The Real Life Adventures of Stanley

Kyoto

2011-11-16T15:20:00.001-08:00

I returned to Japan for the second time this fall during what should have been the leaf-watching season, when the hotels in Kyoto are booked solid for months in advance. People arrive in groups of 30 and upwards to visit the temples and admire the local maple trees, which sport tiny leaves like the one on the Canadian flag, only about the size of a postage stamp. I happen to know the typical group size because it is only over 30 that the group rate kicks in at the temples. It was unseasonably warm this year, so only a few of the trees had turned, but they were a vivid red. I can well believe that the effect of the entire woods turning this colour is worth the trip, and I only wish I had arrived a week later to see more of it.

Spirited Away
Fans of the cartoonist Hayao Miyazaki will be delighted to know of the existence of an entire shop dedicated to his work. You can buy Totoro and his friends in a dozen forms, from ash trays to pocket mirrors, back packs and key chains. Okay, I was only joking about the ash trays, because of course there is a certain element of reverence even in this crass commercialism. The range of creatures was however astonishing when you see them together all in one place. In typical Japanese fashion, the form of the building also seemed appropriate to the subject matter. After entering along a corridor lined with other shops, you come to a spot with some wooden benches and natural stone steps, where the roofs of the buildings on all sides end to make a little patch of open sky. The shop is off this tiny courtyard, quietly playing soundtracks from the various movies.

A Keen Sense of Liminality
As my colleague Susan pointed out, the fact in Miyazaki’s movies of a different world being just around the corner is based on the exquisite use of even the smallest actual spaces in Japan to transport you to a new experience. It is not uncommon, for example, to walk from a congested street to a wide open area for bus transfers, only to step aside into a rock garden where all the traffic noise is gone and you are suddenly listening to a small stream while sitting on a wooden bench beside a grove of bamboo, with old moss thick on every side. It is amazing, astonishing, and charming, and I wish everyone on Earth could adopt local forms of this way of thinking.

With Bells On
You can’t throw a stone in Kyoto, a local saying goes, without hitting a monk. There are over 1600 shrines and temples in the city, and we visited all of them, walking generally through mixed woods, often accompanied by waist-deep crowds of school children. It is not uncommon for one of them to muster enough courage to say hello, then burst into fits of shy giggles when you answer. The temples themselves vary significantly, and the grounds are typically beautiful, so that a few steps in any direction gives you another enchanting view of a bit of water, an ancient tree, and part of a roofline. What many of them also have in common are bells. Some are tiny, hanging in strings from the eaves to guide the water into a terminal small cup. Others are about the size of your head, hanging decoratively from the corners of roofs. The premium versions, however, are old green bronze and bell-shaped, except they have no clappers. Instead, they are rung with a swinging beam. I wasn’t fortunate enough to hear any of them being rung, although I was told of the biggest bell, rung only at New Years and other significant occasions, that it takes half a dozen men pulling at the ropes of the striking beam, while one of the young monks rides on the wrappings near the front, so that after each stroke he can push off from the bell with his feet. I can only imagine that the right to be that monk is highly prized.

Tanuki
With a bottle of saki in one hand, a bag of money in the other, and exaggeratedly enormous testicles (often hanging far enough to rest on the ground), these ubiquitous fat little creatures are symbols of the good life. In some cases they resemble western raccoons, while in others they are closer to red pandas. There is even on rare occasions a missus Tanuki -- a bit, as someone pointed out, like a missus pacman, distinguished by her lack of balls and the colourful bow on her head. Tanuki himself wears a straw hat pushed back, the better, one supposes, to get a good look at this pleasant world.

Clinton

2011-11-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

I arrived in this small town in upstate NY after an instructive hour-long ride with a local driver who was roughly the age and temperament of my older brother. We talked about politics (bad), the economy (worse), and education (terrible), as well as the aptitude of the people responsible for everything (disastrously poor). Along the way, we narrowly missed hitting one of the largest does I had personally ever seen. She was standing in shadow on the other lane of a two-lane highway, and only the quick reactions of the driver saved us from a messy and complicated interaction that the deer herself seemed to be interested in producing. When I told people about it subsequently, they explained that the area is heavily populated with deer, so that you often see them in or around your yard.

Poetry Slam
I had never been to a spoken word event before, and it was a lively and somehow cathartic experience. I have sometimes wondered if poetry is a dead art form, but it is alive and well with these young people, who were full of loud music, mutual encouragement, and charming conceits. Some people read their poems, some recited them from heart, and a few sang songs. At times I felt that I had been transported to a beatnik gathering from the 1950s, I think in part because to avoid applauding so loudly as to drown out the performer, the convention is to snap your fingers to make a sound like rain. Crying out encouragement or commentary was also not uncommon. One of my favourites was the single word “preach.”

A King-Sized Bed
I know it seems a somewhat trivial reason, but I generally avoid the bed and breakfast as though it were vexed, because I have never been in one where the picturesque and antique qualities that are so admired in the genre accommodate the fact that I am six foot two and two hundred pounds. I also do like a bit of sleep when I can get it, and I enjoy eating breakfast when I do manage to get up. Both are mitigated against in their various ways in the typical B&B, the one by the charming tiny beds, no bigger than your thumb, and the other by the tendency to serve breakfast between the hours of 6:15 and 6:17, after my hosts have been up and doing for hours, usually on the other side of the paper screen that serves as my bedroom wall. All of which to say that none of these restrictions applied to the B&B I stayed at in Clinton, where there was an unprecedented king-sized bed, a separate building containing my room, and breakfast at 9:30.

Osaka

2011-09-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

I took a 14-hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo, then a 1-hour commuter jet to Osaka. On the overseas flight, despite having work stockpiled, I mostly slept and watched movies (/X-Men First Class/ and /Pirates in Strange Waters/). When I got to Tokyo, my original itinerary had me changing not just planes but also airports, from Narita to Haneda. However, after I consulted with a few people about the hour and a half bus ride, I arranged to get that changed, which was a good thing because the customs lineup took a while.

I had a few observations about the Tokyo Narita airport, largely dealing with how they manage to keep it feeling like a small and somewhat soothing place when in fact it is huge. For one thing, the ceilings are quite low for an international airport. Then there are the conveyor belts, which you normally expect to stretch for miles. Only here, they are short belts lined up, so it is quite easy to get off the system if you change your mind. Similarly with escalators, which take you for a short ride, a small walk, then the next ride, and so on. The chairs in the lounge area all face the same direction—toward the gates—and there is plenty of room to walk between rows of seats, and a ton of room in the stretch directly facing the gate, where they have a printed sign on a stand that tells you the status (e.g. “servicing” or “priority boarding”).

The customs area was also well managed, with polite people to show you where to stand and make sure you’ve filled out both sides of your form before you go and meet the teenager at the desk. Plus all the public announcements are made by impersonators of Hello Kitty.

The Green Rich Hotel
I am staying at a small designer hotel near the domestic Osaka airport, one of a cluster that includes the Hotel Nice, Hotel First, and somewhat confusing Hotel To. I seem to be getting along nicely myself, although as I had previously been warned, there is no English signage and no one outside the university seems to speak more than a word or two of English. Fortunately, I’d printed out my reservation in Japanese, so I can point to the part that I’ve been led to believe says I’ve paid for my breakfasts, and to the line that gives the name and address of the hotel, and so on. One of my colleagues, who travels quite a bit and is a vegetarian, carries a handy little card that says in Japanese “I don’t eat meat.” Features of the Green Rich Hotel include a “shower toilet” that “rinses your posterior” with either water or a deodorizing spray. It isn’t a separate bidet, but is built right in. They had something similar at the airport, only it seemed sufficiently technical that I elected not to try it—it looked like there were moving parts, perhaps designed to swipe across the toilet seat like a photocopier. The hotel also has public baths (one each for men and women), where you have a little shower on a stool off to the side, then climb in with your towel wrapped modestly around your waist (bathing suits are not, apparently, an option). Other delightful features of the hotel include a heating pad behind the bathroom mirror, so a rectangle of it never fogs over, your selection of additional robes, pillows, and dehumidifiers in an open case on each floor, and a talking elevator (featuring, of course, the voice of Hello Kitty).

Buffet Breakfast
I enjoyed peering under all the lids and opening the electronic gadgets that contained, respectively, rice, soup, and gravy. There was the kind of egg you get on tamago, next to pickled slips of something delicious and a plate of dried black shredded seaweed. The pineapple slices came from tiny baby pineapples and the orange slices came in your choice of orange or bright yellow. I had a fountain drink that I hoped would be carbonated apple but turned out to be carbonated water that glowed green in the dark. The bacon is not to be described, although later in the grocery store I saw that it comes already packaged in those neat rectangles and apparently just requires steaming for a minute or two once you get it home.

Outdoor Vending Machines
They are ubiquitous, standing wherever in North American cities you’d expect to see a newspaper machine or mailbox. Many of them are Boss brand, which is a can of cold coffee, although there are also various teas and Pepsi Nex Zero (I think the Nex means that it serves as a mild malaria medicine), as well as more recognizable Coke products. There are separate machines for cigarettes, which must be popular given the size of the machines and the range of choices. The restaurant last night had an ash tray at the table. I noticed it because one of my Japanese colleagues asked me to hand it to him, then went and sat in the doorway of the tatami room to smoke. He is fluent in something like eight languages, studies international Buddhism, wears Buddy Holly glasses, and is a Toshiro Mifune lookalike contest winner. The vending machine motif also carries forward into the student cafeteria, where you enter next to a glass display case of plastic dishes, make your selection on a large panel full of buttons that also takes your money, vending machine style, and gives you a ticket. You present the ticket to the cook and get your meal. It seems foolproof enough except that I was going by price rather than by Japanese characters, and ended up with curry on rice instead of vegetables on noodles.

Nerja

2011-03-16T12:25:00.001-07:00

Marlene’s son Ezra had rented a car to drive us through the mountains to the absolutely beautiful southern coastal resort of Nerja. Ezra is a good driver, but the very curvy mountain roads provided me with an experience I haven’t had since Cape Town, where I needed enough gravol that the trip consisted of a series of snapshots taken between naps.

Wind Turbines
One of our stops took place at a set of giant wind turbines placed on the edge of a mountain. We were able to get out of the car and walk right out underneath the blades. From a distance, they look leisurely, even elegant. Standing underneath them, on the other hand, you expect to hear the voice of Blofeld saying: “And so, Mr. Bond, we meet at last.”

Tiny Lizards
They live on the cliff face and go like the dickens, especially when you are terrorizing the poor things by trying to capture them on video. Each one is a little brown/green jewel, about the length of your finger.

Granada

2011-03-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

A flight of just over an hour will get you from Barcelona in the north to Granada in the south, and you have really flown to a different world. This is the Spain I had been expecting to see, with a strong Moorish influence in the architecture and a more powerful Catholic presence in the streets.

A Pearl Set in Emeralds
That’s a phrase Wikipedia mentions in describing the Alhambra, originally a 14th-century Moorish fortress and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Certainly there are some gorgeous buildings and some lovely gardens in this massive complex, which was sufficiently abandoned by the 19th century that Washington Irving could squat there with some gypsies. In fact, the modern curators have used him as the fictional tour guide in the little wii remotes you can rent to explain the place. Unfortunately, he doesn’t come with a reverence filter, with the result that you get to hear more poetry than facts. Luckily, you aren’t required to listen, so you can set it aside or take it in small doses. An amazing feature of the place is the intricate carving on the walls, ceilings, doorways and windows. As Irving puts it: "everywhere the same and yet each piece different." There are also silent pools for reflecting the architecture, and noisy fountains for cheering you up, all of them with goldfish swimming in their depths. One of my favourite uses of water is in the stone balustrades to one of the staircases, which have channels cut into their surfaces so that the water runs down under your hands.

Serrano Ham
Legend has it that the ubiquitous, deliciously cured Serrano ham was originally a test devised by Catholics to make sure they weren’t inadvertently feasting with people from religions where pork is forbidden. If it is true, from these ignominious beginnings has arisen the tradition of having plates of cured shaved ham available for every meal. Tostado with jambon for breakast, a plate of jambon for second breakfast, jambon on the tapas for both first and second lunch—it is hard to avoid it in Spain. I can’t, of course, speak from first-hand knowledge of its presence at dinner.

Barcelona

2011-03-12T05:36:00.001-08:00

The three-hour train trip from Valencia to Barcelona passed without incident through some rather stunning landscapes. One thing that caught my attention is that the Spanish trains have a security checkpoint that scans your luggage. They don’t do anything else, like looking at your passport or metal-detecting your body, or even talking to you, really. There is just a guy watching a screen beside a luggage scanner and you put your bag down on one side and pick it up on the other. I don’t recall having experienced that before.

A Place Without Street Corners
A unique architectural trope in Barcelona consists of the absence of corners where streets meet. Instead, nearly all the buildings have faces on the diagonal, so that there aren’t two walls forming a corner, but rather an additional short wall. This has several desirable effects, such as making more room for pedestrians and improving the lines of sight for drivers, which is good because the drivers here have a bad habit of treating a red light as a stock car starting line. In fact, the motorcycles will routinely creep up between the cars, so that just before the light changes, there is a burst of a couple of dozen motorcycles leaping forward, and heaven help the hindmost pedestrian.

City of Nudes
One of the striking features of some areas of Barcelona is that they are chock-a-block with marble statues of ladies who forgot to wear their clothes. They are kneeling in the park, sitting beside fountains, wearing wings but no heads, and in at least one case getting up to no good with a bull. One of my favourites is an odalisque lying on a pedestal in the median of a major street, eating an ice cream cone.

Gaudi
You can’t spend any time in Barcelona without becoming aware that the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) lived here, and created some iconic buildings such as his 6-storey apartments, an extensive park, and a cathedral, for which he was apparently still trying to raise funds at age 74 by going door-to-door, when he was hit and killed by a tram. This is not the land of Don Quixote for nothing. The buildings are variously called art nouveau or modernism, but to my way of thinking they are not so easy to classify except to say they have a lot of at least potentially disturbing influence of the organic. Take for instance the glass case in the top floor of the apartment block, where there is the skeleton of a snake as a reference for the way the internal brick arches have been built. As Teresa said, “I’m not sure I want to think of myself as walking around in the belly of a snake.” You can always exit the snake, however, and go up on the roof, to be greeted by rows of penises with faces.

San Jordi
Just as Valencia celebrates St. Joseph by blowing shit up, the Barcelonians celebrate the attributes of their patron saint by giving symbolic gifts. San Jordi, or in English St. George, is not only known for slaying dragons, but is also associated with books and roses. Accordingly, on April 24 the city is filled with temporary stalls that sell these items so that people can exchange them, as the tour guide phrased it, as tokens of love.

Stacks of Fashion Models
I first noted a peculiar behaviour at the 1992 Olympic park, where we’d gone to see the absolutely fabulous futuristic telecom tower by Santiago Calatrava. As we exited the grounds, there was a pile of people sleeping in the sunny corner of the wall. I thought to myself: “That’s quite a few more derelicts than I’m used to seeing together,” but as we got closer, it became clear that they were in fact lovely young women, very fashionably dressed, just taking a little communal nap. At first I assumed this was some anomalous event, like perhaps the break between photos at a fashion shoot. But then I saw a couple of other similar stacks in a completely different part of the city, in fact down on the pier.

Ironic Spanish Guitarists
One rainy night, we went to the little brick chapel off to one side of a cathedral to see a couple of Spanish guitarists named Ksenia Axelroud and Joan Benejam. They played up a storm, including a lot of what I have now begun to think of as the characteristic irony of Spain. For instance, in the signature section of the concert, they played four movements of Bizet’s Carmen, reverse-engineered from the symphony score to Spanish guitar, which Bizet had claimed as his inspiration. The second encore was what they introduced as “a little musical joke.” It was a version of Mozart’s Turkish March with one performer standing behind the seated other so that they could play at the same time on the same guitar.

He Never Got a Dinner
This was a comic line from the celebrity roasts that were fashionable in the 1980s. The comedian would list famous historical figures, which in contrast to the current roast victim had some genuinely remarkable achievements, but had never been honored with a public dinner. I’ve been having a somewhat similar experience throughout Spain, where they eat five meals a day: two breakfasts, a 2:00 lunch, tapas at 7:00, and dinner at midnight. Despite my inability to survive a day long enough to actually get to dinner, I couldn’t be happier with Spain in this respect, since it often happens, even in relatively cosmopolitan world centres, that there is nowhere to eat by 10:00 in the evening. In Spain, they aren’t even getting started eating by 10:00 in the evening.

Sing Coo Coo
Spain is, apparently, the land of green parakeets. We had the chance to sit under a palm tree and watch a pair of them making a nest. They would fly in with a beakful of string, then chatter away while they wove it into a bundle they had set into the crease of a palm leaf.

Valencia

2011-03-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

I stepped through the looking glass into this unbelievable Spanish port city with two colleagues, after 19 hours in the air. We descended through some of the blackest clouds I have ever seen—as-black-as-the-keys-on-my-laptop black—and I began to wonder if I would be able to breathe after we landed. On the contrary, the air seems fresh and beautiful down here, perhaps because it is being cleansed by the breeze off the ocean. It wasn’t long, however, before I began to develop theories about where the smoke might be coming from.

The Nineteen Days of Burning
The patron saint of Valencia is St. Joseph the carpenter. You see statues of him in the cathedrals and churches, which are easy to identify because he is carrying a two-by-four. From the connection to carpentry comes a local tradition, dating to the middle ages, that prior to the feast of St. Joseph on March 19, you should burn any scraps of wood you happen to have around the house. The next phase involved the logical step of saying why stop with scraps of wood, when you could equally well take the opportunity to burn any old furniture you had kicking around. I’m not sure what the other steps might have been, but in its present incarnation, the Fallas in Valencia consists of thousands of people building hundreds of giant wooden sculptures, “dolls” people said “as large as buildings” then setting fire to them all on the same night—March 19. The designs are too large to move, and have to be shipped in pieces to the places in the city where they will eventually be assembled, displayed, judged, and burned. I have heard estimates ranging from 400 to 1000 of these objects will appear all over the city beginning March 15, at a total annual cost of something like 300,000 euros.

Mascleta—“a symphony in gunpowder”
Prior to March 19, there are 19 days of explosions. Everyone gathers in a particular square at 2 pm. We went on the Sunday, and the crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages was so thick that I had something happen to me that has never happened before. I was following a string of people moving through a heavy crowd on both sides. Suddenly the line stopped moving, and I realized that as far as I could see ahead, for blocks in fact, no one was walking anymore. So I looked back, and no one was walking there either. I was immobile in the middle of a packed crowd. What we were all waiting for was a series of about 5 minutes of continuous explosions, like a fireworks display, except it is only sound. The windows rattle in the buildings nearby. You can feel it vibrating in your body. There is a steady orchestration of small explosions, punctuated by larger ones, until the climax which is almost unbearably powerful but consists of just an overwhelming number of small explosions. The air fills with the gunpowder smoke. It is like nothing I have ever experienced.

Firecrackers
A city that spends 19 days exploding things in preparation for setting fire to a thousand public sculptures is a city that appreciates loud and unexpected noises, and the kids seem to enthusiastically embrace this ethos. Boys and girls of all ages carry boxes of firecrackers, usually 100 to a box, and can be seen in all the parks and streets, with either lighters or matches or else borrowing their parents’ burning cigarettes to light them. And these aren’t the mild little snappy firecrackers that I remember from my youth. These ones pack a punch. I’m not sure if my nerves will ever recover.

Churros
Nearly as ubiquitous as firecrackers are doughnuts. Made fresh on the not-infrequent stands that sell them, they are available in a traditional doughnut shape, but more common are these long stringy loops, textured with straight ridges that run the entire length, delicious and sprinkled with sugar.

The Palace of the Arts and Sciences
One of the words that appears occasionally in the city collateral is “irony,” and I think the writers might be on to something. As an example, take the postmodern architecture of Santiago Calatrava at the Palace of the Arts and Sciences, where you have a conquistador’s helmet, a giant eyeball, somebody’s spine, and a harp. They respectively house concerts, an iMax theatre, a science museum, and I’m not sure what. On the far end there is also an aquarium. The path leading to the complex is lined with giant photos enriched with pop quotations from song lyrics and the Dalai Lama and so on. The path leading from the complex has cheerful, colourful cubist sculptures by Juan Ripollés of people with giant heads, wearing suns, clocks, and their hearts on their sleeves. As Teresa pointed out, everyone walking along the lane of sculptures was smiling and laughing.

A River Used to Run Through It
Until the 1950s, when they experienced a series of devastating floods, there was a river running through the middle of Valencia. Then they moved it outside the city, and converted the entire course of the old river into a long, serpentine green space, with parks and playing fields and ornamental orange groves bearing the sourest oranges imaginable. All the bridges are also still in place, making it simple and easy to cross from one side of the park to the other. The bridge outside our hotel is loaded on both side with flowers, and there are palm trees that grow from the river bed up through the surface of the bridge to provide shade.

Children in Disguise
As if the firecrackers weren’t evidence enough that the Valencians love their children, there is the further observation that the children are often seen running around in costume. I first noticed it on the plane, when a five year old in a wizard’s hat as big as he was exited just ahead of me. I thought it might be exceptional until I spotted two or three other costumes in the crowd. What finally cinched it was the Sunday morning sight of two formally dressed parents being accompanied into the cathedral by a two-and-a-half-foot tall version of Zorro, the desert fox.

Los Angeles

2011-01-09T08:13:00.001-08:00

I first visited LA in 1991, when I was sent by the consulting company I worked for to get some specialized training in systems maintenance environments. I spent the time instead by roaring around the city in convertibles, going out to fancy restaurants, and sitting in outdoor hot tubs, firmly sharing the conviction of my hosts that a fistful of smuggled config files would meet the technical brief when I got back home. It didn’t, of course, but I have had ever since a soft spot for the easygoing life in the big city on the California coast.

L.A. LIVE
On this trip, I stayed at a luxurious conference venue right in the heart of the downtown. I don’t typically manage to convince myself to stay in the conference hotel, but I was sufficiently nervous about my first visit to a notoriously large and complicated event that I decided to break the bank and stay where the action was. And action it is, with about a million English professors and graduate students plunked down in the middle of a sort of social hotspot called L.A. LIVE. The stadium where the Lakers play is across the street, and a block away is the city’s main convention center, so the area in between is lined with bars and restaurants, large scale video displays about the size of the side of a barn, ten-storey towers that seem to exist just to broadcast light, and a dozen searchlights playing against the cloudcover. There is even a bronze statue of Wayne Gretzke. Everything is artificial, including the grey plastic rocks that line the path between the bars. The crowd it draws is in some cases wildly enthusiastic in matters of sartorial expression, so it wasn’t clear to me if I was seeing citizens or performers from the cast of Cirque Berzerk, which is currently playing at the Nokia theatre. They may have alternatively, of course, just been English professors letting their hair down.

Hot tubbing on the roof
Sitting in whirlpools outdoors continues to be a California staple. I spent some pleasant hours that way in San Diego in the spring, and I couldn’t resist it here, although in this case the lower temperatures (only around 60 degrees f) meant there weren’t very many of us out on the roof. I did, however, have a moment of dega vu when I realized the bird I was watching circle was a vulture.

LA is a Great Big Freeway
It was true when Burt Bacharach wrote it in 1968 and it is still true today, so I put a hundred down and took a taxi out to the Getty Museum, which Richard had advised me was not to be missed. It is unfortunately half an hour from LA LIVE, down a highway with more lanes than I bothered to count, but eventually I was deposited on a concrete slab outside a car park, and began to follow the signs that led me through a maze of nondescript concrete until I got to the tram that is necessary to carry you up to the Museum proper. Not really a walking city, LA.

The Getty Complex
Sprawling all over the top of a large hill, the J. Paul Getty Museum is well worth the trouble it takes to get there. The weather is sufficiently clement that a visitor can spend a lot of time outdoors, walking between the fountains and the massive rocks out to a variety of promontories, where the views of the city are amazing. The collection is as heterogenous as you like, packed into a kind of maze of relatively small rooms, which gives the illusion that the whole thing is at a human scale. There are also plenty of exits through glass doors taking you temporarily back out into the hilltop air. I think the principle of collection may have been “something for everyone,” an effect that is enhanced by the various instructional exhibits.

The Hague

2010-12-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

I found myself spending a few days in the Hague for a conference and some research team meetings, and I have to say that I found it an absolutely charming city. The buildings, the canals, the sense of spaciousness in the streets coupled with the coziness of the shops and restaurants, and most of all the cheerfully helpful people, have convinced me that this is a city worth revisiting.

Everything on wheels
One thing that I did have to get used to was the close proximity of wheeled and pedestrian traffic. It is not unusual to find yourself sharing a few meters of what I would normally consider walking surface with a tram, a couple of cars, and ten women on bicycles. The cyclists in particular reminded me of their sisters in Copenhagen, each one a picture of the well-groomed professional on a sensible bike with a basket, going hell bent for leather past my elbow.

The girl with a pearl earring
The Mauritshuis art gallery, although unpronounceable by mortal tongues, does have a marvelous collection of Rembrandt, Steen, and Vermeer, including the famous girl with a pearl earring. In the gift shop, you can buy her on any number of items for around the house, including the usual postcards and coasters and keychains, but also an umbrella, a wristwatch, a box of wooden matches, and soap. Richard and I visited the place twice, applying our close scrutiny to the many details of Jan Steen’s paintings, which to my mind are in the same category as William Hogarth. We also joined Ruskin in subjecting to our critical judgment the many paintings involving water.

God of 5s
I was pleased to learn that the Hague was home to M.C. Escher (1893-1972), familiar to anyone who has ever bought a poster as the guy responsible for drawing hands, the 2D lizards who walk off the page, and an impossible set of staircases. I have a soft spot for him because I once took a senior math class in symmetry, where I painted a couple of tiled planes. I was particularly fond of one of them, which featured coelecanths and toucans, because I thought it combined one of the shiest creatures with one of the most flamboyant. It marks my only real commercial success as a painter, since my prof purchased it at the end of the term and hung it up behind the registration desk in the Math Dept. In any case, the Hague has an entire art gallery dedicated to Escher, with three floors packed full of prints of all kinds, as well as a few sketches and some sculptures. He had apparently once mentioned that some of the images should be read as small movies, so they also had digital films that people had made. On the fourth floor, there were a number of optical illusions, including a distorted room that made people look bigger and smaller than they are.

A Winter Wonderland
I woke up on my last morning here only to find that the night had brought a seriously heavy snowfall. It reminded me of Balgonie in some ways, with all the trees piled with snow and the snow on the ground up to your knees, when the night before there had been clear paving stones. I got to see a little toddler chortling with each step she took on the ice, clearly saying to her mother how interesting it was to try this out. There were also kids out sledding in the country, and ducks on the canal, standing around waiting for the water to open up again. Unfortunately, it also meant that the trains were shutting down and the flights back to Greece were being cancelled.

Hania

2010-12-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

My introduction to Aegean Airlines involved them (one assumes) saving my hide. I’d made it as far as Athens, flying low over the various gorgeous islands, then waited a couple of hours to board to Hania. After we were all loaded, we sat and sat, waiting maybe an hour without moving, until finally they announced that we had to change planes, since there was something unresolvable wrong with the one we were sitting in. So we deplaned and road another bus back to the terminal, while they transferred our luggage to a replacement jet.

A Polite Harbour Cat
One of the first people I met here was a cat. She lives around the harbour and thought I might be interested in sharing my chicken gyros with her. Unfortunately, I had just eaten all the part that cats like. I finally spotted a scrap. It occurred to me, however, that the restaurant might have a policy, so I asked the maitre d’. “It’s okay,” he said, “I feed her something every night, from the side. She’s a very nice cat. She recently had kittens.”

The Skulking Hour
It turns out, of course, that the city is littered with cats, all of them feral. What this means in practical terms is that there are a couple of societies who take some responsibility for catching them, neutering and spaying them, giving them a little doctoring, and releasing them again. However, it is a never-ending struggle to keep the population at a reasonable level. Just up the street we have a set of garbage bins that are the stomping grounds of an entire colony of thirty or more, all of them ready to hiss at you while you are feeding them, as Susan quickly discovered, but also to bunt your leg and purr like idiots. As with cats all over the world, twilight is the skulking hour, when they spend their time in intense but silent negotiations with other cats. They wait until four or five o’clock in the morning before the negotiations turn noisy.

Staring into the water
One of the pleasant options available for the discerning traveler in Crete is to stand by the edge of the water and stare into it. You see all kinds of people doing it all over the harbour, from grizzled old ex-fishermen to round-eyed kids taking their first steps away from the strollers. Susan and I have spent a few hours now in this innocent pastime, and have seen shoals of minnows of at least ten different species, as well as a needlefish, a couple of kinds of crabs, and, on one occasion, a local brown dolphin who came up briefly for a breath of fresh air.

Scraping my knuckles on the antiquities
Here on the northwestern coast of Crete, we have a lighthouse, originally built by the Venetians in the sixteenth century, remodeled by the Egyptians in the nineteenth century, and subjected in the twenty-first century to a thorough renovation that ended in 2006. There are spotlights that shine on it every night, making for a picturesque harbour. There is also a stone pier, about a mile long, where young couples can take a walk that affords them some measure of privacy for discussion, while they remain in the full view of the entire city. Susan and I elected one day to stroll along the pier, walking at first on the second level. When we decided it was time to jump down to the lower tier, I managed to scrape, not my palms, not my nose, not even the improbable top of my head, but the back of my left hand. Luckily, the Greeks sell a very nice version of band-aids, made of paper white fabric.

Croissants with jam
Wherever you go, you need to figure out how to eat, and part of that equation involves learning what is normal or at least readily possible in each country, and what is odd or downright can’t be done. In London, for instance, there is instant custard from a packet. You can buy it at any shop and prepare it in a minute with a bowl, a fork, and a cup of hot water. Similarly with raisins and gruel. In Krakow, on the other hand, forget about custard, and watch yourself with the gruel, which may just as easily be barley as oats. In Hania, they’ve never heard of custard or gruel, but for entire shelves at the supermarket and at every corner cigarette shop, you can buy individually wrapped croissants already filled with chocolate or jam. The package for the peach version even has a glowing white halo around the sacred croissant in the middle.

A dip in the Aegean Sea
Crete is home to at least a couple of world-class beaches, but they both involve a bus ride from where we are staying. The buses at this time of year are not frequent, so it is a bit of a commitment to get there and spend a day. As an alternative, a ten minute walk along the sea wall will bring you past a sports arena, a little marina where the kids are learning to sail, a small fishing fleet, and on to a local beach populated by elderly people who are taking the sun and a dip in the Aegean as part of their health regimen. We’ve joined them now on several occasions, and the water, I must admit, does wake you up.

Milan

2010-11-25T12:32:00.000-08:00

If you think Venice is a labyrinth, you should try driving in downtown Milan. It is Venice on wheels, right down to the approach to signage. We spent a couple of hours circling in on the railway station, which you think would be mentioned somewhere relatively prominent, but the city is large enough and we are illiterate enough that we weren’t able to figure it out. Piotr finally adopted the strategy of asking a series of random strangers, who helped us find our way, beginning with an elegant young woman whose answer was, as near as we could make it out, “it’s nowhere near here—I hope you aren’t walking.”

L’Eko Café and Cucina
Having eventually located our hotel, we decided to take a short walk to find dinner. There were some restaurants near the train station, but we hoped for something better and cheaper, so we headed away from the lights. After an hour and a half spent wandering in a desert of office buildings and closed retail outlets, we finally spotted a café. There were half a dozen people standing at the bar, and about three tables in total. We went in and said “Do you have food?” “Yes, we do!” was the enthusiastic response, so we sat ourselves down. More people kept appearing at the door, where they were greeted and introduced to the others. Eventually, the whole mob of about 25 people disappeared down the back stairs, and Piotr and I were left at our table. About half an hour had passed. “Can we order some food?” we asked. “We only have toast.” “Nothing else?” A reluctant pause. “One pasta.” “Just one?” “Yes.” “Okay,” I said. “We are interested in that.” It turned out that we had stumbled on a culinary night, where a guest chef from Rome was in town, and everyone had come for a private set meal. They kindly agreed to include us in, and since we didn’t speak Italian, we stayed upstairs at what was for all intents and purposes the chef’s table, since he was working in the open kitchen just a few feet away. We ended up staying and eating the best Italian food I could imagine for two and a half hours.

Padua

2010-11-24T11:23:00.000-08:00

Piotr and I decided to take a few hours to explore Padua, since it is on the highway from Milan to Venice and is also home to our pals Jorge and Guille. They were unfortunately away at the time to give a talk in Edmonton, so we didn’t get a chance to visit, but we were able to enjoy the older area of the city, which features a small university where the architecture includes marble floors, ancient wooden arches, and interior surfaces of some of the entranceways and courtyards that are covered with commemorative plaques.

Not so fresh frescoes
Another thing worth spotting in Padua are the frescoes on the faces of some of the buildings. Worn with time, these frescoes may currently consist of just a few ghostly faces, in the palest colours imaginable, but one can readily imagine when they were bright colours freshly added to the wet plaster. Since these were so indescribably beautiful even centuries later, I began to wonder why all buildings don’t include frescoes by default, until I remembered that they require specialized artists to produce them.

Italian risotto
Speaking of specialized artists, those of you familiar with the apparently simple but in fact absurdly difficult things to cook on this planet will know all about risotto, which is a species of rice with a short grain and a tendency to absorb water and release starch. The result, if you add stock to it while stirring constantly, can be deliciously creamy, while if you do anything else, it can be an inedible crunchy or in some cases gluey mess. Piotr and I stopped for lunch at a restaurant that seemed to have the right attitude, so we risked a risotto with mushrooms. One of the indications was that they wouldn’t make it as a single portion but only if two people ordered it. So we took a calculated chance that if ever a place would have a decent risotto, it would be here. Our bet paid off.

Venice

2010-11-24T02:14:00.000-08:00

My friend Piotr and I arrived in the vicinity of Venice after nightfall by car, having navigated in pure paramecium fashion a comically arcane set of highway switchbacks and roundabouts. Feeling a bit anxious after this experience about finding our way further at night in a strange city, we ended up ignoring Jan’s sage advice to park the car on the mainland, and instead drove over the lengthy bridge into Venice, then paid an exorbitant price to take it on the half-hour ferry ride over to the Lido district, which resides on an island shaped a bit, Piotr says, like a leg bone. I can’t remember ever having taken a car on a ferry before, so this was a tonne of fun for me. We were sure that the parking rates would be punitive, but were fortunate enough instead to find rockstar parking, right on the street across from our little hotel.

Water Buses
Taxis and buses exist as usual in Venice, only of course they are all in the form of boats. We climbed aboard the waterbus from Lido to downtown Venice on Saturday morning, then elected to simply not leave for an hour and a half, until it reached the end of the line and they threw us off. By this method, we managed a tour without narration of the main thoroughfare, which weaves along between some very impressive architecture. Imagine Rome or Florence or some other awe-inspiring Italian city made of marble, then put it up to its knees in the ocean. You can watch the water lapping at wooden doors as you grind by on your bus.

Frog Strangling
We eventually overstayed our welcome on the water bus, and climbed off to find an alternate route back, circumnavigating the archipelago instead of traversing it. We arrived at noon at a stop of interest, near one of the major squares, just in time for a monumentally torrential downpour, which turned into a good, steady, heavy rain for the remainder of the day. Tourists with an ounce of sense immediately purchased and donned colourful translucent raincoats and rainboots, which fit right over their shoes. Enterprising umbrella salesmen also made the rounds, taking advantage, as Piotr put it, of the harvest season. We of course had just arrived from Poland, where people pull down their hats and pull up their collars, shaking their heads in sadness at the weak folly of their fellow mortals.

The Absence of Paperwork
We sat out the first 45 diluvian minutes by taking refuge in a restaurant run by a couple of energetic men, one of whom was a Marcel Mastrionni lookalike contest winner in a somewhat shabby white linen jacket. This wasn’t the kind of restaurant that stood on ceremony. Instead of providing a menu, the waiter came up and said: “What do you eat: pizza or pasta?” We said “pasta.” He began naming sauces until we chose one. “What to drink?” We said. “Tea, with lemon.” “Limon, certa,” he said, and in due course, things arrived. Similarly with the bill, which consisted of him naming a number and us conjuring some Euros from about our persons.

The Labyrinth
Venice, the brochures tell us, is actually a micro-archipelago, with more than 100 islands joined by something like 350 bridges. I can attest to this because I crossed most of those bridges in the course of repeatedly, some might say obdurately, violating my principle of “don’t go up that alley.” In Venice, if it isn’t a Square, or rather a Piazza, it is probably an alley, situated between stone walls that rise several storeys on either side. In many of them, two umbrellas can’t pass each other, and in some, a single umbrella is too wide. They are all streaming with people going both directions or sometimes just standing in everyone’s way and having an Italian conversation. You have the option every few metres of plunging into a canal, but usually the preferred method is to cross it on a little rounded stone bridge about as big as a minute. I had to admire a country where those aren’t just flat paths with railings, but instead there has been individual attention to their nature as bridges.

Bridges
As you sail under the larger ones, you can see that the designs are varied and impressive. There are many stone arches, of course, but also some ancient wooden ones that are simply amazing. Down by the ferry to Lido, there is a modern footbridge, made of metal and enameled white, so that it looks like the extended spinal cord of some prehistoric beast.

Signage--now you see it; now you don’t
They have quite good signage in Venice, if by good you mean a clearly legible sign with an arrow pointing some direction. If, on the other hand, you mean a series of signs of that kind, intended to get you somewhere, then maybe you want another city. As far as I was able to judge, signs in Venice are produced as individual works of art, never to be corrupted in their essential purity by subjecting them to the mundane methods of mechanical reproduction. As Piotr said, staring at yet another list of ten arrows, each pointing different directions: “Rome, Cairo, and Peru.”

San Marco Square
One of the places we had hoped to see was this historical location of Church and State, where the paintings on the marble fronts of the buildings are rivaled only by the sculptures and other carvings that flank them. They are sufficiently overwhelming that it is hard to give them the credit they are due. Perhaps it will help to say they are like the Cathedrals I’ve seen all over the world, only moreso.

Random Bell Ringing
If there is one thing that has been a consistent theme of my first sabbatical, it is the bells, bells, bells. Like the hunchback of Notre Dame, I love them but sometimes I think it may have been a case of too much of a good thing. I heard Big Ben when he wasn’t ringing in London, and only stopped hearing him in my dreams when I got to Krakow and he was replaced, not only by a different set of bells but also by the mad trumpeter--a civil servant who climbs the tower in the square every hour, 24/7, to play a song that breaks off in mid-note. He does it to commemorate the brave watchman who was shot in the throat in 1241 while warning the city of invading Mongols. In Venice, it was the churches, completely removed from this postlapsarian world, joyously ringing out the 2:37 or 7:19 or whatever it happened to be. Piotr explained that they were likely doing it in memory of the moment of someone’s death.

The Casanova Tour
Venice was Casanova’s home town, where he worked as an 18th century alchemist and quack doctor, and where many of his adventures occurred, including a dramatic escape from the Leads--a prison notorious for its solitary confinement cells up in the ceiling, where the hot sun would beat on the lead tiles and make life an intolerable oven for anyone within. Hence the nickname for the prison. Today’s Venice honours young Giacomo by offering tours in his name. We wondered how his amorous adventures fit in to the tours. “Perhaps,” Piotr dryly observed, “they contain special opportunities.”

A Domino for the Masque
Casanova enjoyed a lot of things in his long and eventful life, and one of them was dressing up and going to a ball. The labyrinth contains many places overflowing with absolutely gorgeous masks, each one calling out to the impractical, improbable heart of the Frahnkenshteens. I was particularly drawn to the ones that featured coronas consisting of about a yard of feathers. Luckily, I had Piotr there to help me keep a steady head, or I’d have been drawn in like a moth to the flame and ended up shipping bits of colourful shattered enamel to my family and friends.

The Doge’s Palace
The name of the place is a bit of 18th-century humour, since it is actually the seat of government, a bit like the parliament buildings, and not a palace at all. Venice was a republic. But the Doge apparently did sometimes reside there. Casanova’s prison is connected to it by way of a bridge called “The Bridge of Tears.” That seems somehow more romantic when you aren’t aware that every ten metres there is another bridge connecting something to somewhere.

Ants of Glass
There is evidence of glass craftsmanship everywhere, from the many shops selling glass sculptures and ornaments down to the railings in our hotel, which were metal bars with coloured glass dumbbells, or maybe they were thighbones, strapped vertically on their middles. One store had a display with thousands of tiny glass creatures, each one no bigger than the fiery end of your elegant Italian cigarette. Among them was a whole platoon of glass ants.

Architectural Festival 2010
Piotr was eager to see the last day of this month-long event, and he had a map to the many locations scattered around the city. We settled on one of the two main venues, the Arsenale, which is a building about a mile long, originally used I think as a dock warehouse. Despite the appeal of architectural models, I was too wet and cold to enjoy myself, so I suggested to Piotr that he go ahead while I rested and dried out a bit at the rather extensive bookstore and coffee shop. It also gave me an opportunity to dry my hat under the hand dryer, while I waited in the half-hour bathroom lineup. I saved the exhibit's 20 Euro entrance fee, but what I missed were some amazing projects, including an indoor cloud that some lunatics had engineered, a giant art installation/sprinkler system consisting of running garden hoses suspended from the ceiling, and an audio installation where they had miked each member of a choir separately, then reproduced them on individual speakers, arranged in the shape of the original choir, but manipulated so that the songs could be deconstructed into their components. What I did get to see were several displays about architecture in Hong Kong, including the history of the astonishing Walled City of Kowloon, where our pal Rosan Chow grew up. Take the apartment block in Stephen Chow’s movie Kung Fu Hustle, and imagine the same design packed wall to wall inside a single square mile.

Peggy Guggenheim
We also had dreams of getting to see the collection at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery, but alas we arrived after it had closed. So we contented ourselves with hanging for a few minutes on the elaborate metal gates, which look like tangled bramble bushes where some fist-sized chunks of glass have gotten caught. I say contented ourselves, but really we were washed up against them by a surge of umbrellas turning the tight corner of the alley.

Santa Maria della Salute
To console ourselves on the way back to the water bus, we joined the eisodus of pilgrims heading into the cathedral of Santa Maria. I saw Piotr eyeing the three-foot-long white candles that you could buy outside for the choirboys to light, but we managed to sidestep that particular rite. We also narrowly escaped the lineup to go behind the altar, but only because I baulked and Piotr realized that none of the people who went back there ever came out again. Make of that what you will. We ended up instead watching one of the many large-screen TVs. Each screen showed a live video feed of the same closeup of the face of the icon of Mary above the main altar. Piotr said they were perhaps waiting for it to do something miraculous, like weeping. The TVs were mounted above head height, apparently at random on the walls between pillars, which were draped in decorative red tapestry. We conjectured that all the festive appearance must have been put there in commemoration of whatever was signified by the random bell ringing.

Grotesques and Gargoyles
If you are a fan of making fun of The Man by carving his face in marble, whether with his cheeks blown out or with an improbably and wickedly irreverent expression on his bad face, then Venice is where you should set up shop. You can hardly light a candle without being startled by some manner of grotesque or gargoyle either leering at you or gurgling water on you.

Catwalks on the Waterfront
The water being absurdly located as it is, the locals occasionally find it expedient to produce artificially raised sidewalks, which consist of miles of gritted plywood, supported on knee-high scaffolding. They resemble nothing so much as fashion-show catwalks, only in this case they are keeping tourists a few additional inches above high tide. When we arrived, workers were just dismantling them and stowing them away.

Hotel des Bains
The hotel used for the movie Death in Venice is now closed, but it still stands, another marble monument to Italian architecture, overlooking the beach that runs the length of Lido. We were there in the off season, so the sand had been bulldozed to make a six-foot-high embankment to help protect the inhabitants from the Adriatic. There were also 530 (they were numbered) little wooden shacks facing the water, which people could presumably rent when they brought their families and friends for a day on the beach. Imagine, I said to Piotr, all of those Italians in their designer bathing suits and sunglasses. It would be something to see.

Trieste

2010-11-21T14:31:00.001-08:00

Piotr and Monika had previously been delighted by a few hours they’d spent in Trieste, so we made a special effort to drive down to this previously thriving port city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Built on hills that are terraced down to the sea, the city is absurdly picturesque from above, although it quickly becomes a labyrinth of narrow streets lined with 8-storey buildings and jampacked with cars that are routinely doubleparked for entire blocks. There also appear to be something like two vespas for every citizen. After the second world war, the city was equally populated by partisans of Slovenia and Italy, so Trieste remained a free city, with no national affiliation, until the 1970s, when it finally became part of Italy.

James Joyce
I don’t know how familiar this story is to people, but Joyce apparently spent 12 years in Trieste, working primarily as a teacher of English as a second language for the Berlitz company. I’m not sure how I would feel about being taught English by the author of Ulysses. Privileged, I suppose, but it could very well lead to some awkward moments in polite society when I deployed my extended vernacular. In any case, there is a very nice little bronze statue of him standing just on the edge of one of the bridges over the grand canal, with his plaque embedded in the sidewalk at his feet. I am always interested to see in these cases what part of the bronze has been rubbed shiny by people interacting with the statue. In this case, it was his shoulders, since, as Piotr explained, people would stand and put their arm around him.

Illy
Trieste is also home to the Illy corporation, so we stopped off at a coffee shop for an espresso. It turns out, of course, that we were a bit gauche to ask for espresso, since the local convention is to call it a café negre, but the decorative pair of young men behind the counter, replete with sailor tattoos, seemed to laugh it off with good grace, and the coffee was delicious.

Graz

2010-11-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

Following three weeks of pampering by Piotr and Jan in Krakow, Susan flew off home to see her kids while Piotr and I rented a car and headed cross-country to Venice. We crossed through five countries in two days: Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, and Italy.

To Confuse the Enemy
On leaving Krakow, we were anxious not to miss our exit, since we had used something of a side road to avoid construction on the main route. Fortunately, we came across a road sign that showed that we were approaching a roundabout with three exits. The only problem is that there was no text on the sign at all. “It has been removed,” Piotr joked, “in order to confuse the enemy.”

A Cup with 2 Pieces of Chalk
We stopped for dinner at a roadside chain just on the outskirts of Vienna, where they kindly arranged to feed me some pasta that combined items that were not combined on their menu. For dessert, they had a special that provided Piotr with a coffee and me with a doughnut, and as a bonus they gave us a coffee cup. What was unique about this item is that it came with couple of pieces of chalk, because the surface of the cup is a kind of slate.

Peter Cook
Our first night was spent in Austria in the delightful little city of Graz, built on the pretty Mur river. Graz is home to a fanciful art gallery, designed by Peter Cook—an architect, like several of his 60s generation, famous for buildings that were impossible to realize. He once designed, for example, a city on legs that was intended to walk slowly across country. Graz, however, actually managed to instantiate one of his designs, in the shape of a giant plexiglass loaf with a row of nipples along the roof. Each piece of the cladding is a two-inch thick slab of translucent plexi, no two alike, averaging probably five feet across, and bound to the frame with giant rivets.

Sexy Female Robots
It was in Peter Cook’s gallery that Piotr and I went to see, appropriately enough, I thought, an exhibit called “Robot Dreams.” One of the items in the display was a reconstruction of the wicked robot who impersonates the heroine in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. Her face is currently plastered all over the city. The exhibit featured some interesting animated constructions, including a kind of complex array of cutouts and video cameras that filled a wall of video screens with constantly changing combinations. There was even a room of little spiders, about the size of your hat, who were triggered by motion detectors to begin scurrying around.

Artificial Handshake
As we were leaving the art gallery, we were stopped by two very polite information design students, who asked if they could videotape, not us, but just our hands, in the act of handshaking. They were making a collection for their web site. We tried it a few times from a couple of different angles, and they eventually cut us loose, but we really felt that we hadn’t managed to provide a satisfactory handshake that represented our actual manner of shaking hands. What they really needed, I think, for a natural-looking greeting, was to hire some actors who knew how to simulate it properly. Only later did I realize that we had missed what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance to carry out one of those elaborately artificial handshakes involving slapping our fingers and bumping our fists.

Open-Faced Sandwiches for Breakfast
We had breakfast in Graz at an absolutely delightful little sandwich place called the Café-Imbiss. It is a cozy spot with a very dynamic atmosphere, where tables of people are rapidly coming and going. All of them were there to enjoy oblique slices of fresh baguette that had been artistically supplemented with equally fresh delicacies. I ate, for instance, one open-faced sandwich consisting of folded prociutto that concealed at one end a small slice of melon, and I had another with a small set of smoked salmon slices, topped at one end with a tiny rosette of cream cheese and a miniature sprig of fresh dill.

The Abandoned Tollbooths of Slovenia
After leaving Graz, we drove through Slovenia, which reminded me in many ways of the Rocky Mountain foothills. It took about three hours to drive completely across the country, but every half hour or so we had to slow down to go through a tollbooth. Technology, however, has improved, so that the practice now is not to pay for each section of the highway, but instead to buy a highway pass that lets you use all the highways in the country for several days running. By the time we got to Venice, we had three of these stickers in the window, as well as a pay-as-you-exit toll pass, which is how these things are managed in Italy. Thank God I had Piotr with me, or I would have ended up in a series of confrontations with authorities over my lack of evidence that I knew enough to pay to use the highways. The guards at the final gate in Slovenia were pulling people over with submachine guns, so I was particularly pleased at that point that we had not been delinquent.

The Royal Lippizan Stallions
Who knew that Slovenia is the home of the traveling trick horses of my youth? I remember as a child that these magnificent white horses and their deft riders would make an annual appearance for three shows only in the city of Regina. Piotr tells me that they are considered somewhat of a national treasure by the people of Slovenia.

Arnold
Kim Hoyer tells me that the current governor of California (and former killer robot from the future) was born and bred in Graz, and sure enough, when I checked it out online, there he was, just as bold as brass. He actually came from a small town outside the city, although for some time he was apparently a carrier of the Honorary Ring of Graz, a gold signet given since 1954 to its most prestigious citizens. He returned it in 2005 for reasons unspecified, but one would assume political.

Ludlow

2010-09-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

Having learned our lesson about train travel in the English countryside, we gave ourselves plenty of time for the next leg of our trip, and of course everything worked out beautifully. Our excellent fun on the trains ended in the most picturesque English countryside imaginable, replete with cascading river, quacking ducks, giant oak trees, and, in the near distance in the morning as you stand on your balcony, lowing sheep.

Loveliest of Trees
Those of you who are familiar with the work of the poet A.E. Housman may recall his famous poem about the cherry tree, and how since life passes quickly, it is good to spend time admiring it not just in the spring, but also in the winter. Taking this lesson to heart, the good people of Ludlow have planted a cherry tree in Housman’s memory in one of the local churchyards. We managed through trial and error to find this tree and its plaque. We were a bit troubled to see that it was quite a young tree, until we spotted, on the opposite side of the churchyard, another cherry tree, at least hoary with age, and although it did seem to have recently sported a leaf or two, perhaps actually dead. So we admired them both.

Ludlow Fair
Describing the tendency of rural people to have a drink or two when visiting the metropolis, Housman wrote: “I have been to Ludlow Fair, and left my necktie God knows where.” The fair itself is everything you could wish it to be, with tables full of local produce and small household items, but Susan couldn’t rest until we had found a shop facing the square where the Fair is held, and she bought me a neck tie. I’m not sure what people felt as I posed in front of the stalls to prove that I still had it before I left for home, but certainly I felt that I’d entered into the spirit of the thing. We also tried to pitch the local museum’s gift shop on the idea of producing ties for that very purpose, but we met with some resistance from the woman behind the counter. She didn’t say anything of course, but the words “loopy colonials” were written for a moment in the thought balloon above her head.

Birmingham

2010-09-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

Susan and I spent August this year going to cultural institutions around London. Then in September, we decided that we’d make a pilgrimage or two. Our first adventure involved going to Shropshire to see the home town of one of our favourite English poets, A.E. Housman. Unfortunately, this effort also gave us a good taste of British rail travel, which consisted in this case of taking three and a half hours for a 45-minute trip to Birmingham, so we decided to stop the night and spend part of the next day exploring the town.

The Bull Ring
I had first visited Birmingham with Susan in 2004, when David Sless had a bunch of us to Coventry to talk about health information design. We had a few hours to spare when all the dust had settled, so we tootled over to Birmingham to take a look. She snapped a photo of me in front of a giant bronze bull that gives its name to the central shopping complex. I did my best to look as though I had no idea I was standing in front of this giant, charging animal, but I’m afraid the photo itself doesn’t quite manage to convey my fecklessness, since it is, after all, a statue of a rampaging bull, and not the real thing.

Pre-Raphaelites Galore
If there is one thing you can say about Birmingham, it is that they have an art gallery that is worth the trip. It is quite large and impressive, with a very good bronze statue of Satan in the lobby, and enough work by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood to make your head spin. If you’ve seen it in a book about the pre-Raphaelites, odds are good that the original is in the museum at Birmingham. Or rather, since many of the pre-Raphaelites had no compunction about painting the same picture more than once, it might be more accurate to say that one of the versions will be there. Perhaps, for instance, the Rossetti Prosperine where Jane Morris has red hair.

San Diego

2010-03-04T17:29:00.000-08:00

I flew in yesterday after a lovely flight in an Embraer, which has become one of my favourite kinds of jets. They feature roomy seats with a headrest high enough for my head, and every seat includes an individual television set. I watched Bruce Willis in *Surrogates*, which was a movie that I believe confused its own PR people. I also got a look at a couple of episodes of *Better off Ted*, which Milena had recommended to me. It’s a sitcom about a team of people who invent things for a living. I particularly love the commercial they include, which is based on the theme of each episode. For example, they explain how the company is one big family, which is why they keep everyone together on evenings, weekends, and holidays.

Just say no to $100 worth of sea salt
Those of you who have followed my adventures for a while, and, I suppose, anyone who has met me or seen me in a store, will recall that I am a sucker. This is especially true while traveling, when I get into the frame of mind of going with what’s going, and end up wondering if a bottle of wine with three snakes in it will really clear customs, or if they would prefer to display it prominently in their glass case of absurdly ridiculous, in fact bordering on criminal, foreign purchases. Today, however, you will be proud to learn that while stopping by the Fashion Street Shopping Mall, I not only experienced an entire demo of how my hands could benefit from exfoliation using salt from the dead sea, but I also managed to thank everyone and get out without buying an unreasonable quantity of these viscous liquids, by which I mean more than I could possibly carry in my luggage. I even held my ground when they offered to ship it to me. Thank God the woman wasn’t somebody’s Chinese grandmother, or I’d’ve been toast.

San Diego Zoo
World famous for its decent treatment of animals, the zoo here is huge. It takes 45 minutes just to ride around it in a bus, which I did today while getting glimpses of a wide variety of earth’s endangered and critically endangered species. Then, once you have your bearings, you can get off and walk around to look at everybody in more detail. I saw, for instance, lions and tigers and bears. There was a herd of what the man beside me described to his child as “the Pumbas,” which were surprisingly cute. I also found myself at one point in a hummingbird garden, where I was soon nose-to-beak with one of the little flying jewels, and I stopped by a couple of gorgeous parrots wearing, respectively, red and blue, with tails down to here. One of the main attractions for me, however, was the flora, which is sufficiently diverse that the zoo is also classified as a horticultural gardens.

Outdoor Whirlpooling
Say what you like about the cold weather (two degrees above freezing last night), strong winds (up to 75 mph yesterday), and rain (I believe the adjective is “torrential”), you still can’t beat eating some fresh papaya for breakfast, then going and sitting in the outdoor hot tub until you begin to wonder how seriously they meant the signs that say there are limits on how long a person ought to soak in there. I stayed long enough today that a buzzard begin circling the back yard of the hotel, although after a while I must have sufficiently waved a languid foot or something, because he gave up on me. A couple of hummingbirds also zipped by, busy in what passes for a conversation among their kind.

P.S. I noticed the next morning that the buzzard was back, so I’m guessing it was nothing personal. The hotel is apparently just part of his regular rounds.

Addictions While Traveling
I’m not sure what it is about being alone on the road, but it tends to bring out the obsessive and repetitive aspects of my nature. Perhaps that’s enough said, but I’ll go on. For this trip, I started by leaving home in the middle of an addiction to the TV series JPod. One of my brilliant graduate students recommended it to me a while ago, and sure enough, I started to watch all the episodes in rapid succession. Since they weren’t available here on my not very good wireless connection, I switched to all of the first season of Better Off Ted. Now that I’ve seen them two or three times each, I logged in (again on the suggestion of one of our genius grad students) to www.hunch.com, and I find myself answering dozens of random questions in the hopes that the system will tell me about new things I can get addicted to. Is this any way to live? I think of the line from the standup comedian Marc Maron: “I feel sorry for anyone who has never been addicted to something. Imagine wanting something really bad, then getting it, again and again.”

Four Brothers (Spoiler Alert)
I watched the other night a Mark Wahlberg movie that is essentially The Return to the Shire, except it is set in Detroit. Four brothers revenge the murder of their saintly adoptive mother, succeeding through a combination of direct action and shrewd knowledge of the people in the neighbourhood. I particularly liked the red herring where three of the brothers begin to suspect the fourth, since he received a large insurance claim when his business is going broke, and they subsequently watch him handing money to an underworld character. It turns out that of course he had paid for his mother’s insurance—he paid all her bills. The insurance is for the next generation of kids she’d adopted, and the money to the underworld figure is a bribe—you can’t do business in their neighborhood without paying off the corrupt people in the system. In the end, they defeat the villain, or Saruman, by giving money to all his henchmen instead of bribing him; the successful brother had made his early successes in union organizing.

Charlotte and Rock Hill

2009-10-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

Georgia Rolls
When I got into Charlotte, it was time for dinner, so Karen and Gerry and I went out to a local sushi restaurant. My usual approach to sushi consists of a plate of raw salmon and a bowl of rice on the side, but these guys had the most elaborate menu I’ve ever seen, and it was impossible to resist. Gerry ate a pile of shrimp tempura decoratively arranged on top of a pile of spinach in order to resemble one of the explosions at Pearl Harbour. I had some California rolls made out of smoked Georgian catfish. They had been rolled in corn flakes and lightly fried on the circumference. It was, I must say, surprisingly good.

Rapid Prototyping Jewelry
One of Gerry’s colleagues is well known for his sophisticated uses of rapid prototyping technology, where a laser is used to set resin in consecutive passes that build up complex objects. The objects are sufficiently complex that they can be made with moving parts in a single printing, provided the 3D models have been constructed carefully enough in their details. We looked today at an exhibit of resin jewelry, including pieces that had ball and socket joints, various elaborate insertions, and metal plating. Most surprising to me were a set of four-inch-square broaches, or perhaps more accurately nipple plates, designed to be pinned on top of the breast.

1960s Lunch Counter Protests
McCory’s lunch counter was the site of a series of protests by a group of African American men in the 1960s, resulting, according to the sign out front, in the first people who spent time in jail rather than paying fines. This strategy was subsequently adopted throughout the South. Gerry and I went there for brunch today: they still have the original lunch counter and the seats, recovered when the store shut down and the restaurant opened.
http://visityorkcounty.com/partner/92686/3123/friendship-nine-lunch-counter-at-old-town-bistro/

Rust Red Bird
I spent some time this afternoon sitting out on Gerry and Karen’s lovely new screened-in deck, listening to birds singing and cicadas shrilling, and watching a busy red squirrel. Whether or not all this activity contributed to the quality of the documents I was working on is another question, but someone who stopped by was a bird I’d never seen before, slightly longer than a robin but rust coloured all over, with a long tail and a long beak. I tried to find his image on the interweb but to no avail. He sang a couple of times, and it sounded just like the scream of a diminutive gull. Perhaps it was after all a white bird that had been rolling in the local red dirt—Gerry has a pile of it beside his driveway, brought in straight, I would opine, from the surface of Mars.

Bethesda

2009-06-21T19:19:00.000-07:00

I am at the University of Maryland to attend the annual Digital Humanities conference, but before we begin, I had a chance to spend a few hours today with Poshen and Ritchie and their daughter Michelle, who just turned six in May. Poshen and I went to grad school together in the late 1990s when we were both doing our MDes degrees, but after she and Richie got married and moved to the States, we’ve stayed in only intermittent contact. Now she is working as a designer at Johns Hopkins, and he is a senior epidemiologist for a consulting company in Rockville. They came to pick me up for lunch and we drove to an attractive area of Bethesda known as Bethesda Row, which is one of the “walkable town-like neighborhoods.”

Penang Restaurant
We went for Malaysian food, and I have to say everything was delicious. I tried to locate something intelligent online about the restaurant, but their site was down and I found the variety of reviews intimidating. Someone didn’t seem to like that they had food from all over the place, but I do enjoy a little transparently thin Nan bread followed by curried seafood and a delicious lamb stew. For dessert, something I’d never even heard of—a rice pudding made with black rice. Poshen tells me that black rice is a staple in Taiwan and is considered very healthy.

Bethesda
Wikipedia says that the city (about 55,000 souls) is a bit unusual in that it isn’t incorporated, so it has no official boundaries. Home of the National Institute for Health and a lot of institutions related to the American navy, it is also listed as one of the best-educated cities in the U.S. We spent some time at the bookstore, where Michelle read some books with her Mom and then one with me: Goodnight Moon. On the ride home, she also printed all our names and provided some very good drawings of many hearts, a lollipop, a flower, a bag with a heart on it, a chicken wearing a jacket, a face of a bear, and me.

Tucson

2009-01-12T13:23:00.000-08:00

It was a bit of an adventure getting here. I got up at 7 am to finish packing for an ostensibly noon flight that actually left at 4 in the afternoon. That flight got me as far as Denver but then I had to wait for a plane to Tucson. I finally go to the Doubletree hotel at about 1:00 in the morning. Did I mention it is beautiful here, with actual sunlight that seems to have a warming function?

Planes from Brazil
One of the women at the airline desk gave me her theory as to why United is always so fraught with delays, which in this case required an engine part. She said, “well, these are Embraer planes. They’re built in Brazil. They don’t do well in the cold.” That sounded reasonable to me, but when I suggested it to my colleague Mo, she said “It’s always cold at 40,000 feet.” Fair enough.

Orange Trees
So it’s one o’clock in the morning and I look out my second story window and there is an orange tree there full of ripe oranges. This morning, I see it is one of a row of hundreds of trees that line the compound. I once heard from a colleague who’d moved to California that expat Canadians are always crazy for oranges, until they’ve spent a few years shoveling up the fruit and throwing it out. Nonetheless, I am crazy for oranges. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the orange juice at breakfast was ghastly—thin with no flavour.

How Many Cactuses?
I guess that should be cacti. In any case, I took a few minutes at lunch today to stroll around the hotel, which is designed on the rambling model, something like a dozen two-storey motels strung together. In the course of circumambulating the building, I saw no fewer than 5 different species of cactus.

I picked a grapefruit
Stop the presses. I reached up and picked a grapefruit off one of the trees on the path between the meeting room and the swimming pool. It isn’t quite ripe, but I set it on the desk in my room when I went out for dinner, and when I got back, the whole room smelled deliciously of grapefruit. Who knew these things were so aromatic?

Ansel Adams
He lived from 1902-1984 and when he was in his seventies, he helped set up The Centre for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. We went to tour it last night and were reminded that a lot of the creative part of creative photography takes place in the dark room. So now I am left wondering how many of his amazing effects of shadow and light were actually burning and dodging. http://www.creativephotography.org/

Arizona – home of turquoise mining
Who knew? Maybe everybody except me, but the Navajo in Arizona and a lot of other people too have mined turquoise here. You strip mine it, apparently. Many of the historic mines are closed now, but a few are still running, producing 20% of the world’s supply of turquoise. Much of the rest comes, who knew? From China.

Guelph

2008-07-20T08:23:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-14T06:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T09:36:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-07T03:24:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-07T03:22:00.002-07:00

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

2008-07-07T03:22:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-25T01:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-06T07:58:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-01T23:27:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-23T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-23T07:34:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-10T15:31:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-08T22:46:00.000-08:00

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.

DC

2007-12-16T19:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve been to Washington, DC now half a dozen times, beginning in the early 90s with my ex-wife. We came in the heat of summer and toured various parts of the Smithsonian, taking periodic breaks in the centre of the mall, where we cooled our over-heated selves with fresh lime juice and sugar, combined with water on ice, from various street vendors. During another visit, I entertained a group of Japanese tourists with my pantomime explanation of what was exciting about a small sliver of grey stone mounted so you could touch it. The stone was brought back by one of the Apollo missions, from the surface of the moon. On a trip last year, Milena arranged for me to walk the length of the mall, visiting each of the presidential and war memorials in turn. Our favourites included the ghostly soldiers from Korea (www.nps.gov/kowa/), the clever quotations by George Mason, who said most of the smart things you see in the Declaration of Independence, for instance (www.nps.gov/gemm/), and the extended waterworks for FDR. He sits life-sized and ground level in his wheelchair, with his bronze cheeks rubbed shiny by kissing teenage girls, who take turns sitting on his lap while their boyfriends pretend to push the chair. That’s my idea of a nice statue.

[I am afraid that I can't find an image of this statue, although they mention it on the nps site. What they have instead is the monumental main statue, which is definitely not the same. The one I'm thinking of is apparently in the "prologue room."]

Nine Shopping Days to Christmas
On this trip, Milena and I decided to do a little conspicuous consuming. We visited Macy’s, Target, Victoria’s Secret, the Sony Store, the Apple Store, Radio Shack, Barnes and Noble, and Armani, collecting prestigious shopping bags as we went. One of the highlights of our trip was a large black man who knew everything there is to know about Hong Kong action movies. He sold me four that I’d never heard of before, entitled respectively: Dororo, The Promise, Shadowless Sword, and Legend of the Evil Lake. Actually, I think two of them are Korean and one is Japanese, and they all resemble extended-play video games. In Dororo, the hero was born with no limbs, so his father provided him with false limbs that conceal swords. He can get his limbs back, provided that he systematically kills all the demons responsible. I can hardly wait to watch them. I’ve also already begun to download online Wuxia novels to load into my new Sony E-Reader, with its innovative epaper display.

The DC Metro
One of the nicest things about this city is its underground, which is fast and clean and generally efficient. There is a sometimes alarming official American tendency to periodically warn us all that untended packages are a threat to life and limb, but in person the people seem very warm and kindly. You can stop people on the street and they take an interest in the fact that you are lost, and will help find you a map and point you in the opposite direction from the one you’ve been going. There are a gajillion lines on the DC Metro, all coded by colour, and Milena and I will occasionally find that we are riding the orange line instead of the yellow one, but fortunately they also tend to intersect at multiple points, so you don’t really have to backtrack a whole lot. Many of the exits from the underground are also at attractive locations, so you come up the escalator to find yourself facing some national monument or flashy mall full of Christmas shoppers.

University of Maryland
It’s big and sprawling, made largely of red brick buildings with monumental pillars out in front. You hike across an endless parking lot only to find that now you have to climb a hill, turn a corner, and repeat the process a couple of times. But it’s all worth it when you find a room full of some of the smartest people in the world, talking about the research project you’re all tackling together. Unfortunately, the U of M is found in the United States, which means that on at least two occasions I had to help the person selling me my coffee with her arithmetic, and the taxi drivers routinely laugh at me when I ask them if they have ever taken any classes here. “It’s too expensive,” they say. “Not like in Canada—it’s free there, right?” They are thinking, of course, of health care.

Pirates of the Caribbean III: At Wit’s End
If you have been following my adventures closely, you may recall a celebratory moment during my recent flight to Ottawa, when I mentioned that Disney had spared us the nuclear family at the end. Well, Marley gently disillusioned me the other day, since apparently all you need to do is wait until the credits are done. Milena hadn’t seen the third movie, so we watched it here, and sure enough, there’s Kiera Knightley and her 9-year-old son. Since Pirates IV is going to be about the fountain of youth, it occurred to me that the whole thing could be children as pirates before Disney is done with it.

Ottawa

2007-11-30T08:03:00.000-08:00

Ottawa is one of my favourite Canadian cities, and I have been there half a dozen times. My last trip was in October 2006, when I gave an invited paper to the Access conference for technical librarians. I also lived here in the winter of 1986, when I was working as a co-op student with Statistics Canada. They had interviewed me for two different jobs, one as a writer/editor, and another as a database developer/programmer, and I got both the jobs. It was my first time in Ottawa, and I loved StatsCan, who rewarded my eclectic interests with a wide range of tasks. I edited a highly technical article on computer chip design. I wrote radio spots about interesting statistics (did you know that Canadians chew an average of 1 kg of chewing gum each year?). I worked on speeches for the 1986 census. I also got to write an obituary for the late chief statistician of Canada, Simon Goldberg, which meant I interviewed all the top brass at the time, including the current chief statistician of Canada, Ivan Felligi. They made me take out the part where someone once got so made at Goldberg that they tore the telephone out of the wall and threw it at him. I guess it wasn’t setting quite the right tone for an obituary.

Air Canada
I’ve been on a variety of airlines lately. I have to say that Cathay Pacific has been a clear winner for their efficiency and courtesy. Air Canada was interesting to me, because I had forgotten that you have to buy your dinner. I think it is a good way to cut down on some of the waste produced by eating on a plane, since that many fewer people do it. I was also surprised by the variety and high quality of the choices on the individual entertainment systems, which no longer communicated what I believe to be a wholly eastern Canadian belief that what I really wanted to do was watch an hour of local news before I could do anything else.

Johnny Depp
I elected to watch the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Susan had mentioned that it was surprisingly good, and it was pleasant to see that they let Johnny Depp act again. The plot was interesting, with a good mixture of the apocalyptic and supernatural. The two women leads were easier than ever before on the eyes. There’s a nice scene straight out of Evil Roy Slade, only this time it’s Keira Knightley who turns out upon inspection to be carrying an entire pile of concealed weapons. And Chow Yun Fat was in it. I enjoyed the description of his character by another pirate, the murderous traitor Captain Barbossa, who says “he’s much like myself, but absent my merciful nature and sense of fair play.” Aside from a nonsensical Disney marriage ceremony, it was as much like a real movie as you could hope for. Keira didn’t even have to have a baby to complete the nuclear family.

The Minto Suite Hotel
The name says “suite” and they mean it. Every room has both a bedroom and a living room, intended for small meetings. I asked to see the floor plans, and the largest room available has a boardroom between the bedroom and the small meeting room. Ray has us in what they call single-bedroom suites, which means I also have two bathrooms and a “Pullman kitchen” which is concealed behind what appears to be another set of lobby closet doors. I never found it on my own, and had to be alerted to its existence by Richard Cunningham. There is also a small room dedicated to ironing, located off the entrance bathroom. Even more important, at $150 a night, the price is reasonable. This is now my hotel of choice in Ottawa.

Disposable toothbrushes
Why a guy forgets his toothbrush, I’ll never know. But there I was, and the fellow at the front desk obligingly went and found me one. It suddenly explained to me the disposable toothbrushes at the Kimberley Hotel in Hong Kong, which had an unusual grey plastic handle. They were the communist factory version of the white one they give away here, by Gilchrist and Soames. Unlike the Chinese disposable toothbrush, this one appears to be reusable, since I’ve brushed my teeth half a dozen times and none of the bristles have fallen out yet. There was no tiny toothpaste included, though.

Bistro 115
Christian Vandendorpe recommended this restaurant for our group dinner, and as you might expect if you know Christian, it was a great choice. For an appetizer, I had half a poached pear piled high with a kind of soft whipped blue cheese, set on a pomegranate reduction with fresh pomegranate seeds thrown in, all on a delicious radicio salad. As an entrée, I ate their specialty, a confit of duck leg with a sauce made out of the grapes they grow in their courtyard out back. The duck was crispy in parts and tender in other places, and absolutely worth flying to Ottawa to eat. http://www.bistro115.com/

Hong Kong

2007-11-10T02:49:00.000-08:00

The airport on Lantau Island has to be one of the most exciting places in the world to land. I often say that Hong Kong consists of two big islands and a strip along the coast, but in fact there are dozens of little islands, and as you fly in low over the ocean, you get to see a lot of them. In Prague the standard building was 6 storeys. In Hong Kong, I’m guessing it is closer to 60, and many are 80 or more. I saw a note somewhere that says 90 is the tallest. The effect is a cityscape that feels dynamic. It is like they leave things alone and then suddenly build a skyscraper. That may not actually be the case, but that’s the impression you get when you fly in. It helps that Lantau island is a nature preserve of sorts, so there is mostly bush and exposed rock as you drive toward the bridge, making a big contrast with the inhabited parts. It also helps that the water is packed with ships of all sizes, and that even the bridges are amazing. You can’t build suspension bridges this big, with cables thicker than my torso, but there they are, suspended all the same.

The Beijing Olympics
There are five little cartoon characters on the Beijing Olympic signs at the airport. They look like a cross between Manga and the characters in Lillo and Stitch. One has fire coming out of his head and another has leaves and a third has waves of water. I’m not sure if they represent elementals or categories of sports, or maybe cities? The text was illegible at the distance I was standing, but each one had a Chinese name under it, and the slogan seemed to be something about pulling together with Beijing. Okay, so I looked it up online and it is of course more complicated. They stand for friendship and peace and other positive attributes. Here's a quotation:

"Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China's most popular animals -- the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow -- and the Olympic Flame."

So they are five elements, and five animals, and in addition, their names spell out "Welcome to Beijing." There's more here:
http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/beijing2008/graphic/n214068254.shtml

Hong Kong Movies
On the way into town, I saw signs for two new movies. The first had a young actress I didn’t recognize. The movie was called In Love with the Dead. I'm guessing that it isn't a blockbuster, and the branding wasn’t scary, either—it was all pink and lacy. The other movie starred Tony Leung, who is in the running with Chow Yun Fat and Andy Lau to be the Gerard Depardieu of Hong Kong movies. You will remember Tony Leung from his lovable monk in one of the Chinese Ghost Story films, his lovable rogue who marries the princess in Chinese Odyssey 2000, and his lovable swordsman who has bad luck with his choice of girlfriend Maggie Cheung in Hero. We went past the billboard pretty fast, but I think the new movie is called Just Caution.

Two More Gift Shops
I never know when I get someplace if I am near a real attraction, such as people would travel far to visit, or if I am near the local thing that is not very interesting. Today I wandered over to two attractions within three blocks of my hotel: the Hong Kong Science Museum and the Hong Kong History Museum. It is Sunday, so the former was knee deep in enthusiastic youngsters, which along with the interactive display promotions told me most of what I wanted to know. The special exhibit is called Soaring Dinosaurs, but I think it might actually be primarily about Chinese Dinosaurs rather than flying ones per se. The keynote of the gift shop was a cartoon character named Ein-O, who had wild hair and a white moustache and seemed to know something about a lot of subjects, which was of course not really true about his model. Across the courtyard was the History Museum, which appeared to be empty. There were me and the staff, and a couple of American tourists wandered in eventually. The history museum had a very nice gift shop with a wide range of cultural products, none of which I purchased, although I was tempted by the many t-shirts with slogans from the Art of War, a bilingual little red book, and a green glazed clay flute.

Grocery Stores
Much as airlines have their national flavour, so do corner grocery stores. In Siena, for instance, we found at a little small-town corner store a wider variety of good meat and cheese than we would normally expect in a supermarket in Edmonton. I thought I’d gained enough weight at the cheese boards of Europe, which should be fine here since cheese is not on the menu, so I determined to get some healthy food. I passed by the seaweed-flavoured potato chips and the cans of wheat grass juice, which I understand can be taken at either end, and found instead a can of instant Quaker Oats, much like a large coffee can. When you pop the lid, there is an internal seal of aluminum. I had resourcefully bought myself a bowl for a dollar, so I was able to pour hot water over some of these oats to find that they set up much more glutinously than the ones I’m used to, but maybe that’s because they are “instant” rather than “quick.” The Tropicana orange juice seemed familiar, until I opened it to realize that it has no internal seal, but that’s okay because the lid itself has one like a water bottle. It was nice to see stacks of fresh dragon fruit and some others I didn’t recognize, a bit like small white mangoes. I got a paper cylinder of digestive biscuits which may in fact consist largely of ground-up Chinese newspaper, but they taste great.

Noisy Streets and Quiet Streets
It isn’t surprising to find streets here packed with people. When I told my bus driver at the airport that I was staying in Tsim Sha Tsui, he laughed and said, “ah yes, the shopping district.” My particular street is dedicated to wedding dresses, maternity dresses, and tailors, not necessarily in that order. A typical shop name here is the one on the corner, called "Marry Claire." I was flagged down by enough east Indian men interested in having me get a suit made that I almost began to wonder if I needed one. I don’t, of course, but they may wear me down yet. Turning the corner, however, I find myself in an empty street and am able to walk several blocks without really having to share the sidewalk with anyone. I walked far enough to see the entrance to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where the conference will start tomorrow morning. It was only a few minutes away—closer even than it looked on Google Earth, although of course it is quite a large campus.

Miramar Tower
I wandered into the Miramar Tower this evening, only to realize that it was where I had eaten the first part of an ill-fated dinner on my last trip. Two of Rosan’s pals had kindly agreed to show me their city. The first, Shum Yuk Wo, was waiting for me every day after my conference, and really treated me like a king. He jokingly told me that his name could be read as “Sum of the Five Virtues” and I would agree with that reading wholeheartedly. Rosan’s second friend, whose name I never learned, tried to take me out for a good dinner, but my jet lag hit me hard that night, and I had to go back to the hotel early and collapse. Imagine my surprise on seeing the restaurant again. At the time, I had no idea what part of the city we’d gone to.

Vivienne Westwood
One of the shops in Miramar Tower is Vivienne Westwood of London, which you will recall as the place Gwen Stefani wants to clean out when she collects all her pirate treasure. I walked three times past the various windows, inside and out, before I worked up enough courage to go in and look at the wild designs. There were three salespeople and only me in the store. The tiny young woman who drew the short straw and came over to greet me seemed very nervous as I looked through the racks. She appeared to believe there could only be the kind of cross-cultural misunderstanding that would end in tears. At one point, she got my attention to explain that I was looking at the women’s clothes, and that the men’s were over there. I reassured her that I just wanted to see some of the clothes. I also looked at the prices, which were extravagant but not insane. You could get a sweater for $3500 HK, which is $320 or so Canadian. There was a very nice sleaveless summer dress, the kind you can crinkle up in your backpack, for HK$7500.

Books and Films
It has occurred to me that what a person looks to buy when traveling can be a significant indicator of personality. Tonight I found myself, as I often do, at a bookstore that also sold movies. I bought a Tsui Hark “Classic” edition DVD, which I believe to be his remake of The Seven Samurai, set in rural China. The English title is Seven Swords. I’ve always liked Tsui Hark movies, and The Seven Samurai too, so how could this be wrong? Well, in fact it is an adaptation of another book, called Seven Swordsmen from Mountain Tian. So I guess we’ll see how that works out. I also bought Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Difficult Loves. I haven’t read it before, and for some reason I always want to buy something by Italo Calvino when I am overseas. I first read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller during my English undergrad degree, so maybe that has something to do with this impulse. I am regressing to a time that was characterized by the strange combination of uncertainty and confidence.

Seven Swords
Okay, so say that the bandits aren’t after food, but are instead a face-painted bounty-hunting army collecting the heads of martial artists, since a government decree has made martial arts illegal. Actually they collect everyone heads, then say they were martial artists. The seven samurai are supernatural swordsmen who’ve been on a spiritual retreat in the mountains, because their general under the previous regime, Fu, gave up torturing and killing. And the villagers aren’t helpless sufferers, but are instead members of the Heaven and Earth society, and residents of Martial Village. They are still no match, however, for the variously inventive eye-gouging, limb-removing, head-cutting-off weapons of the mercenaries. The decapitating umbrella is a good example--the blades are on the outside and he inverts it over your head, then spins it. The villagers are rescued and led into the mountains, where all the adults are eventually slaughtered by a traitor in their midst. Otherwise, the plot is the same. Well, except that one of the seven swordsmen is a woman, and the one raised by wolves never goes anywhere without an aerial somersault. He is played by an actor from the Beijing Opera. When the seven swords attack the mercenary fortress, they begin while Fu is negotiating outside the walls with the mercenary leader. They use the fortress’s own flags as torches to burn the place down, smash all the wine, and feed a laxative to the horses. When the mercenary leader gets the report, he says, “They weren’t attacking—they were slowing down my attack.” Pure Tsui Hark fun from start to finish. Did I mention Andy Lau is in it?

Value for Money
The Canadian dollar is currently strong, which means you can get almost eight Hong Kong dollars for one of ours. When I was here in 2000, it was closer to five. Given these arithmetical facts, I decided that since I needed some shirts, I might as well get dress shirts. So, turning down offers from east Indian tailors to the right of me and to the left, I wandered along until I found Shopper’s Boulevard. It is one of the places Shum Yuk Wo considered too expensive for me to bother about on my last trip, although he walked me along it so I could see the stores. They are arranged like a strip mall, except the weather is nice enough that the fronts are all open, and there is a very wide sidewalk out in front, wider than many streets, with millions of tiny red and white lights suspended above it. It goes for blocks and blocks--I never reached the end of it. None of these small stores spill out into the sidewalk like you might expect. They are too classy for that, or perhaps there’s some local regulation against it. In any case, I stopped at a likely store and tried on a nice-looking shirt, which they said was the largest they had. It fit okay across my shoulders, but the sleeves were on the edge of being too short. Strolling further, I stopped at a place that seemed to have the right attitude, with brands named Alexander the Great and Caesar. I tried on another shirt that was too small in the sleeve, but the saleswoman swore that she had something bigger. After a bit of digging around, discussion, and giggling, she and her colleagues came up with three shirts that fit perfectly, so I bought them all. As I was leaving, I mentioned that I had despaired of finding a shirt big enough, and was happy that they’d had some. They broke out laughing again, then decided to let me in on the joke. “You are size triple-X,” they explained.

Hong Kong Signs
The signs here are a strange mixture of the UK and the vernacular, which in some cases is just a transliteration of the Chinese and in others is something else. I am in the Kimberley hotel, for example, on Kimberley Road, which is very convenient, except that there is also a Kimberley Street. Nearby are Nathan, Granville, and Chatham Roads, as well as Haiphong, Tak Shing, and Mody. I saw a herbalist whose shop included the word “Swallowingness,” which seems to me something I would like to have from a herbal medicine. The red-bordered yield signs say “Give Way,” as they do in London, and there’s the familiar writing on the street telling you which way to look. One of my favourites is a cartoon sign used by the construction workers, which shows a man in a hardhat covering his ears. For the conference, Sharon has arranged a number of very large format signs, printed on canvas and hung on ropes spiralling through the many gromets. Some of these signs are posted in permanent frames, and at night the staff at the university protect them with pre-fitted cloth covers. The regal staircase leading into the university has the IASDR identity secured to the risers, so as you walk toward it, the effect is of a giant poster welcoming you. I complimented her on it the first time we ran into each other. “It’s very grand, isn’t it?” she said, a bit apologetically.

Disposable Toothbrushes
One of the conveniences here at the Kimberley hotel is the disposable toothbrushes. The cleaning staff leave two in boxes every day in the bathroom. They are the size of a regular toothbrush, although they make me think there must be a 50s mainland factory involved somewhere. The handles are ribbed cylinders, made of industrial gray plastic. I left a used one in a glass my first day, and came back to find it had been thrown out and a new box left in its place. This just seemed extravagant to me, so the next day I tucked one away for reuse. However, after I brushed my teeth the next morning, I had to spit out toothbrush bristles. They really are good for just one or two uses. The toothpaste tube is also unbelievably tiny, as though it were from a doll’s house--perhaps a 50s dollhouse somewhere on the mainland.

Mr. Brown Cappuccino Coffee
Well, who could resist it, really. It’s sold at the grocery store in a short soda-style can. Their logotype is a loose reference to Second Cup, only inside the circle of the name there’s an insane bearded man in a white suit winking at you and giving a thumbs up. The instructions state that you shouldn’t heat the contents for longer than three days, and that if you spot any milk flakes, that’s normal: “Tiny milk flakes may be occasionally found in the coffee and this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality at all.” I think it is the “at all” at the end that I really like. It leaves you with the sense of “methinks they protest too much.” I just wish they’d put a full stop before it: “… no effect on the product quality. At all.” I am tempted to make this into a standard disclaimer about myself, for use maybe on course handouts. “Dr Ruecker will occasionally appear to be speaking gibberish, but this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality. At all.” Mr. Brown’s coffee naturally bears no real resemblance to coffee, but it is sweet rather than bitter, so it is definitely a good breakfast beverage. And I didn’t notice any milk flakes. At all.

What to Buy
Shopping in Hong Kong is an exercise in absurdity, since the range and complexity of the choices is overwhelming. On my visit here in 2000, I found myself wondering at the end of the trip if it might prove difficult to bring my expensive bottle of alcohol full of pickled snakes through Canadian customs. So on this trip, I tried to set myself a few simple ground rules that might be suitable for a beginner, such as “don’t buy any clothes made out of dried banana leaves,” and “stay out of that alley.” Prepared in this manner, I went out today with about HK$1500 in my pocket, and it took less than an hour for the local salespeople to strip me down to a few coins. One thing to remember is that no clothing items are to be bought for the prices indicated. I got my three triple-X shirts the other day for less than half the advertised price, really with no effort on my part. My lucky strategy was to stand in the middle of the store and look confused. By the time I gathered my wits, I found I had been awarded a 60% discount on everything I wanted. If I had blinked a couple of more times, and perhaps glanced again at my watch, I’m sure I’d have saved another twenty dollars. Today I was trying to be efficient, with the result that at the first store I confused and upset the young salesman, who began offering me discounts after I’d already agreed to buy. As I left the store, I could see that he was clearly still rattled by the experience. It seemed to touch on his conscience a little. A while later I found myself in the basement of an office supply store, wondering if I needed a metal sign for my office that said in both Chinese and English: “Please do not spit.” I decided enough was enough, and, gathering my collection of bulldog clips in colours and sizes I’ve never seen before, I headed back to the hotel.

The Kimberley Hotel
I am staying in a place that has been a wonderful base of operations. It is surrounded by enthusiastic East Indian tailors, for one thing, and the sidewalk is littered with elegant young brides-to-be, looking like they might shake out a water sleeve at any moment and begin singing about their childhoods in the Imperial Court. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the crowd, some of whom would scorn to read a sign that says “Please do not spit,” no matter how many languages it were written in. My room has a bilingual control panel beside the bed that controls all the lights, alarms, air conditioning, and notifications to the staff. I push a button that says “Do not disturb,” and no one does, because there is a light outside the door that I’ve activated. I push the other button that says “Make up room,” and I’ve barely walked down the street to buy a classic Wong Kar Wai film when I return home to find the room has in fact been made up during my brief absence. I just stopped off at the desk downstairs to ask for a few extra hours on my room, and everyone was happy to oblige. A manager directed me to one of the counter people, but just as I stepped up, a large and florid Australian man, recently arrived from the airport and clearly Overcome By Events, lurched in front of me. The manager returned and led me by the elbow to another of his staff. “I’m so sorry,” he said, apologetically indicating the person attempting to deal with the Australian. “She is busy.”

An Evening Stroll
If you thought shopping at four in the afternoon was chaos, you should try it in the evening. I sauntered out at seven o’clock on my never-ending search for a nice shot glass, only to find that there are an order of magnitude more people on the busy streets than were there during work hours, and a far lower percentage were tourists. After a few blocks of dizzying activity, I decided maybe I could just watch a movie tonight, and try looking for shot glasses in the morning. With my unerring sense of direction, I headed home and found myself outside the hotel where I’d stayed ten years ago. I tried again and managed to make a giant loop, which at least gave me the reassuring sense that the things I was seeing were familiar to me. At one point, I even broke one of my own beginner’s rules (“don’t go down that alley”) and I joined a steady stream of people walking a dark, narrow path past discount electronics and street vendors. It doesn’t help that the controlled intersections are all arranged as what in Saskatoon they used to call “scramble corners,” so that all vehicular traffic stops while foot traffic can cross in every direction at once. These crosswalks have lights, but they also have a very useful beeping signal that speeds up when you are allowed to go, then chirps in bursts during warning mode. At last I found myself on my route home from campus, and before I knew it I was tripping over nervous young gazelles and shaking hands with East Indian tailors.

Heathrow

2007-11-10T02:34:00.000-08:00

Heathrow Airport is so large and I spend enough time connecting there that I am tempted to treat it as its own travel location. Certainly on this trip, when I had seven hours there, I felt myself inclined to buy postcards and send them out. Only the unexpected appearance of an available power plug for the laptop held me back.

British Airways
I have to say that for in-flight magazines, it is hard to beat the British Airways one, called High Life. BA.com is their site, which I hope contains half the interesting articles and useful advice I found in their print version. I was particularly struck by the travel tips, which included suggested itineraries for a two or three day trip, as well as details of good places to stay and eat in various cities, including the kinds of prices you could expect to pay at the places they recommended. They had articles on Paris (Hotel des Grandes Ecoles at 100 Euros/night), St Petersburg (one of the mini-hotels: Sonata, Nevsky Inn, Kristoff, Pyaty Ugol, the Rakhmaninov, for 50-100 Euros), and New York (Hotel Belleclaire at $130 US). I almost feel now like I could stand to go to St Petersburg, despite my earlier reservations about needing three weeks to get a visa. Oh--and I almost forgot, Tobago (the Blue Haven hotel).

Radio Interference
Pilots and flight attendants and people like that are forever asking everyone to turn off their cell phones during flights. I’ve always felt a bit like Toby Ziegler in the pilot episode of West Wing, when he expresses incredulity that a $30 purchase from Radio Shack could compromise the electronics on a brand new aircraft worth millions of dollars. But our British Airways pilot came on the intercom as we lifted off from Prague, to say that someone was using a cell phone onboard and it was screwing up the transmissions from Air Traffic Control. Luckily it wasn’t me. I have no idea if Aaron Sorkin was on board.

Fire for Lunch
My one regret about BA is that they allowed Lister from Red Dwarf to choose the sandwiches. You will recall that he subsisted, unlike the Cat, on a diet of chicken vindaloo. I thought I was lucky when it turned out that only half my sandwich was curry-based, but then I ate the other half, which was canned tuna infused with what I now believe to be essence of hell. Maybe I shouldn’t have made so much fun of those 12th century Benedictine monks.

A Decent Cappuccino
Terminal 1 at Heathrow, on the other hand, has been undergoing a facelift. I had heard rumours, but hadn’t gotten the ocular proof until this afternoon. There are a number of very good stores, and the quality of the food is much improved since my last visit. I stopped and got a respectable club sandwich and a decent cappuccino at Pret a Manger, who you will remember has the slogan “Eat with your head.” Susan and I lived on their food a few years ago when we took an apartment for ten days in Soho. The coffee alone has enough moral fibre for three travelers, since it is not only free trade, but also a couple of other commendable things that I forget now but appreciated at the time. Having just watched Babel with Stefan, Milena, and Piotr, I am particularly conscious of the many opportunities for international miscommunication. Give your rifle as a gift to your fine native guide, and next thing you know Cate Blanchett is bleeding all over the handwoven carpets.

Dorling Kindersley
The Eyewitness Travel guides were first recommended to me by Susan Hockey, whose advice I have tended to take. They not only describe everything you want described, but they also have instructions on how to get there, and cutaways of the buildings once you do. We kept saying we’d look for them in Cracow and Prague, but we never did. Here in Heathrow they have both, and they are lovely. They don’t, unfortunately, have one in stock for Hong Kong, although I did finally, for the first time in my life, buy a Berlitz phrase book. I saw how Milena used hers in Peru, which is a method I think I can manage. It consisted of finding a relevant phrase, and rather than stammering it out in amusing tourist gibberish, simply pointing at the text for the local person to read. I also noticed that they have an Eyewitness Guide to Canada, and couldn’t resist seeing what it said. All of western Canada, which they called central Canada, filled 20 pages in the middle of a 340 page book. The cities where I’ve spent most of my life were each accorded two columns on a three-column page. I’m seriously thinking of moving to Cracow.

Prague

2007-11-04T02:24:00.000-08:00

Prague, or Praha as it is known locally, is another of the cultural capitals of Europe. I found out from Piotr today that this designation is more than an idle fancy. In fact, there is a program that identifies them and they hold the designation for a while, perhaps a year, before passing it to the next. Krakow and Prague have both been cultural capitals, and Budapest is another on the list. Piotr also recommends visiting a city called Cluj, in Transylvania. I don't know if it is a cultural capital though. We have a similar program in Canada. This year Edmonton is the cultural capital.

Czech Air
Just as LOT airlines has its idiosyncrasies, so does Czech Air. One of them was in the design of the little tables that let down from the back of the chair in front of you. On this plane, there was a cupholder built into the back of the little table, so that if all you had were a cup, you didn't have to use the entire table. A less useful innovation is the advertising on the back of the disposable cloths covering the headrests. Ours held ads for a new model of the Skoda, which was originally a Czech car company, now owned by Volkswagen. This model features a light that shines sideways to help you see around upcoming corners. The text on the baggage tag was also interesting. Here's what it wanted to tell me: "This is not the luggage ticket described by Article 4 of the Warsaw Convention as amended by the Hague Protocol, 1955." "Okay," I thought. "Thanks for the heads-up on that." Another oddity on Czech Air was the in-flight magazine; the cover story was about Miss World, in the back there was a short story about adultery, and in the middle somewhere there was a separate set of tasteful nude photos.

Student Housing
We took a taxi from the airport, which was driven by an elderly Harpo Marx. Despite a somewhat irreverent approach to traffic signage, he managed to deliver us in one piece to a student dormitory. It is a huge complex with six storeys, and many of the balconies have gardens with hanging plants. The central space in front has a giant pole with klieg lights on it, and Milena swears there are air raid sirens up there too. The dorm rooms are quite large with a kitchen and a built-in bathtub that is actually long enough for me, which is something I haven't seen since I lived at Mary Noonan's B&B in Saskatoon. The bathroom sink is man-sized, and there is plenty of water pressure. Unfortunately, as in Krakow, the beds are more along the lines of cots. We are just a short walk from the subway, which is very good. In three fast stops it took us to the local shopping mall, and in five stops with a transfer will drop us in the heart of Prague, at the spot called Muzeum.

Secure Student Housing
Unfortunately, there are also guards on the main floor, who keep your keys when you leave the facility. When we checked in, they filled out a two-page ledger with information about each of us. There was a small moment of excitement when they realized that I was born in the Queen City, Regina. I didn't explain that it was in Saskatchewan, and if the Queen ever visited, it wasn't for long. The other noticeable thing is that there are plenty of locks. The door to the dorm room locks. There is an internal door that also locks, with an old-fashioned skeleton key. Between locking the outside door and unlocking the inside one, you are trapped in a small entranceway between two locked doors. There are four rooms to a hallway, and the door to that hallway also locks, and has a big sign on both sides to remind you to lock it. "I don't think that Canadian fire inspectors would approve of this," Milena says, as we turn the key to lock ourselves into the third layer of security, not counting the men at the front desk. Certainly leaving in a hurry would be impossible, but I guess there's always the balcony.

Too Cool for Cats
If you've ever wondered where all the cool kids went, they are in Prague. All ages, all sizes, many styles of them, but here they are, riding the subway, lounging against walls, talking energetically in pubs. Marley and her friends could walk in here, no questions asked. Here's a skinny blonde woman in her twenties, wearing a torn jacket and shit-kicking boots, standing with her feet absently turned out in fifth position. There's a middle aged guy in skinny plaid pants with bright yellow socks and a pair of what look to me like vintage Converse sneakers. On the corner are a couple of eighties rockers, perhaps Billy Idol and his younger brother, now working in industry and feeling the weather change in their bones. Nobody seems to look much at anybody else, but as you walk down the street you can't help but notice how cool everybody is, partly because there are so many cool people to look at and nobody compromises themselves by looking. Milena tells me that Vin Diesel's action movie TripleX is set in Prague. Piotr says the national passion is for conversation, usually over beer, and the pubs are like salons, with regulars who meet in a favorite location over well-established topics. The per capita consumption of beer in Prague is apparently one of the highest in the world.

City of Men
Based on the in-flight Men's magazine and the good plumbing, combined with the Spartan domestic interiors and the lack of a shower curtain, not to mention our time downtown with the many pubs, I am beginning to think that Prague is a man's city in the same way that Sweden is a country of women. Without the mitigating influence of the other gender, a number of creepy peculiarities can emerge. I think of those domestic interiors full of chintz curtains, lace doilies, and small porcelain objects, clearly designed to forestall abrupt movements by large creatures. Once we started looking for evidence to support this theory, there is of course plenty. Not that you can prove much using this method. But one of the pieces of evidence is in the quantities of things. Milena ordered a cup of tea one morning, and was delivered hot water in a glass large enough to hold an entire beer, with two large tea bags and three-quarters of a lemon to go with it.

A Murder of Goths
Well, maybe it was a gaggle. In any case, as we were walking along the street today, we came across a crowd of maybe 35 or 40 people, all Goths of various shapes and sizes, just standing together or sitting on the sidewalk. Other people were sort of wending a path through them, so we did the same. Afterward, I asked Milena and Piotr what they thought the Goths were waiting for. "It's a sale," Milena said. "Of black," Piotr added.

Escalators in Prague
The escalators here run at twice the speed of escalators everywhere else, and many of them are also twice as long. The people appear to be leaning forward on the uphill ones, as if they were leaning into a strong wind, which is sometimes the case if the escalator happens to be one coming out of the underground. Another peculiarity is that the handrail moves slightly faster than the escalator, so if you actually hold onto it, you end up slowly leaning over further and further. This isn't something anyone here actually notices, however, since they are too cool to use the handrails. Another thing they are too cool to do is leave each other alone while escalating. It is not uncommon to see couples pressed together with their tongues in each other's mouths.

The View from the Castle
Prague really does have some remarkable views. We rode the funicular today up the hill to the monastery, then walked the seventy-five miles or so over to the castle grounds. I insisted on stopping every two hours for ice cream. After the third stop, Piotr suggested maybe we should eat something more substantial than ice cream and we'd be able to last longer. That just sounds like crazy talk to me, since the ice cream here is very good, and they also seem to have a good attitude toward whipping cream. In any case, we finally ended up outside Prague castle, where you can see for miles out over the red tile roofs of the city. There is a stone railing lined with photographers and couples manhandling each other. The descent has dozens of equally attractive vistas, where the various cross-streets converge to give a series of unexpected views of the buildings.

Salvador Dali - more than just melted clocks
Who knew? Probably everyone but me. When Mike was young, he had the photo on his wall of Salvador Dali and all his things being thrown through the air. So we went today to an exhibition of Salvador Dali, and his famous surrealist work was not only the least interesting, it was also not the bulk of the exhibit. He did a whole series of ceramic tiles with colourful prints of horses-Don Quixote, St. George, Lady Godiva, and so on. They were just brilliant. There was a small statue of Durer's Rhinoceros. There were some gold plates, enameled with dark blue, then scratched to let the gold through. They had images of women, mostly, and one with a horse that reminded me of the handwriting exercises we used to do on the blackboard in Grade Four. He also had a whole room full of watercolour illustrations for Dante's Inferno. Many of these seemed to me not as interesting, but some of them were very fine.

Alfons Mucha - more than just calendar girls
Paired with the Dali exhibit was one for the Bohemian artist Mucha, who I knew primarily through his colour lithographs of seasonal ladies in filmy clothes. But he actually had a massive body of work, including designs for currency and stamps, and a set of images intended to be used for doing frescoes in the city hall, based on allegorical attributes like diligence, courage, industry, and so on. There were also plenty of lithographs of ladies in filmy clothing, including my personal favourite: a life-size poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Medea. She looks as mad as a hatter. Mucha's life wasn't without its own tribulations too, apparently, with various periods of what the flier describes as "horrible deprivation." Born in 1860, he died in 1939, "shortly after being interrogated by the Gestapo."

Prague's Jewish Community
Lucie Dolezalova, who arranged the workshop here in Prague, also arranged an afternoon tour of several important Jewish sites in Prague. So I put on my paper yarmulke and followed our guide, who was basically Meryl Streep's younger, cuter sister, into the Old-New Synagogue, which is the oldest synagogue still operating in the city. It has several peculiar features. For example, medieval law dictated that the Synagogue had to be a shorter building than the lowest Christian church in the city, so to make the interior still seem impressive, they dug the floor lower. Then the Gothic arches were a problem, since they form crosses, so they modified them so that they wouldn't. The place where the cantor stood has an interesting medieval convention-it has a half-step cut lower into the floor, so that the singer could step down into it when he sang the part about calling to God from out of the depths. Another interesting fact is that this is the Synagogue where the Rabbi Low created the Golem as a protector of the people. They say the Golem is still here, waiting in the attic, although I missed whether it was the attic of the Synagogue, which seems unlikely to me, or the palace. Our guide also pointed out a variety of numerological points around the building. For example, the columns were octagonal and there were two of them, totaling 18, which is a number that sounds like the word for "life." I got the impression that this kind of symbolism in the architecture isn't unusual, though.

Our next stop was the Jewish Museum, which had been a Synagogue at one time. After the Nazis transported and killed two out of every three Jewish people in the area, it wasn't needed any more. But at one point the Communist authorities agreed it could be used for commemorative purposes, so someone retrieved the Nazi records, and they wrote on the walls inside the building the names and demographic information about all the 80,000 people who'd been transported and killed. Then the Communists changed their minds, and whitewashed out the names. After they left, the people went back again and rewrote all the 80,000 names. It is one amazing interior.

Upstairs in the Jewish Museum is a selection from thousands of children's drawings made at Terezin, which was a "show camp" arranged outside Prague for the Red Cross to visit. They had music pavilions and artists, and children and old people, and coffee shops. There was even a local currency that showed Pharaoh holding Moses. The Red Cross visited in June 1944 and made a short documentary film. In October, the Nazis shipped everyone off to the ovens. But 45 suitcases packed with children's drawings remain.

After the harrowing experience of the children's drawings and the walls with the names, we went next to a Jewish cemetery, begun in the fifteenth century and closed in the 1780s. It is a relatively small plot of ground, but has 12 levels piled one on top of the other, so it is currently at the second storey of the nearby buildings. As they added each new layer, they tried to lift the tombstones up, with the result being a field of clusters of stones of various ages and degrees of dilapidation. When they buried someone, one tradition was to put a piece of broken glass on each of the eyes. Another was to write something complimentary on the gravestone. However, one of the stones in this cemetery apparently says "Here is buried a liar."

Finally, we stopped off at the Spanish Synagogue, which has a very unusual Moorish interior, a pipe organ, and a number of display cases with various objects. Even this beautiful building, however, has a horrific story associated with it. Rumour has it that the Spanish Synagogue was intended by the Nazis as a museum to a vanished race, since it was preserved intact during the war, packed as a warehouse with museum pieces. It is now a working Synagogue again.

Street people
The people who would like to ask if brother you can spare a dime differ from country to country. Although I never saw it, in Poland, apparently, they are often quite aggressive. Based on Piotr's description, I wouldn't have been surprised for the man with the belt to turn around afterward and demand a donation to his cause. In Prague, however, and in one spot in Cracow, the procedure appears to involve a degree of supplication that startled and alarmed both me and Milena. The person kneels in the street, not necessarily in a warm cozy spot, but perhaps where there is some refuse or mud. They have a container in front of them, and bend over with outstretched hands on either side of the hat or whatever it is. They don't look up, either. It was a singularly effective approach, at least for those of us who weren't used to it, but I think I rather prefer the chatty, sometimes even sociable, interactions we're used to on Whyte.

Piotr Michura - prince among men
It occurred to me just today that for almost three weeks now, Piotr has been kindly and quietly arranging my daily life. I've gotten used to saying "Piotr?" whenever I feel lost, and he pulls out a map. If I need to enter a building, I look again and there's the door, being held open by Piotr. Milena finally broke under the strain of this unremitting courtesy, and asked why he insisted on us going first. At that moment, we were about to descend a staircase into a restaurant. "You never know what's down there," Piotr said. I'm going to miss him in Hong Kong.

Museum Gift Shops
It is with the best of intentions, really it is, that we set out on our various treks to try to appreciate the art and culture of a place. But it sometimes happens, occasionally, that we arrive tired at the national Czech industrial crafts display, or that we realize too late that the Franz Kafka Museum is likely to be a bit depressing. On these occasions, we've developed the strategy of visiting just the gift shop. "You can get a lot," Milena says, "from a Museum Gift Shop. All the good stuff is reproduced in postcards and t-shirts and calendars. And you can take it home."

Amadeus
We had dinner on our last night in Prague at a nice little restaurant called Tri Stoleti, on Misenska Street. They had one of the freshest cheese boards we've eaten here, and we've eaten a lot of cheese boards. They also had a chocolate-based pasta sauce that Stefan and Milena seemed to find surprisingly good. You will recall this particular street because it was a location for the movie Amadeus. When Mozart's Requiem is playing, carriages are clattering over the cobblestones, and the buildings are looming on each side in a particularly medieval way, that's where I ate my dinner.

One Big Medieval Book
Lucie also kindly arranged a visit to a display of the world's largest illuminated manuscript. It was compiled, if that's the right word, in a 12th-century Benedictine monastery called Podlazic. The Codex Gigas contains a variety of texts, including a Bible and some spells. Most famous is probably a full-page illustration of the devil, who has two tongues and a green face. This image is one reason for the vernacular name of this book, which is The Devil's Bible. A single monk wrote the Codex Gigas by hand, and also illustrated, and illuminated it, then bound it in a massive binding. The project probably took ten years or more. The whole book is a metre tall and half a metre wide, and weighs 75 kg. It has more than five hundred pages, made from about 150 donkeys and calves. One of the photos on display included a section of parchment that had been repaired with stitching that looked like the sewing on a baseball.

The Company We Keep
The Codex Gigas display consisted of two floors of glass cases with archaeological materials and other medieval books, along with informational posters. On the second floor there was also a video, which was playing in Czech when I looked at it, and a series of photos of some of the pages. Luckily, we had a room full of medievalists from the workshop with us, and they were very informative on some of the details. "No, that's not a part that's been blacked out by censors-it's a dark background for gold lettering, which has since disappeared, or perhaps didn't register very well on the photo." "No, that's not a page they forgot to write-it's a list of the people who died at the monastery, and there were only enough of them to fill up the first quarter of the first column." Monique walked up at that point, glanced at the poster, and said something to our Hungarian colleague in medieval Latin by way of politely confirming her first impression. She was, of course, correct.

The Vault Room
The two long corridors of information were all very well and good, but the heart of the display was a locked and climate-controlled vault room, which contained a glass case with the actual manuscript in it. We got time-stamped tickets and were admitted at half-hour intervals. Behind the first doors was another empty room, where we promised that we had no hidden cameras or cell phones. Then the guide took us into the sanctum sanctorum, where an informational tape was playing in Czech, and the Codex Gigas was on display to the public, open to the famous spread with the devil on one hand and the kingdom of heaven on the other. I thought that the Kingdom of Heaven bore an uncanny resemblance to a game of Snakes and Ladders, but maybe that was just me.

Scholarly Privileges
I also sensed a certain level of academic frustration in the vault room. Here were a group of international scholars, well used to donning the cotton gloves and delicately handling the most precious documents on Earth, and they were being treated like tourists, restrained from this tasty stack of donkey hides by a glass case and an indifferent Czech official. One of our Romanian colleagues, an expert in eighteenth-century Moldavian missionary geography, actually went so far as to ask if there were any way to request that someone turn a page, but he was coldly rebuffed. So we never actually got to see any text in this giant codex-just the pictures of the fork-tongued devil and the Snakes and Ladders game. I didn't feel the sting quite so much as the others, partly because my command of medieval Czech could do with a bit of polishing.

Rough Talk about Podlazic
One of the informational posters describing the Benedictine monastery responsible for the Devil's Bible mentioned that a visiting Bishop once wrote a damning letter about the place. Whereas in earlier and happier times, he said, there were 40 monks busily acting like monks, now in this degenerate age the Abbot spends his whole time playing poker and they only do the masses twice a day. The poster went on to say that of course this was an exaggeration-it was very unlikely that there were ever as many as 40 monks at Podlazic.

The Library of the Queen of Sweden
The last thing I want to tell everyone about the Codex Gigas is the first thing I ever heard about it, namely that it was stolen by the Swedes when they raided the monastery four hundred years ago. It has been stored since then in the library of the Queen of Sweden. They haven't actually given it back, either, but instead it is on loan for the exhibit. "Four hundred years is too long," one of our colleagues said regretfully. "At that point, it's finder's keepers."

Central European Tour Guides
One of the ways to make a buck here in Prague is to set up as a tour guide. I noticed that Meryl Streep's sister was wearing a plastic identity card clipped to her jacket, that identified her as a registered guide, and at several places where we needed otherwise to buy tickets, because we were in her group they just waved us through. However, there also appear to be freelancers in this business, who stand in the central squares and hold up handwritten signs that indicate, usually in broken English, that they are top guides and can be trusted. Monique, our colleague from Paris, was amused by the crowds following these people, in part because the guides invariably held some kind of unique object in the air so that everyone would know where they were in the larger crowd. "If you ever get lonely here," Monique quipped, "you just have to hold up an umbrella and gather some followers."

Noon Clock Vigil
The central cathedral in the central square has a very fancy central clock on it. People gather from all over the world, idlers mostly who can't find regular employment, and stand around waiting for noon. We happened to be there one day, having gotten out of bed early to meet Stefan, and so we got to witness the procession of the saints. On the stroke of noon, doors open on either side of the clock, and the twelve apostles or somebody walks past the open doors, still inside the clock, but clearly moving. "That's it?" Milena asked. "Ah, those were heady times, in the Middle Ages," I told her. Then the crowd rapidly dispersed, each following their own umbrella-wielding leader.

Krakow

2007-10-26T16:18:00.000-07:00

I arrived on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday afternoon Milena and Piotr and I gave our talk at the Academy of Fine Arts. The room held about 100 students and was completely full. One of the PhD students came to have tea with us and the Department Chair after the talk, and said "this was one of the most inspirational lectures I've ever heard." She is a linguist doing a project on the kinds of language designers use in talking about design, and has been working manually. I suggested that she meet Jan Rybicki and think about incorporating some principal component analysis.

LOT Airlines
The flight to Poland was arranged through Air Canada but was actually on LOT Airlines. I sometimes forget that different carriers each have a particular cultural identity. In this one, for instance, the safety videos were done as cartoons, and they had a second, fairly lengthy cartoon about doing exercises during the flight. The various passengers in the cartoon were inspired by the antics of a young woman to begin exercising too, until the plane resembled a flying gym or madhouse. Other entertainment options included vintage Disney cartoons like Chip 'n' Dale, who it turned out were both stage-door Johnnies secretly courting the same chipmunk nightclub entertainer, and Donald Duck, who had a surprise visit from a hungry cousin. There were nature videos, focusing primarily on small things eating each other or having sex, although there were some mommies with babies too.

Perhaps most unusual were the choices of sites that they identified on the world map. There were key cities like New York and London, combined with a few that just seemed highly improbable. They seemed to have been chosen by someone who was attracted to vowels. Lake Okeechobee in Florida was one. Another was Moosonee in northern Canada. We also apparently wanted to know where the plane was with respect to Timmins, Ontario, and Godtho, Greenland. The meals included turkey and cheese slices on white bread with the crusts cut off, a bowl of mixed canned fruit, and another bowl of tuna mixed with mayonnaise. To drink they served me black currant juice, which was delicious and is ubiquitous in Poland.

Eating in Poland
Wow. I have to say that despite the idiosyncrasies of the airline cuisine, they know a thing or two about eating in this country. Every meal we've had here has been great. Let me take breakfast buffets as an example. From Vienna-style eggs, which are cooked at the bottom of a shot glass, to an entire array of delicious breads and fresh cheeses, I haven't had such good breakfasts since Sigtuna. Time of day doesn't seem to be much of a factor, either. Milena and I realized at midnight one night that we were starving, and half a block away we found a pub that served us a pot of stew with fresh bread, potato pancakes with wild mushroom sauce, and two kinds of cake with whipped cream. I tried to order ice cream instead, but the waiter kindly said: "You don't like ice cream. Trust me." So I consoled myself with an espresso.

Captain Kloss
People in Poland have had a lot of emotional trouble since the Second War because so many of the concentration camps were here. Auschwitz is just a little distance from Krakow, and there are tours to go and look at the gas chambers and the ovens. I don't particularly want to go there, although I suppose if HH can go then I could too. It would be a place to do tong len. But in any case, one of the media outlets for this national anxiety was an immensely popular action-adventure series on television here in the sixties. The hero was a Polish James Bond character named Captain Kloss. He was a devilishly handsome secret agent who wore the uniform and pretended to be a Nazi officer and actually worked for the Polish resistance.

Pastry with Pope John Paul II
When I was a kid growing up in Balgonie, we used to have a series of phrases that were intended to suggest that something was obvious. "Is a bullfrog waterproof?" was one of them. Q: "Are you going in to town?" A: "Is a bullfrog waterproof?" Another of these responses, which I now think were probably intensely irritating rather than, as I believed at the time, witty, was "Is the Pope Polish?" Well, yes he was, and when he came home to Poland on a visit, he happened to mention that as a kid he had enjoyed a particular kind of pastry. It has layers of custard and cream between sheets of thin, hard pastry, with icing sugar liberally dumped on top. Piotr bought some today for Milena and me, after we'd eaten another delicious lunch of chicken breast and cucumber salad. We couldn't get our pastry from the particular small-town shop that John Paul II identified during his sermon, but it was still pretty good. The legend has it that the fortune of that chef was made that day.

Polish Poster Design
Poland is famous for its tradition of poster design. I think it is reasonable to say that posters here have been an art form for longer than I've been alive. Even the conditions of production are something like printmaking, with limited print runs and recognition of different levels of reproductive quality and so on. The famous contemporary poster designer Gorowski attended Milena's lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts before I arrived, and gave her a signed copy of one of his books. She's also been collecting posters from the local store, which I understand is one of the best of its kind in the country. http://www.cracowpostergallery.com/

Broken Glass for Breakfast
On our second day here, Milena and I went to have a buffet breakfast at a local hotel. We'd had good luck the previous day at a different place, where the buffet itself was various and good, and you could also order items from a menu, such as an omelet made with wild mushrooms, all at a reasonable price. This is completely unlike North American hotels, where generally speaking you are better off to go out somewhere else for breakfast. But here even the interiors were gorgeous. In any case, on this second day we were just finishing up our delicious meal by sharing a small glass of lemon mousse, when I noticed a quarter-inch strip of hard sugar on my tongue. I took it out and found only at that point that it was in fact a piece of hard glass that had broken from the rim of the glass and become embedded in the mousse. We mentioned it to the waitress, who expressed chagrin. When Milena went to pay the bill, no one said anything, so she pointed out that this had happened and broadly hinted that it would be normal to expect some kind of reduction in the cost of the breakfast. The Manager was called, and they took 15% off the price. It amounted to about 80 Canadian cents. So now we know, Milena tells me, what the going rate is for my life.

Diplomatic Meetings
One of Milena's goals while here is to help negotiate an institutional relationship between the Academy of Fine Arts and Mount Royal College. She'd like to have exchanges of faculty and students, and joint research programs, and so on. So we've been meeting with a series of people that Piotr has lined up for us. We met the president of the Academy, for instance, and the Dean of Piotr's Faculty, and at least half a dozen professors. The organizational structure is somewhat different from what we have in Canada. It is not uncommon for a department here to have one professor. So there is a Department of Visual Fundamentals, a Department of Visual Communication Design, and so on, each with at most a couple of profs. Of course now I want to come here and start a Department of Humanities Visualization. My favourite so far has been a friend of Jan's, who runs the Department of Philosophy of Mining. Piotr says the slogan should be "Dig. Dig Deeper."

[I note that Piotr and Monika made a noble effort to correct my misunderstanding here. It has to do of course with translation of the terminology. In fact, in Poland a Department is more like a Canadian research lab, and a Faculty is more like a Department.]

Nowa Huta
Today, Piotr drove us to see where he grew up, and along the way he gave me a brief synopsis of local Polish history. Krakow is a city of a million people, and is roughly divided into the old town, and Nowa Huta--the new town. The Russians after the war took a farming area of meadows and small villages, and built a city there for workers to run the steel industry. The workers would balance the influence of the educated population in the old town, which worked for a while, until by 1980 it was no longer possible to truck in gangs of workers to fistfight students on campus, and instead they joined forces in the solidarity movement. The steel works has always been one of the largest in the country and it still operates, although since 1989 it has been downsized and sold piecemeal to foreign investors to raise funds for upgrading. Workers were laid off with compensation, in part because they have always been a strong force in political lobbying. "When the nurses strike," Piotr says, "people don't pay that much attention." The steel factory has a massive footprint, but we couldn't enter the grounds without a proper authorization. We did go to a local park nearby, where the ground between the trees is layers thick with beer bottle caps as the workers stand in small groups and talk about things. Nowa Huta has various sections, most of which consist primarily of massive housing units. Some of these are quite handsome buildings of brick and concrete, five or six storeys, while others seem to be more like cheaper Projects-style buildings, dozens of storeys high. People during the Communist era could apply for an apartment, but the wait was typically in the decades and everyone was crowded. Subsequently people were encouraged to buy the place they lived, at quite a low price, but the result has been that obtaining a new place is again almost impossible and people tend to inherit apartments. We saw where a giant statue of Lenin used to stand in the centre of one housing area. At one point someone placed a bomb between his feet and blew out everyone's windows in the surrounding square, although the only damage to the bronze statue was in one ankle. Afterward they placed a police guard box with someone to watch the statue.

Gangs of Young Women
In Krakow, it is not uncommon to come across a group of maybe five or ten young women who have clearly just walked off a fashion runway in Paris and are now out on the town, perhaps walking along the street or else sitting down together to have a drink and a cigarette. They seem lively and animated and full of fun. Some of them have a captive man or two in their midst, but often as not it is just the women. On the subject of how they are dressed, Milena's Mom says "there are no ugly shoes in Poland." I recall seeing similar crowds in Coventry a few years ago, where they seemed to prefer high heels and micro-mini skirts. In contrast, the women in Sweden who have just walked off the fashion runway seem to prefer to walk alone, or occasionally in pairs.

A Man and His Belt
Piotr and Monika and Milena and I went out to a local night club that was built internally like a warren of small rooms. The thresholds from one room to another were uneven, and the walls had been roughly plastered and painted sixty years ago. There were images lacquered into the paint; there were bench tables, and white peeling wooden side tables that were probably new in the 19th century. It was really a fantastic kind of place. On one wall of the room where we sat there was a buffet and hutch with religious icons in it, and another wall had a closet of shelves full of suitcases. Monika explained that a particular club had started the fashion many years ago by using tables made from old Singer sewing machines. We stopped in briefly there on the way home, to look at the angled mirrors and red plush wallpaper. It made me think of Grushenka in The Brother's Karamazov, calling for a party with gypsies. Afterward as we walked, we passed a little man who I would say at a conservative guess had been drinking steadily for the past fifty years. Our paths coincided briefly, and during that passage, I noticed that he slipped off his belt, which was a broad leather one with a heavy buckle. He draped it around his neck. "This looks like trouble," I thought, and kept an eye on Piotr, who was walking closest to the man. But suddenly, rather than swinging his belt at Piotr, the man turned and swung it against the upright of a scaffold. He swung it as hard as he could, and the buckle broke and rang clattering into the street. We just kept walking without comment. Not a word was spoken by anyone. Several blocks later I broached the topic with Piotr by describing what had happened, and he agreed. "You have to be a bit careful at night," he said. "But Monika and I know how to behave, so it is okay."

Pieskowa Skala
I should point out that there is a slight problem with the name of the castle in the heading of this post. Pieskowa Skala really doesn’t have an “l” in it. Instead, there’s a Polish L, which has a crossbar like a “t” except with a “t” it is at right angles and the Polish L has a crossbar at a 45 degree angle. You pronounce it like a “woo” sound, unless you are from a particular part of the country or are a sophisticated Krakow actor in the sixties, in which case it is further back in your throat, more like a “wau.” Originally they were all variations on L but I don’t detect any contact between the tongue and teeth, which to my mind suggests it has moved into being a kind of vowel rather than a consonant.

In any case, Poland is littered with castles, both for and against the locals, all of which were nationalized under communism and the interiors were stripped. But they are slowly finding their way back into a public life as museums, and some of the artifacts are drifting back to the original families who owned them. Piotr and Milena and I drove an hour out of the city to see this one today, after Jan kindly made a phone call to a childhood friend who it turns out is the curator of the place. It was amazing. The staff had all been informed to watch for our arrival and notify him immediately, and he took us first on a tour of the public collection, then to three other areas that are closed to the public. I’ve never had a tour guide who could literally open closed doors and handle the items in the collection, opening secret doors in the carved cabinets and showing us behind the Medieval wooden saints, who all turned out to be hollowed out in behind to make them easier to handle and to mount near the altars. One of them had a lid in her back that lifted off so they could keep the altar relics inside. They had an early carving of St Agnes of Egypt, who is conventionally fully covered in curly hair, since they wanted to parade her naked through the streets and so God gave her hair for modesty. The story may also have something to do with her name, which could be seen as a reference to sheep, or perhaps one of God's lambs. Another set of panels told the story of the Polish St Stan, who objected when the king harshly punished the women of the country. They consequently dismembered the poor Archbishop, but white eagles reassembled the body over night so that he could be buried whole. It is a story of Polish reunification in the 16th century.

One of the closed doors led to a kind of covered stone balcony that looked out over the gardens and ponds and the gorgeous valley. The castle, Jan’s friend said, was built to protect the road. But this balcony was added later, to look at the beauty of the valley, and as a place for wine, women, and song. The other parts we got to see included the crypt, a library, and an exhibition. The crypt held two elaborate tin coffins of a particular noble family. On one of the coffins there was a skull who was wearing an hourglass as a hat. The library was the private library of the Prince from another castle, which was unusually preserved entire after being confiscated, rather than being distributed in pieces around the country. It contained materials in all kinds of languages and from several centuries. They had a 16th-century Bible in Polish. The exhibition was a display of 18th century botanical prints which Susan would have loved. It had recently closed, but hadn’t yet been unmounted. There is another castle in Krakow, which is the source collection for many of the displays we say today, so we’ll need to make an effort to see that too before we leave.

The Small Square and the Big Square
The heart of Krakow is a central square in a circular area that has a park completely surrounding it. The park is where the medieval walls would have been before they were stripped for building materials. We are staying right in this heart of the city, half a block from the central square, and a block away from the smaller one. These areas are paved in square cobble stones, and there are Catholic churches involved, but the main attractions are the crowds of people who come there to talk and listen to the musicians and so on. The place is always busy. As in a few other places I’ve seen now—Honolulu is an example—one of the popular busking activities consists of young people painted as though they are sculptures. We saw an 8-foot green alien in beautiful long robes with another head on a staff, and the other day a bronze worker with a wheelbarrow passed us on the way to his post in the square. It was shocking to see such a perfect statue off the plinth and stalking along with his tools. “He is a student in Philosophy of Mining,” Piotr joked.

Dirty Babas
This is Jan’s phrase for the people, often old women, who are street vendors. They typically have little glassed-in carts with a tarp over the back so they are a bit sheltered from the weather. They sell cigarettes and juice boxes, but their main item is a kind of giant round pretzel, and there are different coatings available—poppy seeds, sesame seeds, plain ones, and so on. I haven’t been able to convince anyone to stop and get one of these pretzels yet, I think in part because Jan’s descriptive adjective is a bit too effective.

[I note from Prague that in fact I had this wrong, and that the people selling pretzels in Krakow are largely exempt from the dirty Baba category. Both Jan and his daughter have explained this to me, and I look forward to the day when I am allowed to go back and try one of these giant pretzels.]

Schindler’s Factory
On the way to the castle in the country, Piotr stopped to show us the famous factory where Schindler saved Jewish people by having them work. Poles aren’t as thrilled with Spielberg’s movie as they might have been, since the only time the locals show up is when they are conveying a powerful anti-Semitism. Piotr seemed a bit hurt when he talked about it. Certainly, he says, there was anti-Semitism here, but there were also Poles who risked their lives and lost them too in order to help Jewish people. The factory was in a shabby part of the city, but Piotr feels it will not be long before it is revitalized. He and Monika were recently at a concert that was held in one of the buildings at Schindler’s factory. He also showed us a drug store that is now a museum. It served as a secret centre for the resistance. Nearby is the square where Jewish people waited to be transported to the camps. The entire area is a monument, consisting of dozens of giant bronze replicas of wooden chairs, each one empty.

You're in the Army Now
There is compulsory military service in Poland for men, unless you are a university student. You can be a student for free here, but you have to have good grades, and there is also quite a tough entrance exam. For all the other young men, there's a year in the army. When they get out, they have a little parade. They paint their faces bright blue, and wear a kind of cape that they've sewn, which has various figurative decorations in the middle and pom-poms around the perimeter. On the day they are released, platoons of these young men get drunk together and wander the streets, singing songs in loud voices. Milena says one of the songs has in it the words "Whore, whore, whore." At first I thought they might be soccer fans, but Jan set me straight. Nobody minds them, he said, and in fact many people look on it as the rite of passage into manhood. If someone wanted to get married before they'd paraded around the city, drunk and wearing a blue cape of their own devising, people would have to think twice. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry someone who hadn't gone through the rite of passage.

Fresh Mushrooms from the Market
Today we walked through the market area, looking at everything you'd expect in these kinds of places, from fresh fruit to handmade soap to a wide range of clothes and hats. One thing they also have here is big bins of all kinds of fresh mushrooms. There are chanterelles, boletes, and so on. Jan poo-pooed them as not being as fresh as they could be, and I laughed out loud. "I've never even seen an actual one of these before," I said. "Not in real life. There's no way I can distinguish a fresh one from the ones that aren't entirely fresh." Milena bought a big basket of what she calls "Rydze." The "y" is short and you pronounce the "e." I have no idea what they are. They are a flat-topped gilled mushroom with an orange colour, but not inverted like a chanterelle. The aroma is very good. She says you cook them with the top side down, so that the moisture gathers in the bowl of the cap. Then you stop before the moisture is reabsorbed.

Gorowski 25-year Retrospective
Milena and I went today to see the poster display of Gorowski’s work. It filled four large rooms and included not only the posters but also some of the original paintings from which the posters were made, as well as some sculptural and mixed media work. We thought of our friend Alejandro in Mexico City, who doesn’t paint so much as sculpt and then take a photo for use in the poster, but we could definitely see that he had been thinking about the Polish tradition. Gorowski has a number of recurring motifs, including the use of eggs and human fingers, although not necessarily together. I might also mention that Milena already has several of the Gorowski posters in her personal collection, although it remains of course to get them back to Canada in one piece.

A Bull in Disguise
Yesterday, I made my first investment in a Polish poster, in the form of a giant red background on which stands prominently a blue bull. What is interesting about this bull is that he is wearing a mask. What he wants to pretend to be, apparently, is a rhinoceros. I thought it was hilarious and it got me thinking of all the other unlikely things that a bull might want to pretend to be. Perhaps, for instance, a timid little puppy. Or maybe a flower. Disguising a bull, however, is not as easy as you’d think. I have friends, of course, whose disguises are equally unlikely and amusing.

A $650 Hoodie
We spotted today what we thought would be an ideal gift for Susan. It was a blue hoodie with very wide sleeves. So we went into the Diesel store and looked at it. It turned out to be worth 650 zloty, which is $240 Canadian. That’s a bit expensive for a hoodie, by anyone’s standards, but what the heck, how often are you in Krakow? So I took it to the counter, and the guy rang it up. “That’ll be 1,650 zloty,” he says. My eyes bug out, and I ask for him to repeat that again. He looks a bit sheepish. “Well,” he says, “it’s a limited edition. Off the fashion runway.” He gestures towards a particular rack of the kinds of clothes worn by hard-drinking heiresses. I ask him to do the conversion, and the total comes to $650 Canadian. “That’s more,” Milena says, “than I paid for my wedding dress.” So the search for a gift for Susan continues.

One of the Seven Chakras of the Earth
Wawel castle in Krakow is renowned for its museum collection of furniture, art, glassware, ceramics, tapestries, and so on. The collection is shared with Pieskowa Skala, so we had a chance to see several centuries of it while we were there. But what Wawel castle also has is the site of one of the earth's charkas, or energy centres. Some people attribute Krakow's relatively undamaged condition, despite centuries of warfare, to the presence of this energy centre here. One of the previous castle curators didn't think much of this legend, and fenced off the area to prevent people from going and leaning on the wall beside the chakra to soak up some positive energy. Academics. We didn't see any fence when we were there, but then we also forgot to go lean on the wall. I think we might try to go back. I need all the positive energy I can soak up.

The Sarcophagus of St Stan, and three bells
One of the highlights at Wawel castle is the altar in the cathedral, which has a large silver sarcophagus containing the remains of the patron saint of Poland. You will remember him from the story of the knights, who complained to the king when they returned after several years away at the wars, to find their wives with recent babies. The king's solution was to have the women nurse puppies instead, and to have the dogs nurse their children. This struck St Stan as the last word in ghastliness, and you can see him shaking his finger at the king in the painting at Pieskowa Skala. His sarcophagus is being held up by four angels, who frankly looked like it took a bit of an effort. Speaking of which, on leaving the cathedral, the discerning guest has the option of climbing a set of narrow wooden stairs to the bell tower. The ascent is somewhat easier if you happen to be four feet tall, since many of the sections pass under low beams and through A-frames and so on. I speak as someone with experience. "There's an important bell up here," Milena says. "I don't remember why." So we begin climbing. Sure enough, we come across a giant bell. "This isn't it," she says, and we climb some more. Lo and behold, another bell. "Still not the one," she tells me, and we continue. Finally we hit the highest chamber in the bell tower, with the all-important third bell. I offer to ring it, but Milena says that's probably only a good idea if my goal is to see the inside of a Polish prison. Later in the evening, Piotr mentioned that it is only rung for significant national events, such as the death of the Polish Pope. "If you rang it," he says, "someone important might have to die."

The Dragon's Den
When you go to Wawel castle, you can walk the grounds for free. But if you want to go into any of the buildings, you have to buy a ticket. There's a timestamp on the ticket, and you only have a window of ten minutes to get in, or you have to get a new ticket. There are about seven or eight different things you can buy tickets for. We bought ours for the State Rooms, the Cathedral, and the Dragon's Den, which is near the exit. We handed our tickets to the person sitting on the stool at the entrance, and started down a spiral staircase. I had to stoop, since the ceilings were too low. After roughly 172 stairs, I paused for a breather. "I think I recognize this," I said. "We've bought tickets to see the famous Egress." "Hang in there," says Milena, and a nearby castle guide sitting in the shadows tells her something. "There are 344 stairs," Milena says. "We're halfway there." Great. So down we go. Then what should happen but at the bottom we come out into a series of really very nice caves. We are able to take our time looking at them, and Milena shoots a video. Outside the door is a big statue of a six-armed dragon rampant, which I recognize from the postcards sold by the dirty Babas. The cost was six zloty. "I'd have paid seven," I said, "for an elevator."

A Jazz Concert in the Salt Mine
The Polish people seem to love to take some unlikely place and turn it into a cultural institution. The KGB headquarters, for example, with the torture chambers in the basement, is now a museum. Piotr and Monika attended a John Cage concert in Schindler's Factory. Tonight we drove out of town to the salt mines, rode the worker's elevator 130 meters below ground, and followed the rail-cart tracks into one of the most fantastical concert halls imaginable. It was cut from the stone, so that these massive blocks were above our heads, and they'd constructed whimsical features, such as several large chandeliers and a decorative crest on the rear wall, from pieces of salt. For three hours we sat, breathing the healthy dry salty air, and listening to a series of jazz performances. This was the 52nd festival--part of the longest-running jazz festival in the country, although Piotr explained that it had been going for longer than 52 years. They lost a few under communism, because jazz was too decadent. At the intermission we had tea and a bismarck doughnut.

Mozart's Requiem
No tour of a cultural capital would be complete without a classical concert in a Cathedral. Piotr and Monika kindly arranged tickets for us to an evening performance of Mozart's Requiem at St Catherine's Cathedral, which is a beautiful Gothic building with a towering baroque altar. There was also a chandelier that rotated slowly back and forth, like a torsion pendulum, throughout the evening. I wondered if someone had accidentally got it started in setting up the lights for the concert, or if it had been winding and unwinding since the Middle Ages. Since it was an electric light, I admit that the latter does seem a bit unlikely. The performance was fantastic, and we convinced them to give us one encore. We sat close to the altar, which is to say at the back of the concert hall, since the musicians were out in the entrance where choirs belong. Our seats were the raised ones built into the wall, which meant we were sideways to the music. Facing me across a sea of faces in profile between us was the look-a-like contest winner in the category for Rasputin, a bald giant of a man with eyebrows out to here and a red beard. I couldn't really tell whether or not he enjoyed the concert.

A Visit to a Cemetery
All day on November first in Poland is when families make an extra effort to visit their dead. Jan and his lovely family kindly invited Milena and me to come along and participate in their visit, and it was an amazing experience. The graveyard where we arrived at dusk is centuries old and spreads for kilometers in every direction. As far as you can see there are huge trees and graves, many of them at knee height with a large flat surface, where people have set chrysanthemums and candles burning in colourful glass jars with ventilated metal lids. The effect is spectacular. Here are hundreds of thousands of candles that only burn for a day, all burning at one time in one place. It is a monumental effort. We bought our candles, half a dozen each, from Jan's teenage daughter, since her scout troop joins many others in using the occasion to raise funds. She explained that the people start early in the morning and visit throughout the day, with the cemetery closing its gates at 10:30 p.m. We visited several of Jan's relatives, including the one he jokingly refers to as having shot at Hemingway, since they were on opposites sides of the same action where Hemingway was wounded, and the one who was a nuclear physicist at a time when that profession meant something to the military. There were some amazing public sites too, with a carpet of burning candles in front of them. One that I remember was to commemorate victims of communism. We also had a map that Piotr had provided that gave the locations of famous Polish graves, so we were able to visit, for instance, the grave of the professor who founded his college, and also a Victorian Radzikowski who wrote travelogues. I only came across one ghost, when I tripped myself to avoid stepping on a child who wasn't actually there. "It's a good day for the ghosts of children," Milena explained. "The candles are so pretty."

Chrysanthemums: the Polish curse
One side effect of the Nov 1st activity is that there is a strong association in Poland between chrysanthemums of all sizes and colours, and death. "Now I know why my Mom said I was forbidden to have chrysanthemums in my wedding bouquet," Milena said. "Ah, yes," said Jan. "Give someone chrysanthemums and you are basically telling them to go and get themselves a grave."

The Madonna of Good Grades
In Czestohowa, there is a famous painting of the Madonna and Child. She has two cuts on her right cheek, which legend tells us were put there by the impious sword of a medieval Swedish soldier. The painting miraculously bled, and the cuts have grown longer over the years, lengthening toward some apocalyptic future. What's important about this painting is that it is the subject of devotion of Polish high school students, who pray for intercession in the matter of their final exams. The shrine has decades, perhaps centuries, of little scraps of paper with notes on them, and medallions offered to the Virgin. The most zealous procedure involves circumambulating the church on your knees. Milena's comment: "They should be studying, instead of doing that crap."

My Dragons Are Killing Me
In looking at all the mortuary statues of royalty two summers ago in the Louvre, I was struck by how many of the dead kings and queens had dogs lying against the soles of their feet. Unlike the royals, the dogs are carved as though they are alive. Some were little lapdogs and some were greyhounds or perhaps whippets, but almost no one had to lie in stone perpetuity unaccompanied by their dogs. In Poland, however, at Pieskowa Skala, we saw some variations on the theme. One king, for instance, had his feet resting on stone tigers. Another had his feet on a dragon, and for a pillow he was using a live lion. "Now that," I said to myself, "is royalty."

Polish Signs
When Piotr drove us out to Pieskowa Skala, I had a chance to see some of the highway signs. Polish signage has an on/off convention which helps to simplify things once you realize it’s there. One of the first signs I noticed was a long horizontal silhouette of buildings, with a red line crossing it out. “Hmm,” I thought. “No villages allowed on this highway.” But of course it meant we were leaving a village zone. There would have been one at the entrance without the red line through it. They also have some nice warning signs. There’s a regular walking person on a blue background at crosswalks. Outside crosswalks, you will sometimes see a yellow warning sign with two people running. It is there, Piotr explained, to let drivers know that this is a place where people might jump out in front of the car. It reminded me of the ones we have for deer in Canada. They had a similar one showing a little girl marching along with a large red balloon or perhaps lollipop. In any case, the red circle was on a stick and had fins out to the sides.

Montreal

2007-04-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

Milena and I arrived last night from Hamilton, and checked in to the Chateau Versaille. It's a beautiful old hotel that has been updated with orange walls and contemporary art. In 2005 the Conde Nast Traveller magazine named it the best hotel in Montreal. There are bronze lions guarding the door and art nouveau lamps on the landing. Our colleagues here chose it for the delegates to the research meeting.

Unfortunately, as with all revised old places to stay, I find the scale a bit hard to manage. I stand in my shower and the shower curtain is stuck to one shoulder while the safety bar presses into my leg on the other side. The hanging lamps in the hallway don't quite hit my head. I don't quite hang over the end of the bed.

Last night we ate across the street at a fabulous restaurant called Bronte (www.bronterestaurant.com). We had an eight course tasting meal. Each course would fit in the palm of your hand and was tastefully plated on a giant white plate--each course had one with a different shape. In true French fashion, almost everything had a frothy reduction of some kind. There was white chocolate foam, for instance, on the pate. It was, I think, the most expensive meal I've ever eaten. I guess that may not be saying much, given my culinary past, but there it is. In 2004, they were named Canada's best new restaurant by En Route magazine.

Today it was a trip to Old Montreal. We had a brief moment of thinking the artistic autopsy exhibit might be in town, but alas when we reached the counter they were only opening in May. I pointed out to Milena that they were in Chicago when I was there, so that may still be the case when she goes to Chicago in early June. She accepted the disappointment with grace, I thought, and consoled herself with some digital photos of dark shabby alleys.

Walking up and down Rue St Catherine is always a pleasure, and we did a lot of this walking. Unlike for instance Whyte Ave in Edmonton, there's enough road that there are different sections, each with its own character and denizens. Milena remarked the number of homeless people who have pets with them. She seemed to think the pets were an indication of warmheartedness on the part of the people. The young man regaling his friends with tales of busting caps and splitting wigs, on the other hand, had no pet in sight.

Chicago

2007-02-20T16:42:00.000-08:00

I'm at the Hyatt Regency, which is a gi-normous and beautiful hotel overlooking the Chicago river. I'm on the 27th floor with two floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the city. On my first day I had three adventures.

In the morning, I went over the Michigan St bridge and found a Kenneth Cole store, where I spent nearly a thousand dollars that I don't have on several large bags worth of stuff: a pair of shoes, two pairs of boots, and a briefcase. I arrived in Chicago wearing a pair of used cowboy boots and now I have a blister. The strap fell off my old briefcase last summer. It was a shocking experience to have a choice of good-looking shoes that fit. Usually there are none, or if there is a pair, it's only one pair. Maybe I didn't handle the decision so well.

When I came back to the hotel, about half a block away, a big black man named something like Leoni conned me out of eight dollars by rubbing hand lotion on my sneakers. So I gave him ten and said he could keep the change. It was a surreal experience, my hands full of Kenneth Cole bags and this person insisting I put my foot on his knee so he could rub goop on my shoe. He said he thought it was better than begging for money, and I guess he gets to say.

In the afternoon, I took a taxi and went to the Contemporary Art Institute of Chicago, mistakenly believing it was the Art Institute of Chicago. The latter has a world-class collection of impressionists. The former had a display of Rudolf Stingel, including some giant photo-realist paintings, some things that weren't supposed to be paintings per se, made of styrofoam and I think it was rubber cement, and a room with an orange carpet, which was the art object. The foyer was lined with the kind of insulation that has an aluminum foil cover, and you were allowed to contribute to the project by marking it somehow. I thought about writing a quote from the Hong Kong movie 2002. It's what a little old Chinese woman harangues the hero with: "Work hard. Respect your parents." But I decided not to do that.

On the upper floors there was an exhibition of artists' books, which I liked very much, in part because they reminded me of Peter Bartl. I made a note of a chart in a book by Edward Hall and George Trager called Systems of Culture. I think it was this exhibition that made me think I should try out this blog. I thought of getting a book to write about my adventures, since somehow they aren't very reified for me if I only have them, and I wondered if they might be more solid if they were also recorded somehow.

Another thing I liked were a series of photos of seascapes, by Hiroshi Sugimoto. He had maybe 15 or 20 0f them, all a b&w flat horizon of water and sky; they varied largely in terms of how much fog there was. They might have been all the same seascape at different times of day, for instance, only in fact they were each of a completely different body of water. Arranged as they were, side by side along a white wall, they had somehow the emotional effect of looking at a seascape. It was very nice.

Finally, in the basement they had half a dozen charming carp, lazing around in a little wedge-shaped pool.

Chicago Day 2
I'd like to commend Milena for choosing a wonderful hotel. It is close to everything. The greater Chicago area has about 7 milliion people. The city proper has about 3 million. In the city there is a downtown area called the loop, because it is within a circle created by the elevated train. The Hyatt I'm in is at the edge of the loop, which means a lot of great things are within walking distance, or, as I'm beginning to think of it, blistering distance.

I really enjoyed my lunch. I went to what I later realized is a chain called The Corner Bakery Cafe. I loved their slogan: "Feed the Day." The one I ate at was across the street from a sign that said it was the end of the legendary Route 66. The cafe also had an innovation that impressed me. At each table was a little metal clip standing eighteen inches above the salt and pepper shakers. When you placed your order, they gave you a big plastic piece with a number on it, and you clipped it at your table so they could find you. People were coming and going like crazy, but it never got lined up at the counter more than two or three deep.

After lunch I went to look at all the great stuff at the Art Institute of Chicago. (http://www.artic.edu/artexplorer/ but I'm pretty sure they only have a small portion of it digitized). I was fortunate to arrive during the February Free days, which saved me twelve bucks. In fact, today was the last day of the promotion. As in any large gallery, there is far too much to summarize, and I saw most of it.

I also realized something today, as I limped up and down the marble stairs. One of the things I like about art galleries is the rules there tend to restrict unseemly behaviour. If you stay quiet and don't get too close to the art, everyone leaves you pretty much alone. Other patrons will even give you elbow room if you stand directly in front of something.

Some of the highlights of this collection are:
- Van Gogh's self-portrait
- American Gothic
- Nighthawks
- At the Moulin Rouge

I also enjoyed looking at:
- several classy suits of armour.
- lots of Monet, including every painting he ever made of a haystack. This was several more than I would have expected.
- a surprising amount of Georgia O'Keefe.
- Ivan Albright's shocking 1943 lifesize portrait of Dorian Gray, painted for the movie.

There were some very nice Buddhas, boddhisattvas, and dakinis, so I hung around with them for a while. There was also a nice little Chinese guardian creature that appeared to combine a dragon, lion, and dog. I felt safer just looking at him.

On the way there, and again on the way back, I walked by the Millenium Park, which has among other things a music pavilion that Frank Gehry designed on a good day. People were skating at an outdoor rink at the park. They seemed to be having fun, falling down in front of their friends' video cameras and holding hands and laughing.

I came back to the hotel to shower and change my shoes, then took a nap before going on another forced march, this time along Wacker St. The Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness book I bought at the Northwestern University bookstore yesterday recommended it. There were plenty of Chicago's great buildings and bridges, and then dinner at what I can only describe as a character-rich Italian restaurant, Buca di Beppo. The walls were plastered with vintage photos of starlets getting out of cars, contortionists contorting, people kissing while driving Vespas, and so on. On the way to your table they make a point of walking you through the kitchen. They have to make special arrangements for people dining alone, since the menu only contains two sizes of items: small (for 2-3 people) and large (for more). I had lemon chicken with capers and fettucini, and my gosh it was great.

Chicago to Evanston
What a lovely day I had today. I started out by taking Piotr's advice and going over to the Prairie Avenue Bookshop on South Wabash. At first I thought it was all architecture books all the time, but in fact there turned out to be about, well, fifteen design books that I wanted. They graciously offered to ship them for me. I feel like one of those upper-class Victorian women from the States who used to make an annual pilgrimage to Paris to shop for the year. But wait till you see what I bought. Robin Kinross. Emil Ruder. Tufte's latest. All very nice.

The man at the bookshop was also kind enough to direct me to a bookish coffee shop, called The Gourmand, which was an appropriate name because I was starving. They serve, I believe, a brand of coffee called Intelligentsia, which was in any case very good, and so was the spinach and feta omelette.

Back to the hotel, where I stuffed my old abandoned briefcase into the garbage under the desk and caught a taxi north to the Homestead Inn in Evanston. I wasn't sure what to make of it. At first I thought it was quite Oxford-like, sort of ancient and tweedy, but after I walked around a bit it seems significantly more modern. There are probably a dozen restaurants and three or four coffee shops within five blocks. I spent most of the afternoon napping, taking a brief walk to find another latte and a cinnamon bun, and writing an abstract for the Prague Design conference in November. The topic is lists, and I'm pitching our dynamic table of contents project. Sometimes I get so busy I forget how much I enjoy writing. I really become a five about it for a brief time.

Come evening I headed downstairs to find a table full of colleagues in various stages of eating dinner. I joined them, and the food was great. I had a bowl of clam chowder that started out just as a bowl of clams in their shells, and the waiter brought along a jug of chowder that he poured on top. I once again was struck, after these past days of being largely alone, by how much I enjoy the company of my colleagues. I couldn't get enough of them. Now tomorrow we meet all day to talk about what we're going to do together for the next couple of years. John tells me one of the likely outcomes is that we'll meet regularly for hackfests. I couldn't be tickled pinker.