your bowels. They built these amazing streets lined with houses made of pale yellow stone, and at some point one of them fell in and they realized the Romans had bathed here, too. Now you can tour the Roman baths and get some sense of the complexity of what they built, which involved lots of water and heated floors and so on. Apparently you also came here to ask Minerva to curse people for you, mostly for having stolen your stuff and gotten away with it. The curses they had selected for posting usually required a blood sacrifice to offset them, and it had to be your own blood.

St. Albans

We are staying in a private hotel about a half hour by train out of London, in the large town, or perhaps small city, called St. Albans. They have a very good cook here, so we are eating things like fresh tartar sauce on our fish and chips, which is apparently about as hard to make as fresh Hollandaise sauce, so kudos to the chef. Our first day here was spent wandering around literally smelling the roses, which included a big bank of my favourite orange ones. I have only ever seen them before in the form of one or two bushes in the grounds of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I also managed to find someone to sell me a soft ice cream cone. Susan’s crazy for Victorian homes, which means she’s in seventh heaven. We thought we might venture into the city at the end of the day, only to find there’d been some kind of mishap and the trains weren’t running.

Oulu

I first came to Finland in 2004 with Susan and Rosan, for a design conference in Helsinki. We loved Helsinki and still talk about it as a place we’d like to live someday. The Finns seem sufficiently melancholic and subliminally aware of everything around them that I think of them as a nation of telepaths. Where normally you might expect one person out of a hundred to take a good long look at you and get a mental impression, in Helsinki this is maybe one person out of ten. In Helsinki airport, for instance, I arrived in time to change to an earlier flight, so I spoke with a Finnish woman at the desk. She had to be eight month’s pregnant, and she came over to where I stood to one side, smiling at me sympathetically despite the hordes crowded around the front of her desk (you don’t get a seat assignment in a flight to Oulu). The cost turned out to be prohibitive for me ($75 to save 2 hours). “You have time then,” she said, “to go and get a decent meal.” I’m not sure if she actually said “last decent meal before flying into the remote North,” but that was how I understood her, so I went and did just that, eating a pizza made from reindeer, blue cheese, and a long, thick mushroom I didn’t recognize. The pizza was in the original Sicilian style, by which I mean uncut with a paper-thin crust, and the diced pieces of reindeer were very red, tasting a bit like bacon. It was delicious.

Breakfast in Oulu
Thank goodness I misunderstood about the food. The breakfast buffet here was included in the price of the room, and was good as any breakfast I’ve eaten in Scandinavia, which is saying a lot. There were four kinds of yogurt, for example, ten kinds of bread, and fruit compote involving fruits I don’t know anything about, one of which seemed to involve pine trees. I also had the pleasure of eating my first breakfast in Oulu with Susan H. and her husband Martin, who have been systematically traversing Earth now for several years, most recently north of here, where you can drive up to the Northernmost point in Europe that can be reached by car. They got there via the Norwegian fjords, which they say are definitely worth taking the ferry to float past.

Midnight Sun
Oulu is much closer to the Arctic circle than I’ve ever been before. I arrived at my hotel about 10:30 and it might have been late afternoon as far as the sun was concerned. I got up this morning at 7:30 and in terms of the sun, nothing has changed. They tell me that I can only expect a couple of hours of dusk in the middle of the night. It’s been heavily overcast though.

Finnish Design in my Room
Design in Finland is of course world-class, and my hotel room has several nice features. There’s a reclining couch by the large windows, several lights by the bed, including a red strip overhead and two reading halogens on flexible stalks. The closet in the entranceway also has a neon light strip, built right into the bar where you hang up the clothes.

Bunch of Cowboys
In the movie Armageddon, that’s how the Russian astronaut describes the American astronauts as they inadvertently go about destroying his space station. The phrase came to mind because of my bathtub, which is that kind I now think of as central European, because of my bathing adventures last fall in Krakow and Prague. These tubs remind me of the ones in old Westerns, where Jimmy Stewart is hanging out both ends with a bit of water in the middle. Whenever I wash, I feel that I am missing a cowboy hat. There is also the modern addition of a removable shower head on a cord, which inevitably adds that slapstick element.

What is it with the USSR?
While I’m on the Russian theme, Oulu does remind me in several ways of Poland, which I suppose has something to do with the history of the various regions. The highway signs, for instance, are similar, with silhouettes of towns turned off and on to mark the need for reduced speed on the highways, and my queen-sized bed is actually two single beds pushed together. The view from my window, in what I believe is the nicest hotel in town, includes a huge factory, belching steam from three smokestacks. Someone has a photo here, although from where I am I can’t see the water (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/5764906). I also have a government form to fill out, although when I mentioned I’d been traveling for more than 24 hours, the Finnish woman at the desk kindly suggested that I can do it at my leisure and drop it off sometime this morning. On a more positive note, I should also mention that there are little canals or rivers or something all over the place, with low stone arches over them, and right beside the hotel is a beautiful park, that you can reach by walking past the restaurant patio that overlooks the bay. Susan S. also tells me that the entire city is wireless.

Ducks in a Row
Kirsten U. and I took a walk in the park one day, taking the opportunity to talk at some length about land cartels, and the grounds were as lovely as advertised, with trees and shrubbery and flowers and little streams everywhere with charming footbridges built over them. The place also featured playgrounds for kids, as well as some greenhouses tucked away here and there. It seemed to be a favourite too with the wildfowl, and we saw a wide variety of the kinds of birds who swim. At one point, we watched half a dozen or more mature ducks climb one at a time out of the water and onto the grass. They were greenheads mostly, although there were a couple of hens mixed in. Once they emerged from the water, they did something I’d never seen in my life; they lined up single file and marched away over the lawn. It seemed so natural and spontaneous to me that I wondered if the expression for difficulty shouldn’t be the converse: “keeping your ducks from lining up.”

The Fat Man
When I announced that I was going to Oulu, Tom N. mentioned that there was a fat little policeman standing near the harbour, and sure enough, he turned out to be iconic for the city. He’s about eight feet tall and six feet across, and is there to honour the market police, who we saw in quiet action at midnight one night, when we were there to photograph a bunch of our colleagues clowning around the statue. Some of the local boys, beer in hand, came to join us, and so we took their pictures too. Nobody bothered about that, but a police van did pull up and the officers called a few people over for a chat. Everyone stands around in the street with alcohol in their hands, so apparently there’s no equivalent to the Canadian idea of an outdoor patio needing to be enclosed. The statue was commissioned in 1986 for the city from a gallery owner who’d previously made a smaller version. The sculptor’s name is Kaarlo Mikkonen, and this was his only public statue. Someone has a polite photo here, somewhat unlike the ones we were taking:
http://johnmartintaylor.com/images/dcp_3109h1.jpg

Vancouver

Susan and I were in town for a week to attend a couple of conferences. The Congress met last year in Saskatoon and was here at UBC this year. It is a ragtag collection of about 65 learned societies, whose members all get together once a year for a couple of weeks in the same spot. These are societies from the arts side of campus. The Congress this year was the biggest ever, with over 9500 delegates. My research teams gave papers at the Society for Digital Humanities, and Susan had a paper at the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. We had a simply wonderful time at these conferences, then spent our leisure hours wandering around this corner of the city, meeting some of the local flora and fauna.

A couple of raccoons
We went walking in the rain in Stanley Park, and were standing around under the cedar trees at one point, admiring their age and size, when who should stick her head out from around a tree trunk but a ratty wet raccoon. She stood on all fours and looked at us for a while, then stood up a little and showed us her empty hands. It finally occurred to Susan that she might be interested in a little dried fruit strip. While Susan was fetching that out, along came another, older raccoon, much less wet, and Susan fed the two of them the whole bar, tossing the pieces onto the ground in front of them. The older one rubbed the piece of fruit between her hands before eating it. After we finished and were walking away, I looked back to see them walking up the side of a cedar tree, like a couple of giant squirrels.

Water birds
The geese have their goslings and the ducks their ducklings, and you can walk right up to where they are. The family units mostly stick together, but there always seems to be one of the crowd who is not clear on the concept and ends up wandering around and dithering a little. We also had a chance to see several great blue herons, always individually. One was flying by with a stick in his beak, and a couple of them were standing at the water’s edge with the wind blowing their beards. One tonight was perched on the top of a sign down at the beach, looking from the back, Susan said, like an undertaker. Apparently Stanley Park has one of the largest urban colonies in the world; in 2004, eighty of them showed up and started nesting here.

Harbour seal
We walked the sea wall several times with our friends, and saw in the distance some swimming animals, but we never got close enough to decide whether they were otters or seals. Tonight one of them swam close enough to the wall where we were standing that we could have dived down and touched her, and she was clearly a seal. She was larger than the ones I saw in Cape Town, and spotted rather than the uniform colour I saw there. She was floating gently on the surface and took a good long time, even swimming closer at one point while looking right at us. It was clear though that she could swim like the dickens, and when she was underwater you could see her white belly as she swooped around catching minnows.

That’s a Triathlete
One of the other harbour sightings I made tonight was of an ungainly looking creature flopping about a little. I wondered if it was something injured. It turned out, of course, to be a human swimmer. The triathletes are in town, having arrived from all over the world, wearing their spiderman costumes in all weather and making the rest of us look just that little bit more tired and fat. We saw a sign in the lobby today mentioning that the kitchen was going to open early for them, since they want to breakfast between 4 and 5 a.m. rather than at the more conventional 7:00. God love them.

Frankfurt

I have to say we are three for three on hotels this trip. The Concorde Hotel in Frankfurt turns out to be a four-star designer extravaganza, all dark wood and white cloth. The furniture in the lobby all has names, and there’s a bowl of granny smith apples next to the bowl of Werther’s. In the room, you can choose among four colours of lights available at the base of the white drapes. The ceiling is easily twelve feet high, and the leather couch has a matching leather coffee table with a wooden panel. There’s also a matching leather footstool. On the down side, we are about three blocks away from the hotel where I last stayed in Frankfurt, which is just a short walk from the train station. It also means we are about two blocks away from the red light district. I walked today past a neon sign that actually said “girls, girls, girls.”

Crazy Ass Trees
Along the Main river, there’s some kind of public park that has clearly been given over to exotic plants, including all kinds of wonderful trees. There are yew trees and oak trees and the ones I disbelievingly painted in paint-by-number pictures as a child, that seem themselves to have been painted by numbers up their trunks. There is a monkey paw that I’ve only ever seen before in Victoria, some kind of symmetric giant that has two parallel trunks, and a whole corridor of these things that look like nothing on earth, with no foliage at this time of year, but some kind of bulbous growths at the ends of large twisted branches. They all stop at exactly the same height.

Derelicts
Frankfurt seems to have more people living rough than I’ve seen in most European cities. Around the main shopping centre they are lying on the ground in groups, or sitting together on the benches, or lurching from place to place, talking to themselves about their troubles. In the grocery store on the corner there was a man running from place to place, brushing people aside as he collected his packages of pistachios and raced to the cashier. Up closer than we wanted to be to him in the checkout line, we could see he was quite young, in his early thirties maybe, although he looked at first glance twenty years older than that. His skin was covered in sores. He seemed to be on companionable terms with the skinny man with green hair who was waiting by the door. He was having his own problems, and appeared unclear about whether he had actually bought a chocolate bar or not, and if he had, whether or not it could be opened.

Pork Knuckles
Before we came to Frankfurt, our colleagues suggested that we sample the local cuisine, so we made an effort to find it, dining tonight to one side of a medieval square. One of the signature items is a very large roasted chunk of pork, served on a bed of sauerkraut with mustard on the side. It was actually quite delicious, once you got over the emotional realization that you were about to take several years off the life of your cardiovascular system.

Argentinian Beef
I don’t think we get a lot of beef from Argentina imported to Alberta, but I’ve heard good things about a steak from the Argentine. Sure enough, they have them here in Frankfurt, and I have to say they have been amazing. I’ve had an Argentinian fillet twice now, and both times I was more than pleasantly surprised at just how amazingly good a three-inch block of cow can taste.

Frankfurt: city of bankers
There is a giant Euro in the centre of the city, and I think it explains a lot about this place. The city seems to put things together that wouldn’t normally go together, and does it without blinking. In another city, it might seem like cheek, but here it is just the order of the day. Frankfurt has postmodern skyscrapers next to medieval squares, and around the corner is a giant statue of what appears to be a stylized Gumby. There are trains, river barges, girls girls girls, and an eight-storey shopping mall that is essential one big elevator shaft. M.C. Escher may very well have got the inspiration for his famous interior by standing at the top of this mall, which turns out to be chock a block with stores for teenagers. Yesterday we looked, just to take a few examples, at Kurt Cobain dolls that talk when you pull their string, giant vinyl stickers that put shadows of plants on the livingroom wall, and a toaster that scorches the bread with a skull and crossbones.

Four Suffering Impressionists
We went to see an art exhibit that featured four women impressionists who it appears are often mentioned together: Mary Cassatt, Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, and Eva Gonzales. They were trying to be professional painters in the late Victorian period, when a respectable woman couldn’t leave home unaccompanied. The Louvre, it turns out, was particularly useful because you could meet other artists there without compromising your reputation. What we saw was room after room of pictures, the subjects of which were the sources of the oppression of these women: domestic settings, children, other women, many of whom were fooling around with a stocking or a shoe. It was ghastly in the extreme, although I have to say there was a particularly melancholy winter landscape by Marie Bracquemond that I liked very much. The colours are all muted browns and the entire thing is overlayed with swatches of white, conveying perfectly to my mind a particular kind of winter scene that I’ve known well.

Cape Town

We arrived in Cape Town at 5:45 in the morning, flying South Africa Airlines. We found an airport shuttle that turned out to be operated by a tour guide, and by 6:30 we had arranged a full day personal guided tour around the end of Cape Horn, with stops wherever we thought there might be something interesting to see. At 9:00 a friendly little woman showed up in a tiny Mercedes, and away we went. As it turned out, everyone's ideas about my stamina far surpassed the reality, but we did manage to get to about a dozen memorable locations before we cut the trip short and returned to the Fire and Ice Hotel by about 5:00 pm. Since at noon I had taken a dose of whatever they use in South Africa instead of gravol, the second half of the trip passed for me in a kind of strobe-like delirium, where I would blink my eyes and find that half an hour had gone by, and I was variously staring at an exhibit on species of protea, riding again in the car, standing looking at a mountain view, or sipping a cooling drink.

The Fire and Ice Hotel
But first of all, who the heck calls their hotel "Fire and Ice"? Well, the Extreme Hotel chain, of course, which is intended to attract the kind of young people who might be interested in Extreme sports. The hotel slogan is "having a little fun" and it shows in everything they do, from the five-storey climbing wall attached to the outside of the building to the matches for the candles, which include the phone number for the Pyromaniacs Help Line. Each of the elevators has an internal cage and a theme. One is a shark cage. Another is a cable car. There are also five different lobby bathrooms, each with its own theme. "Performance Anxiety," for example, has wallpaper showing a studio audience sitting there to watch you pee. I liked the Lou Rawls bathroom, which has forty single toilet paper rolls covering one of the walls and a wall-sized portrait of the musician on another. I liked it, that is, until I realized the pun on the singer's name-you have to pronounce his last name like "rolls" and realize that his first name is "Loo."

The Coughing Room
They accommodate smokers here at the Fire and Ice Hotel, but if you want to smoke, you have to sit on a couch shaped like a coffin, next to a coffee table shaped like a coffin, underneath a ceiling mural that shows people looking down at you through a hole in the dirt. There's also a tombstone etched into the glass beside the door.

Penguins
One of the highlights of our drive was that we got to see a great many South African Penguins, who are living in the wild, but at a location where the government has built an elaborate set of boardwalks. You pay an entry fee, then brave a gale force wind kicking up fine white sand into your face, until you finally reach a little cove just littered with these little guys. They are about a third the size of emperor penguins, and just about as cute as you can bloody well stick. Most of them are lying on their bellies in the sun, but a few of them are digging holes or walking around or humping another penguin.

Seals
For about five dollars a head and a thorough soaking in a spray of salt sea water, you can ride a boat over to a little island where the seals like to hang out. There they were, sitting around on the rocks, flopping clumsily in and out of the ocean, and swimming like the dickens. They could fling themselves right out of the water when they wanted to, but mostly they seemed to want to float just beneath the surface, with one flipper or maybe a tail sticking up in the air. The effect is a bit like a bed of kelp, until one of them turns over and contemplates you with his whiskers drooping down.

One Baboon
As we zipped through one of the suburbs outside Cape Town, I saw a big old baboon sitting by himself on top of someone's fence. It was a sufficiently surreal thing to see that I assumed he was some kind of lawn ornament or sculpture, but when I mentioned him to our tour guide, she said, oh yeah, this was an area where there are baboons. Then I spotted some warning signs telling people not to feed them, since it makes them too bold, like the bears in the Rockies, except smaller, more numerous, and with opposable thumbs.

Two Ostriches
I don't think we had planned to stop at the South African Ostrich Farm, but I'd been feeling a bit zwooped by the winding mountain roads, so we turned in to get a slice of bread and a few minutes off the roller coaster. While we were there, I also got to see a lot of ostriches at a distance and two of them up close. They could have reached across the fence and eaten out of my outstretched palm, as they did with the man and his little girl ahead of us, except of course I didn't have a bag of whatever it is that ostriches eat. The female of the species is quite large, with grey plumage, and the male is smaller and meaner, with the black feathers and white tail I tend to think of when I imagine an ostrich. Their eyes are incredibly huge and their lashes are Drew Barrymore long, but the unnerving thing really is their strong and supple neck, which seems to have no rational limit on where it can go or what it can do.

Country of Elmers
As some of you know, when I was a teenager, my Dad was forever trying to remove my plate before I was done eating. He wanted to take it away and wash it. So I spent many of my formative years trying to capture a last forkful of food off a rapidly retreating plate. We've subsequently memorialized this behaviour with the verb "to elmer," and I have to say I've never seen such world-class elmering as there is here in Cape Town. I have yet to actually swallow my last mouthful before I find myself sitting in front of an empty table. Different people appear to be competing for the prize, so that setting down a glass, for instance, will provide a chance to score a few points for a waiter zipping past on another errand, while looking briefly away from your side plate conjures a waitress who removes it, the remnants of your butter, and the last half of your scone. I had to summon my chi this morning to face down someone who wanted to claim half my breakfast cereal, after I took an ill-timed sip of coffee.

Table Mountain
One of the most dramatically striking features of this city is that there is a mountain in the middle of it. Table Mountain rises sufficiently high above Cape Town that the summit is often obscured by a thick white cloud, which comes rolling down the slopes, dissipating before it reaches the tallest buildings. According to our tour guide, they call this cloud the tablecloth. This strikes me as most likely something they made up for tourists, but you never know.

The Cape Doctor
Another factor to keep in mind is the prevailing wind, which blows across the city. It might be more difficult to deal with it, our cab driver said, if people here didn’t have the occasional experience of having it stop for a while. When that happens, the temperature rises, and so does the level of air pollution, which is otherwise swept out to sea. For that reason, again according to our cab driver, they call this wind the Cape Doctor. For my opinion, please see the entry above on the subject of the tablecloth on table mountain.

Band of Alcoholics
When you are waiting to get on the boat to see the seals, you can’t help but notice a weathered-looking group of middle-aged men, all dressed in shabby yellow matching costumes, with daubs of paint on their faces. They sang and danced on the wharf, while the leader held out his hat in the hopes of getting a donation from each debarking passenger. It impressed me no end that these unshaven men, shambling a little, reeking of alcohol from the night before, could still manage to assemble themselves by ten in the morning into a performing troupe, for the purposes of cajoling the tourists out of a few rand.

Eleven Official Languages
South Africa has not one, not two, but 11 official languages. How cool is that? On our city tour this evening, the guide pointed out one of the buildings that has statues representing the tribes responsible for 9 of those languages. On the radio this morning, someone was speaking one of these languages and I have no idea what it was, except that somewhere in the middle of what I think was the weather report they had to use a word with a click in it. There’s something about a morning show with a click in it that just makes it that much easier to take.

Killed by Sharks
The Designing Interactive Systems conference is one of my favourites, and this year they once again did a super job. Tonight we had a 90-minute “topless bus” tour of the city, ending in a reception outside the predator tank at the Cape Town Aquarium. There’s a great “rethink the shark” campaign going on there, with posters showing objects like chairs and toasters with one corner above the water, looking a bit like shark fins. The posters have stats like “Last year, 700 people were killed by defective toasters. 4 people were killed by sharks.” It turns out, of course, that 100 million sharks are killed each year by people. I loved the idea of a conference reception somewhere interesting. They also threw in a marimba band.

Personal Funicular
Down at the beaches off the Atlantic Ocean, there is some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Several of these properties are perched somewhat precariously on very steep slopes, and also include personal funiculars. They looked like little glass boxes, with only one or two seats inside. The tour guide pointed out that you could keep track of which ones were currently in use if you passed by several times a day, because you could see whether the car was at the top or the bottom of the slope.

Design Indaba
Concurrent with the Designing Interactive Systems conference, and held in the same convention centre, is the annual national design trade show called Design Indaba. Our conference badges gave us free entrance on Tuesday afternoon, to an event where entrance is carefully monitored. Design of all kinds in South Africa is an emerging area of excellence for the country, and we saw an amazing range of wonderful ideas and products, from wooden bookshelves built of component boxes held together by magnets, to condoms with handles for easy application. I was particularly struck by a hatstand that looks like the silhouette of an African tree, and Milena fell in love with a life-sized decorative sheep made out of wire and beads.

What We Ate
I had hoped there would be food here that I didn’t know much about, and I haven’t been disappointed. The breakfast buffet includes slices of the tiny local pineapple, yellower and more flavourful than the ones we are used to from Hawaii. There are also pitchers of fresh guava juice, thick and pink, and a huge panful of fried mushrooms that aren’t a kind of mushrooms I know, but are inkier and more delicious. Ostrich is available almost everywhere, and for lunch one day Milena had a delectable corned ostrich sandwich. A popular South African line fish is the kingclip, which has large white flakes. Tonight for dinner I ate a flank of springbok, who I understand is a bit like an antelope. His left lower quarter was very tasty, and came roasted with rosemary on the end of a bone that would have caught the interest of Fred Flintstone.

Berlin

Art Hotel Luise
Our designer friend Bernie Roessler loves Berlin, so I asked him where he stayed when he was here. His hotel of choice turned out to be an "art hotel" in the centre of the city, where a different artist has designed each of the rooms, and they get a commission when you stay in one. Apparently this is increasingly common, and there are art hotels in many cities. Our room was modeled on the idea of a cave left behind by retreating glaciers. In the centre was a floor-to-ceiling scaffold with a massive hanging sculpture made of broken panes of glass, variously printed and spray-painted and so on, along with a lot of braids of human hair and small glittery objects and other detritus. The table had a head-size rock strapped on top by twine that also suspended a second rock beneath. The walls and picture frames were adorned with found objects spray-painted gold. The ceiling was about eighteen feet high, and vaulted in the middle. If you've never worried about getting up to pee in the middle of the night and poking your eye out on the broken glass sculpture suspended over your bed, you obviously aren't a friend of Bernie Roessler's.

Window in the Ground
One of the nefarious activities committed by the Nazis was a bookburning in the city centre. They didn't just burn fiction, but a lot of research output too, from various fields. This bookburning has been memorialized by one of the most subtle monuments I've ever seen. As you walk past the square at night, you notice a window of light cut into the pavement at the centre. When you look down into the window, you see a completely white room lined with white bookshelves, all empty.

Field of Stones
There is a memorial here that occupies a considerable city block. It consists of grey, rectangular stone monoliths, each one slightly larger than the dimensions of a coffin. Milena reminds me that these are the standard size for a European grave, like the ones in Krakow and Cuba. They are spaced far enough apart that you can walk comfortably between them. At the edge they are flush with the pavement, then they rise to knee height, waist height and so on up as you enter the maze, until in the middle they are at least twice my height. It is impressive just to look at from a distance, but it's not until you walk inside that you really get the full oppressive effect. I am not particularly sensitive to this kind of monument, but I have to say that even I began to feel the claustrophobic weight when we'd entered far enough. Some of the effect is the result of the looming quality of the stones, which aren't all set perfectly aligned or square, but are instead just slightly off kilter. Very powerful.

Brother Can You Spare Five Euros?
The first person we spoke to outside the Berlin Tegel airport was a young woman who asked if we could accommodate her with some Euros. I thought that might set a tone, but in fact the beggars in Berlin were few and far between. There were some buskers, including a saxophonist on the U-Bahn (U for Underground, I think), and an entire brass section in Alexander Platz. Like the panhandlers in Montreal, many of the ones in Berlin seemed to have pets, usually very well behaved dogs sleeping near them on blankets. On a couple of occasions I didn't even spot the panhandler; there was just the mournful-looking dog lying there.

Remnants of the Berlin Wall
There are a few pieces left standing here and there as yet one more set of bleak freaking Berlin memorials, and there's also a discoloured strip on the ground, maybe a foot wide, that runs disturbingly off into the distance in both directions. Milena took my picture standing on one side and putting my toe across to the other. The wall was made of L-shaped pieces of concrete, and the surfaces are completely coated in graffiti. People have also entirely covered the edge in pieces of chewing gum.

Turkish Quarter
In the 1970s there was an economic boom, and hundreds of thousands of cheap labourers were imported from Turkey. They weren't well assimilated with the rest of Berlin, and now form a quarter where we went for a delicious dinner. The area was originally at the edge of West Berlin, but after the wall came down it became central, so it has become increasingly popular with the Bohemian crowd, in part because artist studios are still affordable. We stopped for a few minutes at a comic book store that seemed to go on forever into the interior, with at least three separate rooms. We admired the graphic novel version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a Wonder Woman action figure, and the many Ugly Dolls of various sizes. There was also a stuffed toy cigarette named Smokey, whose slogan was "Your best and only friend."

Potsdammer Platz
This was where the four powers met to divide the city after the war. It was basically an open field for many years, but after reunification it became the largest construction site in the country. It is now home to a wide range of impressive buildings and shops, one of which is the Sony Centre, which has a roof like a set of sails that can be opened or closed to accommodate the weather. At night it creates a very beautiful interior, with lights at all different levels.

Alexander Platz
Formerly the centre of East Berlin, it is still home to the largest building in the city, a kind of radio tower spire complete with a revolving restaurant. We spent enough time there to see the punks, who were genuine tough hombres hanging around the central fountain. Milena of course made a beeline for them with her digital camera, and we had to rein her in and sit on her head.

Blue Man Group Berlin
I had seen the Blue Man Group on television and thought they were a US phenomenon, so imagine my surprise when Rosan walked us past the Blue Man Max, which is a theatre here with its own trio of blue men. For those of you who don't know about them, they are primarily percussionists but also a kind of performance artists, if that's the right word for someone who throws marshmallows across the stage into someone else's mouth. And by marshmallows, I mean a lot of marshmallows, until the poor guy's mouth is packed full. Then he spits them out onto a pedestal as a kind of mouth sculpture, and attaches a for-sale sign. Blue men, the philosophy goes, aren't white or black but are instead just blue, and they are primarily characterized by being co-operative. So when someone proposes something, the others go along with it until it reaches some kind of absurd extreme. For instance, they open with three of them standing behind two drums. The central blue man is drumming. When he glances right, the one on the left surreptitiously pours some paint on the drum head. Hitting that drum now produces a fountain of paint. Soon both drums are pools of paint, and before the scenario is over, they have produced a blank canvas and made a painting by positioning it above the spraying fountains. That sketch took maybe five minutes of a solid two hour show, so you can imagine some of the hijinks they got up to. By the end, the paint was coming out of spigots in the centre of their chests, and they were alternately drumming on it and eating it. We lost some of the performance because it required you to be able to speak or read German, but a lot of it translated well enough. We were seated at the back of the theatre, and when the rolls of paper started unrolling from the ceiling at the end of the show, it was so much fun that we practically became hysterical. You pass the ends of the paper along down the audience, until there's a river of white streamers, each about a foot wide, flowing down from the seats to the stage.

Havana

I hesitated to include Havana as a travel location, since I only spent one day there, on a kind of bus tour. Then I remembered that in fact I have only spent a single day at other travel locations on this blog, so there you are. I'd prefer to be consistent in listing cities rather than countries.

Dogs, chickens, donkeys and goats
The bus ride from Varadero to Havana takes you along the Atlantic coast of Cuba. The scenery is fantastic, with lots of limestone formations and the occasional jungle ravine. Seeing all the turkey vultures, who nest in little limestone caves, reminded me of the Savage Chickens, who have the following conversational exchange: “why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near?” “Hey, those are vultures!” In addition to these very large scavengers, dogs also apparently roam free in Cuba. I saw three little pugs following each other in a row across an otherwise empty pasture, and a few minutes later there were two rottweilers together, trotting along on dog business of some sort. There were also plenty of chickens and roosters scattered about the place, scratching and eating and ruffling their feathers. Other livestock included cows of every make and model, which was unusual coming from Alberta, where the herds tend to be predominately one breed or strain, the black Aberdeen Angus that we raise to eat. There were a few donkeys and mules, and a herd or two of goats. At one place a small horse was grazing in the ditch, accompanied by a man who was just standing there looking meditative and picturesque, and holding onto his lead.

Bananas and Sisal
The big communal farms are in the interior, where there is soil. Out on the limestone coast there isn’t much farming, although occasionally there are small plots of land where some enterprising farmer has hauled in truckloads of dirt and is now growing bananas or sisal. I hadn’t seen sisal before, which is a member of the same family as the agave plant they use in Mexico to make tequila. Sisal is used primarily for rope. Our guide mentioned that there are over thirty different kinds of banana, although I don’t know if all of them are grown in Cuba.

Revolutionary Square
You stand in a giant empty parking lot of a place, which would be full of standing people at the opportune moment. There are posts in rows with lights and speaker arrays. On all sides are the buildings of government. The Ministry of the Interior behind you has the stylized face of Che Guevara, ten storeys high. The Ministry of Communication beside it has a set of satellite dishes on the roof. But the real symbolic action is up in front, where a monolith, built by Batista, but now called revolutionary, tessellates up into the sky, surrounded by what Susan tells me are Liberty Trees from the French Revolution. The idea was that you showed your support by erecting a pole in the village and putting a red Phrygian cap on top. Here there are four of them and the caps could fit elephants. In front of the monolith is a speaker’s platform where Fidel makes all his speeches. A giant marble statue of Jose Marti, the Cuban reformer who fought the Spanish, stands looking down with a watchful eye on the speaker. Curiously enough, this was also put there by Batista, but if you were speaking from that platform, it seems to me that you couldn’t help but be conscious that you are being scrutinized by the patron hero of the country. Since he equally scrutinized Batista and Fidel, it just goes to show how flexible a patron hero can be in his views. Statues of Marti litter the city of Havana.

Fidel
Our tour guide preferred to call Castro by his first name, perhaps because there are several Castros but only one Fidel, or perhaps by local convention. Not all of the family, apparently, were reconciled to the politics of young F and Che and their friends, since when they nationalized all the private property in the country, they started with the rental properties owned by the Castros. Fidel has an older brother who is devoted to research in animal husbandry, and a younger, more radical brother, Raoul, who is now running the country. This has to be making some people nervous, since it was Raoul who signed the agreement with Khrushchev that led to the Cuban missile crisis. None of Fidel’s six sons are interested in politics, which might be because they aren’t starting by organizing a revolution, which seems a lot more exciting than functional management.

Fidel’s House
Just behind the speaker’s platform, the statue of Jose Marti, and the revolutionary monolith, there is a concrete complex they call, with what I assume passes for socialist humour, the Revolutionary Palace. Fidel refused to live in the usual location, the Presidential Palace, on the basis that a lot of corrupt presidents had lived there. I don’t know if he thought it would be a corrupting environment, but that may be the case, since he also decided not to have the government take up its seat in the Capitol building, which resembles the provincial and federal capitol buildings we have in Canada. Instead, he converted the presidential palace into a museum of the revolution, and the capitol building into a college of science. The various statues of past presidents strewn about the city were torn down and the plinths left standing empty. In some cases you can still spy the occasional foot or pair of ankles.

A Piece of an American U2 Spy Plane
One of the things on display outside the museum of the revolution is a ground-to-air missile, and placed underneath it are some pieces of an American spy plane. We couldn’t help but think there had been someone in that trophy before it was shot down, but then of course he had been spying. They also had some improvised equipment from the revolution, including a shot-up delivery truck and a couple of home-made tanks.

Cuba—Country of Paradoxes
“Country of paradoxes” was a favourite phrase of our tour guide in Havana. He seemed to have a mental ledger, with things like “healthy children, vaccinated, clothed, and fed” on one side, and on the other side “all the buildings are neglected.” Which was true. Havana appears to be falling apart, although a massive restoration project has started, and a part of old Havana has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site. Other items in the positive ledger include a hospital dedicated to Ukrainian children affected by Chernobyl, international teams of doctors devoted to disaster relief, and one teacher for every 42 people. For comparison, Statistics Canada reports that we have one teacher for every 33 people.

Daily Life
Although property was nationalized in 59, now about 80% of homes are privately owned. It is illegal, however, to buy or sell one, so as children grow up, many families have accommodated the change by adding a second floor built into the high ceiling. They cut a window up there and that’s where the kids have their family. There is a food ration, compulsory 2 years of military service for young men, and a chronic transportation shortage, although China just sent a fleet of new buses. University students are exempted from the second year of military service, and do the first year before they start school.

The Camels of Havana
Buses in Havana are actually semi-trailer trucks, only instead of pulling a trailer of goods, they pull a trailer of people. These vehicles are called camels because the ceiling is higher at either end. Lineups for the camels stretch down the sidewalk.

The Year of Literacy
The revolution was in 1959. In 1961, the government decided that the people should be able to read and write, so they declared a year of learning. 300,000 volunteers ran a program for people of all ages. At the end, they declared it a success, although I have no idea what measure they used. Certainly the local people we’ve seen give every sign of being educated, and my opinion is that if you can run a country with so few resources, someone has to know how to do their job.

The Tropicana
Since 1939, the Tropicana has featured leggy Cuban women wearing feathers and sequins, so we went to see them. At $75 a ticket, the price was a bit steep, but I got my money’s worth in the opening number, which featured dozens of women in high heels and g-strings with piles of fruit on their heads. The tradition of goofy hats and forgetting to wear their pants continued throughout the evening, although there was nothing that would have scandalized Bertie Wooster and his pals 70 years ago. One of my favourite numbers involved a wedding where the back was missing from the wedding dress, and the supporting cast of chandelier girls stood around with giant lampshades on their heads, many of them lit with candles.

Night Life in Havana
According to our tour guide, who seemed quite proud of the fact, there is none. Certainly the streets we travelled were very quiet at night, although we were there on a week day. He said other Caribbean islands go in for more riotous living, but Cuba had enough of it pre-1959. Now the tourist crowd, he said, consists almost entirely of couples from Canada, who come to lie in the sun and get a little peace and quiet. “Amen to that,” we all thought, gingerly holding the sunburned hands of our partners.

Columbus Cemetery
Occupying more than five square kilometers, this cemetery, also called the Necropolis de Colon, reminded me in many ways of the one we visited with Jan and his family in Krakow. The graves here are similarly arranged with large flat surfaces at knee height, with giant old trees growing among them. Here the trees are ficus, which seem to me particularly suitable for graveyards. They spread by dropping ropy bundles of creepers that will take root once they reach the ground, but in the meantime they blow in the wind and add a spooky atmosphere to the place. One of the local attractions here is the grave of Milagrosa, who has become a kind of unauthorized patron saint of young mothers. She died in childbirth in 1901 and was buried with the baby. When the tomb was later opened, she was intact. I can’t explain why they were opening the tomb, but there it is.

Folk Magic
Susan tells me that Cuba is also the home of Santeria, one of the Caribbean folk religions, a bit like voodoo. We kept a sharp eye out in the graveyard for any signs of its practice, but aside from some grain left here and there on the surfaces of tombs, we didn’t spot anything. There was some very nice eighteenth-century iconography cut into some of them, consisting of a small set of images altogether no bigger than the palm of your hand. There was a skull and crossbones, and inverted Roman-style torch, and a scythe. Susan says “They were awfully nice. They wouldn’t have made a bad Jolly Roger.”

Varadero

Cuba is an island country of 11 million souls. 2 million of them live in the capital city of Havana, which they spell here with a “b.” We arrived at 10:30 at night at the Varadero airport, slightly ahead of schedule. We flew Air Transat direct from Edmonton. By 2:30 we were done scrounging around the midnight buffet, which had been a bit slim pickings, although a very kind chef arranged to feed us an eeyore burger.

Varadero
There are 14 provinces in Cuba, and the Varadero region, on a little peninsula of Matanzas province, is almost entirely given over to the tourist industry. There are more than 50 resorts and hotels, and the complex we are in has a staff of 600 and typically hosts about 2300 tourists. Most of them, our guide tells us, are from Canada. Tourism is the second largest industry in Cuba, and it is rapidly overtaking sugar production for the number one spot.

Cuban Universities
There are a total of 58 universities in Cuba, with at least one in every province. They are spread over 169 campuses. You go for free to university, but when you finish your undergraduate degree you owe two years of service to the state, which could involve you moving anywhere and not necessarily working in a field related to your studies. This sounds a bit rough until you ask yourself what kinds of work Arts students get in Canada. If you go to grad school, you can do your two years part time while you are still in school.

Hitchhiking
People here rely on hitchhiking as a normal means of transportation. Our guide says she hitchhikes to school and work every day. License plates are colour-coded to help simplify the process, and there are 6 or 7 different colours. Tourist rentals, for instance, are red, which I take to be the universal colour of warning. Government vehicles get blue license plates, and are required by law to pick up hitchhikers. What a great idea. We should have this policy in Canada, along with the one from Sweden that says your effluent pipe into the river has to be upstream from your intake.

Dried Starfish
The ocean is beautiful, the sand is white and soft, and you have to go pretty far before the water is deeper than your waist. If you walk up the beach and pass the line made by buoys, there is a between-resorts area where you meet some local men. The first group of five or six we met were standing around an overturned can with four dry starfish and a large conch shell. We stood and smiled at each other for a while. Then we all shook hands. Someone handed me one of the dried starfish to look at. It seemed enormous to me and in very good condition. I showed it to Susan, then handed it back. “Are you interested in buying one to take home with you?” someone asked. “Oh, no,” I said, grinning idiotically. “Oh, well, happy new year,” someone else said. “Happy new year,” we said, and went further. “Can you take dried starfish back to Canada?” I asked Susan, remembering my ill-advised purchase of a bottle of snake wine on my first trip to Hong Kong. “I think you can,” she said.

Camilo on the Beach
Slightly further along were two more men, looking rather worse for wear than the starfish salesmen, with shabbier clothes, and in the case of Camilo, bloodshot eyes. They hailed us and we stopped to introduce ourselves and shake hands. They didn’t have anything to sell, although one of them—Alejandro—gave Susan a small conch shell. We had some translation difficulties, but I think they would have liked to initiate some form of gift exchange. We talked about cigars and rum, for instance, and used clothing. When I told Camilo that I was a professor from Canada, he told me that he was a construction engineer. I would have liked to give them some money, but like an ass I didn’t have any with me. Luckily on the return walk down the beach it occurred to me that they might like my t-shirt. Camilo had gone off to get into trouble with the hotel security staff, but Alejandro was still at his post, so I turned it over to him.

New Year’s Eve
The resort put it around that there’d be a bit of a feast for New Year’s Eve, and they weren’t kidding around. We had roast chicken, lamb, and suckling pig. I ate mine with candied pear, and Susan tracked down a very soft and white blue cheese for me, which I am assuming must be locally produced. In any case, they seem to have a lot of it around. For dessert there were three kinds of what I like to think of as space alien ice cream, with flavours like carob, pixie-stick peach, and Lowry’s cherry blossom.

Cello and Double Bass
The musicians who entertained us in Cuba were without exception very good musicians. Susan railed at one point against the unfairness of making a good violinist play such, I believe her word was, “crap.” New Year’s Eve, on the other hand, included a dinner performance by a man on cello and a woman on double bass. They were combining two instruments that are not generally considered the most melodic in the orchestra, and they were doing it beautifully. “Listen to the crispness of that mordant,” Susan told me, as I scarpered down my last bit of smoked salmon.

Tropical Buffets
I feel that the best way to conduct yourself at a tropical buffet is to temporarily suspend all normal gastronomic prejudices. Simple rules, of course, such as “eating that will kill me” are another story. But the variety and ingenuity of the available selection do seem to suggest a certain scope for indulgence. Tonight’s dinner, for example, consisted of fish consommé, proscuitto ham, crab legs, and fresh blue cheese, accompanied by delicious gherkin pickles, green olives with pimentos inside them, and some large capers. I followed that with a fruit course consisting of several pieces of ripe papaya, two kinds of fresh pealed grapefruit, and a bread roll. For dessert there was vanilla ice cream with cloves and four kinds of cake. There could be some trouble around the third buttonhole during the early watches of the night, but what I say about that is God Bless the makers of zantac, lactaid, and acidophilus. The invention of the artificial digestive system has been the best thing to happen to international travel since the invention of the pocket compass.

Floating in the Ocean
Some people go in for snorkeling and others like to surf, but to my way of thinking there are two ways to have fun in the ocean, depending on whether it is calm or not. When we first arrived here, the water was like a giant blue mirror, disturbed only by busy toddlers and flocks of teenagers in pursuit of the occasional fish. With this kind of water, what you do is float on your back. It is not necessary to complicate your life with a flotation device, since salt water and middle age spread are all that you require. Milena and I discovered this a few years ago when we went to some trouble to procure air mattresses and haul them around with us. One day I fell off mine and found there was no discernible difference. Just lean your head back, let your hands float free, and watch the cares of the world drift away like a cloud of squid ink. You may paddle your fingers a little, if you wish.

Knocked Over by Waves
The second way to enjoy yourself in an ocean involves waves. The wind came up on Wed, so we had some waves then, except they closed the beach altogether. However, on Saturday they opened it again, and we had some fairly large waves that were not life threatening. You walk out to where they are breaking and let them push you right off your feet. Or you can also go just past that point, then try to swim fast enough to catch them and let them drag you along. You don’t spend a lot of time worrying about how your research is going when a wave has picked you up bodily and flung you at the shore. The only downside is that you will end up with some sand inserted in various locations around your anatomy. These aren’t places where you would particularly want to keep sand. But it is a small price to pay.

Seven Blue Jellyfish
The weather was cool and windy from Wednesday through Saturday. On Thursday, along with about 100 other Canadians dressed in shorts and bunny hugs, we took a stroll up and down the beach. The various bits of jetsam were endlessly fascinating, and included bright red corals, still soft and alive, a variety of sponges, and a total of seven bright blue translucent jellyfish. We were careful of their long tentacles, which we believed may contain stingers, but with some careful manipulation with a disposable plastic cup, we managed to fling two of them back into the ocean. It was interesting to see how their colours brightened up when the seawater hit them. The pink stripe at the top of the sail was particularly affected, going from a dull pink to an incandescent neon.

Black Parrots
Every country has its variations of corvidae, the crows, magpies, and ravens. In Denmark the magpies have comparatively short tails and eat fish. In Sweden, the crows wear gray shawls. In Cuba, the resident black bird has a long tail and handles itself like a magpie, except it is all black and the tail is rounded at the end. The beak is also shaped like the beak of a parrot. We ran across a family of them on our way to the beach one day. The mother was sitting up high on a post and called to her ratty youngsters, who were attempting to climb up the wire fence. She had a very pleasant chirping voice, rather than the squawk we had expected.

[I note that Susan has since informed me that these weren't corvids at all, but are in fact Anas. Related to cuckoos, they are not very good at flying, lay up to two dozen eggs at a time, and eat insects. A group of them is variously called a Silliness or an Orphanage. There is a rough-looking customer on wikipedia, although the ones we saw didn't have grey shoulders: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani_(bird)]

Anoli
In Siena we saw little green lizards with long whip-like tails. They lived in the rose bushes on top of the stone wall on the way to the swimming pool. Here in Cuba, the lizards have much shorter tails, and rather than being the vivid Italian green, the one we saw was the colour of sand. We looked at each other for some time before he began doing pushups and extending his throat pouch, which Susan tells me are his way of telling us not to mess with him. Certainly it was true that although he was only as long as my little finger, he could do more pushups than I can.