Friday, May 10 - Off we go! Getting away is chaos; our ride to the airport is provided by Patty (who stayed over the night before to make sure there wouldn't be any mixups) - but her car turns out to have a slow leak in the right front tire, which almost derails us a few miles from the airport. Then Virgin Atlantic (our airline) almost balks at Kris' ticket: her passport reads "Christine Dyas" (her maiden name), but her ticket reads "Chrs McGrew". Fortunately, they decide to let her through (that the first name matches - sorta - in the ticket and the passport is the deciding factor), but this discrepancy will haunt Kris' efforts to cash her traveler's checks (same discrepancy) throughout the trip. We are warned that coming back we will need to have some form of proof that Dyas == McGrew for the return trip, since English airport security restrictions are more stringent. Two calls to our travel agent bring promises that he will make computer notations that will set things a-right (we don't believe him - quite rightly, as it turns out); Patty promises to fax our marriage license to a hotel along the way. We'll have to hope that's good enough, otherwise there'll be an extra expense at the end, if we have to buy a new ticket home for Kris!
The Flight - our plane is a Boeing 747. Each seat has a little LCD TV screen on the back (for the person sitting behind you) on which you can see any one of nine recent movies (I watch "Broken Arrow"), four channels of TV programs (I watch an episode of the British comedy "Not the News", and the very first episode of "The X-Files"), a dozen Nintendo videogames, and a little trip-so-far map that updates every 10 seconds or so! It was really neat, but did I really need to know that we were at 41,000 feet, and that the temperature outside was -72° F? Food is fine, drinks are free (including alcohol - I have a nice congac), and there is no smoking anywhere on board, which was probably for the best. Many seats were empty, so Kris and I had three seats for the two of us. I'm a rabid non-flier, but manage not to have any obvious panic attacks. Flying is just like riding a bus -- a bus that is seven miles up in the sky; a device that is designed to eventually plummet back to earth.
The bag of stuff Virgin Atlantic gives you includes headphones, toothbrush and paste, slipper socks, writing paper, blinders, airsick bag, and dinner menu. In the event of turbulence, you can use the handy carry-cord to strangle yourself!
The Arrival - is uneventful. Customs is straightforward, but some people on our plane have their bags thoroughly searched. Once out of customs, we are met by Jeremy and Bea (who sound Australian), two Cosmos tour folks, who will sheperd us (and the dozen or so people on our flight who are taking one Cosmos/Global tour or another) as far as the hotel. While we wait for everyone to straggle out of customs, I change money to provide pocket change for all countries we'll be in (except Switzerland, for some reason the airport exchanges don't carry Swiss Francs). We board a shuttle bus to "The Kennedy", a comfortable, but not luxurious, hotel in northern London, which has a tiny little Cosmos bureau in the lobby. The room is small but reasonable, the TV requires a funny protocol that I don't figure out until the next day (to turn it on, select a channel); but the phone's lack of a ringer is more worrisome.
The Queen couldn't welcome us herself, so she sent some of the lads 'round.
Saturday, May 11 - London - up early for a tour of Windsor Castle, one of the Royal Residences. Our bus wends it way though London, past Madame Trussaud's (huge line outside) and the Planetarium (no line at all). The city is full of soccer fans for tonight's FA Cup championship match between Manchester United and Liverpool (Manchester won, btw.) Once out of the city proper, we drive past farms, passing though the fields at Runnymede -- where the Magna Carta was signed -- and on up to Windsor.
London Subway map and and our get-your-room-key-back card at the Kennedy Hotel.
Windsor Castle - when we arrive, the chapel is closed to tourists for some sort of ceremony; private cars drive past us tourists, parking in the Palace grounds (our bus parks far away, in the parking lot for mere mortals.) Guards are everywhere, some checking passes on the cars, other checking us, using bomb-sniffing devices. Commercial jets, presumably on their way to Gatwick Airport, pass low over the palace every four minutes or so. My favorite guard, though, is a soldier marching resolutely back and forth in red jacket, bearskin helmet, and assault rifle with fixed bayonet!
Traditional Uniform, Modern Weapon
The castle, which dates from AD 1080, has been almost continually rebuilt and upgraded since. Although several rooms are closed to visitors due to the fire in 1993, the majority of the castle's rooms are untouched, and filled with paintings of various royal worthies (and royal worthies' worthies, for instance in the "Waterloo Chamber", which paintings of The Duke of Wellington, the Earl of Uxbridge, General Picton, Marshal Blucher, Count Platov (of Russia) and Sir William Congreve (of Congreve rocket fame)). The Queen's Guard Chamber is interesting in that the two flags that hang there are presented to the queen each year by the families of Marlboro (the general who won Blenheim) and Wellington (victor of Waterloo) as rent for the estates granted them in gratitude for their services. The flags are, respectively, replicas of French flags captured at Blenheim and Waterloo.
The walls everywhere are festooned with swords, pikes, muskets, pistols (a couple are double-barreled pistols); suits of armor stand here and there; there are even a few (light) cannon! Most impressive of all this hardware is a seven-barreled musket device - looking very like a gatling gun - but its fired by a single flintlock mechanism, which touches off all seven barrels at once. Each barrel looks to be about .75 caliber - talk about stopping power!
The furniture is, of course, exquisite, much of it with gold and silver inlays; very similar to 18th century furnitures I've seen in other European palaces (get me, the palace expert.)
The greatest excitement generated in many tourists comes from the Queen Mary Doll House, a 1/12-scale replica of a hypothetical mid-1920's six-story house furnished with unbelievalbly accurate furniture and accessories: a scale vacuum cleaner, scale lighting (the building itself is period-wired for electricity), scale bathrooms (the plumbing runs hot and cold water - the scale toilets flush!), scale golf bags with scale clubs, scale bonsai trees, a scale wine cellar with individual scale bottles, a scale garage full of cars, a scale throne room with scale crowns on scale thrones, even a scale postage-stamp collection album (which is itself about the size of a stamp) with scale, accurate stamps pasted inside it), a scale library with scale books, etc. etc. It is certainly a brilliant bit of craftsmanship, and a pleasant surprise -- "human touches" are sometimes few and far between in ostentatious palace-settings.
Lifesize Queen Victoria outside Windsor Castle
Afterward there's time to have a walk around the shops just down the hill from the castle, designed to separate the happy tourist from his or her happy money. "The Reject China Shop" sold less-than-complete china sets, and "The English Teddy Bear Company" were some of the more interesting ones; the "Victorian Mall" (near the bus-parking area and the subway stop) included the "Diamond Jubilee" shop, whose theme of being a replica of the 1897 celebration for Queen Victoria's 50th year as Queen was kind of spoiled by the Beatles memorabilia and records for sale near the cash register. (Nearby, one can get a "Victorian-era"-looking portrait of oneself here, for a mere £18 -- abut $30. Certainly the idea of paying a pile o' pounds to get a black and white photograph of myself dressed to the 7-and-a-halfs (it'd be the nines, but remember, thousands of people have worn these period clothes before me) not smiling (one is enjoined not to -- its not 'historic') is almost irresistable, but I somehow find the strength to pass it by. . .
Plane flies by its way to Heathrow; from the parking lot outside Windsor
Walking around, I am struck by how many German-speaking tourists there are here today. While buying postcards at a little stall, I listen to an Austrian customer argue with an Indian shop-keeper about how much change should be given - in German and English respectively - neither being able to converse in the other's language.
Amazing the stuff you hang onto from a trip, isn't it?
Just before boarding the bus to head back to London, the chapel's bells ring; presumably the special service there is ending.
Besides the inevitable dislocation of everyone driving on the 'wrong side of the road' (everything is a mirror-image, the 'fast lane' is the outside, not inside line, for instance) I felt quite a home watching London-area traffic. London drivers are as crazy as any I've seen (even Boston!) -- cutting each other off with abandon, changing lanes without warning, going slow in the fast lane -- it's great! Lane markers don't seem to mean much, either -- everyone pretty much ignores them, crossing into oncoming traffic to get around other cars, and the oncoming cars' drivers don't seem unduly concerned about it, either. Our driver expertly threads his way through streets nearly completely blocked by parked cars; I'd estimate he made some turns with three molecules space to spare a couple of times.
We take dinner in the hotel's restaurant; I have the served-all-day "English Breakfast", which is a hearty egg, bacon, sausage, et. al meal, topped off with a hamburger for dessert. Mad cow disease - hah! The maitre'd continually hover over customers, which is a little unsettling -- they act as a combination busboy and sergeant-major. One gets the impression that they're expecting any and all customers to suddenly make some sort of major social gaffe, and it is there job to see that such shame shall not come to the restaurant -- on their watch, anyway. . .
We return to the room to discover our "continental breakfasts" for the next day already there, in baskets, covered in cellophane. "Continental breakfasts" are primarily bread and coffee or tea, and for the next 21 days we'll have pretty much exactly that, until we're quite sick of it.
Sunday, May 12 - London - today Kris will be off seeing sights with a computer-friend of hers, whilest I do a bit of museum-hopping. The British Museum, the British Army Museum, and the Imperial War Museum are all calling, but there's no way I could do all three in one day (especially a Sunday, when many museum's hours are curtailed.) The British Museum is quite near - six or seven blocks - so I schlepp off toward it. Like most city maps, the one I have doesn't include all the little twisty side-streets, so "six or seven blocks" isn't to be taken literally. I arrive at the gates, to find them locked, not to open until 2:30pm. Fortunately, there is an Underground stop nearby (this is true of pretty much any touristy place you're likely to go in London). I purchase a "day pass" (3 pounds - about $4.50; only about twice what a one-way trip costs) and make my way to the National Army Museum, going from the northern part of London to the Western part with ease, even though I have to change trains twice to get where I'm going. Subways in London are generally clean and orderly; I am reminded of Penn Station in NYC in all the different London stations (though in NYC, many outlying stations are neither clean nor orderly). Panhandlers and street-musicians appear here and there, though signs tell me that both are not allowed. Once outside the station near the Museum, I get lost; pleasant and helpful passers-by set me on the right path.
The outside of the British Army Museum. The inside is simply amazing.
The National Army Museum is unimpressive on the outside, but the inside more than makes up for it. I'm going to gush rather a lot about it, so if you're not interested, skip down a bit. I would say that of the many museums I've visited, it was one of the most respectful, informative, and interesting I've seen. The collections were carefully chosen, the vignettes lovingly crafted, and the descriptions provided are informative yet concise. A nice, nice place to visit. Unfortunately, souvenirs were unavailable (more on that later), but I kept extremely detailed notes, which I will now inflict upon you.
The museum is staffed by British Army soldiers in uniform - not period or full-dress uniforms (which would, of course, be unbelievably uncomfortable), but it is nice that a public military museum is tended by military men - most I've been to have be staffed by people who could just as easily staff an art museum, or a library. A small thing, certainly, but as I walked around this place, I became more and more aware that this was where the British Army wanted to tell its story - of the glory, sure, but also of the mud, blood, drudgery and inglory of it all.
The museum is divided up by rough historical period - I mostly was interested in the Napoleonic period on, of which there was plenty. Scattered throughout are life-size mannequins sporting uniforms and weapons depicting various aspects of the soldier's life, just standing out in the open (one is enjoined not to touch, but one could.) I'll list those last, because they were by far the most memorable things in the museum. One can look at only so many muskets, swords and flags (in olden days these were huge, to be seen from a distance, something that doesn't quite hit home until you see 'em close up); these mannequins are a brilliant idea.
Among the uniforms and medals is a bobby-like helmet (complete with gold-spike) of an officer of the Royal Dockyard Battalion (1854) - chiefly interesting to me because of the obscurity of the unit, and the grandeur of the helmet - the front-plate and so on are gold-plated. Another exhibit included jackets, belt-plates, gorget's (a ceremonial necklace-like affair), and shakos of the East India Company Army ("John Company"). Another included drums, fifes (with cases) and an on-campaign china sets from the Napoleonic era. All the uniforms are in excellent condition, by the way. In one display case is the stuffed figure of "Crimean Tom", a unit's pet cat of the Crimean War - old Tom doesn't look to happy about it all, though.
A collection of medals and other decorations includes campaign medals issued from 1816 through 1913 -- the one for the South African war has 25 battle clasps! Imagine the stopped figure of a veteran trying to keep upright with that pinned to his chest! All of Evelyn Wood's medals are here, along with his batons, and sashes - quite impressive. So are the medals of others of the pantheon of Victorian heros, like Garnet Woolesey and Fredrick Roberts. Other displays show off the Star of India, the Order of the Bath, you name the medal, it's here. One case holds all sixty-four different commemorative medals were issued by the government from the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1792 to the death of Wellington in 1852, eight of which are various commemorations of the death of the Iron Duke himself. The museum has thirty Victoria Crosses in its collection (for those that don't know, the VC is the highest decoration possible in the British military - a battle's ferocity is often described by how many VC's were awarded.)
The walls not covered with displays are taken up with magnificent martial paintings of famous events in Englsh Army history (mostly the victories), along with posters and artifacts from various periods. Two caught my eye:
There's also a smallish gallery of (huge) paintings in the museum, but its a bit redundant, what with beautiful paintings all around anyway.
Weapons are here, too, of course. There's an entire room just of cutlery (the Templar Gallery), containing officer's and enlisted men's swords and daggers from around 1780 through around 1900. In it there are both curved swords (for slashing) and straight ones (for hacking), plus a number of offbeat items: a "leadcutter" -- an extra-heavy blade that was used to strengthen the wielder's arm by cutting through bars of lead with it; plus a number of serrated blades used by 'pioneers', engineers and artillerymen; plus a number of ceremonial blades, many with gold inlays in the blade - many describing to whom and why they were presented, including one presented to that stolid Victorian general Hugh Gough.
Other weapons presented (besides the inevitable collection of muskets and rifles in immaculate condition), include:
In addition to the more normal displays described above, there were a number of dioramas of varying scales to describe an event: for instance a 30mm figure (that is, a normal man is represented by a figure 30 mm high) diorama of the defense of Rorke's Drift against the Zulus; a tank attack across no-man's-land in 1917 in 30mm; one tank carries a bundle of logs to fill a trench. British infantry string out behind the tanks as they advance, and the unhappy-looking German infantry begin to scatter as the tanks approach the lip of their trench. An HO-scale D-Day diorama set at the sea-wall of one of the British beachs has bedraggled German prisoners watching a burning Sherman flail-tank, while other Germans who are still resisting begin to retreat from the invaders. In another, a long-barrelled Sherman and a Churchill shoot it out at very close quarters with a Stug IV tank destroyer, an AT gun and a King Tiger somewhere in Germany late in the war. All the dioramas are beautifully done, with tremendous attention to detail.
But the piece de resistance in the diorama area was the 420 square foot Waterloo battlefield (that's a little more than 20 feet on a side) with 75,000 7mm lead-tin miniature figures to portray every important (from the British point of view, anyway) moment in the battle. The model was built in 1838 at the direction of Captain William Silborne, who also wrote the major historical work drawn from actual veteran's accounts of the battle. It has been restored for display, and now has an automatic audio track synchronised with special lights to draw you attention to individual events. Beautiful!
In a more modern vein, two small theaters show continuous-loop videotapes -- one a rousing rendition of WWII (which isn't so interesting to me), and a more interesting one concerning three men and their careers in the Army (one a veteran of the Charge of the Light Brigade, one killed at Isandlwana (a British column was anhilliated there by Zulus in 1879), the third awarded the Victoria Croas by ballot when his unit was awarded one during the Boer War, and asked to vote on who should get it!)
Probably the weirdest thing there was the skeleton of Marengo, Napoleon's horse, but by far the most interesting and memorable were the mannequins I mentioned earlier, and which I'll now tell you about now. I promise not to go into this much detail about anything else in this entire story, but this museum was a high-point of my journey. All the mannequins were beautifully done -- each with a distinct 'personality'; each with a readable expression on his or her face, and beautifully costumed. This is the way to make history live. Each mannequin or group had a little placard associated which gave you some historical details to help you appreciate the situation the mannequin is "in".
... Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I left. I wanted to see the British Museum today, and see Picadilly Circus, and stuff. All and all, this was one of the best museums I've ever seen.
So, now, off to crowded, confusing Picadilly Circus, to see "The Trocadero", a collection of unusual and interesting amusments - movie houses, arcades, and theme eateries. One of the two I really wanted to see - the "Alien" 'ride' (in which you're chased around a replica of the colony in "Aliens" by an alien, while your Colonial Marine guide fires a realistic automatic weapon to try and save you) - is closed; but the "Battletech" game is open. "Battletech" is a far-future wargame, in which you pilot a giant cannon- and rocket-armed robot, trying to defeat your opponents in similar devices. What makes the game interesting is that the game is played in individual 'capsules', in which all the controls work (including foot pedals, throttle, joystick, and 10 or 12 different weapons-selection switches), and the displays show real-time, smooth-motion images of what is going on 'outside'. Gangs of fun -- watching enemy robots tear across the game area while you try and draw a bead on 'em, plus the real-time gun-flashes, rocket-streaks, and explosions make this the best vidoe game I've ever tried. Each game was 10 minutes long; though if you get "killed", you restart, which takes up some time with fancy "ejection seat" graphics. I've got my game-card (callsign "Cisco Kid") -- there's another one of these things in Chicago, I hear. . .
The Bar at the Battletech Gaming Place.
Now this is civilization!
Now, at last, I'm off to the British Museum! Back onto the Underground (the station at Picadilly is huge, and minor hurricanes blow through its white-tiled passageways) to Goodge station. As I walk in the general direction of the museum, I pass a storefront, from which a nicely-dressed young fellow asks me if I have 15 minutes to take a "personality test" (I could have told him, "thanks, but I'm sure I've got one", but I'm not that smart). Glancing past him, I see copies of "Dianetics" in the window. Oh no - Scientology! I tell him I haven't the time, and he politely gives me directions to the Museum.
A few blocks right and down, and there it is!
A Roman Mosiac painstakingly restored and displayed at the British Museum
The British Museum is huge. Not a huge as the Louvre, sure, but then it's stuffed full of much more interesting things (to me, anyway.) I couldn't possibly do justice to this place, so I won't try. I'll just say a few things. The collection of objects there is literally overwhelming. There are things I saw there that I thought I'd never see - mummy cases, pieces of the Parthenon (I touched the Parthenon, when nobody was looking, shame on me!), 20-odd foot tall Babylonian winged-beastie figures, jewelry, mosaics, more and more and more. And statues - many, many Roman, Greek, Egyptian - you name it. Many of the statues have been damaged through history. Many have been 'de-nosed' -- it would appear that vandalism is a universal and cross-millenial hobby. The front facade of a Roman villa is here. And the library! Oh, to spend a mere decade in there would be very nice indeed. Illuminated Bibles, letters, stamps, and books from the earliest books (in cuniform), even sheet music.
Part of the British Museum Collection: a Grecian Urn.
What's a grecian urn? Oh, you've heard that one...
The most prevalent type of tourist here is Japanese, who travel in well-defined mobs, with their own Japanese-speaking guides. I guess they get a lot of Japanese here - the signs are in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Despite injunctions prohibiting flash pictures, the Japanese as a group seem to insist on taking flash pictures - even of things that don't require it. You can trace the movements of the groups of Japanese through the museum by the blinding flash-storms that break out as they go into a new room.
Rolling-marble timepiece
I'm proud to say that in a little over two hours, I visited every room that was open in the Museum. It took careful attention to the map, since the layout can get a little confusing, and the discipline not to stop (the temptation of which happens practically continuously), and a good pair of shoes. I could continue with superlatives about the place, but it still wouldn't do justice to it. If you get a chance, just go see it, ok?
Restored Egyptian hieroglyph parchment
One of the many mummy cases in the egyptian exhibit of the British Museum
Once they shooed me (and several hundred others) out of the museum - how dare they close this place - I walked back in the direction of our hotel. Along the way, I run across an antiquarian book fair in a hotel. Never one to pass such a thing up, I wander about. The sale is apparently put on by a consortium of small bookshops. Lots of amazing books (some with stiff prices); I'm ashamed to say I didn't buy any -- I'd have never been able to keep any of these wonderful old books in the condition they'd deserve through the trip (and I'd have wanted to read it before doing anything clever like mailing it to myself.) Oh well.
The walk back to the hotel is longer than it seemed this morning (of course, since then I've walked many, many miles); I arrive footsore and beat. A nice "English breakfast" meal, and I repair to the room to watch a little English TV.
Channels available are BBC-1, BBC-2, ITV and 'Channel 4', plus the MTV-like "Free Video Channel". Channel 4 is more PBS-like (though since PBS shows lot of British programming anyway, all the channels here are 'PBS-like'). BBC-2 shows a bizarre soccer-related show which is very reminiscent of "Wayne's World" -- two geeky guys in a living-room set, sitting on a couch and talking about soccer, with a rowdy audience of soccer fans. ("Soccer" in Europe is "football". What we call "football", they call "American Football".) I see my first episode of "Steptoe and Son" (a re-run, of course; Norman Lear repackaged "Steptoe and Son" as "Sanford and Son" in the US); re-runs of "Sledge Hammer", of all things; and a documentary about an evengelical Christian group that calls itself "The Jesus Army" - very much in the Southern-Baptist tradition, seeming a little out of place in jolly old England. A number of commercials on TV here star US actors; I saw Dennis Leary, and Jim Belushi - doing a "Blues Brothers" schtick! Weird...
Booty from England (like any tourist, we picked up a bunch of tiny-by-itself-but-heavy-as-heck-all-together brouchures and stuff - to give you ideas of things to do yourself): Royal Mail worldwiide (mail anywhwere in the world) postcard stamp packtet holder (we used the stamps); matches and a business card from the "Cul De Sac" Italian restaurant, London; Windsor Castle Information brouchure, a pile o' receipts for everything from dinner to postcards; Phone Guide card, London - teeny tiny print of informational phone numbers (theaters, transport, weather, tours, etc.); "Kennedy Hotel" letter paper and envelopes; Brooklands Auto Museum brouchure; several British Museum brouchures, brouchure for "Eden Camp", a WWII-homefront museum; Bank of England brouchure; Victoria and Albert Museum; Royal Air Force Museum brouchure; Shuttleworth Aircraft (1920's and 1930's) Collection at Old Warden Aerodrome brouchure, Dover B&B brouchures; Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare Association brouchure (Shakespearean performances and museums all over England); Cantebury Tales theme museum; Battlefield Tours brouchures to many WWI and WWII battlefields in Western Europe; Royal Festival schedule - music, visual arts, dance, you name it; Barbican Center schedule - an art gallery with other arts included; "Rock Circus" brouchure -- part of the "Trocadero " complex at Picadilly Circus designed to separate younger folks from as much money as possible - including a Hard Rock Cafe, a seven-screen theater, "Virtual World", and four other such much-more-than-a-nickelodeons; London Zoo brouchure, "Museum of the Moving Image" - film, video, and videogames(!) brouchure; "Walks" brouchures -- walking tours -- including a "Ghost Walk", guided by "The Late Thomas Bodie, RIP - the guide who's been dying to meet you" ; a pile of postcards; and six -- count 'em, six -- copies of the subway-and-bus map of central London (just in case they're different.)
English Money - L to R, T to B:
2 pence("2P")-front, 1 pound-back, 10P,
2P-back, 1 pound-front, 5p
5p, 1 penny-back, 1penny-front
Monday, May 13 - London to Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Today our tour begins in earnest, as we will travel to the continent. Our non-ringing phone decides to ring - twice. Our hotel has at least two different paths for wakeup calls, and we accidently took both. The hotel switchboard keeps one list (if you call the switchboard), and so do the porters. "Porters" are actually much more than that in an English hotel; they do most of the things we think of as "front desk" tasks; everything except checking in and changing money. Anyway, the upshot is that we get a wakeup call at 6:30 am, and another at 6:45am.
Our tour itinerary says we should have our bags (the big bags, the ones that go in the bus' cargo hold) outside our door at 7am for a 8am getaway. (If the time of departure seems a bit early, get used to it - it's a continuing theme.) But by 7:30 am, the bags still aren't gone, so we muscle them down to the lobby ourselves (along with all the other luggage: camera bags(2), and backpacks (2). As you might have realized, we in no way traveled "light" on this trip. )
The lobby is in chaos. It turns out that there are three different Cosmos/Global tours leaving from the hotel this morning; the three Cosmos employees gamely try to sort out all the problems - the people who are at the wrong hotel, the people who missed one of the earlier buses, new arrivals ("The Kennedy" turns out to be a major hub for Cosmos tours), etc. Our luggage hadn't been picked up because of delays in getting out earlier tours, but soon enough our bags are joined by a huge jumble of other, similarly large and heavy bags of others of the various European tours that start today. After a bit, our bus arrives and we climb in for the trip to Dover, and thence to Calais. Once there, we will board the bus we'll be on for the next 20 days (yrgh), and meet up with the folks we'll be spending time with on that bus.
Our route southward takes us though central London, crossing the Thames on Tower Bridge. A pub nearby announces itself as "The Hung, Drawn and Quartered." The day is sunny and bright, our route takes us past the docks of London, then once over the Bridge, into a general suburban south London (around our route, anyway) onto the A2/M2 toward Dover. Gasoline is about $4.00 / gallon (about 3.5 times the rate around where we live when we left.) It turns out that this is the lowest price we'll see for gasoline for the entire trip.
Once out of London, we drive past many large farms, many planted with the bright yellow flowers which wind up as canola oil. These make for an interesting contrast with the bright green of the rest of the farmland - they look like huge brilliant yellow rectangles lain on top of the farmland. We stop at a rest-stop place along the highway (very like rest-stops along major highways in the US), since our bus has no bathroom on board, then on to Dover. We pass a number of signs for the "Chunnel": the rail line that goes directly to Paris -- we won't be taking that, though, since we're heading north to Amsterdam, and won't be in Paris for over two weeks.
At Dover, we board a ocean-liner-sized ferryboat (not one of the hovercraft, which we catch a glimpse of - a gigantic hockypuck with huge propellers on the back) and set off for Calais, France. The ship has shops, moneychanging booths, a kiddy-play-room, videogame rooms, restaurants, and lounges with gigantic windows to see outside. We have smooth seas, so it is an easy crossing. The day has turned a bit hazy, so there isn't much to see besides other ferries passing us on their way to England.
I take a turn around the deck (somebody has to watch our carry-bags, so only one of us gets to explore at a time); looking out over the stern, the ship's wake doesn't dissipate; it stretches back as far as the eye can see as straight as an arrow. At least we're not traveling in circles. . .
Rather suddenly (well, except for the hour of nothing happening), the French coast can be seen to our left. Ten or so minutes later, we and a big mob of other Cosmos/Globus tour-goers (who seem to be a majority of the passengers this trip) troop off the ship and are taken to our tour buses.
We have a short bit of confusion as it turns out that pretty much everybody's luggage (on all six buses leaving today) has been delivered to the wrong bus, and so we all mill about smartly rearranging whose bag goes where.
This is a good time to introduce you to our tour guide and the some of the more memorable members of the tour. First, of course, is our tour guide, Bridgitte van See. She's Dutch, but lives in England (and to complete the international triple-play, is married to a US airline pilot). Her English is very well-spoken, but like many people speaking their second language, she tends to put words in funny order to our ears. (God knows what my various attempts at German/French/Italian sound like to natives, since I can't even pronounce half the words I know, and I probably misuse them.) Brigitte's responsibilities include making sure our luggage gets from place to place correctly, making sure everybody gets back on the bus at rest stops, making sure everybody gets on the bus in the morning, telling us where we are and pithy details about things we were passing (she had yellow-highlighted tour books which she sneaks looks at when she thinks we aren't looking), and collecting money for the 'optional' tours (she had her own credit-card-imprinting gizmo for this purpose). She is certainly consciencious, but we couldn't shake the feeling that she was playing the schoolteacher, and all of us are slightly rebellious schoolchildren. She couldn't seem to 'connect' with us as a group, though she seemed to get along with individuals (including me) just fine. It might have been that she was put off by half the bus being fast asleep whenever she wanted to tell us something (something she commented on to someone in my hearing), but she's been a tourguide for a number of years - she ought to be used to that by now.
Our bus driver is Enrico, an Italian from Milan. He's been driving tour buses for 35 years now (he doesn't look his age, then.) He's a very quiet guy; doesn't talk much without being asked something -- but when you do ask him something, he's a really funny guy! (I occasionally wonder what our tour would be like if he were the guide. Might have been much less like school. . .) His routine is pretty tough: he doesn't get breaks, per se - he goes out on another tour as soon as one completes; his only days off are when the bus stops in a city for more than one day (and not all of those). He doesn't own the bus he drives ("that'd make me crazy", he says -- having to worry about maintenance and all that), but that's just fine by him. He prefers Western to Eastern Europe - he's been pretty much everywhere in Europe, driving a bus. He gets a couple of months off a year, when tourist season ends, which he spends with his mother(!).
Our Tour Group -- A Fine Group to travel with not a single one of them
got on my nerves (which means, I suspect, that I got on theirs no end.)
The Tourists: From United States - Besides Kris and I, there were three other groups of Americans (an inaccurate term, of course - people from Brazil are "Americans", y'know): a mother, father, son and daughter (whom we called "the family") from Oklahoma; a group of college students from Colorado ("the kids"), chaperoned by a professor (Marco, whom we just call "the professor"); a mother, her son, her sister, and a friend ("Melba, Oren, Mary, and Bonny") from Rochester, NY- interestingly, very few of our fellow tourists do we get to know by name -- this is partly to my own inate inability to remember anybody's name very well, and partly due to our realization that we would never see any of these people again, so knowing their names was less important. That might sound shallow, or insensitive, but you try travelling with 30 people you don't know and see how well you do. Mary and Melba both have the knack of being good conversationalists; of listening well, and making you feel like they really care about what you're saying, even if what it is is pretty trivial. These days, its something of a disappearing art - since we can all get all the entertainment and information we need (and more) from various kinds of little boxes, actually just talking to people may be falling into disuse. (Don't talk to me about Internet chatting and the like -- they're overrun with adolescent twits.)
From Australia - The Australians (and NZ'ers) on the tour are the most fun, I think. We have George, and his wife: George is one of the most experienced - or at least clever - travellers on the tour. I take to calling him "map man", because at every stop, he finds appropriate maps and tourist information bureaus (and grabs piles of spares to share around with the rest of us.) Then there's John and Holly, two Latvians who emmigrated to Australia many years ago. (I still say their accents sound South African, but I was definitely wrong about where they're from.) They are probably the most travelled of us all - over a dozen trips to Europe, and elsewhere - including 17,000 miles via bus all over North America (one of those 30-days to anywhere deals that Greyhound has from time to time): after this tour, they're going via Finland to Latvia (they had originally intended to go buy train through Germany and Poland, but they were warned by Latvian relatives that criminals in Poland (and probably Latvia) regularly stop trains and rob everybody on board at gunpoint, so they're going via Finland.) Then there's Jenny and Amanda, a mother and daughter touring together; Amanda is studying in England, and Jenny came to visit her; they decided quite off-the-cuff to take the tour together (ah, to have that much money.) The two of them are generally known by the nickname "The Chimneys", because of their extraordinarily heavy smoking habits (especially Amanda). Jenny in particular is very pleasant, and she is one of our regular conversationalists (along with all of the above). Also, there are two older women (one a widow, one not) travelling together, and one older gent, Douglass (a widower) travelling on his own.
From New Zealand: A husband and wife, who have travelled a lot, though much of it is to/from Australia (which is quite a haul in itself.)
From Canada: A young chinese couple (they're both Canadian citizens, though.)
From Indonesia: A young couple - he on a student visa, she not -- which will cause problems for here at a couple of borders. He's taller than I, heavier too, and she more normal-sized. He's a good guy (good pool player too), smart and funny; she's pretty quiet.
From Taiwan: A group of college-aged students.
In general all of us get along just fine; everybody is pretty good company.. The Aussies and NZ-ers are all older (except for Amanda) than Kris and I; of the US-ers, we're in the middle, and we're older than most of the others. All in all, it's a nice mix.
The bus is air conditioned and not too cramped, and although it has a bathroom on board, it is locked so we can't use it. Although this seemed initially a bad thing ("now we'll have to make lots of stops"), in retrospect this was a good thing - the stops arenn't such a bad thing (though they are a bit expensive), and we were spared hours on the road smelling a bathroom (readers who've spent time on a bus with a bathroom will know what I mean.)
We pile into the bus and we're on our way. We're waved en masse through French customs - to Kris' chagrin -- she had hoped to collect border-stamps as souveniers - and after a quick stop at the across the border rest stop (some change some money, there's also a bathroom -- fortunately, the Cosmos people are very cognisant that since we'll be doing a lot of long bus driving on this tour, periodic WC stops are necessary.) Then north along the A16 through coastal French farmland towards Belgium. The weather is sunny, and the land flat and, well, farmed. The highway is three lanes each way, with overpasses and all. (I don't know what I was expecting, but for some reason I didn't expect coastal France to look like coastal North Carolina.)
We're waved through the Belgian border, while Kris snoozes. Although the weather has been fine as we drive north, by 4:15 pm (the continent is an hour ahead of England, so we're now a full six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time) the sky is quite overcast. The terrain looks just like that I've seen in paintings of the area from Napoleonic days - wide fields separated by tall, sculpted tree lines. It looks just like the paintings except, of course, for the asphalt roads, high-tension wires, cars, telephone poles, and tractors. Going up the E40, we bypass Brussels and head toward The Netherlands. Where England's farms had more sheep than cattle on them, Belgium's are almost entirely cattle.
After passing through the "Kennedy Tunnel" near the turnoff for Rotterdam, we stop at a roadhouse just across the border in The Netherlands which, like many of the places we will stop at along major highways in Europe, are extremely reminiscent of those along the New Jersey Turnpike. For dinner we have hamburgers and fries (31 Guilders). Although laid out like a buffet, where you slide your tray along and grab what you want, here you just pick out what you want, pay, and then take your tray with your drink (only) and sit down. Then a nice (if somewhat overworked) lady brings out what you ordered. The food is roadhouse quality: edible, but nothing to write home about (so I didn't.) Then back out to the bus and on into Amsterdam. Along the highway, we see cows grazing on the grass around a McDonald's restaurant. If they only knew. . .
Sundown in Amsterdam
Around 7pm, we arrive at our hotel on the outskirts of Amsterdam: "The Galaxy". Brigitte, our guide, checks us all into the hotel (something she will do throughout the trip - we just pick up our keys.) Our room is very large, high-ceilinged, and furnished like a Sauder catalog (Sauder specializes in particleboard put-it-together-yourself furniture). The effect is that of a really nice college dormroom. We have a late dinner at the hotel restaurant (50 Guilders) - my meal is the biggest portion of barbequed ribs I've ever seen (I take the leftovers for a latenight snack), which is quite tasty.
Back in the room, we watch today's David Letterman(!) show, complete with Dutch subtitles. The hotel television receives BBC-1 and BBC-2, three BBC-like Dutch channels, a couple of Spanish ones, plus MTV-Europe and a Dutch music-video channel. Just for the heck of it, we take a short walk into the chilly, drizzly evening -- everything (except a nearby go-go bar) is closed, and there is no traffic to speak of, foot or wheeled. The roads are paralleled by separate bicycle-only roads for safety (much better than the 'bike lanes' used in the US). Our hotel is the home of the "Amsterdam Admirals", the American Football team based in Amsterdam. The lobby is frequented by huge football players; it's a little unexpected to see football players in Europe.
Tuesday, May 14 - Amsterdam to/from Margraaten - Up at 7:30 for a trip to the American cemetary at Margraaten -- the only US serviceman's cemetary in the Netherlands. Kris's maternal grandfather - killed just over the border in Germany in late 1944 - is buried there, and a major objective of our time in The Netherlands is to visit it on behalf of the family. Today we'll skip all our regular tour events (a trip to a diamond factory, or something) and travel there; it's about as far away as one can get from Amsterdam and still be in The Netherlands. But before we go, we partake of what will be the best 'continental breakfast' we'll have on this tour -- rolls, cheese, ham, salami, and/or roast beef, with each portion of meat or cheese in its own factory-sealed plastic wrapping. To drink we have orange juice and coffee/tea. We eat hearty in anticipation of a long trip into the hinterlands. (Stocking up on these individually sealed portions of meat and cheese at a grocery store would have been a really good idea, but we are not quite that travel-saavy yet.)
Kris shows the way!
Our trip to the cemetary is via Maasricht, a large city to the south. We start by taking the #34 bus to the central train station (most every European city has a "Central Station"; bigger ones also have an "Eastern", or "Western", etc. as well.) Bus transport in the Netherlands is regulated with a "Strippenkaart", a 2, or 3, or 5 or 10 "zone" ticket, which is stamped by the driver in various ways, depending on how far you're travelling.
Once at the train station, we obtain a 2-person day pass (98 Guilders), which our ticket-guy says is the most economical way to get to and from where we want to go (on later perusal of a rate schedule, it turns out he's right). We board the 10:02 bound for Eindhoven (scene of a fierce fight in 1944 between US paratroopers and Germans as part of the "Market-Garden" operation), where we'll change to another train (and then further south, to yet another train) on our way to Maasricht. It's a chilly, overcast, foggy day. Unlike London, there is tons of graffiti on every concrete surface we can see near the rail line. Looks like Brooklyn! (There seems to be at least one English word that the Dutch can spell, and it starts with an "F".)
The towns along the way are typical for Holland - small, with a centrally located church with a tall steeple. Windmills are scattered here and there - yesterday our tour guide said there are about 1,000 windmills in all of Holland, down from about 10,000 at the height of windmill use (electric pumps, though they may be less romantic and less 'green', work much more efficiently, and are not affected by whether the wind is blowing or not.) The farms along the rail line have more sheep than those along the highway, but cattle still predominate. The train moves along at a good clip, and is quite a smooth ride. A trolly-pushing lady goes by, selling snacks and drinks.
When changing trains, we just walk out of one and into another waiting across the platform. These train-changing stops are the only ones we make, however; the trains are "intercity", which I guess means "express" -- we blaze right through a number of small-town stations without stopping.
Once we get to Maasricht, we buy another Strippenkaart and take the S4 bus toward Margraten. Unbeknownst to us, the bus actually stops at the cemetary, but our directions (provided by the US agency that keeps up these places) says to go first to the village, which is a kilometer or so from the cemetary, so we have to hoof it -- this isn't such a big deal to me, but Kris' feet are not up to long marches, so we have to be careful about such things.
The cemetary itself is exquisitely kept. The grounds are well-manicured (it was being mowed while we were there). The whole place speaks of reverence and dignity.
Stopping at the visitor center (right behind a busload of screaming Dutch schoolchildren, who obviously have no undertanding of - or interest in - the place, and who must be repeatedly shushed by adults) to determine where PFC Chester Nettleship's marker might be, we are met by one of the Dutch employees of the cemetary. Upon hearing that we are family of one of the men buried here, he drops what he is doing (paperwork of some sort) and spends the next hour and more telling us about the cemetary, and personally taking us to find the grave.
He carries with him a bucket of sand, for reasons which will become clear shortly. Along the way, he smokes a cigarrette (like, it seems, practically everybody in Europe), and expresses surprise that I, an American, would smoke also -- American's absurd posturings on the altar of 'political correctness' are, it turns out, well-known in Europe, where they are regarded with the amused eye they deserve. "We're not all puritans", I tell him.
Kris and the Dutchman walk out into the forest of gravestones toward
where PFC Nettleship lies.
Once we arrive at the marker, one of over 8,000 in this cemetary, he takes the bucket of sand and begins applying it to the letters of the marker. Over the years of upkeep, he explains, the markers have been "maintained" by the use of circular sanders when the stone turns less than pure white. A side-effect is that the letters of name, rank, unit, home state, and date of death have become more and more shallow and thus less and less readable. The sand makes the letters temporarily more readable without further damaging the stone. An in-progress project to coat the stones with a clear protective will ensure that the stones will not be any further eroded. The sand, the man tells us, comes from the beaches of Normandy; a nice touch.
Our Objective.
To ensure that we have a memento of this, the man has brought along a polaroid instant-photo camera, and takes a couple of shots - one of the marker, and one of us with the marker. (This turned out to be important, because although both Kris and I took lots of photos with our cameras, her camera malfunctioned -- if mine had too, we'd have had no pictures at all.) He left us alone, but asked us to come back to the office when we were done.
We spent a bit of time wandering around; the place is sobering, sad. I wondered, then and now, if even a fraction of the people who come here (other than the actual combat veterans, of course) have even the barest idea of the bloody, muddy, cold, wet, fiery awful hell that these guys lived and died in. Even I, who have read extensively on the subject can never ever know the awful, numbing certainty that one could be killed in the next minute, in the next step, in the next heartbeat. All the time I stood in the cemetary all I could think about was the inexpressible admiration I felt for these guys who didn't want to be where they were (and certainly not where they are now), and for what they did wherever it was they went. PFC Nettleship spent less than three weeks in the European theater; he landed at Normandy (probably, or Cherbourg), and was transported with his unit into the front lines, and was killed (and decorated for it) helping to fight off a German tank attack. These words, when I read them over, seem entirely insufficient, but they're all I have. . . Perhaps it is enough that these men here will always be remembered -- as they should be.
The inscription on the Chapel/Belltower reads:
"In Memory of the Valor and the Sacrifices with Hallow this Soil".
The graves have been purposefully randomized; the idea is to give one a view of the breadth of the types of soldiers who lie here. We found men who had been shot down in 1943, all the way to a man killed in late May, 1945 -- after the war in Europe was officially over. Most of markers are crosses, but Jewish soldiers have stars-of-David -- they're just mixed in with the rest. Each grave is about 10 feet from the next. When we finished walking around in the cemetary, we walked over to the belltower/chapel - a relatively recent addition (in 1994) that houses a simple but beautiful non-denominational chapel, over which is the belltower, which plays a song every hour -- Amazing Grace, America the Beautiful, things like that. It played while we were there; since the cemetary is far from any noisy highways or anything, the only other sound besides the bell was the chirping of birds. Simple, but beautiful.
On the Wall in the Garden:
"Here we and all who shall hereafter live in freedom will be reminded that
to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful rememberance
of their sacrifice and with the high resolve that the cause
for which they died shall live".
We walked back toward the visitor's center, past the walls of the rememberance garden (the "Court of Honor" - with its interesting metal sculpture of a woman with birds in flight) in which the names of MIA's are carved. Visitors are enjoined to notify cemetary personnel if they know anything about anyone named as an MIA's fate.
Back at the visitor's center, our guide gave us various informational papers (and a short video) about the cemetary, unit histories, and the flower-laying program they have (you can send them money, and they'll obtain and place flowers at the grave whenever you like.) I asked the man if there was any sort of a donation I could make to help keep the place as proper as it was now. "Do you pay your taxes?", he said. "Yeah." "You already did." For this, I don't mind paying taxes. Then he asked us if he could make copies of the photos and papers we had brought: a picture the old war graves administration had sent of the marker of PFC Nettleship, and the original telegram from the War Department, notifying his wife of his death. He wanted very much to be able to add it to the cemetary's collection. We discovered that the photo depicted only PFC Nettleship's original resting place (and his original - wooden - marker): the cemetary had been opened 10 November 1944, and soldiers were interred in the order they arrived. By the end of the war almost 17,000 soldiers lay here. After the war, about 40% were brought home for reburial in the States; the remainder were shifted to their current positions for reasons already described.
We walk back at last down to the cemetary gates, through and across the road to the bus-stop back to Massricht (without having to hike back to the further stop we arrived at.) The bus back and train ride back to Amsterdam were entirely anti-climactic and uninteresting; we had had our experience for this day, and didn't really want much more out of the day.
We ate dinner at a little cafe near the hotel, and relaxed for the rest of the night. On TV there was subtitled M*A*S*H, and - to my horror - Ricky Lake and Jerry Springer, two of those awful my-sister-slept-with-my-husband shouting shows. It's bad enough those shows are seen in the US -- no wonder Europeans have weird ideas about the US, if this is what they see. I wonder if the people who appear on these shows know that their revolting antics are seen not only by people in their own country, but apparently throughout the world (of course, I doubt they care). A continuing theme I found with television in Europe is that it is (like movies) dominated for better or worse (and in this case, definitely for the worse) by US programming. Strange that the US should wind up spreading its culture (or, in the case of these particular shows, its banality) more or less by default by TV programs, rather than by more 'traditional' methods, like literature or ideas -- or military power, huh?
I call up Marge Thompson in the US (10pm here, 4pm in the US) for the heck of it -- she's thrilled, and says that we "sound as if we were in the next room" (curiously, that is precisely what Kris' grandmother had said last night when we called her, and what my mother would say when I call her later in the trip. Phone connections are a lot better than they used to be -- I can recall shouting down the wire to be heard on a transoceanic call just 15 years ago.) Anyway, all seems well there (and everywhere else back home).
Booty: Flier describing the American Cemetary; "Rails" - a magazine for rail passengers -- very like the ones you find on airplanes (the "something, anything to read" magazines - looking very like "Cosmopolitan" -- not that I have ever read "Cosmo", of course); "Amsterdam Times" - an events-calendar thingie, running to 30 pages(!) for May alone; a brouchure for "Wassenaar", a water-park very like any of the sort in the US; a brouchure for "Archeon", a museum encompassing Dinosaurs, cavemen, Roman gladiators, and the middle ages (talk about the sweep of history!); a brouchure for "Beverwijkse Bazaar" - "Europe's largest indoor market!" it says here - a shopping megacomplex that boasts 55 restaurants and 8 public restrooms, and hopefully an EMS team for folks who could come here to literally 'shop til you drop'; and certainly not least, a brouchure for the Amsterdam Admirals, which touts the team in a curious mixture of Dutch and English -- the team is hoped to go "all the way voor de World Bowl", "cheerleaders" are listed as an attraction (along with "fantastichh vuurwerk" (fantastic fireworks), music, "attracties" (attractions), "podium-acts" (guess), and "American food" (tacos and pizza, no doubt),
Dutch coinage:
1 Guilder, 5 Guilder, 1/4 Guilder, 1/10 Guilder
Wednesday, May 15 - Amsterdam to Andernach, Germany - Early (7:30 am) wake-up, another nice 'continental' breakfast (the last nice continental breakfast), and onto the bus in a steady rain for the trip to Andernach, a small town in the Rhineland.
Passing south, we go by Arnheim and then Nimejin (which is counterintuitve to me -- in WWII, the Allies got to Nimejin first) -- our glimpse of Arnheim is just that, about 5 seconds out the right-side windows. A short stop at a "restplatz" for trips to WC and a smoke. Kris tries one of those drop-the-hook-and-grab-the-toy machines (2 DM each), and misses all four times. We buy butter cookies, mineral water and cokes for later (we're allowed only water-bottles open in the bus, for fear of spillage). We're heading for Koln (Cologne), which our guide tells us is from the Latin word for "colony". She also warns us that the Germans are more 'strict' than the Dutch (the proper word, of course, is "korrect"), and then stumbles through a somewhat-accurate description of the unification of Germany six years ago. (Knowing something of history, it bothers me when tourguides give out inaccurate history, but apparently they all do -- at least all the 'normal' tourist tour guides.)
The front of the cathedral at Cologne.
We have a 90 minute stop in Koln, to see the church there, which is magnificent. The church dates back to the 12th century, but the most impressive feature - the tall twin spires on the front - date only back to the late 19th. (I cannot tell you how much of the original original church is really there: the city was extensively bombed during WWII, having the dubious distinction of being the site one of the first bomber-begun firestorms in history.) Kris and I, unfortunately, cannot stay for very long inside -- Kris has a strong allergy to mold-spores, the kind often found in old stone buildings. We settle for a couple of tour books and lunch at the nearby central railroad station ("Hauptbahnhof"). This meal serves as an object lesson - although its a nice meal, its price -- 62 DM (about $45!) shows us the necessity of picking where one eats carefully. The Rhine (looking to be about 100 yards wide here) is just a block away. Koln is one of the busiest rail junctions in the world -- the rail bridge across the Rhine has a train crossing it every two minutes -- 24 hours a day!
Then back onto the bus to continue on south through low-mountainous terrain toward Andernach, which is about 20km from Koblenz. (The terrain reminds me of the hilly farm country of western Pennsylvania.) Despite the rainy weather, a sailplane floats above us as we drive down the two-lane-each-way highway. On either side, just about every square inch of unforested and un-mountained land is cultivated. Rather than follow the way of the land, the highway is carried across the valleys on several-hundred-foot high bridges, so as not to disturb the villages that nestle into the valleys themselves. The steep mountainsides are covered, bottom to top, with vinyards -- this is Rhinewine country, after all. Once we get off the highway (at the Remagen exit, though we don't go there), our "exit ramp" loops for miles - and several times around the valley - to get us off the high highway down to the valley floor to Andernach.
Our guide has to stop for directions to the Andernach hotel, but we still have trouble finding it -- we drive back and forth through the town on the narrow main street, until we are quite familiar with the town (though by this late hour -- 7pm -- the town is shut down for the night). As I say to another passenger, "I hope you like that Post Office -- we've passed it five times so far."
We finally find our small, family-run hotel. The rooms are very much smaller, and the building itself very much older than "The Galaxy" -- the bathrooms and showers were obviously added much later - the bathroom in what was undoubtedly the closet, and the tiny, just-barely-room-enough-to-turn-around shower just cut into the wall (but at least we didn't to contend with communal bathrooms - especially with early-morning getaways, these could have been a real problem.) Downstairs is a bar, and in the dining room a billiards ("snooker") and pool table. We play a bit of pool with several other tour members -- one of the Chinese guys is clearly the best of us all; two local German guys spend the entire evening playing snooker -- and very well, I might add.
For dinner we have sausage, potatos, and saurkraut (the sausage and potatos are good - I skip the saurkraut.) Drinks are not included in the meal - which is true for pretty much every 'included' meal we get; cokes here cost 3DM each (so do beers, btw). We sit with John and Holly (the "Latvian Australians"), who have been on this particular tour before (!). Holly comments that no matter where they've traveled, they never hear news about Australia, unless its a particularly gruesome murder, or something even more catastrophic. She's right, of course, in the US, stories about Australia are basically non-existant. The only news most us ever want to hear is something we can chat about the next day, anyway -- that's often what "informed" means these days. She goes further to point out that most Americans know nothing at all about Australia, except for Paul Hogan. I show off a little, trotting out a little bit of what I know about Australia (you cannot study history without studying geography; if you don't know where, how can you possibly know what, or why?) Perth, where they're from, is very California-like, though they haven't had any rain at all in eight months, and haven't had any snow in years. We regale them with stories of the heavy snows and rains of New Jersey.
After dinner, Kris and I have a quick turn around the town (which is singularly uninteresting - hey, even Europe has boring spots, pal), but its closed up tight and shut down. Tomorrow turns out to be a Europe-wide holiday, and everybody seems to be elsewhere. Back at the hotel, the bar is deserted, and the only TV in the place (no TV's, no phones, no radios in the rooms) shows a Munich vs Bordeaux soccer game. Up to bed.
Booty: Pretty sparse, since we're only about 24 hours in Germany total -- a couple of postcards . Sorry!
Thursday, May 16 - Andernach to Lucerne, Switzerland via a Rhine Cruise - up at 6:30 am for breakfast (with Mary and Melba), and then onto the bus in what is already becoming a tedious ritual. Breakfast today is coffee and bread. The taxis here are yellow Mercedes (which look a little absurd -- o'course, Mercedes are just a little more common in Germany than in the US.)
The highways today are practically empty - the holiday. As Kris points out, practically the only vehicles moving at all are tour buses. Gasoline here is DM 1.59/liter =~= $4.50 / gallon. We drive along the Rhine, going past our first (of many) Rhine Castles, one on each side of the river, and the many river barges that move up and down the river. The tall hills on either side are covered with vinyards. After passing through Koblenz (whose name comes from the word "confluence", since it's at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers) we arrive at the little town of Bopphardt (yes, Bopphardt) for our (short) Rhine cruise.
Castle on the Rhine
Our Rhine cruiser is really a fancy riverbarge, with the lower deck surrounded by large windows, so one may sit in comfort and watch the banks go by. The lower deck includes a bar serving tea, coffee, spirits, soup and the like. Kris has a pot of tea (DM 5.50.) Steep hills rise on both sides of the river, which is still about 100 yards wide. The US Army had to cross this; it would be very, very difficult without surprise (which, of course, is exactly what happened, downriver at Remagen.)
Another Fairy-Tale Castle along the Rhine
The weather is grey overcast; some of the farther-away castles are partially obscured by mist. The more-expensive companion tour - made up, interestingly enough, mostly of Indians - has joined us for the cruise, a number of them seem to have sampled the local wines beforehand; they shout greetings to other tourists and semi-bewildered Germans on shore. Barges pass by going the other way, and others we pass, are carrying just about everything - coal, gasoline, gravel, food, you name it. The entrance to a burned-out silver mine on a hillside stares down as we pass by. A church on shore is fronted by a pub; the only way into the church is through the pub. Maybe a bit too civilized, that. . . A number of campgrounds hug the riverline; towed campers seem to be very popular here, because the campgrounds are all full of 'em. The few tents are cleverly decorated - with windows painted on, as if they were houses, right down to the painted-on curtains and "woodwork".
Lorelei Rock
We pass a number of castles in our hour-and-a-half cruise, most perch on top of the hills lining the river; they were so placed to threaten river traffic (so they'd pay the tolls, y'see), and the "Lorelei Rock" at one end of a sharp and narrow turn in the river. Legend has it that female demons would lure men to crash their ships on the rocks; sounds to me like a fast-talking excuse by a riverbarge captain who had just misjudged the turn and whacked into 'em. The castles are not quite "Magic Kingdom" quality, but they do sort of have that look.
Yet another Rhine castle
One of our group, furiously photographing everything in sight (so were we, of course) runs out of film (one of the decidedly lesser nightmares of touring is that the nicest whatever-it-is you'll see will heave into view just after you've shot the last of your film, or when your camcorder batteries have all gone south); we sell - at his insistence; we wanted to just give it - him a roll for DM10. We both win, that's a lot less than we paid, and a lot less than he'd be able to buy it for (next trip, I'm going pack a suitcase full and go into the film-selling business.)
The town of Bad something
Many of the towns along the way are "Bad something". Our guide tells us that "Bad" in German means "spa" - I search in vain for a photogenic name like "Bad Sandwich", or "Bad Knockwurst". But at last our pleasant cruise is over, followed by a mad rush by all hands for the WC when our tourguide announces we will not make any stops from here to the Swiss border, which is two hours away.
We wheel though more farmland and forest (every square inch of land that isn't paved, ploughed, or forested is covered in vinyards), going past Hochenheim, home of the famous Nurbernring, site of many famous car races. Just past there, we run into a decidedly non-race-like traffic jam, which goes on for miles and miles; exacerbated by lane-changers, who hope, apparently, that the cars in the lane they're changing to will magically vaporize, giving them clear driving. The result, of course, is just a worse jam. I am strangely comforted that European drivers are no more intelligent than US ones. . .
Since things are pretty terrible on the road, our guide decides to let us stop for lunch, at another very Jersey-Turnpike like rest stop. Once back on the road, we (slowly) catch up, finally, to the source of the 100 miles of backed-up traffic: a convoy of eleven cars, laboriously towing trailers, converting our two lanes of high-speed highway into a one-lane 60 mph highway right next to a one-lane 30 mph highway. We squeeze by, and zoom on ahead without further difficulty. Finally we arrive at the Swiss border.
Our guide, as usual, pulls out her manifest of us, but the Swiss border guards take their job seriously - no cheery wave-throughs this time. Some off-the-bus discussions go on for a bit, and then a deadly-serious uniformed guard (with the biggest pistol I have ever seen strapped to his hip) boards and pulls one of our number off the bus. It seems that she (an Indonesian), hasn't obtained the appropriate visas, and they weren't going to let her in until she gets the visas. This winds up costing SFr 72, about $60 US, and a long time, filling out lord-knows-what forms. However, eventually she's allowed to rejoin us, and off we go. (The woman, and her boyfriend - who's travelling on a more-forgiving student visa - will wind up spending a substantial fraction of their time the day before we go to a new country obtaining visas for her for the rest of the trip, just to be safe.)
German Money: 2 Deutchmarks (DM), 50 Pfennig, 10 Pfennig (100 Pfennig = 1 Mark)
We make a WC stop a few miles inside the border, and almost leave one of our Melbournians behind; a search party turns him up, and we're off toward the Alps and Lake Lucerne (we're in foothils now, though the "foothills" of the Alps are pretty impressive in their own right.) Switzerland has four language groupings, German, Italian, French, and "Romanche" - Lucerne, where we're going, is in the German-speaking part. The Romans conquered this area; the tribe that lived here were the "Helvetii", from which we get "Helvetica" - the 'H' in 'CH' is for "Helvetica". (The 'C' is for the German word for "Confederation", since Switzerland is a confederation of semi-independant "Cantons". Ain't trivia grand?) Our guide tells us that the Swiss vote in nationwide referendums on issues of national importance, with elections held on Sundays. These days, there are elections nearly every Sunday. Surely this is too much democracy. In the 'States we'd have national votes on Sundays decided by 5 votes to 2! The Swiss guard citizenship closely; it is very hard to become a citizen. Most foreigners who live here will not be granted citizenship, they are simply "Gast arbeiteren" ("guest workers" -- like the Palestinian workers in Kuwait before the war there).
The roads in Switzerland don't go around, or over mountains, they go through. Some tunnels are very long - we pass through one over 1/2 a mile long; our guide tells us there are others in Switzerland over five times as long. Our highway's scenery switches back and forth from mountains to farmland (in the valleys between.) Finally, we reach the shores of the very large (many miles long) Lake Lucerne, and see our first Alp - it is a big sucker. A half an hour later we reach the city itself, and by now we are surrounded by tall mountains. ("Tall mountains" isn't really enough words to describe them. they're massive; taking up far too much sky for their own good. In Lucerne, the sun sets much too early; it rises much too late. It is awfully pretty, though.) We spot a white-spired castle perched on a mountainside -- for about 3/4 of a second. Then its lost to view as we plunge into yet another tunnel through a mountain. Hugging the side of the lake, between water and mountain, are houses -- the rich folk live there, or on the not-so-steep slopes of the mountains near the lake.
We arrive at Seahof, a small town on the lake (we're not really on the "outskirts" of Lucerne, we're completely away from it, but no matter.) The hotel is again an 'efficiency' -- small room, small bathroom; dorm-room furniture. We're quickly herded off to dinner in the hotel's dining room, where we are served good soup, small salad (with dressing already on), and a main dish of noodles, a chicken sauce thing, brocolli and califlower. It turns out that this dinner, like most, does not include a beverage (waiters are reluctant to provide water) -- a coke costs SFr 3.70 (about $2.75!)
After dinner, Kris and I go for a walk, seeing Alps or lake in every direction, then try to call Kris' mother as a backup for the marriage certificate, which has still not caught up with us. This turns out to be something of an adventure in itself. How to call from here - call information, right? Wrong. Information hangs up on me. Let's hear it for Swiss efficiency! Thwarted by official channels, we try the hotel bar - one employee speaks a bit of english. She tells us it is impossible (!) to call from a pay phone. We keep at it, until she suddenly remembers that "AT und T" is a telephone company, and tells us to call a different information number. This information number doesn't hang up, and tells us to call yet another number, which allows us to make a (short) call to the 'States (whew!) Back up to the room for an early night (everything around here is closed anyway - a combination of the Swiss tendency to be early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise and the Europe-wide holiday), since we'll have to be up early tomorrow to visit Lucerne itself - for the cuckoo clock for Kris' dad we're looking for - and the trip up to the top of Mount Titlis. Kris has had an allergy headache for much of the afternoon and evening. Little do we know that this headache will continue throughout our stay in Switzerland, most probably due to the prevalence of birch trees here - which she is extremely allergic to. This is most unfortunate, because the one place Kris really wanted to see most of all here in Europe was Switzerland, and apparently Switzerland didn't want to see her at all. Although she was in more-or-less agony all the time in Switzerland, she gamely stuck it out, going to all the various places there were to go to
Our hotel window overlooks the building next door (if you lean far over you can see the lake just in front of hotel - well, not counting the road and the railroad tracks). There's no lobby to speak of (and no hotel staff apparent); I suspect the 'other half' of the hotel -- it has a ritzy half, which we're not in - is a little less dorm-like. ("Stop whining, willya? You didn't travel all this way to look at hotel rooms." "Oh yeah? Tearing around Europe at this pace is hard work, a nice hotel can be a refuge - a place to just relax without all those cultural thingamagigs calling to you. This ain't the army, pal, we ought to be able to stop marching if we want.")
The view up the mountain from our hotel near Lucerne.
Friday, May 17 - Lucerne - Up at 6am (yrg) for the drive into Lucerne. Breakfast consists of bread, a slice of cheese, hardboiled egg, with coffee or tea (interesting - a 'continental breakfast' includes a beverage, but a 'continental dinner' does not). The weather is cloudy and rainy, the clouds touching the tops of the taller mountains, with a few low-fliers scuttling in between the peaks.
We pass though a six-mile-long tunnel on our way to Lucerne, where by 8 am we arrive at our designated cuckoo clock store. (Our tour, as we will discover, has sweetheart deals with all sorts of places along the way -- not counting the hotels, of course - who just love a fresh gaggle of free-spending touristas every other day or so.) The store sells cuckoo clocks priced from low-and-chintsy to as high as you like -- there was probably one out back the size of a Volkswagon that would chime out the entire Barber of Seville for someone with a really big limit on their Visa card; swiss watches (only some of which are actually made in Switzerland), and Swiss Army Knives -- which, a clerk cheerfully tells me, are made in Malaysia for a company based in the USA.
For Kris and I, though, this store is exactly what we're looking for: a cuckoo clock store that ships. One of our tasks here in Europe is to buy a cuckoo clock for her dad; this is accomplished at the relatively reasonable price of SFr 185, with an additional SFr 45 for insured shipping for a very nice clock, with delicate elk-horns on the front - which, to my surprise, will arrive in the 'States undamaged. The "professor" is buying a watchband for is Russian Army watch (bought for about $5 US; you can buy 'em from a catalog for about $75 US) -- the watchband he buys easily outprices the watch.
Quick side-trip to a monument elsewhere in Lucerne to Swiss mercenaries who were killed unsuccessfully defending the Tuilleries and the Bastille on behalf of Louis XVI - a lion carved out of a big rock. (The Swiss mercenary tradition goes back a long way, to the time before the Swiss figured out that banking was safer, and more profitable; nowadays the only mercenaries the Swiss (officially) export are the Papal Guards.) Several of the college students celebrate this cultural site by trying to throw one or another of their number into the little goldfish pond in front of the monument. Two distinct groups of Japanese tourists mill about (they don't seem all that impressed with the site either.)
Into central Lucerne for a bit of shopping; Kris buys herself a pocket-watch, and I buy her a Swiss pin for her jean-jacket pin collection. We discover that our SFr 185 clock sells in another store for SFr 245, so we got a good deal. (Note that the 'sweetheart deals' between the tour and various shops were not necessarily a bad thing, as we found -- the difficulty is that we were generally not given the opportunity to discover what a fair price was before we were unloaded at the shop, so we never could tell if we were being 'clipped' or not.) We buy sandwiches for lunch, with croissants for snacks up the mountain, then a quick trip to the Post to mail some postcards (the Post is very often near the train station, btw.) Then back to the bus for the drive up Titlis. (Yes, the name was the subject of no end of jokes.)
Our first stop toward the mountain is the small town of Engleberg, itself 4,000 feet above us. The land is very green - grass, flowers, and fully-leafed trees, with a few cows out being grazed (we saw goats grazing on a steep hillside, standing sideways to avoid falling off.) The road winds up, and up, and up through the mountains to the (small) town. The remainder of our journey will be by cable-cars. The first cable-car is a small enclosed get-four-skiers-up affair, and we ride those (it seems) straight up the mountain, which is still very green. As we approach the station to change cable-cars (6,000 feet), we come to our first patches of snow.
Looking back down the mountain heading toward the second cablecar.
Our second cable-car is somewhat famous, "the first rotating cablecar". The car doesn't actually rotate, but its floor does, so the effect is the same (and is just as disconcerting as it sounds). The view in all directions is tremendous. As we progress upwards toward the mountaintop, snow becomes more common and about halfway up covers everything, and we spot our first snowboarders picking their way down the mountainside.
The rotating cablecar that took us to the mountaintop.
Once at the top, we climb several flights of stairs (the resort on top is huge, and has three floors) to the observation deck, with several stops along the way to catch our breath. We're 10,000 feet up, and the air is pretty thin - though you don't really notice it until you exert yourself (climbing stairs counts as "exerting yourself" in this context.) The weather is partly cloudy, but the view is unobstructed in all directions (and quite magnificent). As if to remind us that we're not really where sane people should be, it starts to snow lightly. Kris and I take lots of pictures, though only Kris gets pictures from the side where the mountain drops straight down for some hundreds of feet. It gives me the willies, so I just don't look thataway. Out the less-steep way, one can see all the way back to Engleberg, and with the handy telescopes mounted here and there, one can see very clearly lots of generally uninteresting things.
The view further into the Alps -- snowblind.
Most of the people up here are skiers, and they troop off to the ski-run, the better to plummet down the mountain. Kris and I walk a (very) short way along the ski-walk, just so we can say we walked on Alpine show. Having seen all there is to see, and getting a bit chilly (we're not really dressed for subfreezing weather), we go back inside to the (huge) dining room for a bit of food. Kris has a salad, strawberry shortcake and water; I have the crossants cleverly brought from Lucerne (and not so cleverly smashed flat in my bag), and a SFr 1.30 (about $1.00) Mars bar. The gift shop is next, where we buy a 'strip book' (a strip of photographs, postcard-sized or smaller) - in case our photos don't turn out (generally a good idea, I think), and a souvenier cowbell. Her headache is a real screamer by now (a combination of the birch trees, altitude, and cigarette smoke), so we head back the way we came. I duck into the "ice grotto" - a series of passageways carved out of the glacial ice below the resort -- if you follow it all the way back, there's a bar! The ice is lit with unphotogenic blue lights, so I hot-foot it back to the cablecars to get Kris down the mountain. Scattered all over the resort, in the gift shop, and in neat little display cases unexpectedly appearing on the walls are -- golf balls. It turns out that "Titelist" golfballs have something or other to do with the mountain.
The more photogenic view from the mountaintop.
After assembling our tour group (straggling down the mountain over a half hour or so), our bus zooms down the mountain much more quickly than we came up. The 80° drop-off from the one-lane-each-way road now looks a lot steeper, for some reason, than it did on the way up. The fact that there's a couple of hundred feet down through woods just off the road doesn't deter car drivers from zooming past us around blind turns. They did this on the way up, too, but it wasn't at 60 mph. I don't think the flimsy guardrail would do anybody any good at all, but we all live to tell the tale anyway. Coming down the mountain, we notice rock outcroppings that have their own little waterfalls of melted mountain ice. Beautiful.
Back to Lucerne, where I buy a history book (the large and extremely interesting "Rise and Fall of the British Empire", of which more will be heard later), after having to trek to the American Express office to get cash - the bookstore doesn't take credit cards; go figure. The Amex cashier is very snooty (every exchange cashier in Switzerland I saw or heard of was very snooty, as opposed to the shopkeepers, who were unfailingly nice.) Then back to our hotel, for a dinner of chicken cordon bleu, diced potatos, pasta something-or-other, and - sparing no expense whatsoever - an apple for desert. It was about this point that I decide to start buying deserty things of our own at local grocery stores.
A quick turn around the little town square (some kids rollerblade expertly through a home-made obstacle course - remember what I said about American culture being everywhere?) We could take the train back to Lucerne, which isn't completely shut down like this little place, but it costs SFr 33 each way (about $25), which is a bit stiff for a 15 minute trip. We give up and snooze.
Swiss Money: 1 Franc (front and back), 1/2 Franc (front),
20 Centime, 10 Centime, 1/2 Franc (back), 5 Centime
(100 Centime = 1 Franc)
Saturday, May 18 - Lucerne to Innsbruck, Austria via Lichenstein - Up early (getting tired of days starting that way? Well, so are we by this point - but it's the only way to get places in daylight). Kris has another screaming headache (birch trees again, most likely), the air conditioning on the bus helps out some. We drive along the lake for a bit, then through mountains. Clouds cover the lower valleys, but the mountaintops are clear. Titanic mountains are all around us now, and even though the sun pokes through to clear the skies, the mountains are hazy. The mountains here are truly worthy of the name: they rise pretty much straight up now, showing mostly granite faces, with very few trees, and patches of snow on the top. We pass through several five-plus-miles-long tunnels-through-the-mountains along the way to the 60 square mile principality of Lichenstein.
Lichenstein is on border of Switzerland and Austria. By the time we get there, the mountains have calmed down a little, and become merely impressive, rather than awe-inspiring. In recent years - since 1990 or so, says our guide, 'stein (sounds hip, doesn't it?) has become more 'swiss' than 'austrian' - the common currency is Swiss, and swiss stamps are the stamps of choice. The capitol is Vaduz, overlooked by the seat of Prince, perched one-third of the way up the mountain nearest the town. The windswept streets are almost ridiculously narrow, but Enrico - our driver - maneuvers our bus adroitly, avoiding other busses, cars, and brainless pedestrians, who wander into our path at every opportunity. Bicyclists must have right-of-way here, they sure act like it.
We get a whopping 40 minutes here, which allows us to see everything interesting within easy walking distance, including the WC's. Although the town is your stereotypical small German town, its skyline is punctuated by a number of tall building cranes bespeaking a lot of new construction; on our way out we'll see a lot of modern - that is, pretty boring - apartment blocks.
Kris finally gets a second stamp on her passport, for which she pays SFr 2. In these days of easy road-travel, getting passports stamped is made nearly impossible unless you want to earn the ire of your tour companions for making them wait at the border. Unless you travel in more nervous regions, your passport may look pretty dull. Back on the bus, and shortly we're at yet another border - the Austrian one. This time we're not exactly waved through -- the border guards have a look at the manifest of who's on board, and where they're from After a bit of wrangling between they and Brigitt (our guide), in which the fact that we are not Italians seems to weigh heavily in our favor, we are passed by without having to de-bus (dis-bus? ex-bus?) after about 20 minutes.
We'll be travelling to Innsbruck via the Albert Pass. Off to our left is the the upper reaches of Rhine River, now much smaller, and no longer navigable. We're again in valleys with (small) mountains all around us, but the mountains behind the mountains neareast us are still extremely impressive, and judging by their snowlines, they must be 12,000 feet high or more. (When you can see the mountains behind the mountains, them's big mountains!)
We cross from the Swiss Alps to the Tyrolian Alps in the middle of the 14km (8.5 mile) long Albert Tunnel and pay 270 Austrian Shillings for the privilige. There are more mountains, valleys, and tunnels (none so long as the Albert). We move into the very deep Inn River valley ("Innsbruck" means "bridge over the Inn"). The mountains on either are shorter (but are still among the tallest I've ever seen), being made up of sheer granite cliffs, with forests on top. In front of us is an almost pyramidal mountain, with still more taller mountains behind it. Austria is two-thirds mountains, so one might be forgiven for getting a little jaded about 'em all. Most of the mountains seem to have ski-runs on them hereabouts, though they're not snow-covered at the moment. To our right, the Inn is pretty rapid, and white-water rafters can be seen bobbing down the river in the bright sunshine.
I notice that the bugs hitting the windshield here are a bit bigger than those in Switzerland, right about the time I notice that my newly-purchased book, "Decline and Fall of the British Empire" is missing -- I've left it in Switzerland. I've finished "Congo" (as usual with Crichton's recent books that I've read, great start, good middle, lousy ending), and temporarily run out of steam on the complex but facinating "Hyperspace"; I had looked forward to ploughing through this 600-plus-page historical opus; I tell Brigit, who promises to do what she can to get it back to me, somehow (I don't hold out much hope -- how wrong I was.)
We have an hour stop at the Howard-Johnson's-like "Rosenberg's", a chain of such highway rest-stops all around Austria, and have a pleasant meal -- the weather has turned hot and humid, with temperatures in the mid-80's. Once back on the road, our guide says she must give us the tour-schpiel before we arrive in Innsbruck; there's an Austrian law that only licensed, Austrian tour guides can give tours -- if we walk around Innsbruck with her, and she's heard talking loudly, or pointing resolutely, she can be reported to the authorities (by out-of-work tour guides, no doubt), and fined (or worse, she darkly intimates). Talk about the power of a union!
Our first stop is the magnificent skijump at Bergisel, site of the 1964 and 1976 Olympics -- the skijump is like any other (I like the graveyard at the base of it -- in case jumpers make a mistake, they don't have to take the body far) - but because of its view of Innsbruck, spread out below us, with the mountains on the far side of the valley as a backdrop. Our group puffs through the old Olympic venue (now a park with a number of bored-looking souvenir vendors in little kiosk/shacks scattered around) up the stairs and walkways to the windy site of the olympic torches (two of them, for the two olympics), and then back down again.
Into central Innsbruck for a non-tour (remember, we can get busted for learning things without a license here), centering on Sworski's, a crystal shop truly worthy of the name -- there are crystal goblets, crystal flatware, crystal curios, crystal animals (some life-size), and an entire floor dedicated to crystal Christmas decorations. A number of the staff, I notice, are orientals -- I guess they get a lot of oriental tourists here and need the language skills. Anyway, I spot an exquisitely tiny crystal tea set, which Kris falls in love with at once (fortunately, my gaze fell upon something quite reasonably priced), and I buy it. A short stop at a sidewalk cafe for ice cream (priced quite reasonably, for once), then back to the fountains and back on the bus.
Our destination is the "Hotel Helga", a last-minute change of hotels, for reasons that are never made clear to us (even though we ask). Hotel Helga is a cut above our last two abodes, with in-room TV and phones; a self-serve bar and an indoor pool! However, we don't stay long, since our dinner for the evening is at the other hotel, the one we were originally supposed to be staying at. Its dining room is very nice; columns, painted ceiling, and a nice atmosphere. We have a ham-and-egg dish, with rolls, salad and soup - but again, no beverage. Kris and I sit with John and Holly (Latvian Australians) and the New Zealanders; we swap travel stories (theirs are significantly better than ours, of course - they've traveled more than we). The fax we've been waiting for (the marriage certificate, so Heathrow security will let Kris on the plane with her "Chrs McGrew" ticket) has finally arrived - way to go, Patty! It was sent to our 'dinner hotel', which Patty's hotel-list had us at. Our minds are considerably more at ease, now that we can both get home!
The faxed marriage certificate.
Back to our hotel, where some of our number go to some sort of Austrian folklore thingie -- one of the optional events. Kris is having the last gasp of her Switzerland-effect headaches, so I play cards with Oren, Jenny and Amanda in the lounge and watch TV.
The TV stations, with the exception of CNN International (CNN, but Euro-centric), are German. I see an episode of "Police Squad" - one wonders if even half the carefully-crafted jokes in that show translate - "You only Live Twice", "The Best of the Best" -- that American Football movie with Robin Williams and Kurt Russell (interesting that a football - and so small-town American culture - centered movie would play at all in Austria), an episode of "Red Rock West", a sports-magazine show, naked women modelling something or other (shoes, maybe), a play about Hitler (the actor playing him acted and sounded just like him, but without the mustache -- it looked like some sort of allegorical piece), and an operatic version of "Othello", with everyone in 18th century garb, with a black-faced German playing the title role, and a documentary on the Nuremberg trials(!)
At the next table in the lounge, a group of the young Chinese of our group play some sort of card game that seems part gin rummy, part poker, and part slapjacks. It must be a lot of fun, because they positively shriek with pleasure at apparently random points in the game. Their racket is so loud and sustained that it awakens Kris, who is two floors up! After we go to bed, it turns out that there was even later in the evening an extremely roudy group of even louder people from our tour (drawing a naughty-naughty lecture from Brigitte the next morning) - the exact membership of this group is unknown, but is said to include a couple of the 'cultural' American students, who apparently had been sampling Austrian wine culture all evening. The man-made thunder (though unheard by Kris or I) kept Enrico, our bus driver, awake until very late - very unclever, since he'll be driving us over the mountains to Italy tomorrow.
Sunday, May 19 - Innsbruck to Venice, Italy via Cortina - up early for a nice breakfast (for once) of rolls, meat, cheese, cereal (a first and only), and coffee or tea. We settle our bill (for a phone call from the room phone - sometimes getting an AT&T operator does not mean they will bill you correctly), and off we go over the Tyrolean Alps, through the Dolomites, and into Italy. As we climb into the mountains going south, the sun breaks through to illuminate the city. With the haze and shafts of sunlight, the scene really does look like a painting of such a scene (the same phenomenon was pointed out to me by Amanda (one of the Australians) last night; the sun disappearing behind the mountains, combined with the haze to make otherwise sharpedged objects in the distance seem to be slightly blurred, as if in a painting.)
Italian money (most of which is paper, since useful denominations are so large):
100 Lira (front), 500 Lira (front), 100 Lira (back), 500 Lira (back),
200 Lira (back), 200 Lira (front)
We cross the valley between the first and second line of mountains on a bridge 625 feet high. Our tour guide tells us the Eiffel Tower will fit underneath it; another triumph of engineering (the lack of a major war in the last 50 years doesn't hurt any, either). The fast-moving clouds drop a little rain on us from time to time. After we cross the bridge, our road winds along about half-way up the mountainsides, affording us great views of the farmland on the valley floors. The clouds part now and again to throw a brilliant patch of sunlight on one farm-part or another. The air is just heavy enough for "sunbeams" to be literally that.
After about an hour, we cross the border into Italy. Once again we're being waved though a border. We change a little money ($1 =~= 1500 Lira), and are back on our way into the Italian Tyrol. The haze hugs the mountains, it makes the near ones sharp and clear, but the further ones indistinct. The effect is that as we travel, the far mountains become more an more 'real' as we approach them. We pass a late-middle-ages fortress overlooking the river valley, now by-passed by the 6-lane highway we zoom along. The mountains here are heavily forested, with the occasional farm cut out of the forest as it reaches the valley floor.
Now that we're in Italy, our guide tells us, we need to be more agressive when dealing with the locals -- to "use our elbows". She also advises us that Italians are a lot louder than northern Europeans, and that we should adjust our own volumes accordingly. The houses we see are a combination of Austrian and Italian design, but the one constant seems to be the little RCA satellite TV dishes they all have -- good to see these folks have their priorities straight!
We're still climbing; heading toward the 'border' between the Tyrol and the Dolomites (the Alps are granite mountains, the Dolomites are limestone, so there really is a difference between them - for one thing the Dolomites erode more quickly). I listen to some "PDQ Bach" on the CD player; whimsical and light - it seems to fit the scenery, somehow. Most of the names of places are still German (e.g. "Seehof"), but the architecture is slowly turning 'Italian', with its orange roofs and white walls.
Our route will take us on an 'optional' tour to a lake high in the mountains, called "Lake Miserina" on a road that is only open four months a year (the rest of the time snow or threats of avalanches force the authorities to keep people off it.) The road winds back and forth, but still rises very steeply. Most of the traffic we see on our side of the road is motorcycles, laboring past us with wide-open throttles, hoping to get by before traffic appears coming the other way. Good luck to 'em; its a long way down the mountainside if they have to maneuver.
The mountains, since they're limestone, have large, long (20 to 30 yards wide) ravines cut in them, made by melting snow - the ravines are very light-colored, so they look like ski-runs. A few of the ravines have small streams running in them, but most (at this time of year, anyway) do not. The mountains themselves are more curiously shaped than the Alps, since they wear more quickly. Our guide tells us that prehistoric fossils can be found all through these mountains, since they were originally on the floor of an ocean, and were raised up over time by the continental-drift-movement of Italy northward into the rest of Europe.
We pass a WWI graveyard from the fighting that took place in these parts between Italians and the Austro-Hungarians (generally the Austro-Hungarians had the upper hand), and a couple miles further on, a stout WWII-era bunker overlooks the highway (and the valley below us), looking every bit as tough a nut to crack now as it must have seemed over 50 years ago when US troops moved up this way at the end of WWII.
Finally, over 7,000 feet above sea level, we arrive at Lake Miserina, a glacial lake (that is, no river feeds it, the water all comes from melting ice.) The scenery is gorgeous, with mountains rising on all sides (mountains rising on all sides is sort of the theme song of this part of the trip, I think).
"Lake Misery"
Lake Misery - The lake is beautiful, the mountains magnificent, the food in the rest stop quite palatable, but this isn't what anybody remembers about Lake Miserina. It's the rest stop's WC. It is the prime topic of conversation for the next two days. First off, there's exactly one WC, with one place to do one's business, for men and women, so the line is long and slow moving. Once one gets inside, there's a sink and then. . . the thing. Picture a porcelane basin, set in the floor, with a drain in it. Picture a small spigot to wash down all the nasty stuff. Picture a couple of footpads in the basin for one to stand on for half the business a male does, and all the business a female does (holding ones trousers very carefully out of the way, since there's no place anywhere in the place you'd want to place them while you're at it). Now imagine the smell of an outhouse, 'cause that's the smell. Welcome to Italy!
Back on the bus and back down the mountains towards the ski-resort town of Cortina. The clouds clip the tops of the mountains as our bus driver carefully maneuvers our bus around turns not remotely designed for a bus to traverse. Coming the other way some few hardy souls wheeze their way up the mountain on bicycles (the way up must be tough, but the way down must be suicidal). Thirty minutes after leaving the lake, we pull in to Cortina (capitol of the Italian province of The Dolomites), having averaged 12 mph down the steep, twisty road. The mountains tower over this quiet little town on three sides. Cortina on a warm spring Sunday is completely closed down; only a tourist-buffet resteraunt is open.
Lunch is a tasty and filling sausage (for me) and goulash (for Kris) - 30,000L (sounds huge, but its actually $20). The bathrooms here are a combination of 'the basins' and actual toilets, with sanitary conditions that are basically non-existant. Afterward, we walk around Cortina, but there isn't much to see. We spend 30 minutes or so hanging around the bus waiting to leave again (one drawback to a tour is that often you're hurried away from a place you want to see more of, and have to hang around a place that you don't), mostly discussing "Lake Misery's", and Cortina's WC's, and hopes that they are not representative of all of Italy.
The road to Venice, it turns out, is closed, due to a landslide that only occurred yesterday(!). Our route from Cortina, therefore, must go back the way we came (much relief all around to hear we will not have another rest stop at "Lake Misery"), and then via a circuitous route out of the mountains to Venice. After going up and down various mountains, we follow the route of a mostly dried-up river (dried up for a long time, judging by the trees growing in the riverbed; the river having been dammed up for industrial use). By mid-afternoon - after passing through a long through-the-mountain-tunnel - for the first time since we hit Switzerland, there are no horizon-filling mountains ahead of us. The Dolomites now lie behind us, looking like dark grey clouds of some fierce approaching thunderstorm. Low rolling hills are the order of the day now, with vinyards in every direction (Valpolicello and Suave wines come from hereabouts.)
A short rest stop (with real toilets - hurrah!) and then on to Venice. The highway has resolved itself into a divided, three-lanes-each-way, NJ Turnpike-like affair, with major overpasses, massive farms/vinyards, and industrial-strength rest stops. Without major incident, we make it to our hotel, the surprisingly (for this tour) luxurious "Plaza Hotel" (once again far from the city; we are warned that travel to/from Venice from here can take several hundred thousand lira, via train and taxi.)
Our Venice Hotel
The hotel looks like it started out life as a summer-home for a wealthy Italiano, and grew from there into a small, but respectable convention hotel (the only multi-story portion is the original building.) Much to our surprise, our rooms are in the older portion (though it is as far from the lobby as you can go and still be in the hotel), and to our astonishment, Kris and I are assigned (at random, apparently) the best room in the place. Our room, on the second floor, has a balcony (the balcony, in fact) accesable through antique glass doors. When it is discovered that ours in the only room of its type, Kris and I conduct impromptu tours of it for others of our tourgroup. They're all cheerfully envious. We're herded back to the dining room for a meal of sliced pork, salad, incredibly hard rolls, and soup or pasta (we have the pasta - it's good.)
Kris on our personal hotel-room balcony.
Afterwards, Kris goes back to the room to do laundry and try to get some sleep (now that we're finally out of the Alps, her allergies are abating, but they've left her exhausted -- the good news is that her allergies will largely disappear for the rest of the trip.) I go to the lounge (by the pool), and hang around with some of the younger crowd of our tour, who play gin rummy and drink themselves silly. (It turns out that this is a nightly event - the drinking part - no wonder they're so quiet in the morning, they're all hung over.) Once one of them tips over in his chair, spilling wine and breaking his glass, I decide its time to turn in. (Was I ever this silly as a young man? Well, yes, actually. . .)
The view from our hotel room.
Up in the room I crack the toilet seat (a cheap plastic affair) while sitting on it to take my shoes off (hoping not to wake Kris; nice try.) The next day I tell the hotel staff about it -- they're stunned: not that I broke it, but that I would 'fess up about it. We settle on Lr. 30,000 (sounds awful, but that's $20) for repairs.
Tips for Travelers #3
Monday, May 20 - Venice - Up at 8 am (amazing how, after a week of "oh-dark-thirty" wake-ups, a little thing like a reasonable wake-up can make you feel good) for breakfast of fruit juice, incredibly strong coffee, rolls (very, very hard - again) and apple-filled croissants, then onto the bus for Venice proper.
Venice in the Rain (Piazza San Marco)
As you're probably aware, Venice is on an island - or rather on many islands. This was no end of advantage in the bad old days (the middle ages, for instance), when all those nasty men pillaging cities were stymied by the stretch of water between the mainland and the city. It wasn't until the middle of the nineteenth century that the first bridge to the city was built - a railroad bridge (Ponte de Libertas). The rail line loops around the perimeter of the city (easy offloading, I guess), but is freight only. There is a road bridge, built in the 1930's during Mussolini's rule, but it only takes you as far as the "parking island", where you (surprise) park, and take a boat into the city proper. There are other special-purpose islands -- the the only ones our guide tells us about is the "cemetary island", and "the garbage island" (if my nose is a guide, we never were near this last one.)
On our way to the "parking island", our guide also tells us not to shop in Venice, or Rome (!); that we'll get better deals in Florence. Cafes, she adds, all have a "cover charge " to discourage people from doing something so gauche as resting one's tired feet (a cup of coffee, therefore, will cost about Lr. 10,000 - about $7). Venetians, it seems, have made a high art of obtaining a traveler's lira. She finishes by warning us to watch our bags and other tourist ecoutrements carefully, as the Venetian pickpockets are apparently famous for their efficiency. (Even so, no one in our tour group will have anything stolen.)
The weather has been a hard, cold rain all morning, but seems to be slowly clearing. Our view from the bridge to the parking island is uninspiring; once our bus parks, we walk to the dockside, which is packed with ships of various sizes. Ours is a sort of floating bus -- a 30 foot long ship that, if it weren't crammed with uncomfortable plastic seats (and low ceilings), would have been quite elegant. Our boat wends its way through the waterways toward the island that contains Piazza San Marco, our 'home base' for our time in Venice. Piazza's are open squares, fronted on all sides by two and three story buildings. Ships seen along the way range from cruise ships, cargo ships, and tankers to small putt-putt boats; various sizes of powerboats zip past us in every direction. On the way in to 'our' island, we pass the famous "Bridge of Sighs" connecting the Doge's Palace with his dungeon - legend has it the name comes from the sound made by the various Doges' various victims (of which there were many) on their last walk. By 11am, we dock at the island containing Piazza San Marco, and see our first gondolas plying the narrow canals of the island. Our dock is right next to the Commando Presidio Militare (sort of a local coast guard, I guess), and it's a brisk walk to the Piazza (a little over-brisk; Brigitte sets a pace that most can't keep up with, so our party straggles badly.)
The Doge's old palace (the Doge was the ruler of Venice, more or less, in the middle ages) and a famous clocktower front on the Piazza; unfortunately, the view is somewhat spoiled by masses of scaffolding on each. We're told when to be back in the Piazza to catch the walking tour, and Brigett gives us vouchers for a cafe just off the the Piazza (more on that later). With an hour or so to kill, Kris and I set off in search of a post office to see about buying a box to mail some things we don't need back to ourselves. We find the Post Office (not far from the Piazza), but it turns out that they don't sell boxes of the sort we'll need. Further, it turns out that they close at 1pm -- on a Monday! (Ah, to be a postal worker in Italy.) We settle for some postcard stamps, and go in search of a Stationary store, which will stock the boxes we search for. We ask directions, and while getting lost searching for that one, we find another. The 'streets' of Venice are narrow, twisting little things -- too narrow for anything more than a bicycle, really -- with occasional bridges over canals along the way. The 'streets' are hemmed in by buildings on all sides, so there really are no landmarks to guide you. We cross two canals and make many turns on our route, but I suspect that we were never more than a half-mile from our starting point at any time. We buy the box at a Stationaire, and an umbrella at a nearby Standa (Lr 9,900 - about $6.50 - not bad), since it is still raining.
We find our way back to the Piazza with surprising ease, helped in small measure by the "Per San Marco" signs that appear now and again at random places on the island, and in large part to Kris' memory of our route (nothing is quite so satisfying as un-losing yourself in a strange place with no help from the locals.) Once we get back to the Piazza, we decide to skip the walking tour (whose high point is a glass factory) -- Kris' feet are bothering her, and mine hurt a bit too, so that's ok by me. Instead, we go down to the "Gran Caffee Chioggia", the cafe we got the vouchers for. We sit and have coffee/tea and a little coffee-cake kind of thing for Lr. 7,000 each. We later learn that deals as good as this can be got, but not a places where you can sit down and relax, like here. We sit for over an hour, and nobody bugs us about it (coffee's not bad either.) A little shopping after that, and it's time for lunch. (If it sounds like we're doing nothing, remember that we're doing nothing in Venice, when most of the other tourists seem to be having a scintillating time standing in line in the rain for one thing or another, so I figure we ain't doing so bad.)
Lunch is at "The Grotto", so named for the stalactite-like decorations (and cave-like paint scheme) of the dining rooms. "The Grotto" fronts right on a canal, so all through lunch we are treated to gondoliers passing by every couple of minutes, interspersed with the occasional stubby powerboat. The gondolieri expertly muscle their boats around sharp right turn next to The Grotto, and into the interior of the island. It really is true: in Venice, you either boat, or walk.
Now that lunch is over, we have three hours to kill in Venice. (Yeah, I know, but a strange city (speaking a strange language), where you've been more or less told not to wander off or you'll face nasty people who want to steal your stuff can be a little imposing. Besides, as you will see, we found pleasant things to do anyway.) There are hordes of pigeons milling about the Piazza San Marco, and a number of vendors selling corn to touristas to feed them (which brings the pigeons back, which the tourists like, so they buy more corn, etc. etc. Gad, I should have been an economist.) Kris and I buy a Lr. 1500 bag (not a great deal, but what the heck), and then the show begins.
Once the pigeons know you have corn to give 'em, they head for you like pyrannahs to a cheeseburger. (They watch the vendors, you see, and once they see the cereal change hands, they start following you about.) Kris stands in the center of the Piazza, and tosses a few kernels in front of her. The reaction is astonishing - first, pigeons come from all over Italy (it seems) and become part of a writhing grey-and-white mass at her feet, fighting each other for the corn. Then the more adventurous start hovering in front of her, waiting for her to hold out her hand with more food. She does, and they land on her hand to start eating. Then more land on her forearm. Then her shoulders. Then her head. Then on top of the pigeons already on her (at one point becoming three-deep). When they run out of room on her, they start landing on me, even though I have no corn to offer (but this way they have a good place to dive on their bretheren on Kris.) One lands on my shoulder, and I respond with my astonishingly good Long John Silver imitation (the pigeon is unimpressed.) Finally the corn was all gone, and another tourist started giving out corn, so we were left pigeon-less (and, surprisingly, without any extra "presents" from our feathered guests.)
The weather has cleared up nicely by now, and a nice breeze keeps things comfortable. We wander down to the edge of the grand canal (the big river-sized waterway that separates the big islands) in search of the local tourist office, only to discover that it has closed in the early afternoon -- I guess if you haven't found a map by 2pm, they figure you want to be lost. We avoid the impulse to shop at the kiosks that line the canal, and instead just sit on a bench and watch the ships go by. My many-pocketed jacket yeilds a packet of melba-toast I picked up somewhere along the line; we feed the birds, who are nowhere near as frenzied (or as numerous) as their Piazza bretheren. Sparrows can be found here, and they prove to be better at grabbing breadcrumbs than their slower cousins, the pigeons.
After a bit, we head back to the Piazza for another stop at the 'recommended' cafe (another couple has given us their coupons, and the cafe employees pretend not to recognize us from the last time), where we chat with Oren and Mabel (US) and Mary and John (Asutralia/Latvia) for an hour or so and watch the world go by - once we spread the word that the place has acceptable bathrooms, 'the world' includes many of our tour, whose memories of our experience at "Lake Misery" are still fresh Several of the Cafes that line this most tourist of areas in Venice have their own string groups and/or singers, who contend with one another to be the most entertaining; all are pleasant diversions.
Rain clouds reappear by 5:30, as we head back to the dock to board our boat back to the mainland, and we leave Venice in a light rain. Heading back to the "Parking Island", we pass a number of large cruise ships docked at the larger port facilities. Apparently trips up and down the Adriatic to/from Venice are quite popular. The bus trip back to the hotel is interrupted by yet another "sweetheart" (i.e. "kickback") deal with a shoe store, of all things. (The owner actually came to the parking island and led the bus to the store himself -- I guess his business is off enough that he wanted to be sure the fat-walleted touristas got there.) Many of us chose not to even go in to the store, being a little peeved at this overly obvious attempt to squeeze a little money out of the foreigners. (In truth, that's all any tourist stop, or indeed any tour is out to do -- the good ones try not to remind you of it, though. A cynic would say that all Cosmos was doing was trying to find as many ways as possible to fleece the tourists of their cash, while making use of local sights we could see for free anyway to keep us distracted from their fingers on our wallets. Fortunately, I'm not a cynic.)
Dinner is sliced turkey, salad, rock-like rolls (again), green beans, and buy-your-own drinks (again). Back in the room we sample local TV, which in this hotel means only Italian TV (no CNN here). There's the cartoons "Scoobie Doo, where are you" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" dubbed into Italian, various other US programs (Kris watched two episodes of "The X-Files" in Italian last night while I witnessed the Decadence of the West), the movie "Red Heat"; there's one channel that shows nothing but scanitly clad women hawking excercise equipment (with extreme, long-lasting close-ups of parts that jiggle - ah, Italy), and after midnight the phone-sex "porno story" (which is Italian, I guess, for "porno story") ads with naked women in what amounts to Playboy-magazine level softcore porn (not that I ever, you understand, have looked at Playboy).
Tuesday, May 21 - Venice to Rome via Asissi - Up at 6:30 am to trundle everything out to the bus. (On the TV is "Blossom" in Italian, a surreal experience.) Breakfast is the usual bread and circuses - the bread being the actual food, and the circuses provided by the circumstance that all the tours staying in this hotel are leaving today, and so the lines for the aforementioned bread are long and slow-moving, but we muddle through.
The trip to Rome is to be 360 miles, and our route is to be along less-than-autobahn-like routes; we'll be on the bus for quite a while. For the first time, our driver puts on a musical tape to pass the time. The first tape is, oddly enough, regae music, which he and Brigitte both like. I explain to the elderly Australian ladies that the song "Buffalo Soldiers" is about the 10th US Cavalry - Black soldiers, white officers, and why they were called "Buffalo Soldiers" (their kinky hair was likened by Native americans to the coats of buffalo).
Our first 'sight' of the day is a large traffic jam in the Venice environs (though the disco, hugely labeled "Super Dancing" catches my eye). Once we break out of that, we cross a bridge from which we can see Venice off in the distance to the left, and the local eel fishermen plying their trade to the right. After two hours we start to see signs for "Roma", though it is still 300 miles away. The Appenine mountains begin rising up to our right as we pass though relatively flat farmland.
We stop for an unremarkable lunch at the "Restorante Ponte Georgi", aptly-named, since the Ponte Geogi is right next to it. ('Ponte' is 'bridge'.) The river is mostly dried up, but it might be significantly larger when it rains. The weather now is sunny and uncomfortably hot, as it will remain for the next week or so. It might seem hard to believe, but we are at the midway point of our tour (I suspect the reader is exhausted already). It has become hard to remember what the world back home was exactly like; it sometimes seems that this tour has been going on forever, and will continue forever as well. That's what 'midway points' are all like, I guess.
The mountains (though after the Alps and the Dolomites, calling these "mountains" seems a misnomer) are green all the way to the top, with the occasional limestone facing peeking out here and there. The highways might be less-than-superish, but two-lanes-each-way gives us and the light traffic that accompanies us plenty of room to keep moving at good speed, and the longish tunnels through mountains bold enough to stand in our way mean we don't have to do a lot of climbing, either.
We pass by the 25-square-mile country of San Marino along the way; the country has its own coinage and postal stamps. It might be nice to stop there, but we have a long way to go, and I have business in Asissi. (Gee, sounds like I'm a foreign correspondant or a spy or something. Where's that trenchcoat when I need it?)
The trip south is really 'more of the same', the green mountains rise on both sides, with wide green valleys in between. There are trees of just about every shade, and although most of the farmland is devoted to grains, there is an occasional vinyard too. The houses on either side are pretty typically Italian: white walls, with flat pink-to-orange roofs. The further south we go, the more the mountains resemble hills.
Assissi, as in "St. Francis of"
After five hours on the road, we pull into Asissi, which sits halfway up a green, tall hill, with a gorgeous view view of the valley below. Our stop, unfortunately, is less than an hour long, so we cannot explore this beautiful little monastery town, whose cobblestone streets slope up at 30 degrees or more as they wind up to the upper and lower basilicas, which sit near the top of the hill. Although our guide warns us that we are not allowed to enter the basilica with bare shoulders or bare knees (the same restrictions apply at the Vatican, it turns out), I never do have time to go see one, because I have to purchase a couple of rosaries for Marge and Hanz back home (and some time lost trying to find Kris, who wisely lit out for the basilicas first thing, and met me coming back down). We stop in at (I kid you not), a family-run (father, mother, two daughters) religious artifact shop. The road up to the basilicas is packed, of course, with religious junk-shops - my favorite item at these is the St. Francis beerstein, but here and there are places of a bit more taste and class. We found one, and had our pick of dozens of different rosaries (and icons, bibles, prayer-scrolls, etc. I suspect saint's bones could be had for the right price.) With Kris' help (she's always better at picking such things than I am), I select two, and a couple of nice wooden boxes to present them in. They were reasonably priced, to my surprise -- I'd like claim smart buying and clever haggling, but in reality, of course, we're just lucky (besides, wouldn't it be a bit unseemly to haggle for religious goods?) Back down the hill to the busses, to be on our way. Wish we could have saved up some of the time spent cooling our heels in Cortina to spend here, but them's the breaks. . . The mid-80-degree air is filled with white puffy things that look like dandelions, but fall from trees, which we've seen occasionally all through Italy. As we pull out of Assissi, they fall like snow.
Our guide, as we motor south, advises us that pickpockets and theives are ten times worse than they were in Venice (and as you'll recall, she made Venice sound like the place was summer home of Fagin and Bill Sykes). Gosh, now I really want to spend lots of time in Rome.
By this time, we're no more than 100 miles north of Rome; the suburban-housing-complex houses in the valleys are now festooned with TV antennas and satellite dishes. The houses are almost all on one side of the highway, nearest the hills; most of the valley is still farmland. Our music now is Ray Charles, including the no-doubt-carefully-selected "Hit the Road, Jack," to be followed by muzak-ified pop music of the early 1980's (run! run away now!)
The hills are slowly turning more mountainish, with medieval-era-built towns perched on the taller hills overlooking the highway. Occasionally a mountain can be seen being slowly eaten by a quarry at its base. But then the mountains turn back into hills, and we've seen just about every possible permutation of hills, big hills, valleys, mountains and farms that can be imagined, so enough about that.
At last we make it to Rome, and only get a little lost trying to find our hotel, the "Central Park". A word or two about Roman traffic: insane -- no, make that violently insane. Roman drivers seem intent on getting where they are going, and bedamned to anyone in their way. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The room(s) - they're all suites - and decor look to have been designed in around 1965, and it was no doubt very chic back then. But 30 years later, it looks a little, well, tacky. There are stains of vaguely unsettling lineage on the sofa, the lighting is that sort of better-then-art-deco stuff that isn't -- the TV, of all the TV's we see in Europe, is the only one that doesn't have a remote, and looks like it came with the original room. On the other hand, both the bedroom and 'living room' open onto the huge private terrace, which gives us a magnificent view of the hotel next door (those of us who have rooms on the other side of the hall at least have a view of the large park which gives the hotel its name.) As usual, we are far, far away from any 'sights', though we are reliably informed that they are all over that way (pointing past the park into the haze toward central Rome.) Kris and I dine at the hotel restaurant, which serves a pleasant pasta at a not-absurd price (which lulls us into a false sense of security for the horror of the following evening, as you'll see.)
Wednesday, May 22 - Rome - up early for the usual bread and coffee, though the bread this time are unfilled croissants, and are quite all right. The weather is already sunny and hot, and will remain that way all day. Then, onto the bus (with a local Roman driver -- never call someone who lives in Rome an "Italian", they are "Romans", by the way; same applies to those living in Vienna -- they're "Viennese", not "Austrian", and woe be unto you if'n you call them "German") and into the nightmare known as Roman traffic to the sights we came to see.
One of the many statues of Garibaldi - uniter of Italy - in Rome.
The drivers in Rome appear to be completely insane, and you ignore that appearance at your decided peril. They drive with complete abandon -- cutting each other off at every opportunity, zipping into oncoming traffic whenever the opportunity arises. Filling the seemingly molecule-sized gaps between larger vehicles are clouds of moped (Vespas, as they're called here) and motorcycles. They roar in and out of the rest of the traffic, oblivious to the mortal danger they place themselves in. Pedestrians seem, surprisingly, to be relatively safe. Traffic will stop at crosswalks, if pedestrians are crossing -- but only if pedestrians are actually crossing; if you wait for them to stop, you'll wait all day. It is somehow fitting that in the city that houses the Vatican that getting around as a pedestrian is an act of faith carried out at each intersection. The only near-accidents I see this day are a car driving too-fast into a traffic jam (the driver stops in time), and a polizia car nearly running down two pedestrians crossing into St. Peter's Square (the police car isn't using its siren, and didn't slow down one bit - though it did honk its horn in what I suppose was some form of salute - certainly the pedestrians returned the salute, but with more demonstrative gestures.)
We pick up our local tourguide at "The Universal Bar" (a sandwich shop and bar just down the road from the Vatican). She is "Niki", a pleasant, middle-aged woman who is quite knowledgable, answers every question put to her, and offers sound advise on what is wise to buy where from the clouds of hawkers that descend upon us at every stop. (Turns out buying postcards and books from these fellows is often a reasonable buy, but any religious artifact is not.)
Cats outside the Coliseum
We go to the Coliseum after driving along the banks of the Tiber river (seeing the famous "ship island", so named because of its streamlined shape, and the Castle San Angelo, from a distance.) The Coliseum is not as large as one might think, especially after going to one of the more modern stadiums like Yankee Stadium; on the other hand, it is about 2,000 years old, and a fine piece of engineering nonetheless. Designed to hold 50,000 people, it could, we're told, be emptied in 10 minutes using the 80 exits to do so. (I never saw any Romans move that fast in the time we were there, except of course in cars, and in that instance they all moved very fast.) Parts of the structure are, of course, missing -- for instance part of one side's top tier collapsed during an earthquake in the 1960's; the wooden floor has rotted away and was never replaced; and bits and pieces were taken away for other structures over the years (all of the white marble covering is gone). Since the flooring is gone, we can look down into the gladiator/animal holding area beneath the floor of the Coliseum, where combatants and maintenance personell waited while events were in progress -- although on occasion the flooring was removed and the entire basin so created flooded with water for naval battles(!). Standing near the edge of the gladitorial area, it is possible to close one's eyes, and imagine the shouts of the crowds (women were banished to the top tier -- which had no seats, btw), and the clang of weapons of men fighting desperately for the amusement of the citizens of Rome. This mood is difficult to hold, as we are continually beset by Roman hawkers of practically everything, but soon enough we're headed back on the bus, walking past some of the many stray cats that sun themselves outside the Coliseum. By the way, the Coliseum is was not the largest sports arena of its day -- the "Circus" in Rome (a racetrack, not 'circus' in its modern meaning) could supposedly hold 250,000 people -- which certainly is impressive in any era.
Proof that I was at the Coliseum. So there.
Our bus takes us to a small park that overlooks the center of the city (from a distance) - a nice, quiet respite -- I'm expecting a go-go-go day of sightseeing, and a Roman park is a nice surprise (of course, it might have been nicer to go to a small museum, but the upcoming visit to the Vatican will fill that bill for the day just fine.) Central Rome is built mostly between the famous "seven hills"; one modern side-effect is that an unmoving urban haze covers the city much of the day.
Now we return to the "Universal Bar" to drop off/pick up people to go on the Vatican tour. By now, St. Peter's Square is filling up with people; the Pope holds an audience every Wednesday in the square. 60,000 people turn out weekly - many on pilgrimage from all over the world. Black plastic chairs have thoughtfully been provided for them; the Pope himself (he will not arrive until after we have left for the Vatican Museum) will sit under a large canopy to avoid the sun, which will be very hot this afternoon. Pilgrims don't have to pay to get a seat, but they do require a reservation (made with the Vatican.) In addition to these people, fans of the Florence ("Fierenza") and Amsterdam soccer teams are wandering about, killing time until the game in Rome between these two teams tonight. They're dressed in team colors, and randomly toot horns and shout team slogans (and drink beer) as they walk almost literally in the shadow of St. Peter's. They and the religious pilgrims certainly make for an interesting contrast.
I stop at "Thomas Cook", a sort of British "American Express", which has an office between the Universal Bar and the Vatican (talk about good location!). Thomas Cook is made known to me from the David Niven version of "Around the World in 80 Days". It turns out that Thomas Cook, according to our Australian tour members, is famous for giving lousy exchange rates, even in Australia (hmmm. . . to be world famous for lousy exchange rates -- this is a good thing?) The rate I got (for dollars to lira) seemed to be pretty reasonable, though.
Although the Vatican Museum abutts St. Peter's, the crush of people in the area require that we take the bus around to the Museum entrance, rather than walking.
The "3-D Ceiling" in the Vatican Museum
The Vatican museum is most impressive. Particularly of interest were the ceilings, painted so as to appear as if the ceilings have framed paintings glued to them -- when in actuality the frames (complete with shadowing) and the paintings are painted on the smooth ceiling. The effect is a little disconcerting -- look once, and there are frames glued to the ceiling, look again, and it's all painted; look again, and the frames seem to be there again. Also is the famous Jesus-is-always-looking-at-you tapestry, which lives up to its reputation. Exquisite paintings, tapestries, illuminated texts, and papal ecoutrements appear at every turn. But all this beauty is just prelude to the recently-restored Sistine Chapel, with its fabulous Michelangelo ceiling and wall behind the altar. These have been restored in the last five years or so, removing centuries of soot from candles and flame lamps. (There was some controversy about this; purists felt that the soot somehow was part of the art -- just goes to show Italians will argue about anything .) The restored art is stunning (in the best sense of the word); looking at the whole of it fills one with admiration for the great man in ways that can't quite be found looking at pictures. He painted for months up there, by candlelight. Amazing.
We can't go into St. Peter's cathedral just yet; Il Papa's audience hasn't quite finished. However, by the time our bus has taken us back from the Vatican Museum (on one side of the Vatican) to the Universal Bar (a block from the other side of the Vatican, within view of St. Peter's Square), a distance of a few hundred yards, the audience is done, and we get a glimpse of the white-clad Pope as he leaves his white audience-chair (on a raised stage) and heads into St. Peter's. Some of our party who stayed within view of the Square during the audience told us that the Pope spoke to the crowd via loudspeakers, and a select few of the pilgrims were allowed to meet and speak directly to the man himself. The 60,000 people in the square disperse surprisingly quickly, and we are allowed to walk past the modern-era-uniformed Swiss Guards (the Renaissance-era uniforms are just for show -- these guys really do guard the Pope, hence the more appropriate regular-day garb) into St. Peter's Basilica shortly thereafter.
St. Peter's is, well, huge. And, well, beautiful. The ceilings are unbelievably high, and the ceilings and walls are covered with mosaics that are so carefully done that I would swear they were paintings, and it took a goodly while of careful observation to convince me that they really were mosaics (the tip-off is the way light reflects off 'em - the reflections are particular, rather than continuous.) There's a brass status of St. Peter in the basilica; tradition has it that touching the foot is good luck. Consequently the foot of St. Peter resembles nothing so much as a big brass blob, so often has it been touched. Not being one ot break with tradition, I do my bit to vandalize the Vatican by rubbing the foot myself. The Basilica hosts 400 altars, and has an interesting bit of ego associated with the floor. At various places on the floor are inlaid lines with inlaid names of other churches, denoting where they would reach if placed inside St. Peter's, just to be sure you know just how big the place is. (St. Paul's, Notre Dame, The National Cathedral are among those so 'honored'; St. Peter's is the largest basilica in the world.) Two more items caught my eye - a small closed-off altar and pews for people who actually wish to pray in St. Peter's, rather than gawk at it (like me), and a brick wall covering a doorway near the back of the basilica. On Christmas eve, once every 25 years, the Pope knocks the bricks down with a ceremonial hammer, and he and selected pilgrims cross into the room(s) that are beyond the wall. I'd never heard of this ceremony before, but apparently it has a long history.
Before leaving the Vatican, we stop by the Vatican gift shop. (Yes, there really is a gift shop in the Vatican.) Here we found many beautiful items at prices ranging from very high (for the very beautiful) to very reasonable (for not quite as beautiful, but still quite nice) -- crosses, rosaries, bibles, saint's likenesses, icons, lapel pins with the likeness of Il Papa (in fact, lots of things with the likeness of Il Papa), and so on. Nothing particularly tacky, but things I didn't expect to find in the Vatican (I was hoping to find an Il Papa t-shirt: "He got to be Pope, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt". There weren't any t-shirts, in case you were wondering. Yes, it was staffed by nuns, who spoke a number of languages.)
Once you purchase something from the Vatican gift shop, you can have it blessed by a priest of the Vatican (the most junior priest, I suspect). This they do free, and then deliver it to your hotel, also free. Kris buys a small angel for her mother; I purchase a rosary in an Il Papa box for my papa. We later discover that we only get one little "blessed by Vatican" piece of paper (which itself is very artful) with our items, and have to duke it out to see whose parent gets it. (Kris won. I let her, of course. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)
The Horror. . . the horror. . . of dinner
Back at the hotel, a group of us (the Americanskis Mabel, Oren, Mary and ourselves) decide to dine together, and set out on foot to find something. We'd heard there might be a good place a block or so away from the hotel, and we brave the local traffic (which at 5pm is, if anything, worse than what we've seen before, but not by much. Rome traffic seems to be incredibly dangerous 24 hours a day.) We passed a pizza place (yes, there are pizza joints in Italy) which we'd been warned by the Lithuanian Australians wasn't so great, and go into a promising looking bistro.
And then come right back out again. They're closed, and won't open for another hour or so. Now, this is with what appeared to be a complete staff, the door wide open, and the kitchen looking quite functional. Ah, Italy. We decide not to wait (there'd be nothing to do but go back to the hotel and then hoof it back -- remember the dark hints about tourist ambushes? We still took them to heart), and - on the strength of Kris' and my experience at the hotel resteraunt last night - decide to have a dinner there again. Big mistake. But first we stop off in an actual grocery store - a mom-and-pop-sized place - and buy supplies for the next day's journey.
Back at the hotel, we have to wait anyway - until 7:15pm - to be seated for dinner (never again will I take for granted a serve-you-any-time hotel resteraunt), but waiting around in a hotel is preferable to waiting around a semi-suburban Roman sidewalk in any case. Kris and I spend the time by me teaching her gin rummy (she picks it up fast.) Then off to dinner.
Things begin to go awry almost at once. Since the menus are in Italian, we have to rely on our waiter. Now, since Kris and I are perfectly happy to order pasta dishes as before, this isn't much of a problem. But the others want non-pasta. Two (Mary and Mabel), after trying to figure out what things are, fall back on an order spagetti with meatballs. Mary (Orin's mother) orders a salad, and is unhappy with what she gets -- a salad. That's not so terrible (though Mary's mood was such that it ruined the rest of the meal), but Orin's order -- a well done steak -- seemed quite beyond the mental capacities of the waiter, the chef, and most certainly the tin-plated manager who swept in and out of the room periodically. He acted as though the customers were annoyances keeping him from something much more important -- perhaps pulling the wings off flies; he seemed to enjoy torturing his own employees, he never ceased to bully them about. First the meat (an absolutely huge piece) arrived with the inside completely uncooked (and I mean *completely* uncooked -- I've never seen anything so inexpertly cooked.)
Sending it back resulted in only a slight improvement (but still inedible). Our waiter's explaination, that it was difficult to cook such a thing properly didn't help much (when in doubt, blame the customer -- look bud, if its tough to cook, select something else. Is that so flippin' hard to figure out?) Then Orin's french fries arrived -- cold. Returning them resulted in their proper heating, but the price (8,000 Lira - about $3.40) was not commesurate with the portion (cost in the US - not more than 50 cents, I judge.)
Orin, by now, was pretty unhappy (but good-natured about it all, I never saw him angry once - which is more than I can say for myself.) Our waiter finally agreed to charge him one-half price for the steak (claiming it would come from his own pocket -- yeah, right.) Then the real comic opera began. Last night, I had paid for our dinner with a credit card, with no problem at all. As a result, I had not been too worried about keeping enough lira on hand for dinner. I passed over the card again, whereupon the aforementioned tin-plated manager swept back in to announce that paying with a credit card was "impossible." (Trying to explain what had happened the day before (with receipt in hand) didn't help at all.) I felt bad enough about the disaster the food had been for our companions, now I had to turn around and borrow 50,000 Lira from Oren to pay our bill. I was, by now, quite upset -- I apologized profusely to one and all (well, all the non-Italians), which was waved away; it wasn't my fault this had happened, to be sure, but it had been our recommendation, however misinformed. Every other table that ordered any meat of consequence had problems similar to ours -- every order had to be sent back. It would appear that cooking meat really was just beyond the capacities of the cooking staff (makes one wonder about the *rest* of the food, but nobody in our group had serious food poisoning.) There's an old saying, which I make up for the occasion: "If you want to see a nice Frenchman, go to Belgium; if you want to see a nice German, go to Austria; if you want to see a nice Italian, go to New York." None of it is true, of course, but it has a nice ring to it, don't you think? However, it is true that Belgians, Austrians, and even New York Italians are pretty nice folks.
Oh, one more thing (if you needed it) about the "Central Park" -- the showerheads (which are detachable) have the unfortunate feature that when turned on they tend to tilt up under pressure and fountain water all over the bathroom. The effect of all this is that you can take a one-half-pressure shower at best.
I decided to buy Orin a drink at the bar -- and they wouldn't take plastic there either. Kris decided to pay our hotel phone bill -- and they wouldn't let her; she had to wait until the next day! I guess the smooth efficiency of the Dutch, the Germans, the Swiss and the Austrians spoiled us, because the Italians have, this evening, shown a complete disregard for our comfort and convenience; and a level of stupidity that is a shining beacon . . pointing us elsewhere. Kris says she never wants to come to Italy again, and that's fine by me. It may not be right, or fair, to judge a country by a few individuals (I can't think of another way, though), but this particular experience was so bizarre, and so stupid, that I just don't want to visit here again. Sorry Italians; I'm sure it doesn't bother you in the least. (Could it be that the energy spent elsewhere in getting things done is spent here just being rude?) I spend part of the evening writing all this down, while Italy defeated Holland in an overtime game marked with what seemed to me as blatant favoritism (towards Italy) by the officials - of course, had it been the other way around, they might have been torn to pieces by the Italian crowd. . . We packed up for the next day's journey, for our trip to Fierenze (Florence). Fortunately for us, the worst of our trip was now behind us, and the next week or so will be very pleasant indeed.
We later learn that one of the young students (Crystal) got so loaded this evening - as all the students do, every night - that she passed out and fell through a plate-glass door, smashing it utterly (the only damage to herself was having to pick bits of glass out of her arms for the next few days. Lucky. Very lucky.) The hotel charged her 200,000 Lira to replace it (about $135.)
May 23 - Up before the wake-up call. We seem to have been pretty well 'trained' by our tour so far; we wake up now at ridiculously early hours all by ourselves. (At least we're not as bad off as Jenny (Amanda's mother), who wakes up at 5am every day no matter what - jetlag and all that.) The weather is once again sunny and warm. (What would our trip have been like with more typical European weather?)
We drive through the suicidal traffic of Rome one last time, heading for the highway going north. (I didn't use the word "kamikaze" on purpose. Kamikazes drive insanely, daring others to crush them into a bloody pulp -- and expect to die for it. Romans drive insanely and expect to live. Most often, they do. Just goes to show you that anything is possible, I guess.) We pass back through the famous hills of Rome, and shortly the Appenines reappear, grey in the distant haze. The sky is bright blue, with whispy white clouds here and there.
We pass a town perched on top of a sheer bluff (30-50 feet high), which is itself perched on a hill. I don't know the name of the place (we zoom past, alas), but it might have originally been a moniastery, it looks to be emminently defensible. In the bad old days, these are probably the only places that could survive the roaming bad guys (as opposed to the Roman bad guys.) As we go north, we see a number of these fortified-town-looking places on similar hills -- many still with enclosing walls for better defence. One is its own history lesson -- the town is on a sheer hill. Enclosing it is an Estruscan wall. On top of that is a Roman wall. On top of that is a medieval wall with battlements and towers. The lesson? Italy has been a very, very dangerous place for a very long time and these hills (augmented by walls) offered the only hope of any security at all.
The land (besides towns-on-hills) in the valley we're travelling north in is similar to the road we traveled south to Rome -- without the suburban sprawl. Rolling hills, with farms, vinyards or small forests are on both sides of us. Almost without exception, the buildings are the usual light color with pink-to-orange roofs. We pass a truck stopped by two cops on the highway. Ah, the sights of home. . . Then more sights of home as we stop at a truck-stop-like truck-stop, the "Auto Grill". All of us buy all kinds of different snacks, which we share around. Kris buys some sponge-cake like things, with raisins, which are quite good. Mabel buys some unbelievably strong licorice, which I have to treat like chewing tobacco - putting it between my cheek and gum to let dissolve, but it's still too strong, and I have to throw it away. (So did everybody else who tried some, it was just too strong.) A pack of cigarrettes here costs 5000 Lira, about $3.20 -- not so bad. By now, everybody on the tour seems to have picked up 'tour smarts' about buying things -- they tend to buy serious food and drink at cheaper places and buy only inexpensive items at roadside stops.
Back on the road, I use Kris' camera's telephoto lense as a poor man's telescope to good effect -- but a real, small pair of binoculars would have been a good thing to have brought along. Kris says if we ever come back for another visit to Europe, we'll buy Eurail cards and go our own way. I did this the last time, and it is deuced convenient, so long as you have many places to go (otherwise, just buy tickets as you need 'em.) Remember that Eurail cards don't work in Great Britain, and Britrails don't work on the Continent. The hills here and there are dotted with fortified houses -- not as elaborate as the fortified towns we've seen further south, but nice to look at anyway.
Overlooking Old Florence
Now, at last, we're in Florence. We drive up onto a hill in a city park, from which we can see all of the old (medieval) town. It's a magnificent view -- old Florence (Firenza) is much more compact than the older part of Rome, or even Venice. Disembarking, we walk past the inevitable tourista kiosks and have a group picture taken (this is part of the tour -- they hire a local professional photographer to do it.) The picture costs $10, so we skip buying it, but line up to be photographed anyway. (We see the photo later, it's very nice -- our group seems to have a lot more character ( or at least eccentricity) than the group whose picture we were shown to try and convince us to buy our picture.) I try and convince the others to 'home brew' group pictures -- after the official picture is taken, I suggest Kris jump out and take pictures of us all with our own camera, and with other people's cameras, if they so wish. Unfortunately, this brilliant scheme to save us all $10 falls apart; after the official photo, the group's composition dissolves, with about half our number jumping out to take pictures of the other half of us. . .
Another view. In the distance is the "gold bridge"
In addition to the normal gaggles of tourists, an oriental bride and groom are also here -- he in a well-tailored suit, she in an elaborate white wedding gown with very high heels -- she teeters dangerously as she walks down the steps down toward the gardens that are part of the park. They are photographed (and video-ed) the whole time, by professional-looking camera people wielding very high-quality equipment. The bride and groom wander around the gardens, while their limosine (the largest automobile I've seen in all of Italy) awaits. As the limo whisks them away, we herd back onto the bus to go into central Florence. Once there, we take a brisk walk (one might say a short run -- Brigitte is in a major hurry, for some reason) through the cobblestoned streets (all the old town is cobblestoned) to a leather store, one of the "Cosmos kickbacks", as I have taken to calling them. Their goods are actually quite nice, though. Florence, so they tell me, is famous for leather goods, but their prices are not exactly bargains. (I am reminded of the clock store in Lucerne -- good quality stuff, at reasonable, but not great, prices.) Once you recognize these stores for what they are (the oh-by-the-way shoe store in Venice being the only abberation), you can make use of them -- if only to get a benchmark of what prices you may find elsewhere. (Besides, this store lets you use the bathroom, whether you buy or not -- by now, we have a new appreciation for this sort of thing.)
Then we're off to the Piazza San Croce, site of the Church of San Croce -- burial place of Michaelangelo and Galileo, but more on that later. (Yes, Europeans -- or at least European tourguides -- sometimes expect you to salivate over historical names you recognize, and are not quite sure how to react when you don't.) Kris and I go out in search of a Post Office, but fail to find it, winding up in the Piazza Signoria, with its distinctive statue of Nepture. Lying on the cobblestones in front of it is a rose wreath and several bouquets of flowers. A note attached to it seemed to say that they were in memory of people on board an Italian ship that had sunk with all hands, lain by someone from Normandy in France (my Italian, of course, is about as good as my Urdu, so I could be wrong.)
Kris surrounded, and nearly buried, in pigeons.
In one of the many pockets of my travel jacket I discover a a packet of Melba-toast-like crackers we had had at breakfast in Rome, and Kris feeds it to the pigeons of the square. At the sound/smell of the first crumb hitting the stones, pigeons in the square comes winging over to wrestle over the bits of bread at our feet. Pigeons walk around, pecking at anything - including our shoes - that looks remotely edible. The braver ones flew up onto Kris' hand to eat from it, perching up to three-high to try to get at the dry - and to my taste barely edible - bread. One pigeon we noticed, incredibly, has the entire top of its head sheared off, feathers and all. We are stunned to be able to look down onto the poor thing's bare skull. And yet it moved around normally, and seemes completely undeterred by its unexpectedly air-cooled brain. We hang around that Piazza a bit more, then head back toward Piazza San Croce, doing a litle shopping along the way. We stop in a little stationary store, where we meet "The Professor" from our group (I discover his name is Marco, by the expedient of asking him.) We buy some 10-for-2000-Lira postcards, which are quite nice (especially for about 13 cents apiece), then we move on. I'm given a handbill for an art gallery showing the works of Salvador Dali. Although I'm quite interested, it's 10,000 Lira to get in, and we don't have it (surprisingly, they don't take credit cards). In P. San Croce, we watch at sketch artist doing 'charicature' charcoal drawings of a young student-looking fellow. The artist is quite good; but we were both a little surprised to see such a thing in Italy (for no good reason, of course). Throughout our time in Florence, the most common tourist nationality we found was German, btw.
Now, at last, we head into the church, to view the tomb of Michaelangelo and Galeleo Gellilei, among others. Kris is a little nervous that there are actual bodies buried in the floor and walls (Kris has a similar difficulty with graveyards), but didn't have much of a problem with it after I explain that it was a custom in churches for famous and/or wealthy people to be buried in churches. In addition to the tombs that were marked with relief carvings on the walls of the church (Michaelangelo, Galileo, others - and impressive they were), there were many laid in the floor, with bas-relief likenesses of the interred person. Unfortunately, people are allowed to walk over them, and for over 400 years, they have done so - many of the faces are worn nearly flat. Several of the rectangular, body-sized floor-graves are surrounded by inlays of small white skull-and-crossed bones inlays in black marble. From the dates I could find (many of the dates were, alas, worn into unreadability), many of these seemed to date from the early 16th century, so the skull-and-bones might denote plague deaths, but there was no way to tell for certain.
Up to a level of about six feet on all the walls and support-columns of the church the stone is discolored (this discoloring even extended to the frames of pictures hung occasionally on the walls). It turns out that some years ago the river - which flows a few hundred yards away - had flooded that high, and stayed at that level long enough to permanently discolor the ancient stones!
Back outside to sit in the shade (the day was quite hot) of the statue of Dante Aligheri erected on the steps of the church -- by now we're pretty much had our day's fill of tourism. Back to the bus, to be driven far away from Florence to our hotel, the "Hotel Europe" (in case the guest forgets which continent he/she's on, I guess), a nice budget place -- small room, small bathroom, but the TV has CNN International, which is a nice change after four nights of Italian-only TV.) Dinner is nice but crowded, the hotel is host to no less than four tours at the moment; the food is filling and tasty: spagetti, potatos, salad, rice, and fruit salad for desert -- we have to pay for drinks as usual.
The hotel is nicely situated for the less-than-exhausted traveler: a train station is 10 yards to the left from the hotel front door, with a train every half hour to the center of the city (the nice lady at the station ticket counter told me -- she spoke English), and the Post Office is 10 yards to the right. Unlike other PO's we've seen before, this one is open from 8:15am to 6pm, so we have high hopes of getting rid of that box 'o' stuff we've been carrying around since Venice. (Time on a tour is measured by city, not by day. Nobody can remember how many days it was since we left Venice, but everybody knows that we left Venice after we left Austria, and before we left Rome. Sounds crazy? Go on a tour and see.) Alas, as you will see, the 'curse of the box' will not be so easily exorcized. To top it all off, there's a nice little gelataria (ice-cream store -- the "Ballatina") just behind the hotel. All in all, it's a nice setup, and is head-and-shoulders above the environs of the Venice or Rome hotels. Now, if we can just find a "Coop" (a chain of grocery stores) or similar here or on our time in Pisa or Florence tomorrow, we'll be set for the trip to France the day after.
In the evening, I sit in the bar and write this, listening to some British tourists mangle recent European history (WWII and the years immediate preceeding), but in a rare flash of don't-be-a-smartass, I hold my tongue and don't correct them. Bad history, it seems, is universal. Several of the younger folks on the tour borrow my card-decks to play Crazy-8's. Always take decks of cards. They always come in handy. A big surprise: my book The Rise and Fall of the British Empire has been returned to me! Apparently, Cosmos has become well-practiced at shipping left-behind items via other tour busses, and have managed to get my book back. I must remember to tip her at the end: I may be less than a fan of her tour-guide style, but she really is efficient and pays attention to detail. And at last I can stop trying to plow my way through a book on multidimensional physics, which was most definately not a good "tour book". Good "tour books" are those you can put down and pick up easily -- histories are good, books of short stories too.
Friday, May 24 - Florence to/from Pisa - Up at 7:30 to try and get "the box" to the Post Office. Unfortunately, this Post Office does not change money (I guess this is just large-city PO's), so I have to go in search of a bank open at this hour to get 80,000 Lira (about $55) to mail it -- and that's the surface-mail rate! Since we are supposed to leave for Pisa at 9am, I run (literally) in search of a bank to change money lands me in a large bank a few blocks away (enter the bank via a phonebooth-sized revolving door thing that checks your for guns, and such -- apparently this is a big problem in Italy; come to think of it, the PO guy (who was otherwise very nice) looked a bit nervous when I passed the package to him via an airlock-like thing for him to weigh it). The curse of the box holds, however. I'm just the third person in line for the (only) teller, but the lead customer is determined to prove something or other to the teller that the teller just won't believe. The customer passed money (a counting gizmo counted it in 30 seconds). The teller stamped a piece of paper. The customer looked at the paper, then passed him another piece of paper. The teller didn't like that paper, and handed it back. The customer shook various fingers, and passed another piece of paper. This went on and on, with papers being stamped and passed, fingers being shook, and many words exchanged at high speed. Meanwhile bank workers walked back an forth behind the teller, ignoring him, his customer, and unfortunately, us. (This is a universal feature of bank personell, of course.) More customers come in, and wait in line. More papers are passed, more fingers shake. My time is growing short, but that's of no interest to anybody but me. Another customer comes in, and stands in a decidedly not-in-line manner, with that I'm-gonna-break-in-line-and-you-better-like-it expression on his face. The customer in line in front of me has that ok-I'll-let you look on his face, and the I'm-going-to-be-in-this-line-for-days look on my face is ignored. More papers are passed, more fingers shake: I expect the customer to either leap over the partition to better argue his case, or nail his shoes to the floor to be sure the teller knows he's not leaving until he gets the paper he wants stamped stamped in the way he wants it stamped with the stamp he wants the stamp stamped with. Now certain that "the box" is an albatross I will wear for all etermity, I leave and head back to the hotel -- spotting a "Coop" on the way, for later food-shopping. Maybe we'll have better luck with that silly box in France. We change some money at the hotel (a mistake, I know, but we actually did want to buy stamps to send the small mountain of postcards we wrote last night for the Folks Back Home, and this was the only open Post Office we were likely to find for a while.) The comedy of errors now completed, we board the bus for Pisa.
We learn we are to have a new bus driver starting tomorrow -- the excellent Enrico (who took the bus through narrow streets, highways, and even backed up in heavy traffic with equal skill and good humor) is being pulled off our tour for some sort of 'special' tour or other. For our last day with Enrico, we drive an hour or so into Pisa, where we are let out right next to the three buildings everybody comes to see here -- the Leaning Tower, the Duomo (Dome), and the associated church.
When good engineers go bad: the Leaning Tower
The Leaning Tower sure as shootin' leans: to my eye, the center of gravity of the building is coming very close to being located beyond the walls, which cannot be good for a building. The authorities, we are told, are very concerned about the Tower (I have no idea what authorities -- for all I know, in Italy there's a cabinet-level Department of Leaning Things), and so have banned people going into it. In addition, various of the "finest structural engineers" (from the DLT, no doubt) have placed seven tons of stone in the building to try and keep it from leaning over at so fast a rate. (Which doesn't make any sense to me; if the weight of the building is causing it to lean over into the unfortunately too-soft ground, adding seven tons of more weight isn't going to do anything be make it lean more. No future for me in the DLT, I guess.) In case it comes up in party conversation, the Tower is leaning over at 1 cm/year.
The reason it leans, it turns out, is the vandalous tourist seen to
the lower left (me). Don't tell the Pisa Police, OK?
Kris takes some goofy pictures of me (at my request; I'm to blame) and the tower: the tower at a proper angle, and the town leaning, me standing in front of the tower leaned over at the same angle as the tower; me pushing over the tower, all that kind of thing. To my amazement, we touch off a wave of such picture-taking (several people even ask Kris to take their pictures for them) -- I put it down to 'tour shock': these other folks are so used to going and seeing something, then going and seeing something else over and over, that they just haven't the intellectual energy to think up this kind of thing. I stop by a "Tabacchi" - one of those cigarettes-and-everything-else-in-the-world stores like the "Tabacs" in Germany/Austria and buy smokes -- as usual, my brand is unavailable, but at least what I get is close -- at one point in the tour I had to buy a very strong brand which I didn't enjoy at all. (Non-smokers can never understand a smoker's fidelity to a brand, but in the US we're used to a bazillion brands available anywhere , so a 'tobacco store' whose only recognized brands are "Marlboro" and "Salem" is strange to me.)
An ornate dome just across from the Leaning Tower. It leans too, for the same
reason (inattention to the firmness of the underlying soil.)
Kris and I wander away from the Tower, et. al, and wind up in a small restaurant not far away with outside tables for lunch. Kris has lasagna and I have spagetti, both of which are excellent, and reasonably priced (surprising for a place near a tourist landmark, but then Pisa is a much smaller city than most places we've been), topped off by a "Coppa Frantasia": yogurt (vanilla and strawberry) surrounded by strawberries and strawberry sauce, which we both found to be delicious. The waiters were attentive and friendly, and the price only 30,000 Lira (about $20) - they even took credit cards. All in all, a nice experience -- a few points back for the debacle in Rome.
After a bit more wandering around, we head back for the bus to spend a few more hours in Florence. On the way, a few of our party were approached (non-threateningly) by local Gypsies for money. Gypsies are, apparently, a complete pariah in Italy; a local shopkeeper noticed what was going on and pointed at them, shouting, "Gypsies! Gypsies!" in an effort to make them go away. In both Pisa and Florence, Kris and I were both approached by black men (speaking amongst themselves something like Swahili -- certainly not Italian or Arabic) selling watches, sunglasses, lighters, jackets ("leather jacket -- minimum price") and other stuff. They were usually pleasant enough, and would go away when you said 'no' (a few were annoying, however). Black men are not an oddity in Italy, but these fellows seemed a litle out of place. I dunno.
Once back in Florence, Kris and I intend to take the train back to the hotel, but since we're only going to be here a couple of hours, we decide to stay and have a look at the "gold bridge". From a distance, this looks like any quaint 100-foot-long, 30-foot-wide medieval bridge, but close up is more like a roofless mall, with both sides lined with shops. Most shops were jewelry shops, specializing in gold (hence the name). All of it is far out of our price range, so back the now-familiar Piazza San Croce to wait for the bus. Two of "the family" - John and Jerry - play soccer kick-around with a three- and five-year old Italian kid. John's dad tells me unhappily that his family has just purchased two leather jackets, two bags, a wallet and shoes (Florence is famous for its leather wares, after all); and that his ulcer is kicking up, which may explain some of his unhappy demeanor. Kris remarks to me (privately) that the family must be loaded, because they've been buying things like crazy throughout the trip, and plan to finish up their tour with time a EuroDisney outside Paris. (Ever been to any Disney place? Bring money -- lots of money.) Kris and I head back to the "Cosmo Leather Store" (where we were taken yesterday). Kris is looking to buy her father a nice tie (she does) - but it gives us an excuse to use their bathrooms -- we haven't seen a public WC anywhere. Back on the bus. On the way back to our hotel, we pass a logistics depot of an Italian paratrooper unit: many trucks and a couple of snappy-dressed 'troopers lounging around the guardhouse.
Our dinner at the hotel is (I believe) the last 'included dinner' of the tour. John (the Latvian Australian) trumps us all by sneaking a glass of peach joice from the large bowl of peaches that are part of the dinner -- the rest of us have to, as usual, pay for something to drink. (Kris and I hae a large bottle of mineral water -- 3,000 Lira. Beware: some 'mineral waters' are exactly that, and taste awful. ) After Kris goes upstairs -- she's showing some signs of sun-poisoning from standing out in the sun all day yesterday and today -- I wander back to the "Coop" I spotted this morning and buy supplies for tomorrow. 12,300 Lira buys what would cost at least four times that much at the more ususal 'tourist' sources; definately a 'win', and it makes up somewhat for the bad hotel-exchange rate this morning. Back to the hotel; packed up for the morning's getaway to France. On TV is Germany's "Sat-1", which at 11pm shows "The Harald Schmidt Show", which is a complete copy of "The David Letterman Show" from the 'States: same set, city backdrop (Cologne, rather than NYC), same dorky-looking bandleader, same demeanor, same format. This they had to copy?? Italian channels are pretty much the same fare as in other cities -- lots of dubbed US shows and movies ("Baywatch", "Booker", "Hot Shots", plus some Japanese Animation.) Well, at least they have CNN. Ah, English! Ah, baseball scores!
Tips for Travelers #4
Saturday, May 25 - Pisa to Nice, France - Up obscenely early (6:30am) for the long drive to Nice. We have a new bus, and a new bus driver ("Georgi") The bus' seats are a little less cramped (maybe), but the overhead luggage areas are much more suited to hold the ever growing pile o' stuff we're accumulating -- even the dreaded box -- and various supplies we have (soda, chocolate, crackers, and the like.) One of the advantages of touring we are only just really appreciating is the inattention we can pay to details of packing -- if it fits on the bus, that's good enough.
French Money: 10 Francs (front), 10 Centimes (back), 1 Franc (back), 5 Centimes (back)
Driving north, we pass through hills (or small mountains, since we pass through them in tunnels) we see a wide plain off to our right. Beyond that is the Mediterranean. In the plain is a middlin' sized city, which we speculate is Genoa (it isn't). Soon we are in the plain too, moving speedily north under sunny skies with occasional high clouds scattered about. Brigitte tells us that the mountains that now hem us into the coastal plain are the "Apulian Alps", which are the source for some of the best marble in the world (the other preferred source is in Greece). The tops of the mountains look like they have a dingy snow on their tops -- that's the marble. Michaelangelo came here to personally select blocks for his work, a tradition that sculpters continue to this day.
Now back up into the closely-packed mountains through a series of tunnels. The tunnels vary in length from a few hundred feet to over a kilometer long, and are lit by sickly yellow sodium lights. It's 9:30 am, and we've been on the road over two hours already. After a quick rest-stop we all share around what we've bought. As a group, the bus' occupants are becoming a sort of community -- one that can't get too close, since we all know we'll be splitting up in a week or so, and never see each other again. . .
By now, the mountains rise close around us on all sides, but every once in a while we get a tiny glimpse of the coastal plain still to our left. We're now in what's called the "Italian Riviera" (presumably to lure tourists from the French one.) Incongrously, our driver puts Simonand Garfunkle tunes on the buses soundsystem. It's all slightly surreal: zooming through an alternately sunny and ghastly yellow Italy with a bus of people from all over the world, while Simon and Garfinkle sing "Hazy Shade of Winter."
Slowly the clouds close in, and Kris says it's raining off to our left, where the farm-covered coastal plain is shrinking, bringing the Med hazily into view. To our right, houses now dot the terraced, narrow valleys in between the mountains. Soon our first sign of big-city living appears, hotels and large apartment blocks perched on the mountains overlooking the ocean and the outskirts of Genoa. Genoa is long and skinny, crushed up next to the sea by the mountains, but nevertheless holds 800,000 people. By 11:45 we're high up in these less-than-Alpish Alps (I've had to clear my ears several times) and it's begun to rain. We stop at a rest-stop, and buy sandwiches and drinks in a desperate attempt to get rid of our remaining 13,000 lira -- better to spend it on overpriced food than give it away changed it into Francs. Even so, we're left with 5,000 in paper (a whopping $3 worth) and some coins as souveniers (coins make souveniers of dubious value - all they show is that you were someplace in the country in question.)
While at the stop, we all change some money (though as a group we're learning that the place Cosmos takes us to change money usually has a lousy rate.) Douglass, an older Australian gent on his own, changes my money with his to cut the "change bite" down a bit. Various of our tour-group have taken to hanging around with Douglass (particularly, interestingly, the younger American folk), which he clearly enjoys no end. Douglass had to change $100 Australian into lira yesterday, so he has a fistfull of lira (wasn't that a Clint Eastwood movie?) to change into Francs. He makes me promise to do the conversion for how much he should give me back (I tell him Fr 15, which is about right); I have attained something of a reputation as a savvy money person, simply because I can do conversion math in my head. (Anybody who really knows me will laugh at the description of me as a savvy money person.) Back on the bus to cross a very tall bridge (between tunnels), with the Med off to the left, and on the right the first of many gigantic flower-growing greenhouses terraced down the steep hillsides - some look to be over 100 yards long. Here and there we can spot powerful speedboats zipping back and forth near the coast.
Now we are clearly descending out of the mountains, and come at last to the French border, which we are waved through. Have we really spent a week in Italy? It seems much longer, somehow. Two tunnels across the border, we see our first little harbor of the Cote d'Azur just as the sun finally breaks through the clouds -- the sun sparkles off the Mediterranean, and the trees are a brilliant green.
Part of Monte Carlo comes into view, a little tongue of land sticking out into the ocean, covered with buildings. (We spent most of the time near Monte Carlo in a long tunnel.) Then very quickly we can see another such peninsula -- Monaco. Our guide tells us that Monaco is the oldest surviving monarchy in the world (I guess she means strict monarchy, without a parliment.) We're off the main highway now, winding down out of the hills toward the coastline - though we're still far above the city in the "middle corniche". A 'tall ship' (old-style sailing ship) can be seen anchored outside the harbor. The houses are still white with orange roofs, like those we've seen all through Italy.
The Med.
We're headed for another 'tourist trap', one which many of our group are actually looking forward to - a perfume factory: Le Fragonard. On the way we miss a turn (or two), and have to U-turn. The hill is so steep that the Med fills the field of view, even though we must be more than a mile from it. We finally find it; a small two-story building with a beautiful view of the Med and artfully shaped trees that look like bright green ice-cream pops. The place absolutely reeks of perfume: a hundred scents all mixed together. Kris and I both have difficulties, we get no farther than the lobby before being driven out into what passes for the 'open air' around the factory. While everybody else goes on a tour of the place (ending, naturally, in the gift shop), we sit and enjoy the view; Kris picks a few flowers growing on the hillside. Later, we try to walk around the factory and discover a small but carefully kept rose garden around the back, but can't stay -- the back door is blocked open and an almost-visible fog perfume scents drives us away from there as well.
When the rest of the group returns to the bus, they're laiden with purchases (I didn't see any gallon jugs of perfume, but that's only because the gift shop didn't have any to sell.) We motor on with our own mini-haze of perfume as people show off what they bought. I'm told the prices were quite good. Soon we're back on the highway, heading toward Nice, spotting the many cruise ships in its harbor long before we come out of the hills into it. Nice is a very large city, with houses and seven- and eight-story hotels and apartment blocks on every scrap of vaguely flat land all the way to the ocean. Parked cars line the roads on both sides, making the way barely passable for our bus. (Gasoline is Fr 6.25/liter, or about $5/gallon. I suspect these cars spend a lot of time parked.)
Our hotel, to my surprise, is part of the 'Quality Inn' chain -- our first major chain hotel, and our last. Our room is large, but looks like its been well-used: the air conditioning vent is bent and the sink faucet comes apart in my hands (though when put back together, it works just fine.) Kris and I take a turn around the nearby area, and discover a grocery store, two laundries, and a large shopping mall containing many stores (which are closed at this hour), some bars, a number of closed restaurants (breakfast and lunch only) and a McDonald's, which is open. We eat there -- the food tastes just like that in the States; in fact the only difference to a North American McDonald's is that the kid-play area inside, not outside. (Before you start snorting about ugly americans with no imagination in the land that coined the word gourmet, remember that this is our first chance to eat food and know what it'll taste like in quite a while. So get off my back, OK?) Back at the hotel, we shoot a little pool in the lobby area (the table has bumper-pool-like pockets, so its a little weird), then head up to the room. The TV shows eight different channels, all French, though they do occasionally show English shows with French subtitles (we saw the British comedy show "Not the News" this way.) French TV, like Italian, starts shows at weird times -- sometimes at 15 minutes past the half-hour, sometimes at 20 minutes past. British, and especially American, influences are everywhere -- from products ("Pedigree" dogfood, Kellogg's corn flakes, and of course McDonald's) to TV shows ("Avengers", "Beverly Hills 90210", "Melrose Place", and so on), to movies, to music: like everywhere else we've been, American music is heard in touristy places, but also on the regular radio one in three songs is an American popular song. Here, like in Italy, sex sells everything, but without the abandon of Italian TV -- no quick nipple shots during women's deodorant commercials, and no all-night nude ads for phone-sex companies). Too bad there isn't a CNN, though.
Sunday, May 26 - Nice - We awaken to a power-failure in the hotel, which turns out to only affect our floor. Although we've set a wake-up call for 8:30 am, Kris is up at 7:30 with a stomach-ache -- her first of the entire trip. I scout around and discover that the power is on on all other floors and then try and convince disbelieving hotel employees that the power really is off on just our floor. While we wait for power to be restored, I chat with others from our group about the trip some of them took last night to Monte Carlo (another one of the 'optional tour' items). Monte Carlo is apparently gorgeous and very clean, with Bentley's, Rolls-Royce's, Lambourghini's and Ferrari's at every turn. At the casino, one could play the slot-machines for free, but had to pay Fr 60 ($12) to play any other kind of game. The group got back about 12:30am last night, to find the lights already flickering,and out for good probably about 1 a.m. Power is finally restored around 9:30 a.m. (huzzahs all around). The TV becomes available just in time to see an episode of "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr." on Channel 6 dubbed into French. "Brisco" is one of my favorite shows, though one which I wouldn't have thought would translate well into French - the episode was "Brisco for the Defense" (yes, I know the show so well I can recognize episodes even though they're in another language.) The voice of Brisco was a little nasal, I thought. (Though that's not the worst voice-change I've heard, on my last trip to Europe, I saw "Battlestar Galactica" in Germany -- the Cylons all sounded like Donald Duck!) Channel 6 seems to be the 'hippest' one around, last night they showed an episode of "The Avengers", and later they showed a French-produced documentary on "The Prisoner" and "The Fugitive". The French (and British) show commercials in big bunches at the beginning of the half-hour (or hour, depending), and then don't interrupt the show after that. A side-effect is that the shows per se don't begin until well after the top or bottom of the hour. Its a little unsettling; on the other hand once the show does start, there aren't any interruptions. (The Italians do commercials like the US, but without the "black" between the two -- they just cut. After a while that becomes very unsettling.)
Breakfast is croissants and coffee; fruit cornflakes and eggs are inviting but unattainable (we are told they are not for Cosmos tour people, though John and Holly sneak in with one of the other tour groups and eat well -- the other tour folks knew that John and Holly were not with them, but cheerfully conspired with them. After a while, a tour becomes 'us' (the tourists, a.k.a. cattle) versus 'them' (the locals, a.k.a. the fleecers.)
Most of our tour group set off for Cannes (yet another extra-cost tour), but Kris and I decide to skip it and just wander around Nice. First we head off to the "Castel du 2 Rois" section, where we've dicovered there is a miniature golf course (hey, why not?) A long walk through Nice and a long hill-climb later (our hotel is on the edge of the big hills that rise up behind the coast) we discover that it won't be open until 2p.m - four hours from now. It is Sunday, after all.
We walk back down toward the coast along the "Rue Barla" towards the Natural History Museum. Many of the shops are closed, of course, but a surprising number of small groceries and eateries are open. We are keeping an eye out for a carry-bag to replace "the box", and find a small shop crammed with cheap imported goods (that is, this is a place where locals shop, which is just what we need.) Amongst the straw hats, water pistols and San Francisco 49'er and Minnesota Vikings t-shirts, we find a sturdy black vinyl carry-bag for Fr 60 ($12). We a loath to spend most of our remaining cache of Francs, and so go off in search of an exchange (they're all closed, and the shop doesn't take credit cards). Our wanderings take us to an old-fashioned outdoor fish market, where big hunks of fish, minnows, shrimp, and so on are for sale, with swordfish heads scattered around for decoration. Unfortunately it smells, well, like a fish-market, and Kris and I beat a hasty retreat. After wandering through the streets for a bit longer we return to the shop.
The shopkeeper agrees to take US dollars for the purchase, and even allows me to do the exchange rate calculation. I select 5 for 1, which is slightly low on my side by about 3 francs, but I don't have to pay the exchange commission, so I think it was fair to the both of us. We parted smiling (having not exchanged a single word in the other's language), in any case, and I had a revised (upward) estimate of the general attitude of the French.
Heading back to the hotel, we stop a little sandwich/bar place and again have to negotiate in my horrific french for sandwiches. I have a cheese sandwich, which turns out to be aromatic brie, and Kris has a ham sandwich. The ham sandwich is quite good, and after getting used to it, my cheese sandwich is pretty good too (though the smell of it is such that Kris insists I not finish it.) 30 Francs for the lot, not too bad a price. While we ate, a fellow came in for a drink -- with his dog, an Alsatian. The dog sat with him in the bar, and would occasionally stand up with his paws on the bar -- as if he was demanding service! The serving woman asked me what was wrong with the sandwich when I brought it back half-eaten, I tried to stumble through explaining that Kris didn't like the aroma, I may well have told her that the sandwich was excellent but that I stank -- who knows.
From there, we head back to the hotel room - Kris' feet are beginning to show signs of pre-blisters, so it is wise to go easy. We take the opportunity to say goodbye to the Holy Box, by tranferring its contents to the freshly-bought carry-bag. I use the Holy buck-knife to cut the Holy String and then the Holy Packing-Tape. Farewell, Ye Box, you were a good plan that fell on the rocks of being too heavy to mail. All I can say is, "get stuffed".
We inventory the money situation: I'm down to about $170 US and Kris about $250. We should do nicely for the rest of the trip, so long as we show a little bit of prudence.
While in the hotel lobby, I read an article in "The European", an English-language newspaper, that says that movie-making in Europe is largely a state-supported affair; commercial studios cannot compete with the US film industry, since most movies made in Europe simply are not profitable, even those from England. Even the Cannes film festival has had to accomodate this: there are now two categories of films at the festival: commercial - for profit, and "art" movies. The "for profit" category is almost totally dominated by Hollywood. It turns out that there are comparatively few movie theaters in Europe in relation to the US. There are only 2000 in all of Italy, for instance, many of which close for the summer(!) US-made movies tend to elbow European films off those screens (80% of movie houses were found to be showing US-made movies), so there's no venue for European film to turn a profit in. The old saw that movies that bomb in the US can make it back in European release might actually be true. Movies like that four-star turkey "12 Monkeys" is advertised like crazy all through Europe, and was actually #1 at the box office in several countries.
Kris comments on the clothes young people everywhere in Europe we've gone are wearing: young women's choice of dress seems to come from the mid-1970's US stye:the bright-pastels/bellbottom/goofy-hat look, with ridiculously high platform shoes worn as apparently normal-get-around shoes. The young men wear more what we see in New Jersey these days: jackets, shirts, and slacks or jeans. Curious, no?
A quick back out to wander around nearby Nice (in a different direction), then back to the hotel to rest, shoot a little pool, and eat McDonald's again (by 6pm on a Sunday, its about the only thing open; the Quality Inn doesn't have an attached restaurant.)
A word about the sidewalks in Nice. Apparently the phrase "curb your dog" never made it around here. Dogs - even those on leashes - just dump any old where on the sidewalks, while their owners watch, then the two just saunter off, leaving the evidence of their passing lying in wait for unsuspecting shoes. (This was also the case in Florence, too, but not in Rome.) Apparently pets are not allowed in the parks, so their owners feel perfectly justified in leaving Le Merde on Le Sidewalk. Somebody must clean the stuff up, or else we'd be hip-deep in it.
On the TV is a live feed of the Indianapolis 500. The satellite link goes down in the middle of the race, so we browse the channels. On another channel is Leonard Bernstein, of all people. It's a rerun of a series of music-education shows made back in around 1960, in which he would explain the intricacies of various musical pieces and styles. In this one, he's explaining DeBussy (as well as anyone can.) The Indy feed comes back on after being down for over 15 minutes; French TV has been showing a bio of Ari Lyendyk, highlights of past races, and a freeze-frame of the crowd at the speedway to cover. The general tone of the coverage is "Ari Lyendyk against everybody else." Most of the fillers they show they show during yellow-flag laps (when US TV would be showing commercials) are about Ari winning races various places in the last three years or so.
We pack up everything before going to bed; we've got to be up early again tomorrow morning.
Tips for Travelers #5
Monday, May 27 - Nice to Lyon - Up at 6:30 and off for Lyon an hour later - packing up the night before turns out to be a tremendously large 'win' - we have time to collect ourselves, eat leisurely, and be in reasonably alert shape when the bus pulls out. We drive down towards the harbor to get onto the highway which will take us west. The harbor is thick with sailing and motorboats, a cruise ship and a huge "lifestyles of the rich and famous" personal cruise ship, all aerodynamic and fast looking, with glassed-in waterline inserts holding jet-skis, ready for that quick jaunt to the casino.
We zoom down the "Boulevard des Anglais", with luxury waterfront hotels to our right and the narrow beach (no more than 30 feet wide, and most times ten feet or less, with an occasional man-made 10-20-yard-long tongue of rocks to lessen beach erosion) and the Med to our left. According to Amanda and Jenny, and also John and Holly, the 'beach' isn't sand at all, but smooth pebbles (later, "Map Man" will tell me that the beaches in Cannes are actual sand). Deck chairs/loungers are available for rent, and the beach is 'topless'. Holly tells us of standing toe-deep in the Med (just to say she had), while John shot video of her doing it, and semi-serrupticiously panning about to catch shots of the topless women! The road is lined with an irregular assortment of trees, in which palm trees dominate. We pass a tall hotel whose top two floors are entirely glassed for the best viewing, and another with a huge circular viewing port in the center of the top floor.
The Med is a steel blue, blending to a darker blue further out to sea. The color of the overcast sky almost matches that of the ocean. The waves are at most a foot high. Another marina is a forest of small sailing-ship masts, with what looks like a small island just outside. To my amazement, I realize that the 'small island' is really a huge lobster trap - it must be 30 feet on a side!
Continuing up the Boulevard, we pass a few teams of professional bike-riders, who I suppose are in training for the Tour de France. Traffic is seems quite light for 8 a.m. on a work day, until Douglass tells me that he's heard that today (and tomorrow) are holidays in France, which explains it. A curiously-shaped apartment building appears: its apartment blocks are laid out like bricks in a brick wall (this way many of the 'edge' apartments can have their own gardens) - its ultra-white paint job gives it a very striking appearance. Brigitte tells us that that this and many other of the apartment complexes in Nice started out as "council housing" (that is, government-owned housing for the poor - a British term.) However, since Nice has become a trendy hot-spot, the apartments are now sold to the tragically hip for astronomical sums.
We finally bid goodbye to our last tunnel, we have passed through, according to Brigitte 167 1/2 tunnels since yesterday. (What exactly is half a tunnel?) Crystal wins a prize for keeping best count -- a wooden shoe emblazoned with the Cosmos logo and the date we were in Amsterdam. Brigitte then goes back to feverishly reading her tour book to get tidbits to tell us. The mountains here are heavily wooded and uninhabited -- looking to me like the Alleghenies, or maybe the Appalachians (mit me, the mountain expert.) The wind has picked up noticably, and the bus is buffeted around -- quite a feat considering all the weight of people, fuel and luggage it has for ballast. We pass what looks like a mine-entrance and an attached quarry looking forelorn and abandoned out here in the middle of nowhere (but not abandoned for too many years -- it also has a helipad.)
Then quite suddenly we round a turn and we're in a small town on the plateau we're on. The change is quite jarring: one moment we're in a wooded wilderness, the next we're amongst warehouses and residences on both sides of the highway. (I never did find out what town it was.) Then back into the 'wilderness'; a long, tallmountain rises up on our left, looking something out of Monument Valley in California, except that every flat surface has trees and grass on it. The Australians in our group comment that it looks like something from Australia,too.
The wind is still strong -- cars are visibly affected by it, and motorcyclists waver up the road as if about to be blown over at every moment -- which is probably the case. Some motorcycles have two riders, the two bodies must act like quite a sail in a crosswind. . . The wind is known as "Le Mistralle", and blows through this area (from the north) pretty much continuously, and is even stronger in the autumn.
Quick rest stop at an Esso station (with attached convenience store, just like in the States), parked behind a Swiss Yamaha motorcycle racing team, which might be returning from recent motorcycle races in Cannes. We sample mix 'n' match candy we buy at the Esso, which are as unappetising as candy bought at any such place anywhere in the world, I expect. The land near the highway around here is partially cleared, with farmland and vinyards, intermixed with brush, wildflowers and low trees (does the strong winds preclude tall trees?) The whole area reminds me a little of wine-country California, with vinyards in the valleys, and mountains in the distance. "Map Man", seeing a rocky, flat-topped mountain to our left, remarks that he half-expects to see an American Indian war-party riding along the top. (And they say we have funny ideas about their country!) The sun has at last broken through the clouds, but the day is still hazy, giving the far-off mountains a vaguely unreal appearance. We pass, unexpectedly, signs pointing the way to Barcelona, Spain, which is quite a ways away, but these signs are probably left over from the 1992 Olympic games that were held there.
The highway is taking us through Aux-en-Provence -- what we can now recognize as a fairly typical Southern French small city, with many of the houses still white or beige with orange roofs, like we've seen all through the last week-plus - from southern Austria through all of Italy. Further along the highway we pass a ten-plus vehicle caravan of "Cascadeurs", a performing stunt-car team,whose vehicles (carried in vehicle-carrying vehicles) include a van with tractor-catepillar treads used to (if I read the logo a-right) crush other cars; and cars that looked to have been crushed by it. Another 18-wheeler proclaims itself part of the Mercedes track racing team (truck racing team?).
We are now on "Le Autoroute de Soleil" ("the highway of the sun"), which goes all the way to Spain. We've been following this west, and then will turn north toward Lyon in central France. We approach Arles, an old Greek trading post, and later Roman city, and still a thriving place. (Vincent van Gogh lived here for a time.) We drive through the city and across the Rhone in search of an old Roman ampitheater which still survives in use to this day. We get thoroughly lost, but eventually stop near the amphitheater/arena and walk to it.
The arena is a small-scale version of the Colisium in Rome with, for some reason, very tall steps and seats -- Kris needed help getting down out of the theater area. The arena is used for bullfights to this day, and was laid out for it when we were there, with wooden barricades around the outside to hide from the bull with.
After a bit of postcard shopping -- to save on pictures, as we are getting a trifle short of film, and there is no dishonor in postcards (so long as you buy them at the site, of course -- there's probably a modest living to be made creating "souvenier packets" of vacations you don't take -- just a collection of postcards, ticket stubs, hotel-towels, and train schedules. Cost a lot less, and who besides you will know?) We eat lunch at a little patisserie that sold an excellent hotdog-in-a-pastry thing that is quite filling, and not particularly expensive. Nice day to sit out and watch the tourists go by, too. Since its a holiday, most of the 'normal' stores - and tabacs - are closed (now there's a real difference between Europe and the 'States: in Europe, when it's a holiday, everybody takes off; in the U.S., it's an excuse to go shopping!) However, we find a small exchange that offers a slightly-less-than-optimal exchange rate (but doesn't charge commission, so it comes out about the same), and follow the signs to the local McDonald's (which is, of course, open -- creeping Americanism to our rescue again -- and has the only known-to-be-reasonable restrooms around. It turns out that a number of others of our party had the same idea, and we congregate there (as a European might say, at an American cathedral.) We grab a local tourist map (for once, I beat "map man" to the tourist information place), then we wander back to the bus to continue up the highway to Nimes (on the way to Lyon).
Along the way, I am surprised to pass rice paddies, but my geographical confusion is short-lived, as we turn north (finally free of unsettling signs announcing we are on our way to Barcelona) into the Langedoc region of France.
Our rest stop on this leg is at Montelimar, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Nougat" (sort of the Hershey, Pennsylvania of France, I guess.) The nougat candy (sugar, honey, egg whites, vanilla, almonds and pistachios according to the handy brouchure at the truckstop nougat store - yes, a store just for that particular candy -- it even had nougat ice cream) is apparently the main claim to fame. Fortunately for us, Kris manages to find some chocolate-covered mint-thingies somewhere in the store (I sure didn't see 'em), since neither of us particularly like nougat. Since this is probably a hanging offense in Montelimar, it's a good thing we're soon back on the bus for Lyon, 160 km (about 100 miles) away.
Lyon is the second-largest city in France, like most major cities here, it started out life as a Roman trading post/town/city. Our path has been generally in a valley between two lines of low mountains on either side. The mountains are covered with vegitation, with the valley heavily cultivated; although the occasional town springing up here and there. The further north we go, the more traffic we have around us -- we are, after a couple of days of pleasant motoring, about to re-enter industrial civilization, heralded by a huge refinery about 30 miles south of Lyon (since the wind generally blows north-to-south, I guess the refinery stench doesn't bother anybody -- there is a significant suburban settlement just north of it.) As the sky slowly begins to cloud up, we roll up to a 41-lane toll stop (26 northbound, 15 southbound. Traffic is such that although all toll lanes are open, there are at least five vehicles per lane. The closer we get to Lyon (the Rhone beside us), the narrower the valley becomes -- though with its three-lane roadways, toll plazas, and truckstops, I cannot shake the feeling that I've been teleported to the NJ Turnpike.
As we drive into Lyon, a light rain starts to fall on us; greying the late afternoon. River barges and river cruisers crowd the rivers as we drive alongside them; I see an olympic-sized swimming pool literally ten feet from the riverbank; either these people have phenominal flood control, or really, really good pool-filters. The buildings here are a little more up-scale than in Nice, with 19th century stone cheek-by-jowl with late-20th-century class and steel. In the distance, a large castle overlooks the city. There are a surprisingly large number of empty, for-rent shops. I wonder if there's some sort of recession going on here.
Our hotel is the "Bleu Marine". The rooms are a little cramped, but include most of the amenities (that is to say, the amenities you'd expect in your average "Motel-6"), including a bathtub, to Kris' delight (our hotel in Nice was the first since Amsterdam to have one), and a basket of coffee/tea/hot chocolate, with a water heater dingus for hot water for 'em. The electricity is handled a little oddly; you have to insert your keycard-with-the-holes into a little gizmo inside the front door and leave it there if you want the electricity - including the lights - to work. The only snag is the included, but non-working hair dryer.
The TV selection is surprisingly good, with CNN International, and Cartoon Network(!) -- some cartoons translated into French, but others in good ol' English. Surprising how nice it is to hear simple entertainment without having to filter it through my godawful understanding of French. (What is French for "You waskilly wabbit", anyway?)
We head down to dinner -- the last of the 'included dinners' of the tour; our "last supper", as Holly says. We sit with Holly and John, and Jenny and Amanda for dinner, of vegetable pate (first I've ever had, and quite tasty), chicken with potatoes (more potato than chicken, but still quite good), an apple pie I don't care for, plus a glass of white wine -- this after my excrable french almost winds us up with a red. Jenny, fortunately was wearing a white shirt, which helped. (It might sound like I'd have been generally better off not trying to stumble along in this, my fourth non-language of the tour, but I was pretty much the only person on the tour who even tried to speak, or even translate the local language. I can't quite figure that part out. Here's a little tip for you: Dutch works a lot like German; Italian works a lot like French -- at the pigden-tourist level, anyway.) A quick retirement to another table for Amanda, Jenny, and myself -- to smoke, while Holly and John set off to explore the town. (They are the most indefatigable tourists I've ever seen; they always find interesting shops and places all over the place. Kris' feet aren't up to such continuous traipsing, and mine, truth to tell, aren't much better -- never let enthusiasm wear the bottom of your feet off; it ain't worth it. Do you really want to have your most vivid memory how much your feet hurt?) Then upstairs to relax.
The Cartoon Network has turned into TNT (another Turner Station), showing the excellent Charlton Heston version of "Treasure Island". About 10:30, the rain that has been threatening us all day finally begins; just as well we didn't go out.
Tuesday, May 28 - Lyon to Paris -- Up at the ever-so-ungodly hour of 6:30 am for the ride into the last of our great cities, Paris (and the next-to-last bus trip we'll have to take). Everyone on the tour, by now, is pretty worn out, but I suspect that once Paris hoves into view, extra reserves of energy will appear in us all. The streets of Lyon are fairly well jammed with rush-hour traffic, but after a passage through a disturbingly-smoggy tunnel, we break out into the countryside, on the A6 (if I read the signs right) highway to Paris. The terrain is hilly and well-wooded, reminding me a bit of I-95 in Virginia, except for the red-roofed house, and the low mountains in the distance. By 8:15, we are in a steady rain. Normal northern european weather is something of a surprise to us, after having been sheilded by the Alps for a week or more.
The complete "optional tours" list for our tour. Taing them all would have cost us $1470
over and above the regular tour costs. We took: Rhine Cruise, Mt. Titlis, Venice
walking tour, Vatican tour, "Lake Misery", and the Louvre tour.
Brigitte (the tour guide) is wandering up and down the bus (as she has off and on for the last couple of days) settling up 'optional tour' bills. Fortunately, she is equipped to handle credit cards, and we pay with that.)
We play highway tag (passing each other) with the other bus on the same tour (the more expensive one). Scuttlebutt on the bus is that the other tour's guide -- Marco, by name -- is just more chatty, friendly, and appears actually interested in his tourists. (Doesn't hurt any that he's a handsome devil, to boot.) Conversation on a tour bus in the middle of France can be just as mundane as that anywhere else, I guess; besides, such gossipy conversation is something of a refuge from the every-changing parade of countries demanding our attention. Anyway, the two buses engage in friendly-combative hand gestures as we pass each other; the best, most entertaining of our opposite number is one of the Indians last seen overly-wined on the Rhine, the leader of the Indian contingient. Just goes to show that the most annoying people are really the most interesting, if you can get past the 'annoying' part (which is their 'armor'.)
The further north we go, the more the roofs on houses turn from the now-familiar orange back to the more northern-european brown. For the first time in over a week, mountains no longer dominate the horizon, as we move into the flat plain toward Paris. Highway informational signs in France announce not only the next rest stop, but the next four , describing not only how far, but what sort of gas stations they hold, and how much they charge (all are about $5/gallon). A pretty nice idea, actually.
Our rest-stop is at Beaune, a smallish town chiefly famous for its monastery and the wine that has been made there since the middle ages. John and Holly, ever the explorers, duck into the monastery for a look (but are disappointed to discover that they don't have time to take the wine-cellar tour, and its free samples of the product), while Kris and I and the two older Australian ladies hunt up the local Post Office, which is surprisingly crowded. A ten minute wait and we can buy stamps for our postcards -- we follow the long tradition of sending postcards to the folks back home. We have to prove we were here, don't we? The Post Office, in addition to self-service postal scales and stamp machines, has one of the little public-access computer terminals I've read about. France decided a while back to create a national electronic mail service centered on the Postal Service. A nice idea, but one of which I fear will be overcome by inexpensive computer systems and Internet Service Providers. Them what would want to use the service will get it for themselves. . .
Then back to the "city center" (that's what it's called) in search of restrooms (we find 'em. You never appreciate bathrooms until you go to a place where they are few and far between, and you have to pay besides. A regular topic of conversation on the tour is where to look, and which ones are good or bad. Our experience at "Lake Misery" still is a benchmark in this regard.)
We meet up again with John and Holly (back from the monastery), and they tell us that 40 years ago, they took a tour that brought them to Pompey back when it was first being excavated. Their itinerary took them to the site on a Sunday, when no workmen around -- John picked up a brick as a souvenier! Now there's a conversation piece. He also gives us a spare copy of a brochure for the monastery, which was quite nice of him. By now, pretty much everybody is friends with everybody else on the tour -- though some of the young'uns still tease each other mercilessly. A nice extra of a tour, I think, is that you have lots of people to talk to -- and since we're all a sort of captive audience, we get to learn quite a bit about one another. I only wish this sort of cameraderie could have been engendered earlier in the tour - something to build group identity. I noticed that some tours gave out badges, though something like bracelets, or even just a 'count-off' number would have probably done the job. ("What's your name?" "Number Two, sir!") It might have even allowed for interesting 'extras', like lotteries for small, but nevertheless amusing prizes -- nothing major, just something to pass the time and give a group identity. Well, maybe I'm overanalyzing here. . .
We spot a bus marked "Rotel"; John tells me that this is a special kind of tour company -- there are two buses for the tour, the travelling bus, and a 'sleeper' bus for overnights, with a small restaurant built in. These are particularly popular for tours in places where hotels are scarce, for instance for a tour of the lochs of Scotland.
Then back on the bus for Paris, where Brigitte hands out surveys for the touring company, which we dutifully fill out (we say that the optional tours were too expensive, that events are scheduled badly -- with lots of time at uninteresting places, and not enough at interesting ones, that there are too many events scheduled, that the buses need more legroom. When we were just starting the tour, we were very pleased that there were so many things on the itinerary. Having lived through it, though, sometimes its nice to just be able to sit around, rather than rushing off to the next national treasure. I must be one of those gauche americans I've heard about.. .) A quick stop in Auxelles at a typically too-expensive restaurant, and then back to the bus for the last, 100 mile dash to Paris. The weather has cleared nicely along the way, and now the few clouds are vying with aircraft contrails -- planes coming and going from the Paris airport. We pass our first sign for "EuroDisney", with Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice. We pass through some light industry on the outskirts of Paris - and our first traffic jam. This passes relatively quickly (once we get into the suburbs, but is just a warning for the traffic jams that are to come.
Downtown Paris in the smoggy haze.
Paris has a ring-road around itself (compared to large cities in the US, Paris is tiny, by the way) called the "Paripherie". As we approach it (and get our first glimpse of the most famous Parisian landmark - the Eiffel Tower, we run into a full-blown, get-comfortable-this-is-going-to-take-a-while traffic jam, which continues as we get on the Peripherie, and . . . never ends. Near as I can tell, the Peripherie is a perpetual traffic jam, 24 hours a day, along its entire length. I never did see it with trafficthat might be considered 'smoothly flowing'. Parisians seem to think this nothing unusual; besides, european cities grew up over the centuries before automobiles were ever thought of - there really isn't room to put enough road to make things work.
Two unusual buildings catch my eye: a health/fitness/golf/billiards/bowling club (I kid you not) - Fr. 249/month (about $50) - is a series of 3-4 story-tall silvered glass pyramids, and a helicopter park, with about 20 various helicopters parked here and there (one is warming up as we pass). We cross the Seine, and finally get off the Peripherie in search of our guide -- we're getting the high-speed tour today, with a more leisurely set of tours tomorrow. We pass the French version of the Statue of Liberty -- which is only about 30 feet tall, by the way (a US-sized one would dominate the Paris skyline -- much of the city is no more than 5 or six stories tall.)
We stop at the Place de la Concorde, with its gold-plated (looks like it, anyway) statuary and its Egyptian obilisk. Our guide, Nadine, gets on there, which is fortunate, because it has taken all our driver's skills to get us here, he's completely at sea from here on out. We drive past the Tuilleries, famous for the assault on it as part of the French Revolution -- and across the street, block after block of animal stores, selling every animal in the world, or so it seems.
Notre Dame
We make our first of several hurried stops at Notre Dame, the front of which is covered with scaffolding for repairs (the other sides are clear, however, and the famous "Rose Window" is unencumbered (and magnificient). Once inside, I am surprised to see musical instruments, pianos, microphones and chairs scattered all around the altar. It turns out there will be a Stravinski concert held here tonight(!) The audience will sit in the pews, or stand in the upper gallery, which our guide tells us was used in the middle ages as housing for pilgrims to the church.
The famous stained-glass "Rose Window" in Notre Dame.
Once back outside, we make a quick trip to a souvenier store next to the cathedral; Kris finds a very nice teacup-and-saucer set, which we purchase. Although it costs $50, it is certainly a better choice than a "Notre Dame" bumper sticker, or a deck of "Notre Dame" cards, other such typical touristy things. (Much to our relief, this cup-and-saucer makes it back to the 'state intact.)
Our next leg takes us back to the Seine -- a river-touring barge passes beneath us; like all river cities, there is tons of barge traffic -- and past the fountains of St. Michael and the Prefecture of Police. The nearby bridge is being cleaned: one side is shining white, the other is grimy black from engine exhausts. There must be large crews going from bridge to bridge and monument to monument continuously cleaning. Next up is a ridiculously short stop at the Eiffel Tower -- five minutes worth -- for photographs. We take some.
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 for an exposition, with the intention of tearing it down almost immediately. (At the time it was called, among other things, an eyesore, but it was one of the tallest objects in the world at the time.) It survived, in part because it makes a dandy radio tower, a role it fills to this day. But we certainly don't have time to go up in it (turns out the lines were long anyway), and everybody's decision to stick with the bus turns out to be a good one, since (as we will see), our hotel is not our hotel.
Here I am having just purchased a really big radio-tower kind of
thing in central Paris -- and such a deal I got!
We wend our way back to the Peripherie, not in the least helped by our guide's un-stunning command of English, and our bus-driver's complete un-command of French (and un-stunning command of English). Brigitte, who speaks both French and Italiian, sits unconcerned with us passenger-types -- prepared, apparently, to see us drive to the Spanish border if we get lost enough.
If it is possible, the Peripherie is more jammed than it was before; cars, trucks and busses sitting, whiile motorcycles roar in the gaps. There are not the clouds of such as there was in Rome, but there are plenty -- at least the French have better bikes. By now it is late afternoon, and the banks are closed, so anybody who ain't got Francs ain't gonna have 'em until tomorrow, which is unsettling. (Of course, anybody who is out would be able to borrow from one or another of us in the group, but nobody likes to be without cash.) The traffic jam seems to cover the entire ring, so it's quite a while before we leave the Peripherie, much less find our hotel. Almost all the cars are one-person-each, no carpooling is evident. Well, at least they don't park as manicly as they did in Rome.
We wander about for quite a while, before someone realizes that our hotel has changed its name (normally not a good sign, but it's a big Holiday-Inn looking place, so it's no big deal. The new name is "A L'Hotel", which is instantly nicknamed (by "Map Man", as I recall) "Al's Place", and it sits on the western side of Paris, just outside the Periferie, but also right next to a Metro stop, part of the excellent Paris subway system. From our room on the 11th floor, we have an excellent view of the Bois de Bologne (a big park -- "Bois" means 'forest'), and from the elevator foyer, you can see the Eiffel Tower near the city center (you can tell because of the smog.)
Our room is college-dorm-room decor again, with low beds, particle-board closets attached to the wall, and particle-board furniture. Unlike Lyon, there's no free coffee or tea, and no hairdryers, though there is a bathtub, so Kris can take a bath. We discover that to make long distance phone calls, one must put in a deposit of Fr. 200 (this is the big city now, nobody trusts you!) Since Kris and I are just about out of Francs, we dine at the nearby Burger King for a reasonable Fr. 56 (about $11 - well, it's tourist reasonable) of our remaining Fr. 80. We hunt up a K-Mart-like store (where the locals shop), and I buy a 2-liter bottle of Coke and a 2-liter bottel of distilled water for an astonishingly low Fr. 9.65 (about $2). We'll need to change more money tomorrow, our last full 'sighseeing' day. We'll visit a few places (notably the Louvre) as part of the Cosmos tour, but we'll wander around a bit on our own. We'll also look around for an "Internet Cafe" -- something we've kept an eye out for all along, but not found through our travels (an "Internet cafe" is a place where one can use a microcomputer with a connection to the internet, with an associated coffebar or such. This was when such things were few and far between -- most of the places that sounded promising turned out to be "Techno-Disco" kind of places, with nothing whatsoever to do with the 'net.)
Paris sundown.
Wednesday, May 29 - Paris - Up early for a thoroughly unappetizing breakfast of watery orange juice, average croissants, and absurdly strong and bitter -- to the point of undrinkability -- coffee. As in other hotels, we "Cosmos" tour folks get breakfast-in-name-only treatment, as opposed to other tour patrons, who actually eat quite well. Well, we didn't pay the extra money, so . . . Our waiter/guard-so-we-don't-sneak-over-and-get-the-non-peasant-food is a silly little man; Holly refers to him as "the little Hitler". Then onto the bus for the trip into central Paris.
Once on the Peripherie - in the ever-present traffic jam -- we learn about the goings-on at last night's 'optional' (and very expensive) event at a Paris Cabaret. It seems that Douglass (the older Australian gent on his own) won some form of dance contest while there, and his prize was . . . a woman! He was brought up on stage, and the woman appeared, in a complete wedding dress, which she then proceeded to remove in a striptease, to the amazement of all - but especialy of Douglass. By the end, she was down to just panties. Douglass was completely red-faced (but no doubt grinning like a demon), and she and he left the stage arm in arm. A bit later, he returned - with a baby in his arms - to the great amusement of all. Reportedly, his face was even redder by the end, as every dancing girl in the troupe gave him at least one bright-red-lipstick kiss (he also got a t-shirt, but I suspect he won't need a memento to remember that night!) The show included a comedian who was excellent in several languages at once, and a juggling act that saw a member of the other tour (one of the Indians) seated between two jugglers, with a pair of eyeglasses on his face, and a cigarrette in his mouth. The jugglers hurled clubs past him, closer and closer, until they knocked the cigarrette out of his lips, and then the glasses off his face - all without touching him. He was reportedly petrified - I know I would be!
More than an hour passes before we get back off the Peripherie, to meet up with the bus from the other tour - relatively few of both tours want to go to the optional Louvre tour, so we're being combined. At last we get to see how the other half lives (more legroom, less overhead luggage space). Considering how much time was wasted on the Peripherie, I suspect we could have taken the Metro and gotten there much faster (as it turns out, I'm right, since we will use the Metro later.) George ("map man") tells us about the Sacred Heart Bascilica (there are three 'rankings' of churches -- churches, cathedrals, bascillicas), whose stone exterior has gotten whitter and whiter over the years, as pollution-chemical-laced rain bleached the stone. These days it's almost pure white.
The interior court at the Louvre
Our combined tourgroups' bus pulls at last into the Louvre's underground parking garage, and we are ushered up into the museum proper, to meet our 'local guide', a lady whose English is so heavily accented that many of the tour have no idea what she's saying (we 'group translate' behind her as we move along.) In quick succesion we are escorted through a section on Egyptian works to see the Winged Victory (which is headless, by the way), and a short lecture from our guide about how representations in statuary have changed over the centuries -- which is grossly simplistic, but our guide figures we aren't up to absorbing nuance, I guess. Then glasswork (exquisite), and jewelry (exquisite) -- some of it royal gifts and crowns and such, including a tiny bejeweled elephant figurine. And then, of course, the paintings -- no too many paintings, fortunately (egad -- 'painting shock'!), which fortunately (for me) includes the famous huge painting of Napoleon crowning himself Emperor. (Our guide tells us that the presence of Napoleon's mother at the crowning was an invention, but not that the apparent blessing being bestowed by the Pope is also an invention -- he was present, but loathed Napoleon.) The display includes a helpful 'key' at the bottom for those interested in who is who. We also run across a work-in-progress of a student copying a painting to learn technique. The easel is set up in the corridor in front of some Flemish master or other's work -- the copying looks pretty well done so far.
And then it's time for what everybody comes to see (or at least, that's what our guide seems to think) -- the Mona Lisa. The picture comes as something of a disappointment: it's relatively small (compared with what we were expecting), and protected by smoked glass, to save its pigmentation from sunlight and the many, many people (the room it's in is packed) who ignore the no-flash-photography rule and blaze away like crazy. To top off the surreality of it all, an Italian camera crew runs around shooting the crowd, and recording crowd-noise, for lord-knows-why.
People mill about smartly in front of the Mona Lisa in the Lovre.
And with that, we are free to go our merry way - to spend the day in Paris as we see fit. Despite the seeming brevity of our time in the Louvre, its been over 90 minutes (plenty of time to see the 400,000 works in the Louvre, right?), and its already noon, thanks to the time wasted in Paris traffic. But first, we need to buy a Louvre t-shirt for Patty (Kris' friend; an artist) and also for my mom (who may not be an artist, but is my mom). This turns out to be more of a chore than one might think, as we miss the gift shop, and find it again, after finding every other shop in the mall that is built underneath the Louvre. (We get fooled by not recognizing that there is not one but two inverted glass pyramids that extend from the ground-level down to the mall-level. Stop complaining, it's art.) But we find some nice shirts, and an excellent souvenier book. and then we're off to find the Louvre Metro station (we get lost looking for that too, but what's wrong with getting lost in Paris?)
The Metro stop at the Louvre doesn't have a human ticket-taker. To get coins, Kris buys a 9-franc bottle of water, we buy a block of ten tickets (which turns out to be two too many, but we couldn't know that yet. We'd changed about $100 in cash, and $50 from my now nearly-exhausted supply of traveller's checks, so we're actually pretty flushed with francs.) We obtain a Metro map, and figure out how to get to the station near the Arc du Triomph with no trouble at all -- like every other subway system we used, it was well thought-out, efficient, and relatively clean. Some stations, notably Bastille and Hotel d'Ville, are artfully decorated with represenations of the building in the days gone by. In the tunnel just leaving the Bastille station, a small plaque announces that part of the original Bastille's walls were in that spot. Only the sharpest-eyed Metro traveller would notice it.
McDonald's in Paris. No wait, this is the other arches...
The Arc turns out to be at the center of a terrifically busy traffic circle (there are a number of police standing in it who do nothing whatsoever). Kris takes her life in her hands when she walks out into a pedestrian 'island' in the middle of a feeder street to take some excellent shots of the Arc. We walk down the Champs Elysse a bit and sit down for lunch at a cafe (in the hot sun, at the only table available -- on the other hand, we could see the Arc from our table.) I have an omlette (ham and cheese - excellent), and Kris has a salad (less excellent - she wound up with diarrhea), something to drink, and we were off (about Fr. 100 -- $20). A bit more walking around convinces Kris that her feet won't stand much more today, and the hot sun isn't helping things either. So back to the hotel we go.
On the way, we accidently take the right train, but in the wrong direction. A friendly Parisian points out that we will still get where we want to go, but explains that this is actually the better way to go if you're a tourist, because the views are much better. Sure enough, his advice pays off, as we get a fantastic view of the Eiffel Tower, and also of the River Seine on our way to our train-changing station (to get to the hotel, we had to change trains; the Paris Metro has several 'lines'.) I am forced to revise my opinion of Frenchman in general -- this fellow took time out to talk to us, help us, and even advise us on things to see: a thoroughly nice person.
The Eiffel Tower seen from the subway.
By the time we get back to the hotel, Kris' face is noticably (and painfully) sunburned - so are my arms. She decides - quite rightly, I think - to relax at the hotel while I make a quick dash back into Paris to visit the Hotel des Invalides (the French Army museum) and adjacent tomb of Napoleon.)
The very nice black lady (remember that France has been home to blacks since the French began colonizing Africa, and as an alternative home to American blacks since at least WWI) at the front desk helps out by calling up the Army Museum to find out when it closes for me. She speaks excellent English, unlike the other (white) lady - who doesn't speak much or understand any - and she helped us out again later, when we tried out our 'cybercafe' quest; she actually hunted one up for us, but we just couldn't muster the energy to go (besides, we didn't know anything about the neighborhood it was in, which we would have had to visit at night.)
Anyway, I change subway lines correctly this time, and find the museum easily enough once I leave the metro, and get in (Fr. 35) at 4pm.
Tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Frenchmen come here to worship the memory of greatness.
Englishmen come here to make sure he's dead.
First stop is the tomb of Napoleon (yes, he's still dead), which is a building (and a tomb) which befits a man who is still something of a demi-god in France. The building looks very like a church (there are chapels in it), with a huge domed central gallery in which is the actual tomb, viewable from all sides, with the names of his various victorious battles inlaid in the floor around it. Many pictures, exploring, and a dropped hat later (I had of course removed it when I entered, and it had dropped unnoticed out of my pocket; it was collected by museum guards, who held onto it for me), I head back to the museum proper, passing a Renault tankette (about 6 feet high and 12 feet long) along with wheeled, man-high bullet-shield from WWI and various 12-pounder cannons in the courtyard.
Armor of of a Genie, or Engineer. These guys did the building and
blowing up, often under fire.
The museum is laid out by period, with the largest and most elaborate section devoted, naturally, to the Napoleonic era (which lasted less than 20 years -- France, it has been said, is a country with a great future behind it; the French look back on this period of "the glory" with the same longing that some Americans look back on the 1960's -- and with an equal lack of justification.)
Helmet of a Polish Lancer of Napoleon's Guard. The Polish Lancers, at the time,
were among the best cavalry in the world.
A Grenadier a Pied, one of Napoleon's stalward "Old Guard".
Notice how these are behind glass, unlike the British Army Museum.
I saw many uniforms, muskets, and swords; Napoleon's greatcoat and bicorn hat from the disasterous Russian campaign (part of La Gloire that cost about 95% casualities to his army - to battle, disease, starvation and freezing to death; oh yeah, I'd like to go back to them good old days) - all perfectly preserved. Of interest to me (since I'm a wargamer) is
Napoleon would 'wargame' out his strategies; this set of 'game pieces'
was kept by Berthier, his chief of staff.
Marshal Berthier's wargaming set for planning out campaigns consisting of blocks of wood for units and regular military maps. Each potential adversary and ally has a complete set of pieces (and, of course, the French army), all stored in a chest, so it could be carried on campaign. Napoleon, I've read, used to crawl around on the the floor pushing pieces around to figure out how to defeat his opponents.
Hat and Greatcoat Napoleon wore during his disasterous campaign in Russia,
1812. This is pretty much the only measure of the real physical size of the
man to be found in Paris.
Original casket of Napoleon. It was in this that he was brought from St. Helena to Paris.
Death-mask of Napoleon
Rifles of the mid-19th Century
Other components of the museum host uniforms and weapons from other periods, including rifles, armor, and machine guns (interestingly, a German MG34 from WWII is here) -- I just can't do it all justice, and besides, you've already read one long military museum description. But I would say that it is somehow more impersonal than the British Army museum. For one thing, the British museum had many exhibit items out in the walkways -- the various mannequins -- whereas in the French museum everything was behind glass. For another, the French museum was staffed by civil servant types, who looked distinctly bored and unhelpful; while the British museum was staffed by military personell in uniform. The British Army museum just felt more personal somehow, as if it was the Army itself trying to tell you about itself, rather than just another public work.
From the "flag room". Colors are 'way off since light was low, flashes were
not allowed, and the flags were behind smoked glass.
A special mention of the flag room, however. A small, almost-missable room contains battle flags from various French wars. They are kept in a barely-lit room (so the lights don't wash out the colors of the flags (no flash phographs, of course). Flags from the 17th century, the Napoleonic era (Imperial Guard, 85th of the Line); there's even a captured Viet-Minh flag from the early 1950's. The darkness and relative lack of visitors (I was it, while I was there) gives the room a quiet, respectful air. Very appropriate, I thought.
Too soon it is time to go back to the hotel, since the museum closes at 6pm. The museum shop is surprisingiy poorly stocked; I manage a book and a few postcards, and I'm off.
The subways in Paris seem to have two speeds: "stop", and "go very fast". This may be more efficient, but screaming into and out of stations is very hard on your neck. They're also the only subways we've seen with passanger-operated doors (i.e. non-automatic, with overrides so you can't open them while the train is moving).
Back at the hotel (via the correct subway path this time, thank you very much) I take Kris to the supermarket I had found; she's suitably impressed with the selection and the prices. We buy supplies for the last leg of our trip (to England) -- Fr.25 for what would have cost at least Fr.100 at places we might be expected to go to. We scout for a place to have dinner, but eventually settle on the hotel restaurant, selecting the beef "traditional", which turns out to include salad bar, meat, french fries, and desert. Its quite good, though the waitress forgets our order of ginger ale, bringing instead Schwepps tonic water (on the other hand, the water was free, so we didn't kick about it.) We write postcards, and pack up. Tomorrow, on to London!
. . . oh yes, only about six of our tour group went to the (optional, and expensive) "farewell dinner" this evening. George ("Map Man") told me the Brits call the Aussies as "Pommies" -- "Prisoners Of Mother England", harking back to the days when Australia was a penal colony. In fact, Australians divide themselves along this line today, those that came there of their own free will versus descendants of the prisoners.
Tips for Travelers #6
Thursday, May 30 - Paris to London, England -- Up at 6:45 to head downstairs to say goodbye to Melba, Orin, Mary and Bonny, plus various others, who are heading out to the Paris airport to fly home (there turn out to be two itineraries, they're on the other one.) Then into the main restaurant (rather than the windowless back room we had yesterday) for a breakfast very like yesterday's (in substance and lack of taste.) Then back up to the room to collect our baggage for the bus. The elevators here seem to follow some sort of bizarre algorithm about what floors to stop at - seemingly guaranteed to minimize the number of people collected, and maximize the time to your floor. But at least they don't have that sickening 'bounce' when it stops that every other elevator we've had
Our bus takes us to another hotel before heading out of Paris, to drop off a couple of our number who are staying on a couple more nights, including the Chinese newlyweds and the family that is going to spend time at EuroDisney.) Crystal and Tiffanie are taking a taxi to the airport -- Crystal wears a bizarre dress and platform shoes, topped off by a beret. The silly thing is, she's probably right in the current local fashion!
As we get on the Peripherie (yes, it's jammed at 6:45 a.m. too), and begin our journey northward, we hear a little about others' adventures in Paris. One is not so amusing, Amanda (the young Australian woman) was 'felt up' by the quintessential dirty old frenchman in a Metro station. Jenny (her mother) screamed at him "Get away from her, you pig!", at which all the passersby stared him into going away. Still, Jenny felt it necessary for Amanda to be kept 'under guard' from then on. So maybe my glowing words about frenchmen are not the whole story. . .
Our conversation turns to the flaws of Brigette, our tourguide, which boil down to a perceived distance that she places between ourselves and herself. I've touched on this before; it would have been very nice to feel like she cared bout us, except in carefully rationed doses. On the other hand, she did put in the effort to get back that book I lost.
Kris has made an improvised pillow out of a pilfered pillowcase and our towels (which we turned out not to need -- apparently we've stayed in hotels just barely good enough that the things we were warned about (lack of soap, towels and toilet paper) are not a problem. The weather, as we drive along the highway, is sunny and warm.
We're about 150 miles from Dunkirk, and the land is hilly, and covered with large farmed fields with wooded patches here and there, and the occasional village. High up in the sky we can see contrails of aircraft -- military aircraft, judging by their maneuvers. (If they're not military, I'm not getting on that jet at Heathrow!) Brigit puts on music that sounds like it came from a New Jersey diner (that kind of bouncy muzak stuff), but the Aussies seem to like it. It might have been neat to have music from each country as we rolled through it, though that might be a lot of work.
The "Eurostar" train screams past us at 300kph (180 mph) on its way to the Chunnel -- Paris to London in four hours. We have a short rest stop at Aire D'Asservilles, where Kris gets rid of most of our French coins buying a big coffee mug with "Paris" on it. Since money-changers generally don't like to deal with coinage, its either this or carry it home (and we've got enough coins already, as you have seen). We pass up, thankfully , some really junky stuff -- a teddy bear that wolf-whistles (there's something deeply weird about that), Effel Tower paperweights, and the like.
Back on the highway, the land is now just plain flat, with farmland as far as the eye can see. Traffic is light; we're still near the high-speed rail line -- another "Eurostar" whizzes by, this time on its way to Paris.
Our guide tells us that all the red poppies we've seen have a recent legend associated with it; that the poppies used to be white, but turned red after WWI (the battlefield of Arras is near where we are) -- this red-poppy thing showed up in "Oh What A Lovely War"; a great movie: see it. I realize that I have been able to perfect a sort of 'waking sleep' mechanism, in which I can listen to the spoken word, but have actual (visual) dreams, lasting for about 10-20 minutes, after which I am refreshed enough to write more of this apparently endless description of our journey (lucky you.). A handy talent, I suspect, but one I am very happy to not to have to use very much! Being this tired all the time just can't be fun in the long run.
Finally, we roll into the port of Dunkirk (avoiding the city itself). Those of us with any knowledge of the history of this place (folks old enough to remember the era, and me) talk in low tones about what happened here. I look into the clear blue sky and wonder what it must have been like to have Stukas popping out of the little white clouds to pound away at the lines of men waiting to get on a ship going back to England. . . what this port must have looked like capped with oily black columns of smoke from burning buildings and vehicles, with scores of ships on the horizon, trying to get the men out. Instead, this is just a small, light-duty port, with our huge blue and white ferry already docked to take us on.
Our group is the first one on board, which means that we must hang around for 30 minutes or more while other passengers trickle on. We were waved through French customs (for the third and last time), which prompts George ("Map Man") to comment that his specially-purchased dual-entry visa was a waste of money, since no French official ever laid eyes on it.
Our ferry maneuvers skillfully past various sandbars and docking piers of the port; one manuever causes a passenger's bottle of duty-free whiskey to break near us. Fortunately, it's a good brand of whiskey, so the smell is actually rather pleasant. Ship's announcements come in every known language, but we don't listen to the English one, and it isn't repeated. Perhaps it was something about watching out for your whiskey bottles tipping over.
Kris and I hang out with the Aussies and New Zealanders; Kris goes off for a walk while I watch the bags. This ship is actually smaller than the one we took coming over to France, and even on a smooth sea, the rocking of the boat bothers her. I steal off with some of the others to the duty-free shop (smokes, and liquor for some of the others.) When Kris gets back, I go up to have a look topside, but there really isn't much to see.
Once we dock at Ramsgate, we breeze through customs and squeeze onto the bus for London (after 2 and a half weeks in right-hand-side Europe, I walk to the wrong side of the bus, this is left-hand-side England once again.) We share the bus with regular commuters; it's a pretty cramped 90 minutes into London. Fortunately, our very-British driver is a very funny guy, who seems delighted to chatter away with us. We drive (eventually) up the M-2 into late-rush-hour London traffic with cars, trucks, bicycles, and motorcycles darting in our way, requiring some fancy driving from our jovial busdriver. (You might wonder how this differs from, say, Rome. In London, idiots to be avoided are few and far between. In Rome, they're everywhere.
After a few wong turns, necessitated by inconveniently-closed roads, we arrive back at the ol' Kennedy Hotel, where we are given a room with a magnificent view of the brick wall out back. Kris and I repack the bags for the very last time, to organize things properly for air travel (on a bus, you can be pretty slack about such things, not so on a plane.) That evening, I watch British TV: an episode of the more-or-less improvised game show "Whose Line is it Anyway", a documentary on the Maastrickt Treaty, and Woody Allen's "Play it Again, Sam" on BBC-1. Then, surprisingly, BBC-1 goes off the air, even though BBC-2 and BBC-3 are still on the air. I guess I'm just too used to big-city US television, where you can watch terrible programs at any time of the day or night.
Our haul of books, etc. along with our rarely-stamped passports.
Friday, May 31 - Goodbye to All That: London to USA -- Up at 9 for a quiet morning. I'd sussed out the arrangements for the day last night, so everything is packed and ready to go long before our 'safety' wake-up call at 10. Unfortunately, my preparations fall down when we go down for breakfast; the hotel restaurant closes for breakfast at 10, not to reopen until 11 for lunch. We repair to the bar for coffee and biscuit (cookies) for me, and orange juice and ham and cheese on toast for Kris -- very nice.
We loaf around the lobby, and get to see George and his wife off -- they'll be spending a week with their son here in England before heading back to Perth. Then it's time for us to take the hotel van to Heathrow airport, which also stops at a couple of other hotels along the way for others on their way to Heathrow. After all the group-hubbub of the last three weeks, this ending is strangely quiet, it somehow feels odd. Along the way, we see the novel mechanism the London Police use to deal with illegally parked cars. They use special flatbet trucks with integral cranes. They simply lift the car up off the street, onto the flatbed, and drive it away. Our van driver says that the car's driver will have to pay about 180 pounds (well over $200) to get the car back, since he'll be charged for the towing as well as a ticket.
Several of the other passengers on the bus are from Globus (the upscale version of our tour company, Cosmos) tours of Scotland and Ireland on a double-decker bus. They said the bus was very uncomfortable, because it had no air conditioning. Globus officials, when questioned, said the bus had no air-conditioning because 'no one had ever asked for it before' -- a stupendously threadbare lie, I thought. The last hotel we stopped at as part of the "Novotel" chain -- very, very upscale. Now that's the way to travel.
As we approached Heathrow, we have a chilling reminder that the real world is not necessarily as pleasant as we had experienced: we pass a police checkpoint, at which a policeman looked at cars coming in, prepared to wave those to be searched into a parking area. Behind him was another policeman, carrying . . . an assault rifle. Apparently, there was some sort of terrorist action expected, and the police were ready for some serious trouble. This was also our first indication that security at the whole airport was to be very, very tight.
Once we got to the Virgin Atlantic ticketing area, we were able - after some nervous delays - to convince the Chief of Security that the faxed copy of the marriage license (sent by Patty, thank goodness for that) meant that Kris really was my wife, regardless of what her passport said. We passed over our suitcases (after being asked if we had packed them ourselves, etc.), and then went to the security checkpoint for our other bags and persons. My carryon bag was completely searched (quickly and efficiently), as was my many-pocketed jacket -- the fingernail clippers had triggered off the fluroscope-watchers. My camera bag, with cameras, film, CD-player, tape player, et. al did not cause a problem, however.
Having successfully proven that we were not a danger to ourselves, the plane, or the British Empire, we moved on to passport control, and then to the gigantic waiting area inside the airport proper -- which is very like a shopping mall, with restaurants, duty-free shops, and normal stores like "The Nature Company" and Harrod's. While we wait, we hear that an Air India flight has been completely cancelled -- this explains some commotion we had heard back at the ticketing area: there were a number of people to whom this cancellation was a very inconvenient surprise. Makes me appreciate even more how many things could have gone wrong with our trip, but did not. I decide to buy a few books at the airport bookstore (I'm almost ashamed to have bought only one book on this trip) -- one on the "Triads", which I have always been interested in, Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper book (the basis for the movie "Murder by Decree" -- see it), and a cheapie UFO book. On this trip, I gave away three books I was carrying, and bought four -- I win!
Earlier than one might expect (2:30 for a 4:00 flight), we are allowed to board the plane (which is more completely booked than our flight over - we won't get a triple-wide to ourselves this time, I think). The walkway to our gate is very long, but includes a sliding walkway. Kris, who has taken a Benadryl to beat a headache, comments that everything is moving in slow motion. She's right -- as the trip winds down, all the pent-up adrenaline is leaking away.
Our seats have similar amenities to the last time - little TV screens, a bag with socks, blinders and the like. Kris falls asleep from the effects of the Benadryl, but awakens just long enough to listen to the 'safety' talk. ("If the plane strikes the ground, you'll all be killed. Try to keep your belongings near you, as this will make identifying you easier.") As before, the flight has me nervous (did I say I didn't like to fly? I did? Well, fine, but I really, really don't like to fly); our view out the window is mostly of the wing, which is fine by me. I'd just as soon know at all times that we have at least one. The entertainment system keeps me occupied (I wish I could sleep, like Kris, but I just can't) - I sample "Jumanji", and the excellent "Richard III", along with an episode of "Friends", and the first episode of "The X-Files" (shown at a little faster than normal speed, for some reason.)
Our trip takes us over the northern part of Ireland, and into the US over the northeast corner of Maine, and is completely uneventful but nevertheless long. We drag ourselves off the plane, and through US customs, and out to meet Patty, who talks brightly to us, about. . . something. Kris and I both actually manage to carry on conversations, telling Patty all sorts of things about our trip, but I honestly cannot remember much about it. Our journey was at an end.
Well, it was great fun! The tour, with all its flaws, was a very pleasant experience, and we got to see things that many people don't get to ever see. (This is both a blessing and a curse. Count your lucky stars you haven't been to "Lake Misery", for instance.)
What was the best thing? Well, despite the drippy weather, the long travel, and the generally un-tourist flavor of it, I'd really have to say it was the visit to the American Cemetary in Holland. For a couple of reasons: it was a way for Kris to connect with her family in a way that simply wasn't possible without going there; I think it gave her a new view on her family (and herself). It certainly gave me a new view on WWII -- it is instructive in many ways to read about the war, to see films, even to talk to veterans (which include my own parents). But visiting the cemetary is a very focussed reminder that the only 'product' of war is dead people, and that those men out there, which includes Mr. Nettleship, paid with everything they had for what I get to read about.
What was the worst thing (besides "Lake Misery")? I think that the tour was too short; that we didn't have time to really get to know much about where we were visiting. Sure, we got to see the sights and take the pictures, but did we know anything about any of the cities? No -- in fact we spent more time in the bus than in any city. On the other hand, we didn't know until we went where we wanted to go. Perhaps a longer (temporally) tour, or the same length with fewer cities is the better way to go. The problem is, our tour sounded great -- on paper. But having to live through it taught me that 'whirlwind' tours are only really useful as 'scouting' for a more thorough exploration of what really winds up interesting you.
Do we have a favorite city? London, I think. For one thing, they speak English there, more or less, and the signs are readable (though it takes a bit of gear-shifting to realize that "Way Out" is not a description of a state of being, but rather the exit.) London has a lot of places to go that we wanted to go to, and still has places we would like to go to, or go back to and explore more. For instance, the Imperial Museum.
Do we have a least favorite city? Easy - Rome. Just go back and read what happened there.
Where next? Oh, I dunno. How about Ireland? Scotland? We both have various blood-ties there. (In fact, Kris took a trip with Patty there the year after this trip. Me -- I watched the cats. They also serve who watch the cats, I always say.) Australia. Vienna (again, for me.) The midwest. The pacific coast (again, for Kris.) Japan. Cairo. The Rockies. Berlin. Constantinople. Mars.
© 1998, Charles McGrew