Au revoir à Avignon

It was perhaps fortunate that we were numb from the seven-hour bus ride from Barcelona to Avignon – a ride that had stretched to eight and a half hours (see my earlier posting: “Life from both sides now”). Beyond the shift in language, it felt as though we had left the known world behind.

Old town, Avignon, the "City of Popes," is one of the few French cities whose ramparts remain fully intact.

It was cool – almost cold – as we made our way through the dark, empty lanes of the walled city. The relentless mistral (you remember: the wind that drove Juliette Binoche’s character to restlessness, if not distraction, in “Chocolat”) had a nagging wintery tinge to it. And after the genteel beauty of Spain, there was nothing to greet the eye but the oppressive, uniform drabness of unfinished stone and concrete.

But, we had committed ourselves.

And so we did our usual bit of settling in, which is to say, we weathered the now-familiar new-to-town blindness.

We first noticed this phenomenon in Munich. One of our earliest impressions of the city was that it was impossible to find a meat shop or grocery store that sold basics like chicken, the protein staple of our diet.

About three weeks in, I was back downtown one afternoon, again wandering Marienplatz and Viktualienmarkt. As if they had suddenly appeared, I counted nine little meat shops all lined up in a row, along a stretch of sidewalk we had covered numerous times.

Within minutes, I had also “discovered” a terrific fishmonger, another couple of butcher shops, and a half-dozen gorgeous fruit and vegetable stands, all of which we are looking forward to revisiting when we return to Munich later this week.

The same sort of thing happened in Avignon, but we now anticipate it.

We spent our first afternoon scouring the old town for a basic grocery store, settling finally for essentials at a shop clearly priced for the tourist trade. A week later, we could only laugh at the number of grocers that had unveiled themselves. We settled on Casino, just outside the ramparts, for our main shopping, and the much smaller Carrefour City, a few minutes from home, for the too-lazy-to-walk stuff.

On our second afternoon, a Sunday, we visited Pont St-Bénézet, the “Pont d’Avignon” of nursery rhyme fame in France and Canada, according to our audioguide. Bracing against the blasts of wind roaring down the Rhône valley, we didn’t doubt the pont’s one-time reputation for travellers being blown off of it. Another aspect of the bridge’s reputation was captured in what was apparently a popular 16^th century saying in France: one couldn’t cross the bridge without encountering “two monks, two donkeys and two whores.”

Marian, sur le Pont d'Avignon. Elle y danse, elle y danse. According to our audioguide, a popular expression in the 16th century, prior to the bridge losing 18 of its 22 arches, was that one could not cross le Pont St-Bénézet (the actual name of the bridge) without encountering at least "two monks, two donkeys, and two whores."

The following day, the mistral subsided and spring came to Avignon.

Approximately 12,000 of Avignon’s population of 95,000 live within the ramparts of the ancient city. That includes an envigourating base of young people that attend l’Université d’Avignon, also housed within the walls. Just as at home, as day-time temperatures crept up into the low- to mid-20s, the human race again blossomed.

On our penultimate weekend, we took advantage of beautiful Saturday afternoon weather to wander Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, the neighbourhood at the other end of the Pont d’Avignon, before it lost 18 of its original 22 arches.

Printemps des Familles was in progress, an event that reminded us of the Teddy Bear Picnic at home, with various kids’ activities taking place in the neighbourhood’s many small courtyards and squares. We looked in on the circus training activity and we were immediately welcomed by the youngish woman running the event to try our feet on the tight-wire.

Marian tries her feet on the tight-wire during Printemps des Familles in the Villeneuve lez Avignon neighbourhood.

It was one of those fleeting-but-beautiful, multi-lingual encounters that makes me love travelling. She most certainly helped shape our impression of France and I expect we shaped hers – for better or worse – of Canada.

On our final weekend, a similar family festival was taking place at Place des Carmes, in our own neighbourbood. Along with kids’ games, face-painting and the like, a steady stream of magicians, musicians, and jugglers were delighting the crowd. And they really were delighting the crowd.

Intent on getting our travel logistics nailed down, we only barely slowed down as we passed through the square on our way to the train station – twice. But when we did, the young women selling home-baked brownies (in French, they’re called “brownies”) seemed to delight in asking us about Canada, our stay in Avignon, and, in general, making us feel welcomed.

Place des Carmes, our nearest neighbourhood square, played host to a Saturday morning market, as well as special events.

And just as at home in warm weather, it was becoming increasingly difficult to travel our established routes without seeing familiar faces.

There was the book-store shopkeeper who, twice in our first few days, so obligingly gave us directions in slowed-down, dumbed-down, tourist-friendly French.  There was the young woman from the conservatory of music – with her distinctive purple, hard-shelled cello case – who once directed us to a the local music store. There were the cashiers at Casino and Carrefour City who, clearly having us pegged for tourists, seemed to use it as an excuse to be extra friendly.

A week or so before we left, I mustered the courage to move beyond “Bonjour. No, no sac, merci,” and ask the perpetually on-duty Carrefour City cashier “Comment ça va?” She replied by asking, in French, if we were having a good vacation. That led to another of those fleeting-but-beautiful exchanges.

Late in the afternoon of our last full day in town, we walked back to Carrefour City and, as we hoped, she was again on duty. We had nothing to buy, but queued at her cash to give her a Kingston lapel pin as a token of our thanks for her thoughtfulness. In the midst of the rush-hour line-up, she gave each of us a huge hug, accompanied by the rosiest of all possible blushes.

With confidence, because we now know about these things (see my “Learning to French Kiss” blog), we bade farewell on our last evening to Emmanuelle, our lovely hostess, and her two boys, and, as we set out the next morning for the train station, to Marie, her equally lovely mother-in-law, and our neighbour over the last few weeks. Our final stop was at our local charcuterie, with a Kingston pin and a goodbye for the young butcher / proprietor.

Every morning, the grape vine suspended crisscross over our front terrace had more assuredly regained its ability to shade the mid-day sun.

Like its people, the foliage of Avignon had also blossomed. Seemingly overnight, the plane trees transformed from amputated- to majestic-looking. Every morning, the grape vine suspended crisscross over our front terrace had more assuredly regained its ability to shade the mid-day sun. And, to our fond, departing eyes, the greenery added a particular dash of beauty to the rich, varied tones of unfinished stone and concrete.

Venice, Vienna and Prague: January 30 – February 15, 2009

(Written on February 23, 2009, after a series of weekend trips from our homebase in Munich.)

Marian and I are fundamentally different sorts of travelers. She suffers from Plaque Plague, a chronic inability to bypass anything remotely brass-looking without stopping for a read, even when said artifact is in a language she doesn’t read. I, on the other hand, prefer to explore new lands from an outdoor café or public square, coffee in hand, developing a voyeuristic sense of the passing native population.

Despite 28 years of marriage, we seemed to arrive at an easy compromise on our weekend jaunts. First of all, of course, you can’t do justice to world-class cities like Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Prague in a weekend. Second, there are only so many hours of the weekend that you can spend inside yet another fourteen-dozen historic churches, particularly when we’ve made it impossible to not use St. Peter’s Basilica as the benchmark. Third, ditto for museums and galleries. Fourth – and here’s my side of the compromise, ditto for the inside of cafés.

So, our compromise is to work with a list of the top-ten or twelve things to see, stay outside where the locals are, and walk. A lot.

We’ve walked in the brilliant sunshine of late spring-like weather. We’ve walked through bone-chilling damp and cold. We’ve walked through miserable, wet and sloppy snow. A lot.

We haven’t done justice to the world-class cities we’ve seen, but in as much as one can do so in something less than 48 hours, we’ve given it our best shot.   

After spending two weeks in Italy at Christmas, there was a minor sense of home-coming as we headed to Venice the last weekend of January. The Trenitalia train wound its way from Munich down through Innsbruck and the Austrian Alps, allowing us to marvel from only a slightly different vantage point the engineering feat we drove at Christmas.

The Trenitalia train ride through the Austrian Alps gave us a different perspective on the engineering feat we drove at Christmas.

Roberto Benigni – clearly on uppers – had been hired to do the afternoon’s announcements. In a setting that felt a little bit like something out of “A Room With a View,” Marian and I shared our six-seater berth with an older woman and a very reserved, if not timid, young couple (they whispered across the berth to each other). Long before Roberto had finished his first announcement – delivered in an over-the-top exuberant Italian, ratcheted up a number of notches on the over-the-top exuberant Italian scale – even the young couple was laughing out loud.

Just when it couldn’t get any funnier – in a laughing with him sort of way – he then repeated the announcement in a no-less-exuberant German. You have to realize that at no time in history did anyone intend German to be a language of exuberance. His exuberance waned not the least in the English rendering, unfortunately for Marian and me, the message got entirely in the way of the medium. We spent the balance of the trip looking forward to his performances.

I don’t want to overstate it, but Venice is as close to a disappointment as we’ve experienced. Cool weather on Friday evening gave way on Saturday to the chilling dampness that only an island can deliver. That gave way on Sunday to wet snow. While it wasn’t a disaster, our accommodation was our first and only experience so far with something less than truth in web advertising.  

Having said that, Venice rightfully belongs on a must-see list for its remarkable architecture and the watery context in which it sits. The age of the structures and their dubious underpinnings dish up a remarkable array of leans, twists and compression that left me thinking that if one structure collapsed (as some have in the past), the whole thing would come down like falling dominos. But then: some of the buildings have been around for a thousand years. 

However fading the "Glamour Queen," Venice remains a must-see destination.

We saw under a half-dozen buildings that weren’t missing large sections of parging, exposing the underlying red brick construction. In many instances, chunks of bricks were also missing. Graffiti is rampant, as are dog-droppings. There is a pong to the smaller canals that eliminates any question as to the final disposition of sewage, but raises a big bunch of questions about the source of the water coming out of the tap.

Venice is described in various tourism publications as a “fading glamour queen.” That fairly describes, I think, the almost palatable sense one has of its rapid decline, despite its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

The highlight of the visit for us both was stopping mid-Saturday afternoon at a traditional Venetian wine bar for a warming glass of red and a selection of the imaginative and tasty canapés for which the Venetian bars are noted. Hanging on the wall was a newspaper photo from the early ‘90s showing the walkway outside of the bar – sitting that afternoon about three feet above water level – under waist-deep floodwaters. It gave us an even deeper sense of the improbability of the place.

In sharp contrast to Venice, Vienna, the following weekend, turned out to be the prettiest city I think I’ve ever seen. As a bonus and in tribute to off-season travel, we had a low-cost hotel suite that was gorgeous. The weather on Friday afternoon and Saturday was positively spring-like. In addition to walking many miles of streets, we took a long walk along the Danube River, an even longer one along the Danube Canal, and took a ride on the city’s 200-foot Ferris wheel that dates to the early 1800s (cabins rather than chairs) for a bird’s-eye view of the city.

In sharp contrast to Venice, Vienna, may be the prettiest city I’ve seen.

I once heard a town planner who’d studied the characteristics of great town squares compare such places to livingrooms. There are real or implied enclosing walls, lots of places to sit, lots to look at, and a minimum of heavy activity (e.g. we don’t typically play football in a livingroom). That’s all of Vienna.

The city gives the immediate impression of being clean and elegant. The buildings are universally pale – white, off-white, sandstone – and are no more than five or six stories high, so they give a sense of enclosing without overwhelming. Virtually every façade offers a feast of imaginative and whimsical architectural touches – asymmetrical balconies, turrets, and porticos, the former two often supported on the shoulders of cherubs, angels, mythological and/or whimsical figures. Modern architecture, where one sees it, is no less imaginative. There are few straight lines to bore the eye.

We woke to rain on Sunday and that became a good excuse to visit the Monet to Picasso exhibit in the Albertina Gallery, housed in a portion of the former royal palace. The featured exhibit was great and a Gerhard Richter Retrospective was icing on the cake. Neither of us knew much of Richter; he’s a remarkably prolific artist in more media and styles than should be humanly possible – everything from impressionism to hyper-realism.

Vienna and Prague are terrific cities to see back-to-back. The architecture is very similar, but whereas Vienna breathes refinement, Prague gives the sense of that more varied, untraditional, esoteric, perhaps earthy blend of arts and culture to which we attach the term “Bohemian.” Prague, as we discovered, is the largest city in the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic.

Like Vienna, Prague is a pretty city, but there is an intriguing earthiness to it.

We had lined up a beautiful apartment in the Old Town of Prague. From there, we walked. A lot.

In brilliant sunshine but cold temperatures, we headed out early Saturday morning, crossing the Charles Bridge into Mala Strana, the minor quarter and, the oldest part of the city (yes, older than Old Town). We spent most of the morning and early afternoon wandering Prague Castle and the quarter, before heading back to wander the Old Town in the afternoon. We had most of the day Sunday, so again used our time to see the Old Town and to take a long walk along the Vltava River that runs through Prague.

Apart from the gorgeous architecture, stand-outs of the Prague trip in my mind include Svatováclavské náměstí, St. Wenceslas Square, where every major political step in the Czech Republic’s history first found its voice (usually somewhere in the order of 250,000 voices).

I was surprisingly thrilled to see places where Beethoven and Mozart worked and/or performed their works (In Vienna we saw similar indicators of where Bach and Strauss worked). Saturday, we stumbled across a small folk festival that may have been related to the start of Carnival. It was terrific to hear a trio play what I assume was traditional Czech music. We also tasted traditional flat bread toasted over an open flame.

Svatováclavské náměstí, St. Wenceslas Square, where every major political step in the Czech Republic’s history first found its voice.

Without taking anything away from the city itself, the truth is that the highlight of the Prague trip for me was the people we met along the way.

On the Friday train ride, we wiled away a number of hours with Michael and Catherine Tierney, originally from Washington, D.C., and their wonderfully precocious eight year-old son, Aiden, sitting a couple of berths away from us. Michael was a NASA earth-sciences engineer, but took up a job as an intellectual property attorney with a Munich firm last August. Catherine’s father was in the diplomatic core, so she travelled much of her younger life and had lived in Prague for a few years in her adolescence. For her, the weekend was to be a trip down memory lane. 

Catherine had that look in her eye of a parent carrying the load of a “wonderfully precocious” child. In a variation of what Marian used to do with our boys and their friends, Catherine assigns Aiden “tasks” to occupy his brain…and relieve hers! She sent him off, for instance, to determine which of the train car’s berths had the fewest occupants. Counting books in a bookstore is apparently always good for a few minutes rest.

We ran into the couple again in Mala Strana Saturday morning. Aiden was looking very much like a young man who would have preferred to be pursing his passion – soccer. In one of those been-there-done-that gestures to fellow parents, Marian asked Aiden to count the number of lions he saw in the statues that line the Charles Bridge. I asked him to check the statues for St. Propeller Head, the patron saint of computer programmers (photo attached).  

We asked Aiden to watch for St. Propeller Head along the Charles Bridge. The statue is, in fact, of St. Anthony of Padua, by Jan Oldřich Mayer, dating from 1707.

Late Friday afternoon, we had about a 20 minute wait for the rental manager to show-up with the key to our rented apartment. It was cold and the building’s unilingual Czech superintendent somewhat reluctantly invited us to wait in her miniscule office (room for one person to sit). We had compiled a list of essential Czech phrases off the web. Marian asked about the pronunciation of one phrase and that touched-off a wonderful lesson in the Czech language and the dos and don’ts of visiting “Praha,” all conducted with a great deal of laughter.

Viktor, the retirement-age rental manager, showed up and took us up to the apartment. While registering, we asked where he learned to speak English. What followed was an amazing story.

Growing up under the thumb of the Stalinists, he secretly listened to Radio Free Luxemburg to learn English. University friends were killed in “Prague Spring” uprisings of 1968 that prompted the Soviet invasion in August of that year. Viktor told his father he had to leave before he did something rash. His father said, “we’re coming, too.”

The family escaped to Vienna, but, he said, the communists had a long reach. The family moved on to Switzerland and Viktor settled into the telecommunications industry. In one of those freakish coincidences of the universe, he eventually moved to Munich and lived a few blocks from our flat Wald Trudering. He is back in Prague now, running the rental business with his wife and son, and ruing the lingering social apathy/inertia inflicted by the Soviets.

On Saturday, we stopped for mid-day coffee at the Starbucks in Mala Strana. We ended up at the opposite ends of two two-seater couches from an older French-speaking woman and a woman about our age. The younger woman disappeared for a few minutes and we took our French out for a ride, asking the mother where she was from. Algiers originally, it turns out, currently living in Paris, and with a son living in Quebec City who she visits regularly. Marie, her daughter, returned to the table and we had a great yatter. What was so remarkable for Marian and me was that listening to the two women speak French was almost like listening to English. After months of German, Italian and a dash of Czech, it was like music to Canadian ears!

A Weekend in Berlin

(Written on January 29, 2009, after a weekend trip to Berlin, January 21 – 23, 2009. We were living in Munich at the time.)

Last weekend, we caught the Deutsche Bahn high-speed rail service for the 500 kilometer hike north to Berlin. As on a plane, the train’s speed is periodically displayed. Marian marveled at the lack of seatbelts. It took us a second to recognize that, aboard a train travelling 228 km/hour, a fast stop was just about the last thing we might experience.

Berlin reflects its history. Quartered post-WWII and halved in 1961, the two Berlins grew independently for almost thirty years before being rejoined with the fall of the wall in 1989. It’s a massive city, encompassing the erstwhile eastern and western city centres. We chose a centrally located hotel, ironically the “Best Western,” which put us in walking distance of the city’s historic attractions.

In contrast to Munich, Berlin architecture is predominantly modern, a tribute to the accuracy of allied war-time bombers. A notable exception, Gedächtniskirche, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, sits a few blocks from our hotel and was the first stop on our walking tour.

Built in the 1890s, a relative newbie by European standards, the church was all but destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid. Post-war, the temptation to raze the site to make way for traffic was resisted. Instead, the towering ruin was stabilized and “book-ended” by a modern, free-standing chapel on one side and a stand-alone bell tower on the other. Sitting on a median in the middle of two very busy downtown streets, the once-great skirche is now maintained as a highly visible memorial  to the destruction of war.

Gedächtniskirche, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands as a memorial to the destruction of war.

We moved on to Siegessäule, Berlin’s famous Victory Column, serving as a roundabout at the convergence of five major roadways in the beautiful Tiergarten Park. Proving that there’s merit in the sometimes glacial pace of government action, the monument was designed in 1864 to celebrate the victory of Prussia in the Danish-Prusssian War, but, by its inauguration in 1873, it also bore the celebratory burdens of victory in the Austro- and Franco-Prussian wars.

We climbed to the top of the column and after catching our breath – and admiring the ability of the young guys ahead of us to do the same with a cigarette – we took in the somewhat drizzly and misty bird’s-eye view of the city. Looking a few kilometers due east up Strasse Des 17, Juni, named in remembrance of the violently quashed 1953 workers’ uprising against the Stalinist East German government, we could see Brandenburger Tor, the Brandenburg Gate.

With the Berlin Walled all but flush against its eastern side, the Tor was the very symbol of the Cold War. Crossing through it onto the historic Pariser Platz – for a time a military zone but now re-established as a beautiful public meeting space – the first thing we saw was a Starbucks, and, right next to it, Museum The Kennedys. So moved were we by the history-come-alive, we stood between the two loudly declaring “Ich bin ein Tim Horton’s Berliner!”

Over a couple of lattes, we noticed that the only visible vestige of the paucity we associate with the Soviet rule of East Berlin were the large gas mains that inexplicably sweep up out of the ground like enormous exposed veins, circle about overhead, cross the street, run down the block, make a few connections, and disappear back into the ground. Those, and hucksters offering rides in the questionable remains of “classic” East German Trabants, the car, it is said, that gave communism a bad name.

A short distance from the Gate, we stopped at Gendarmen­markt  to visit the private museum in the domed French (Huguenot) Chuch. The displays were in German and French, but Marian was satisfied to spot a reference to Rachelle, France, ancestral home on her mother’s side.

Opernplatz, for which we have developed a certain regard from our Pimsleur German lessons (“See Hans run. See Gretel run. See Hans and Gretel run to Opernplatz.” You get the idea.) has been renamed Bebelplatz, in an effort to live down the square’s reputation as the main fire pit in the Hitler youth book burning spree of May 1933.

A work crew was putting the final touches on a temporary building erected on the square that will house this week’s Berlin Fashion Week. In its foyer, we found the book-burning memorial. A section of plate-glass embedded in the surface of the square allows you to look down into a sealed subterranean room. The room is bare, but lined with empty book shelves – enough shelf space to accommodate the estimated 25,000 books that were burned.

As we neared “Checkpoint Charlie,” possibly the highest-profile Cold War access point to the American sector of the city, we hit the start of what turned out to be four city blocks of museum-like wallboard displays running along the sidewalk and detailing the history of the wall.

A wall is a wall is a wall, or so we thought. Neither of us was prepared for the horror documented in the display.

As you may know – but we didn’t – the east/west barrier was thrown up early one August morning in 1961. Berliners awoke to find themselves separated from families, friends, neighbours and neighbourhoods by army and citizen militia units. And while the initial “line in the sand” was somewhat porous, work began that dawn on construction of the wall “system” that would snake its way along a 150 kilometre path through the city. That system included inner and outer walls separated by the Todesstreifen, or “death zone,” so-named for the guards’ standing orders to shoot-to-kill.

We watched helicopter video footage of a trip along the perimeter, captured from western air space. It confirmed my sense that, from conception through execution, the wall was so over-the-top, Monty Pythonesque, outrageously absurd, that it’d be hilarious, if it weren’t for its inherent horror. If fact, I think it’s the absurdity that makes it particularly horrific.

In many instances, buildings were annexed to form part of the barrier, their windows and doors bricked in to prevent passage through. In some instances, historic residential buildings were forcefully emptied and then dynamited to further secure the perimeter. Western subway routes that passed under the eastern sector rolled past “ghost” subway stations, inhabited only by armed guards who ensured the train didn’t stop.

It’s difficult to believe that this year – November 9th to be exact – will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall. While Cold War relations were warming, there is some poetic justice in the absurdity that’s credited for its final demise. On that particular morning, erroneous news reports announced that a change in regulations would permit East Berlins to cross over to the west and return. By that evening, the crossing points were overrun to such an extent, they became meaningless. Not missing the significance of it all, people were out the next morning with hammers and chisels demolishing the abomination.

Clearly, the relationship of Berlins to the wall has evolved over the interim years. It’s easy to understand the first instinct to erase all traces of it as quickly as possible. This was fostered by a government-backed buy-a-piece-of-the-wall campaign. More recently, there’s been recognition of the importance of preserving its history.

Where possible, a double row of cobblestone is being laid to mark the path of the wall. A memorial has been constructed at the longest remaining stretch of the wall – about a half-block long. Polished steel walls have been construct perpendicularly, book-ending the inner and outer walls and sealing off the death zone in between. In the reflected surfaces of the steel, one sees the wall continuing on in both directions. An observation deck on the opposite side of the street provides a view of the memorial and the neighbouring Church of the Reconciliation.

Where possible, a double row of cobblestone is being laid to mark the path of the wall. In this picture, the actual cobblestone leads into a musuem-board display of the memorial pathway's construction.

We ended our day at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. This is an extraordinary site that covers a large city block in the heart of the city, and defies description. It consists of 2,711 blocks, looking like large grave markers. From the street, the blocks look roughly the same height, but as you wander through the memorial, you realize that the perfect grid of pathways between the blocks descends, and that some of the blocks are 10’ = 12’ in height. In the aerial photo on the web, you also noticed the tops of the block undulate like a flag in the breeze (http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/history/assets/berlin_holocaust_memorial_4.jpg).

The Berlin Holocaust Memorial is an extraordinary site that covers a large city block, and consists of 2,711 blocks,

A staircase in the middle of the blocks takes you down to subterranean memorial centre. The history of the Holocaust is presented in graphic detail. You’re then led into the “Room of Dimensions.” Illuminated rectangles on the floor (recalling the rectangular blocks above) present brief excerpts of 15 personal accounts of the Holocaust, each panel containing a copy of the original source document and then a translation in German and English.

One of the panels contains a seven year-old boy’s goodbye, written from the concentration camp in which he and his mother are being held, to his father, being held in another concentration camp. With resignation, the boy expresses his sadness that he and his mother will soon be killed – as they were – and he will not see his father again.

In the “Room of Names,” the names and short biographies of Jews murdered or presumed murdered in the Holocaust are projected on the empty walls and read aloud, one at a time. It’s estimated that to run this cycle for each victim takes six years, seven months, and 27 days.

I came away from the weekend feeling as I did after our visit to Dachau, perhaps better able to get my head around the evil that was perpetuated here – the Holocaust and the Wall – than I am the notion of a society allowing it to happen. There’s an old axiom that says evil walks in the door when good people do nothing. There’s an Ethiopian proverb that says evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.

There’s a clear and disturbing link between what we’ve seen here and the American population’s enthusiastic rallying behind a president as he flouted civil liberties, human rights, and international conventions and treaties in the name of protecting the motherland. I see exactly the same link in the Canadian population’s silence as our values around citizenship and children rot with Omar Kahdr in a universally condemned concentration camp.

Who says it can’t happen here?

Outback Safari

I’ve written in the past that Marian and I are accustomed to being the oldest in the class. Five years ago, we did the Bronze Medallion and Bronze Cross swim programs at the ‘Y’ with a wonderful group of 13-year-old classmates. Last summer, we did the TESL certification with an equally wonderful group of freshly-minted Queen’s undergrads. Having signed-up for a three-day/two-night backpackers’ Outback Safari – a tour that includes two nights of sleeping under the stars in a “swag” – we figured it was a safe bet we’d again be anchoring the summer/fall end of the age range. And that was part of the attraction.

Ours was the first of the dawn hotel pick-ups in Alice Springs. We laid claim to a seat nearest the door of our 21-seater Toyota tour van – home for the next three days. This gave every last one of the 15 younger people who followed us onboard the opportunity to nod, in some cases say “good morning,” and in all cases to pose – in rapid succession – two unspoken questions: “Am I on the wrong bus?” and “What the hell are my parents doing here?”

A quick stop at the tour office for final registration and we were Uluru-bound. “Just two right turns down the road,” Sam cheerfully announced over the vehicle’s PA system; Sam, being our mid-20s Kiwi driver, tour guide, cook, relationship councillor, and all-round good friend. Two right turns, yes, and 460 km. of typically red, but, thanks to record rainfall, this year green desert.

As seen from atop Kings Canyon, thanks to record rain fall, the "Red Centre" has a decidely green hue.

One of the first things we learned about Sam is that music is big in his life. For the next three days, iPOD-fed tunes played on the bus’s speaker system in lock-step with the vehicle’s engine running, interrupted solely for group announcements. Sam offered to substitute other peoples’ players for his own, but warned of a three-tune probation. To my knowledge, no one risked the unceremonious and public rebuke of their musical tastes.

Having made the first right-hand turn onto the Stuart Highway, Sam shut-down the tunes and introduced an ice-breaker exercise. One-by-one, we ventured forward to take a backward-facing seat on the engine cowling. PA microphone in hand, we answered a series of questions: name, homeland, favourite Australian experience to date, favourite music and musician(s), and key skill to contribute to an outback camping expedition.

Sam went first; Alex was second. It was only later that we realized Alex, a native Italian, spoke virtually no English. Nonetheless, he confidently faked his way through the exercise. By the time Lauren, from Wales, wrapped up the exercise, we had heard from eight nationalities whose mother-tongue covered Kiwi, Aussie, “Pommie” (i.e. U.K.), and Canuck shades of English, as well as Taiwanese, French, German, Italian, and Serbian. English was almost common; by the end of the trip, Bruno, a former journalist on sabbatical from an ad agency in Milan, had graciously slipped into the role of simultaneous translator for his countrymen, Alex and Simone.

It wasn’t yet 8 a.m. when we finished the ice-breaker and the group’s energy returned to up-before-dawn level. Marian and I silently scoffed at what would be the first of Sam’s suggestions that we snuggle in and let his choice of tunes lull us back to sleep. Ah yes, thought I, trance-rap lullabies!

That said, whatever annoyance we might have felt with the incessant din was soon offset by Julie and Eva in the seat behind us. Delightful and lovely, from France and Germany, respectively, they quietly sang along with just about every song Sam played, no matter how inane and forgetable we judged the lyric. Their ability to do so became a topic of conversation on day one of the outing, and ended the trip as the source of much two-way kidding (I think they were secretly pleased when, bizarrely, a Four Seasons’ tune shuffled its way to the playlist late into our second day and we were able to join in).  

Normally, I’m not a nervous passenger, but perhaps because Sam isn’t much older than our boys, or maybe because we recognized he’d been  up even earlier than the rest of us, I found myself paying attention to his body language as he drove. When I saw him rubbing the back of his neck in the manner I do when I’m fighting nods at the wheel, I decided it was time to go forward for a visit.

"Kiwi Sam," our cook, relationship councillor, all-round good friend, and a remarkably gifted tour guide.

Sam had already told us he was from north of Auckland. When I asked him what brought him to the Outback, he told me he joined the New Zealand army at the age of 17 and served for six years, the last six months in Afghanistan. When he returned home from the posting, he quit the military and, I suspect, in his own way, his country. “We have no business being there,” was all he said, but I sensed there was a whole lot more unspoken.  We commiserated on that point for just awhile before it was time to pull off the highway for the trip’s inaugural pit stop.

Kings Canyon was our first destination, approximately 200 km north and slightly east of Uluru. Yes, there is a canyon, but there couldn’t be one without the breath-taking escarpment in which it’s found, towering majestically and improbably over the table-top-flatness of the surrounding desert. The 6 km Rim Walk offered-up a challenging hike, rewarded at every turn with stunning vistas. The pathway routinely broadened and then narrowed again to single- or near single-file passage (one such narrowing featured prominently in the terrific Aussie movie, “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert).” The routine narrowing of the trail had the effect of continuously shuffling the group, which I took as an opportunity to reinforce names and other particulars before the ice-breaker introductions disappeared into a cerebral fog.

I have two theories related to the human condition. The first – of which I’m entirely certain – is that we all yearn to be friendly and unguarded with strangers, we just need permission to be so. Granting someone such permission usually requires nothing more than the willingness to be the first to say “good morning.” I test this theory routinely, which is my our boys were forming full sentences by the age of three months: “Dad, you talk to much!” That’s probably entirely true – the talking too much thing, that is – but I’m awed at how consistently a simple “hello” walks away with full credit for a wonderful, albeit fleeting, connection with a complete stranger. Sandy, my friend the scientist, says she much prefers marsupials, but, granted permission to be so, humans can also be quite likeable.

My second theory is an extension of the first, dealing with younger women and their relationship with creepy middle-aged males (CMAMs), a category into which, at least from their perspective, I’m at increased risk to be relegated. The permission theory still applies, but CMAMs are wise to recognize that, generally, the “simple ‘hello'” overture must be cautiously repeated several times over before it’s accepted as being string-free. As I discovered with the younger women with whom I worked for several years on organization of the Teddy Bear Picnic – the Teddy Bear Girls, as I so lovingly think of them – being a friend, without the burden of being peer, parent, or date, is enviable space to occupy. 

Stairs and boardwalks aid the descent from atop Kings Canyon into the lush Garden of Eden.

I had most of the group’s names, countries, and cities of origin nailed down by the time we hit the Garden of Eden, a uncharacteristically lush section of the canyon that harbours a natural deep-water pool. Having weathered arid desert conditions to get there, most of the group opted to do a towel-clad, discreet-as-possible change into swimmers for a refreshing dip. Changing back into dry clothing in a similar fashion, I sensed that, while we might not know each other, the group was pretty comfortable with itself.

The proof and benefit of this came late in the afternoon as Sam made an unscheduled stop along the edge of the highway. The winds had picked up and we could see heavy lightning and rain in the distance. All hands pitched in to move our swags – a somewhat weather-proof bedroll into which one inserts a sleeping bag – from the roof of our tow-behind trailer, into the trailer itself. We then loaded up the trailer roof with fire wood we gathered from along the side of the road. As it turned out, we collected enough for our two nights’ of camping and to leave behind a sizeable contribution to the communal woodpile at our last site.    

The greater proof and benefit came that evening as we made camp – in pitch darkness – somewhere in the million-acre holdings of Curtin Springs Station. I sensed Sam leaned on his military background as he orchestrated – with remarkable speed and great helpings of humour – the group’s rustling-up of an inviting camp fire and an over-the-coals dinner that was as  elaborate as it was delicious. By the time the last of the dishes had been washed and again stowed in the trailer, everyone in the group could rightfully claim a contribution to the effort.

It seemed so natural, then, for us to fan our swags out on the ground, side-by-side around the campfire. There was a certain loveliness as Lauren, claimed the space on Marian’s far side. “I’m sleeping next to the Canadians,” she announced. There was a similar loveliness as Christine, the young German optometrist on my opposite side, and I coordinated the ultimately mundane task of safely stashing our glasses for potential quick access during the night, as well as the location of our “torch” should she or Lauren need it. Most especially, there was an indescribable loveliness when, with everyone comfortable snuggled into their swags, Julie from France – for no particular reason – launched what would become a laughingly-sung group chorus of “Frere Jacques.” How could this not be a great trip?

But by far the greatest proof and benefit came over the next couple of days as we explored Uluru – Kata Tjuta National Park through its Culture Centre, through Sam’s award-winning interpretative commentary, and while hiking on our own. And yet I know my lasting memories of this spiritual well-spring are wrapped in memories of the people with whom we experienced it, and the snippets from their lives they gifted along the way. 

Uluru at sunset (above) and sunrise (below).

I’ll remember the conversations that second evening as we waited for the sun to set on the rock; the muted conversations the next morning as we shiveringly awaited its return. I’ll remember the campfire games that second night – games I opted to forego in favour of simply soaking up the sight of people so clearly enjoying each others’ company. I’ll remember wee, tiny Ben from Taiwan, shivering by the campfire until Marian fetched and wrapped him with a sleeping bag. “Ya’ can take the mother out of the nursery…,” was Sam’s dry observation, but there was no mistaking the group’s tacit acknowledgment that there’s a time and place for motherly acts; I’ll remember the early morning 10 km hike around the base of the rock, warmed in equal measure by the rising sun and the quiet, comfortable conversation with Bruno and Martin from Paris.

Even small, mundane things like the communal clean-up after a breakfast spent watching the sunrise on Uluru added to the richness of our experience.

We arrived back in Alice Springs late in the afternoon of our third day, but not before stopping for a group photo atop the “Welcome to Alice Springs” sign. I suspected again that Sam relied on his military background in contriving the group’s pose to deliver an alternative message. Later that evening, when we had all reconvened for drinks and dinner at a local eatery, he commented that he doesn’t normally stop for a group photo, “but this group just seemed to gel so nicely.” 

As we have in the past when we’ve been the oldest kids in the class, we come away wondering if our sense of the richness of the group experience would be the same if we were the ages of our younger travelling companions. Do they share our sense of the experience’s richness? Would we experience that same sense of richness in a group more exclusively of our own age?

In truth, once again this time, the warmth of the lingering goodbye-hugs told us we weren’t alone in our sense of it all. From the 20-something perspective: maybe,  just maybe, having people their parents’ age along made for a more enjoyable ride. From our perspective: maybe, just maybe, anchoring the summer/fall end of the age range is also enviable space to occupy.

Our wonderful travel companions were (left to right) Bruno (Italy), Simone (Italy), Katie (England), me and Marian (Canada), Ben (Taiwan), Rad (Australia), Ana (Serbia), Christine (Germany), Eva (Germany), Martin (France), Alex (Italy), Basti (Germany), Lauren (Wales), Steffi (Germany), Lena (Germany). Missing from photo: Julie (France) and our tour guide and photographer: Kiwi Sam (New Zealand, of course)

Nostalgic longing for places unseen

Great works of fiction are always set in our own living rooms, says American academic and novelist Siri Husdvedt in the lead essay of her collection “A Plea for Eros.” Recognizing this, good writers sketch the room and leave us to the furnishings. Lesser writers load on detail, not recognizing that by doing so, they cheat us of the pleasure of a good read.

Husdvedt is absolutely right, of course. Every reader has had the experience of having a crystal-clear image of a main character or other essential element of a novel shattered by an incongruent Hollywood blockbuster. But I think Husdvedt understates the phenomenon on two counts.

Number one: how is it that we can take an historic or period piece, for instance, and set it so vividly in our living room when we have no context – experience – to do so? Secondly, how is it that we develop such a strong emotional attachment to what is nothing more than a mental contrivance, and carry that attachment for years after we’ve forgotten all other detail of the story?

I’ve come face-to-face with this phenomenon twice in the last year.

In March, we were wrapping up our second week of scuba training on Utila Island, part of the Bay Island chain that bookends the southern end of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, stretching from the northern Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico to Honduras.

On what was to be our last Saturday on the island, our dive centre was offering a day-long expedition to Cayos Cochinos, an archipelago and marine biological reserve situated about two hours away by water. It was an expensive outing and we were torn on whether or not to participate.

In the midst of our indecision, we asked Lauren, one of the dive instructors, for her recommendation. “It’s the Caribbean the way you’ve always imagined the Caribbean,” was all she said. Yet, all of Madison Avenue couldn’t have fashioned a more persuasive response.

Through more years of reading than I care to mention, I’ve accumulated an image of the Caribbean. Throughout my adult life, it’s where I’ve always gone when I picture the perfect holiday. It’s where I’ve always gone when closing my eyes and imagining is as close to a holiday as I’m going to get. How could I resist, then, the opportunity to see it in real life?

The Caribbean as I've always imagined the Caribbean. Our captain nudged the diving boat onto this beach so we could enjoy a lunch of whole fish and Coco-Locos, a rum-filled coconut shell.

Fortunately, unlike the aforementioned Hollywood Blockbuster, Lauren’s description was spot on. Cayos Cochinos turned out to be the Caribbean exactly as I’ve always imagined it, and we had a day that was as close to my idea of a perfect holiday as I might ever see.  

I’ve always said that it was music that kept me in high school, but the truth is my graduation from a small rural public school’s monthly “bookmobile” to the comparatively vast holdings of a regional high school library was just as instrumental (pun not intended).  

Over the course of five years, at a pace of six to nine books per week, I read my way through the library – and most classes – beginning with all 58 volumes of the original Hardy Boys series.

I remember little in the way of detail of the formulaic stories: Teenage brothers Frank and Joe Hardy – with improbably-named pals Chet Morton and Biff Hooper – forever stepping in to solve mysteries for their detective-father, Fenton; Mrs. Hardy, never quite in the picture, save for baking cookies for the boys; Aunt Gertrude, even more distant.

And yet, since the age of 13, I’ve nursed a poignant, near-palatable longing for the remote, always blustery, always haunting headlands of the Bayport coast, the boys’ hometown. I’m tucked away in a towering crag, a sea breeze whipping my face, the surf crashing below; a group of smugglers surreptitiously maneuvering their mahogany runabout to a nefarious rendezvous in a secluded cove.

The funny thing is, I had no clue I was carrying any of that around with me until our first visit to Sydney in 2003.

It was a business trip for Marian. While she worked, I had two weeks of visiting one indescribably-beautiful beach after another. Two days before we were to depart, I discovered the Manly to The Spit Trail.

It’s helpful, I expect, if I first tell you a little bit about the Sydney Harbour. The Harbour is 16 miles in length, but its perimeter is 152 miles long. As it runs through the centre of the city, it’s difficult to get much further than a couple of blocks out of sight of an arm – or at least a finger – of the harbour. It also means that one has to be conscious of water when attempting dry land navigation from point A to point B.  

From the headlands near the mid-point of the Manly to The Spit Trail, looking across the Sydney Harbour to South Head and the city centre. To the left, two Manly Ferries pass on their routes to and from Circular Quay, next to the Opera House.

Sydney is described as “the city of villages,” and Manly is the former village – now thriving beach-side town at the northern end of the harbour. Because the harbour is particularly wide at its northern end, vehicular traffic would be required to travel quite a distance to the west before being able to swing south to the city centre. The saving grace is a narrow “spit” of land not far from Manly that, with the addition of a heavily-trafficked bridge, forms what looks almost like a causeway – and short cut – back to town.  

As the crow flies, the distance from Manly to The Spit is approximately 4 kms. But given that length-to-perimeter business I mentioned earlier, the trail that follows the headlands is 11 kms. I was somewhere around the mid-point in 2003 when I suddently realized I was walking the Bayport coastline. It was one of those “coming home” type of moments. The next afternoon, our last full day in Oz, Marian played hookie so we could walk the trail together.

From roughly the same spot on the trail, a view of North Head in the distance, and Manly to the left.

I really didn’t expect we’d find ourselves back to Australia anytime soon. But I couldn’t think of a better reason to return than to once again walk the trail, which we did a few weeks ago. I expect we’ll do it at least once more before we head back to Canada. Try as I might, there seems to be no satisfying my nostalgic longing for a place I’ve never seen.

(By the way, Will Ferguson wrote a wonderfully warm and funny Father’s Day piece in the Globe and Mail earlier this year on his reading the Hardy Boys series to his young son. See it at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-burden-and-the-glory-of-fatherhood/article1610030/print/)

OZ on Parade

A very large flat screen TV is the centerpiece of our Sydneyside living-room. I’m not sure exactly how big it is, but a corner-to-corner stretch consumes the lion’s share of my arm span. It would be incorrect then to say we are not big TV watchers, we just don’t do it very often.

Like Canada, Australia is a large country with a small population – only about 21.5 million, mostly clumped in relatively few urban areas. After a few weeks of infrequent TV viewing, then, one becomes conscious of seeing the same faces showing up on multiple channels and programs.

“Good News Week” became our instant AusCon favourite. Hosted by comedien/musician Paul McDermott and featuring a revolving cast of six comediens/performers, GNW combines a wacky-headlines-of-the-week game show with “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” It typically keeps us laughing out loud for 50-odd minutes of the hour-long show. When we’re not laughing, it’s usually because we haven’t kept up with the pace of delivery. We’re looking forward to attending a taping of the show next Saturday at the ABC studios downtown.

There is a striking difference in the comedy one hears on GNW and other Aussie shows compared to what we hear in Canadian or U.S. programming. One senses the broadcast environment here is uncensored by regulatory code and it’s certainly free of self-imposed political correctness.

The effect is that whit runs rampant. There are no laugh tracts. No subject is sacred. Who knew, for instance, that there were so many al Qaeda jokes? Those who resort to the easy, obvious jokes are greeted with evident distain. Profanity, when it’s heard, tends to make witty comments that much funnier.

Yes, intelligent humour seems to rule here, and for reasons I can’t explain, it would never be permitted on North American airwaves.

I was thinking about this yesterday as we hiked the “Parade” historical walking tour of downtown Sydney.

The Parade route is anchored by Oxford Street, widened in 1910 – 1914 to become one of the city’s first boulevards – a place to see and be seen. The street has hosted many parades: military, celebratory, ceremonial and political. But “Parade” also alludes to the gay rights movement that found its way out of the closets – and jails – of Australia onto Oxford Streets and environs in the ’70s and ’80s.

Although homosexual acts remained illegal in Sydney’s home-state of New South Wales until 1984, a plethora of restaurants, shops, bookstores, pubs and “back rooms,” according to our walking tour guide, clustered to form the “Gay Golden Mile” along – and near – Oxford Street.

Marian reads inscriptions on artist Annie Kennedy’s “Camp Stonewall,” which encircles the closed up “men’s convenience” (public washrooms) in Taylor Square. The monument honours the leaders of the gay rights movement in Sydney. Two of the inscribed tiles appear below.

Today, the Parade district is reminiscent of the Castor neighbourhood of San Francisco: more trendy and tasteful than flamboyant and rebellious.

A Gay Holocaust Memorial in Green Park brought back memories of our Sunday at Dachau two years ago, with one entire room of the museum dedicated to the enumeration of groups – including homosexuals – who were on the Nazi hit-list.

A funkier monument can be found in Taylor Square, at the convergence of Oxford, Bourke, and Flinders Streets. Artist Annie Kennedy’s “Camp Stonewall” encircles the closed up “Men’s Convenience” (public washrooms), and honours in words and looping audio recordings those who led the gay rights movement.

But Oxford Street’s urbane shops and somber monuments remain spiced with dashes of pepper. Amidst the many, many high-end women’s shops and men’s boutiques with names like “Aussie Boys,” are shops catering to virtually every sexual taste and preference.

We passed one sex shop called “SAX Fetish.” Right next door is a Thai restaurant.

What would you call a Thai restaurant that’s right next door to a fetish sex shop?

What else would you call a Thai restaurant that neighbours on the Fetish sex shop, but "Thai Me Up?"

Well, this is my point about the difference between Aussie-rules and North American humour. We’d be concerned about offending say, victims of sexual assaults. Here, the shop is humourously, delightfully, and unaplogetically branded “Thai Me Up.”

(For additional comment on the Aussie sense of humour, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZPuu_GUqHM)

A Taste of Kiwi in Oz

There was a pleasant feeling of homecoming last Monday as we took our first foray downtown from our temporary digs in the Forest Hills suburbs of northern Sydney.

After seven years, the names of the main public transit stops still had a familiar ring to them, concluding with Wynyard, a stone’s throw from Circular Quay. The quay, a large dock area, is the site of the first European footprint in Australia, but was likely doomed to be little more than a ferry terminal until someone thought to build an opera house between it and the gorgeous Royal Botanic Gardens next door.

On the opposite side of the terminal, many more thoughtful minds and at least one high-profile arrest were involved in the decision to transform – rather than raze – the industrial buildings – once a staple of urban waterfronts – into The Rocks, a delightfully trendy neighbourhood of high-end boutiques, galleries, and eateries that explodes into an artisan market on the weekend. 

The Rocks, Circular Quay, the Opera House, the Botanic Gardens combine to offer what is in my mind one of the world’s truly great public meeting places. I’m certain we sounded like little kids as we explored and rediscovered. “Ooh, I remember being here…. Ahh, I remember this!”

But neither of us remembered the two-storey rugby ball.

The two-storey New Zealand rugby ball is a new - and temporary - addiiton to Circular Quay since our last visit to Sydney.

New Zealand will host the 2011 Rugby World Cup and its government is pulling out all the stops to promote tourism. We cooled our heels for about ten minutes before stepping into the inflated building for a whirlwind, multi-media tour of the other land down under.

We took our seats on the mezzanine level, pleasantly removed from the mob of school kids sprawling themselves on the floor below. We had a few minutes to marvel at how – with IMAX technology – the entire inside of the oval-shaped building was an animated living-room.

A fire was burning in the fireplace on the front wall. The landscape we could see outside the windows did a slow, unobtrusive cycle through the seasons. Books glided off the book shelf, opened up, and scrolled through pages of photographs of Kiwi rugby teams of yore. The projected image of a movie projector on the left wall click-clacked footage of historic rugby games on the projected image of a portable screen on the right wall.

At the appointed time, the movie projector stopped, the portable screen folded up, the room dimmed as the window curtains were drawn, and the show began.

The ceiling of the living room peeled opened and we found ourselves sitting on Circular Quay, seeing the Opera House and all of the sights we would have seen had we actually stepped out of the rugby-ball-building. A larger-than-life rugby player picked the room up, making us realize that we were inside a transparent rugby ball, and then booted us out into space. After a brief tour of the galaxy, we settle back down for a gentle landing in New Zealand.

Over the next ten minutes, our rugby ball transporter was carried across New Zealand by car, helicopter, in the mouth of a dog, underwater, on a snowboard, and on skies. As we travelled, a real-life host/interpreter shared the folklore history of his country. 

Only toward the end of the presentation was rugby promoted. Up-close footage was played of the New Zealand All Blacks national team doing the Haka, a Māori traditional dance that it performs immediately prior to its matches. If you’re not familiar with it, don’t think dance, think aggressive, assertive, chest-beating, ready-to-kill war chant (watch a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkxaBKd8SwA&NR=1).

A New Zealand troop performs a Haka before moving to more decidedly soothing Māori singing.

Our Australian friend Paul tells us that the Aussie team’s response to the Haka is to stand, folded-arm, unmoved, unperturbed. Occasionally, Aussie players will turn their backs on the ritual, a ploy that Paul says is intended to rile the Kiwis. I’m betting it’s to hide their wet pants.

The show concluded with us being booted back through space to Circular Quay. The ceiling of our transporter closed back in and we found ourselves again in the comfort of our living room. 

We stepped out of the rugby ball in time to watch a troop of ten young New Zealanders in native costume do a short version of the Haka. They then sang three Māori songs. The musicality sent shivers up my spine – full-throated, lyrical harmonies capped by a heaven-sent soprano gliding ever so gently above.

It did the trick: on our first day of rediscovering Australia, we came home keen to visit New Zealand.