Category Archives: Travel

Feelings, Third Phase, Travel

Sightseeing By the Dollar

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Spring                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

Whenever I travel, I get performance anxiety.  Weird, huh?  Spending the amount of money required for travel makes me want to get plenty of sightseeing in per dollar. But, how much is enough?

Surely walking past the Willard, the Dept. of Treasury, the Whitehouse and out to the Lincoln Monument, then back is enough.  Isn’t it?  How many hours at the museum or paintings per visit is enough?  Does eating in the cafeteria count?

Now I wouldn’t raise these questions at all if I felt I’d done enough, so  you can tell how I’m doing by my own barometer, but I question my barometer.  At home I work most in the morning, usually a couple of hours in the afternoon after the nap, too.  That seems fine to me.  Most of the time.

(Me wondering about enough.)

On vacation though I get up in the morning around 8, my usual time, wander to some breakfast place, then head off for sightseeing that counts.  However, about 1 pm or so, my everyday nap habit reels me in, back to the hotel.  After a nap it’s the middle of the afternoon and doing much else just doesn’t happen until dinner. Which is the big event, then I’m done, not being a drinker, dancer, night outer type.

Anyhow, it’s a very bourgeoisie problem.  Or, it’s not exactly a problem so much as it a perception of value for the dollar.  How much more Babbity can you get?

Ah, finally I’ve written long enough to get to the nub of it.  After my trips the memories and thoughts enjoined during them always enrich my life. Always.  So, it’s not the sights seen, nor the miles walked that matter.  It’s the quality of the time overall and it has been this time and will be next time, wonderful.   All that thinking on power that I haven’t written about yet.  But I will.

This is a guy, just some guy, in front of the D.C. city hall getting made up for a press conference on the front steps.  A very D.C. moment.

 

Cinema and Television, Dogs, News of the Strange, Politics, Travel, US History, World History

All in a Morning’s Jaunt

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Spring                                                      Bloodroot Moon

Today is the much nicer day of the next three.  Tomorrow the high will be 46 and windy, Monday 41 with ice and snow. Today it is 53 and sunny. I chose walking over museums today.

Before leaving I ate my first and last breakfast at the hotel.  Their main breakfast is a buffet, served for the  many students staying here.  The coffee was weak and served in tired blue plastic mugs.  Jack Reacher would have scored the coffee very low.  A group of 18 students from Germany didn’t seem to mind the coffee though.

Outside the wind was mild, though the temperature in the morning was in the high 30’s.  I saw people in shirt sleeves but I stuck with my hat, Chilean fjord special muffler and my Ecuadorian coat.  There were a number of people out enjoying the sunshine when I passed the Willard Hotel.

(apparently my Android takes self-portraits.  This one showed up in my pics today.)

Those of you who watched House of Cards would recognize the Willard from the scene where Clean Water held its fund-raiser on the steps, then crossed the streets with trays of food for the striking teachers.  Up close it looks like money and power compressed into architecture.

About a block from the Willard and right next to the Whitehouse–how did I not remember this?–is the department of the Treasury.  Keep the nation’s finances right close by the Oval Office, I guess.

Michelle’s garden is on the south lawn and visible from the fence where we all gathered, gobsmacked by the presence of this icon of politics and American might.  The Whitehouse has been the home of all U.S. presidents except for George Washington though Truman vacated for four years while it got a top to bottom rebuilding.

Onward to the Mall, entering the green west of the still not open Washington Monument.  It’s having repairs and rejiggering of its foundations due to a 2011 5.8 earthquake whose epicenter was in Virginia.

Walking along the reflecting pool on my way to the Lincoln Monument I saw a very large Irish Wolfhound, gray and stately, walking its people, unfortunately too far away to meet.

At the monument there were a lot of people though not the crush I’ve  experienced at other times.  This is a moving place as I’m sure you already know.  It is, as it says right over Lincoln’s head, a temple.  Immersed as I am right now in Greek and Roman mythology it’s easy to see the architect and sculptor’s reach back to those ancient worlds for adequate ceremonial features.  He was and is a giant in our history and this haunting building makes that place clear.

A brief thought passed through my head that this was a monument for the ages, then Ozymandias came in its wake and I realized I was a citizen of Rome at Rome’s peak.  London at the height of the British Empire.  Xi’an during the T’ang empire.  Edo during the Tokugawa era.  And the glory of those cities now lies in the past, a memory, not a present fact.  So it will be with Lincoln and Washington, D.C. itself.

After the Lincoln Monument I went by the additions to the Vietnam Memorial, two statuary groups, one three men, the other three women, and wandered on to come upon what must be the most jingoistic of all our monuments and one built under the reign of George II, George W. Bush.  Nothing against the vets of WWII, among them were both my parents and an uncle, but this monument reeks of American exceptionalism and the projection of US power.  With George W.’s name on it it will forever be linked, as I’m sure he intended, with his misguided efforts in Iraq.

This is an example of the unintended consequences of the use of power.  No one can or should compare the US WWII effort, the last ‘good’ war’, with the ill-advised and deceitfully sold war against the Iraqi people.  This monument will itself stand as stone and metal irony on just this point.

In case, though, all these monumental treatments of liberty and freedom seem ill-advised, I found this on the back of a truck parked on the corner of Constitution and 15th, just two blocks from the Whitehouse.  There is always someone who would take freedoms away.

By the time I trudged my way back–I figure 4 to 5 miles round trip–this guy had exhausted himself.  A lunch at the Elephant and Castle then a long nap.  Woke up refreshed and ready to go back to the PRB show tomorrow.

Travel, US History

Taking Advantage of Good Weather

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Spring                                                 Bloodroot Moon

Of the next three days here in DC today will have middlin temps and modest winds.  That means today is a good day to walk past the Whitehouse, out onto the mall and onward to the Lincoln Memorial.  I haven’t been there in a long time.

In my focus on the pre-Raphaelites and my upcoming shift away from the MIA I forgot I was coming to DC.  Oh, I’d thought about going to the Supreme Court and/or the Library of Congress, yes, but only vaguely.

When I got here, I saw the Capitol building from afar.  Oh.  That Washington, D.C.  This is the nation’s capitol, the historic and present locus of US power.  And I haven’t been here for any length of time in a long while, since our family honeymoon back in 92 or 93.

In Penn Quarter, the name some urban planner cum tourism official has given the neighborhood of the Harrington Hotel, there is quite a bit of history within 2 or three blocks.  2 blocks away is the Ford Theatre.  Up another couple of blocks is the National Portrait Gallery.  In the other direction is the Old Post Office and the Navy Heritage Center.  3 blocks west is the Whitehouse.

The revolutionary era is a time period on which I’m weak, having spent my US history reading largely on the Civil War, the West and the period of the Transcendentalists. As a result the early history of D.C. is fuzzy for me. Someday I hope Kate and I can do a driving tour of Revolutionary War sites and, at the same time, visit the Hudson River school of artists along their namesake river.

 

Art and Culture, Sport, Travel, US History

The Contenda

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Spring                                                       Bloodroot Moon

First day, tired.  Ate.  Walked.  Got too chilly.  25 mph winds and 37 degree temps.  Came back to the Harrington after getting a sight of the US Capitol, white and domed at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

When I began to scout D.C. on the web, I got on a Washington Post website that featured restaurant critiques.  It wasn’t the restaurants that caught my eye though, it was a helpful graphic the Post staff had created to help you find “the homicides in your neighborhood.”

That night I didn’t click through since I didn’t have a neighborhood, so imagine my surprise as I sat in Harriet’s, the Harrington’s restaurant and saw, on the now cliched plasma screen, “Murder by the Whitehouse.”  Sure enough, within two blocks of the restaurant and hotel somebody had shot a football player and killed him.

The Whitehouse is only a hop, skip and a drive-by from here.

Whitehouse, in fact, is the Harrington’s passcode for its wi-fi.  A  natural.

Too weary to do sight-seeing with a wind-chill I went back to my quiet room, wondering what was happening on floors 2 thru 9, and flicked through the channels, reconfirming our decision to cancel our Comcast TV.

But.  I did find a middle weight boxing match, a world championship in the WBA between Macklin, the contenda, and Felix Sturm, the champ. I haven’t watched boxing since they were sponsored by Gillette Razors and that was in the fifties, but I watched this one.

No knock-out punches, but a lot of gamy attacking by the contenda and a lot of backing up by the champ.  There was blood, some.  Shots of faces crushed by left and right hand jabs.  Uppercuts.  The occasional clinch, but mostly strategic holding up of gloves followed by flurries of punches.  Boxing seems almost quaint with mixed martial arts, Ultimate Fighting, now enjoying popularity.

The bout had a Hemingwayesque aura, perhaps a bit of the 1940’s.    The referees were all Latino one from the U.S., one from Puerto Rico and one from Spain.  They went with the German though the Irishman, Macklin, could have won it, too.  At least that’s what the announcer said.

It was Hemingway and contestants bloodying each other up and the Spanish referee that led me to bull fighting.  There is, in both boxing and bull-fighting, a suspicion that you shouldn’t really be watching.  Two adults pounding each other with their fists?  A whole raft of folks against one bull whose only way to leave the contest is dead? (Yes, there are the rare exceptions where the crowd saves the bull, but most of the time the bull dies.)

This wasn’t the I planned my first evening of this pre-Raphaelite immersion, but there you are anyhow.

Art and Culture, Dreams, Family, Travel

Oh, man.

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Imbolc                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

Oh, man.  Staying up late no longer has the romance it used to have, or else the way I feel after, like this morning, has simply become intolerable.  Whatever I don’t like the feeling, jangly, edgy, a bit morose.

Had a dream last night where someone tried to steal my laptop.  While I had it in my hands.  I cried out, “Stop that!” and flung my arms up, waking myself up.  Pre-travel jitters I imagine.

Now when I travel, or at least prior to travel, I have a period, sometimes intense, of not wanting to go.  Not wanting to leave the predictable comforts of home for the uncertainty of the road, the hassles, the physical demands.  Once I leave the house this all wanes and then again I delight in travel.  The strangeness of it.  The oddities.  Even the hassles, so long as they don’t involve running for airplanes.

My family was born to travel.  Mom went to Europe as a WAC during WWII.  Dad traveled happily and often within the US with the occasional trip to Canada.  Once, even, to Singapore.  Mark has traveled the world since college or close thereafter.  Mary moved to Malaysia many years ago and both still wander.  Mary just returned to Singapore from Valencia and England.  Mark toured Saudi Arabia over his break.

Wanderlust, I suppose.  A sense that the present moment, the home, needs the occasional view from afar.  A desire to see what’s over the next hill.  In the next valley.  Around the next bend.  There is, too, at least for me, gaining a clear sense of my Self as stranger in this world, one alone while living with others.  This existential isolation hides often at home, the quotidian a salve for it.

So, Washington, D.C.  I was last there during a layover for a train home from Savannah, Georgia.  I went to the National Gallery that day; I’ll go again this week.

Family, Travel

Saudi Arabia

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Imbolc                                                       Valentine Moon

Saudi Arabia.  Mark has been there for well over a year, almost 2, so the day-to-day scene comes more and more into focus, even for me, 8,000 miles away.  Perhaps the oddest piece of information so far concerns postal service.  Addresses don’t work in Saudi Arabia.  To this northern European mind, used to numbered homes and buildings, named streets and precisely divided zip codes this data fails to process.  So much so that we insisted (I insisted) on sending Mark a package for Christmas to his school.  Well, it hasn’t arrived quite yet.

Apparently the only solution to this problem is to use Fedex or DHS.  Which begs the question of how they find a place, but they must have some kind of system.  So, next time we send Mark a picture of Gertie and a book on the geo-political affairs of Saudi Arabia, it’ll go out Fedex.

Banking, too, has its peculiarities.  You can’t get a bank account without an iqama, sort of a work visa, and Mark’s school has not been able to arrange iqamas for their first year employees.  This is Mark’s first year working in Riyadh.  An iqama is roughly equivalent to a green card in the U.S.  Without it Mark has to go on a familiar routine for expats in many countries, a visa run.  On a visa run you leave the country where you live, stay away a few days, then re-enter, starting the visa process again, usually for a period of 90 or 180 days.

Mark also reports that a few students watch jihadi videos and execution videos in his class. His afternoon classes have to stop for the afternoon prayer, then start up again.  The priorities of other cultures, which seem obvious to them, often seem odd or at least unexpected to outsiders.  Mark seems to have adjusted very well to the differences between his U.S. acculturation and the Saudi’s.

 

 

Travel

Falling in Love

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

“I really fell in love with that part of the world,” says Cynthia Hopkins of the Arctic, where she journeyed with other artists in 2010. “I also fell in love with the boat we were on.”  author of This Clement World opening at the Guthrie

My promiscuity.  I shamelessly fall in love over and over again when I travel.  Bangkok’s quirky Chinatown, especially on the weekend with all those restaurants set up on the sidewalks and folks walking in the densely trafficked street.  Angkor in all its viney, scorpion infested, land-mined Hindu strangeness.  Inverness and its smoky river, walking there with Kate.  Why do we ever have to leave?  That little restaurant, Crispie’s was it, just down from the Internazionale in Rome.  The Ringstrasse in Vienna.  The left bank in Paris.

(oh, yeah, Romania.  A more recent love.)

Then there was Ushuaia, that frowsy scamp of a town as far south as you can get in the Americas.  And, god, just before her, those Chilean fjords.  Let me off the boat.  Give me a small house, an internet connection and forget about me until, well, forever.  Montevideo, too.  Friendly, beefy, colorful.  Old world European with a Latin twist.

I suppose I’d have to mention those old, first loves, too.  Chicago, city of roast beef sandwiches, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, Hyde Park.  D.C. and all its power, its monuments and museums.  And yes, like so many before me, I had a brief fling with San Francisco, but she’s so expensive, a real high-maintenance gal.

Of course, there are a few I keep, stable-like, harems of places that I visit like a ghost Sultan, flitting in and out, but always returning for one more time.  Lake Superior, especially the true north shore, the part in Ontario.  The Georgian bay of Lake Huron.  Those rocky mountains lying just at the limits of my home turf here in the U.S.  All majesty and purple.

Savannah and Charleston, yes.  The south is a guilty pleasure, that one with the dark desires, visited always with an eye to the road back north.  New Orleans, oh yes.  Dark queen of the south.  I’m sure I could return to the Okefenokee swamp.  And I confess to two trips to Red Cloud, Nebraska.  Those Grand Tetons.  Yes.  Cody, Wyoming. Yes.  Ely and the north woods.  Yes.

You see, I’m the tramp really.  Letting my heart go, letting it all go.  Loving this place and that.  I’m easy, I guess.

Cinema and Television, Family, Politics, Travel

the quiet american

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

In the spirit of catching up on the films of the last few decades Kate and I watched the Quiet American, a 2002 adaptation of Graham Green’s 1955(!) novel.  It depicts, through the eyes of a British journalist, the early activity of the CIA in creating the South Vietnamese army and government.  Astoundingly prescient.

Raised many different feelings.  Yearning for Southeast Asia, a wonderful, yet strangely far away part of the world.  A place I feel intimately tied to through my sister and brother’s long tenancy there and my 2004 visit.  Disgust at the role of the American government in its most banal anti-communist clothing.  Memories of the 60’s as the dark fruit of the 1950’s seeds began to ripen, then rot.  Kate’s distaste for war.  “Killing doesn’t solve anything.”

A period for my generation that defined us as young adults.  Either for or against, little middle ground.  Those division persist among us.  Even in my high school class there are only a few of us who were anti-war.  The rest, the blue collar middle-class of those days, patriotic in a militaristic, flag-waving way.  Long ago but not far away.

Dogs, Health, Our Land and Home, Travel

Out of the Salt Mines and On to the Treadmill

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Well, I’m close, but not finished.  As the books got shelved, the remaining space seems to be inadequate for what I have left.  Probably a way around it, I’ll find it tomorrow.  Right now.  Tired again.

(a salt mine cathedral in Colombia outside Bogota.  I visited in 1987.)

Just brought in more bags of feed for the animals.  40 pounds at a time.  Then salt for the water softener, 50 pounds a bag.  But.  They have nice plastic handles.  Working in the salt mines doesn’t mean what it used to.

Discovered that my glucometer needed calibration.  Once calibrated it told me a story I was glad to hear.  At least by today’s reading my low carb diet has lowered my blood glucose level.  And, I’ve lost a bit of weight, too.  All in all a good thing.  Though Kate, a carb lover of some note, has expressed some dissatisfaction.  No pasta, no breads, no cakes or pies.  We’re figuring out now how to add carbs back into her diet without creating a cook two meals at a time situation.  We’ll figure it out.

Right now I’m getting on the treadmill.  Which, for that matter, doesn’t mean what it used to either.

This is a Landice treadmill, the brand and model I’m about get on.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Travel

Ghosts

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

Today, a bit tired due to early rising, moving books put a weight on my shoulders.  It was the past and its tangled feelings.  Found my first passport and saw a young man with a full head of dark brown hair and a beard that matched.  Surprised me, so long have I seen his gray descendant in the mirror.

(arrestedmotion.com 2012 10 upcoming aron wiesenfeld new paintings arcadia-gallery)

That was my passport for Colombia, the trip to check out a bank for the poorest of the poor.  Carolyn Levy was in my life at that point, between my divorce from Raeone and meeting Kate a year plus later.  A hard time, raising a 6 year old boy, working night and day between church meetings and organizing.  A hard time, too, since the future had grown unclear.  Something big had happened or was about to happen, but its outlines in my life were not yet clear.

Then I moved out the books related to shifting my ordination to the Unitarian-Universalist movement.   Again, a time when the future had become unclear.  Writing had not shown the promise it offered when Kate and I agreed I should leave the Presbytery.  Frustrated there, I regressed, headed back to the trade that I knew.  More lack of clarity.

Poor decisions.  I chose Unity UU over First Unitarian for my internship.  An error.   The humanist congregation would have fit me much better.  Then, at the end of an interesting year, I accepted a job as minister of development.  Chief fund raiser.   OMG.  One of the really boneheaded decisions in my life.  Not the only one, for sure, and not the worst one, but dumbest?  Probably.  Kate saw it coming. I ignored her.  Sigh.

(Vincenzo Foppa The Young Cicero Reading 1464)

Those books were the heaviest to move because I’ve traveled out of the UU circle, too.  A solo practitioner am I, as the Wiccans say.  In that vein though I retained many of my books on spirituality, works on natural theology and those commentaries I mentioned on the Torah and the book of Revelation.

Heavy, especially with lack of sleep thrown in.  Ghosts.  They’re real and they live in the closets, basements and attics of our mind.