Category Archives: Travel

Travel, US History

From the Outside Looking In

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Beltane                                              Garlic Moon

The U.S. looks different from outside its borders.  Of course, that’s a truism, but, it is also true.

The guy who worked at the Best Western Stil said it was his dream to come to America.  I would say it a bit differently, I believe America was his dream; that is, a place to lodge, for him, a wonder, a hope, a promise of a life he for some reason cannot find in Romania.

No different, psychically, is the dream the Islamists have of America.  Again, their dream is America, but this time it is a nightmare of Islam hating, God denying, capitalist entranced monsters whose hope is to remake the world.

As world hegemon we have become a global Rorschach, an actual physical place and a real nation on which many project their most fervent inner hopes or fears.  In this sense I suppose we’re not much different from the cult of celebrity or the faded past of monarchy, people in seemingly untouchable realms whom we can imagine as the embodiment of good or evil.

Have we a sort of free market in which irrational entrepreneurial exuberance can catapult a power to Trumpdom?  If that’s what you really, really want, then, it could happen.  Have we a legal system that honors and defends the individual against oppression by others or the state?  Yes.  No.  Sometimes.  Is this a beautiful, varied land filled with the best and the harshest and gradations between?  Yes, the natural beauty of the USA matches that anywhere.

What it is and what it is not, this is home.  And I’m glad to be back in it.

Family, Humanities, Politics, Travel, World History

The Sunnier Side

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

OK. I may have tilted toward the darker side in the post below.  It’s here, all right, and dominant in much of what I’ve personally experienced of Romania this week.

However.  If this were a movie, the weather would have started rainy and cool, which it did.  We might say, the Romania I reported on in the post below.  Then, as the week went on, the rain would lift until a pleasant, sunny, mild day ended the visit.

The Romania which I saw, for example, as I took a walk around the hotel’s block.  There apartment buildings of modest heights, 3-6 stories, hide behind vine covered fences, a small pocket park has a shady place for children from the Mikos child care center.  Two backyards (all the backyards) have well-tended plantings and fountains.

A couple sat on their balcony four floors up, smoking, drinking morning coffee.  And, of course, there are homeless people on the streets and under the bridges of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There is, too, the land, a beautiful land with mountains, picturesque villages, good train service and a friendly population.  And Bucharest has many, many trees and beautiful parks, wide streets and a safe feel so often not present in US cities.

This is a country, I believe, that awaits its vision of itself as a free people.  I can imagine one though.  It roots in millennia of settled history, linking this land to the greatest of early Western civilizations, Greek and Roman and makes the remains of those two a vital aspect of a new future.

The difficult period after the fall of Rome adds great texture to current Romania as Mongols, Magyars, Russian and Turks fought back and forth over this rich land at the nexus of so many ambitions. Those eras, though painful, also enliven a sense of Romania as a place desired by many; many who contributed cultural legacy to the present, like the Saxons around Brasov, the Slavs on the coastal regions of the Black Seas and the Hungarians in northwestern Romania.

The 19th and early 20th century had some stirrings of a free Romania, then world war II came and after that the fall of the iron curtain.

Now there is a country just waking up in its own home, a home with a past, and now one with a future.  I hope this is just the first visit for me.  Nicoleta’s brother and his wife have a baby on the way, naming ceremony in October.

 

Humanities, Latin, Literature, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Travel

Searching for Ovid

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Beltane                                    Garlic Moon

Ovid on the third phase:  At times it is folly to hasten at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.

Searching for Ovid.  Gone now.  2000 years ago.  An unhappy man, yet he went on, did not stop, wrote, lived.

Of course, his statue is here.  He looks suitably serious, dignified, the man some Romanians take as their first national poet.  But what of the man, not bronze?

If I limit myself to the Roman mosaic, the material objects in the museum, the remains of the wall across from Hotel Class, the ruins of the homes and the butcher shop, the promontory views from the high coastline overlooking the Pontus Euxinus, the Marea Negra; if I image Ovid carrying a small oil lamp to light his way and his night, drinking from the glass vessels in the museum, turning a cynical educated Roman eye towards depictions of gods and goddesses; getting water from the clay and lead pipes also on display, walking over those intricate mosaics while looking out at the sea, a slave stigiling off his sweat and dirt with the small curved tool I saw here, then I have begun to see him.

To populate this place in the very early 1st century a.c.e., to get the small things right and the people and the matters under consideration, I wonder how much that would take, how much research?  A lot, I imagine.  Still, it would be worth it, if the time was available.  Why?  Oh, for the same reason, evoking 2012 Bucresti is worth it.  Because we’re strange creatures, but often the same and we can reach across time and space to be with each other.  That’s a gift and it makes us more.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

Be Glad to Exist

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

A Greek bowl in the alternately wonderful and frustrating Constanta musuem of archaeology and history had this inscription:  Be Glad To Exist.  Those Greeks.  Had it going on so early.  And now?

Be glad to exist and carpe diem amount to a satisfactory life philosophy.    I finished the book Masters of the Planet, an excellent summary of current findings and theories about human evolution.  The author added this to a summation of cognitive theory:  “We are ruled by our reason, until our hormones take over.”  Fits with the Greco-Roman fortune cookie life path.

While on my way to Constanta Tuesday, I returned to Bucresti Nord and ate breakfast there.  As usually happens to me at some point on a trip like this, I do something I never do at home:  eat at McDonald’s.

It felt like being in American terrarium, eating a sausage McMuffin and drinking the still not very good version of coffee.  Inside the terrarium I looked out at a Romanian world:  a board of all the departures and arrivals for Bucresti Nord, a currency exchange shop, Schimb Valutar, Romanians going about their mornings off to work, running, sitting, waiting, flirting.

The cut of the suits, the occasional very Slavic physiognomy: eyebrows, squared off jaws, thick necks, serious all remind me of the latter days of the Soviet Union when apparatchiks still roamed the countryside, conducting the business of a centralized state and a planned economy.

It occurred to me, as it has before and like my hero Scott Nearing proposed, that the middle way would be best, a place between the grim and often inefficient (therefore grim?) Soviet communism and rapacious, winner take all, screw the little guy late stage capitalism now regnant.

In other words, let capitalism have the non-essentials designer cloths, fancy watches, restaurants, but not groceries, hotels but not homes, minute clinics but not personal health care, boutique education but not public education, a gated community or two, but not urban planning.  Give capitalism the margins and let the money enchanted compete and scrabble and become rich there.

The rest of us, whose lives themselves are our focus, those of us glad to exist, could read, write, paint, sculpt, build cars, houses, care for the health of others, teach, grow and distribute healthy food.  We might, probably would, have less material wealth, but we would have life itself.  And think how short that is.

 

 

Family, Travel

La Revedere

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Beltane                                                           Garlic Moon

Checked in for my flight, boarding passes printed out for the journey to Bucharest.  Bit of a bump.  The Delta website said, Visa required.  Have proper documentation.  Whoa.  I thought…  So, I checked again.  Nope.  No visas required.  Romania requires one after 90 days.  But, passport’s good until then.  Geez.  Don’t scare me like that.

Bags are packed, I’m ready to go.  Well, almost.  I haven’t quite finished Pentheus and I want to do that before we leave for the airport.  That’s next.  Last few things go in the pack and in the checked baggage just before I leave.  That sort of thing.

My plan right now is to update from Romania.  Perhaps starting Saturday since I get in at 3:05 pm Bucharest time which is 11:05 pm here.  Updates always depend on finding wi-fi but I anticipate it will not be a problem, at least not too much.  So, if you’re interested, tune in again on Saturday when we’ll be reporting live from the home of the 5th Romance language.

The header is from a small village in rural Romania.   Oh, and la revedere is good-bye in Romanian.

 

Travel

Happy Feet

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Beltane                                                     New Garlic Moon

In case you wondered, the header up now is a vertical slice of the Romanian flag.  The time till departure grows short and that tingle before a new, interesting trip has begun to make its way up and down my spine.

Kate and I know that our travel budget during retirement is anemic, not a good thing for us.  There are those trips to Denver, to Georgia, and vacation like journeys.

This morning in our business meeting we discussed ways of adding money to the travel line item and came up three or four different things we can do that will increase it, some additional money per month and adding certain larger cash amounts we might get from roll-over funds after she retires completely, plus a few thousand from the last days of her working life.

All the world is an interesting place as far as I’m concerned.

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Literature, Travel

A Thought, A Sigh

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Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

All day.  A thought comes.  A sigh, hoping to delve into, oh, say, renaissance humanism.  Dive in and just stay there until all there is to absorb crawls inside my skin and remains.  Or, maybe Romania.  Wondering just how the Slavic countries ended up north and south of Romania-Hungary-Austria.  Here’s another part of the world about which I know almost nothing.

Later, watching Kate, seeing her sinking back into a life without paid work, a sense of relaxation, of being at home.  At last.

Looking at the Google art.  A kris.  A southeast Asia blade with a wavy, not straight edge.  Indonesia.  Again, a country with a population comparable to the US and lots of islands, but, again, not much is in my head about it.  A little.  Bali.  Krakatoa.  Suharto.  My god, it has 17508 islands.

Lyndon Johnson.  In the first volume of Robert Caro’s four volume (so far) biography.  He dominates, pushes, acts out against his parents.  The hill country of texas.  A difficult place, a trap for the unwary.  Most of the people who lived there.

The dogs.  At the vet.  18 years to the same vet.  Many dogs, all panting, all nervous.  Rigel, Vega and Kona today.  Rigel and Vega, sweet dogs.  Kona more aloof.  A grand dame.

Irrigation overhead busted in the southern vegetable garden.  Pulled loose from the pcv that feeds it water.  Have to fix it.  Plant more collards and beets.  I’ve touched most of the plants here, memories.  Buying them at Green Barn.  Digging a spot for them.  Pouring water on them.  Over the years, 18, lots of plants, thousands.  One at a time.  In the soil.  Maybe pick it up and move it or divide it.  That sense of a deep, long connection.

Dream of the Red Chamber.  Chinese literature, the third classic of the four major ones.  Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Monkeys Journey to the West. Sinking into the rhythms of another culture.  Reading it on the Kindle.  Odd juxtaposition of past and present.

original by Ivan Walsh)

Now, tired.  Smelling the lilacs Kate brought me.  Thinking of sleep.

 

 

Aging, Family, Retirement, Third Phase, Travel

Go or Stay?

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Spring                                                     Bee Hiving Moon

“Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.”   Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes

I have a friend, he knows who he is, who loves to pack up and go.  Stay a good while.  Then come back.  He has tales to tell, too.  That time in the Caribbean when he thought he was going to die in a bad storm.  Selling art in the Greek Islands to make money.  Learning Fiji and Hindi while in the Peace Corps.  Tai Chi while living in Shanghai.  Creating an exhibit on safe sex for Thai kids.  Tango in Buenos Aires.  Gunplay in Mexico.

I don’t know about fear, but he sure loves change.  “Change is good,” he said, “I look forward to it.”

Since he began the pick up and go live in a foreign city idea a few years back, I’ve often compared my life choices to his.  It goes like this.  Am I too timid?  Stuck in one place?

I try to answer this question honestly because the answer matters to me.  Travel is part of my soul, too, and I love foreign travel most of all.  His choices seem to maximize the experience of being in another culture, being there long enough to sink into the culture, be part of it.  At least for a while, not just as wanderer from one place to another.

My answer to these questions goes like this.  I moved so much after I left home at 17.  Off to college, to a different college, back home for a quarter, then out for good.   Continue reading Go or Stay? →

Aging, Family, Travel

Dining In Lima, Peru

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Winter                                            Garden Planning Moon

Another bit of photoshop work.  This photo in Pizarro’s house in Lima, Peru.

One other odd bit of info.  Tomorrow I go off private health insurance and enter Medicare.  A transition I’m making with this beautiful lady.

Also, look tomorrow for Imbolc posting.