Let’s put an end to squinting. Based on some emails I received, some of you might not know that if you click on a photo it will enlarge to fill your screen.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
The River Beatrice
(NOTE: based on some emails, I received, some of you might not know that if you click on a photo it will enlarge to fill your screen)
The River Beatrice (the Germans pronounce it “bee-at-trice”) is 410 feet long, 37 1/2 feet wide, and about 40 feet high. It really looks less like a boat than a barge, and less like a barge than a floating mattress. Which, in a sense it is for about 140 guests. Chagalls, Tolouse-Lautrecs, and Picassos adorn the passageways leading me to believe that the boat might be worth more at auction than on-river. Or, more worrisome, in an insurance claim. Not that I feel the boat or we are in any danger from Teddy the Torch. So far, there seems to be more profit in tourism.
The staterooms occupy the two upper decks. We are on the lower of the two, about 10 feet off the water, but we don’t hear those above us. And, since the river is virtually flat, there is no chance of getting inundated. In fact, the boat is so well helmed and outfitted, it is impossible to tell when we are moving. Even the bottled water in our stateroom doesn’t ripple. Our cruising speed is about 12 knots at the maximum. The Danube itself has a current of almost five knots at times. Words like serene and stately come to mind as one motors down the river.
The main lounge and restaurant occupy the front half of the boat, one on each upper deck. Most seating is for six, and there is no couples seating in the restaurant. So, we are getting used to chatting with other people instead of our cats. This leads us to the conclusion that we and the cats need to get out more.
We’ve met guests from Australia, Britain, South Africa, Mexico, and the USA. All are interested in travel, food, and politics, so the conversations are interesting and lively, and we all seem to have a lot in common.
As we have found in the past, the Aussies are particularly warm, funny, and easy-going. They seem to be like Americans used to be before we started taking life, and our role in the world, so seriously.
On The Beautiful Blue(?) Danube
Water is not blue and neither are rivers, including the Danube. But it is beautiful. We boarded our boat, the River Beatrice (the Germans pronounce it “bee-at-tress”) in the small town of Passau. Passau is so quaint it could be made from gingerbread. It is at the junction of the Danube and two other rivers. A couple of years ago, storms caused the Danube to flood at nearly 40 feet above high water and the area was devastated. While there is still some construction to be done, the town and area have been restored to their picturesque past, and it is easy to imagine why Strauss could be inspired by the sight to write perhaps his most famous waltz.
It’s been two days and we have yet to hear the waltz, but I’d bet bucks to bratwurst, we will not get off the boat without hearing it at least twice. All anyone has been playing since we landed in Europe 10 days ago is Christmas music. And most of the music is American, especially Bing Crosby. Man, I’m beginning to feel like I’m in a “road” picture. But, with Christmas only an eve away, I can hear the violins and violas tuning up in 4/4 time.
Update: Didn’t figure on Boxing Day. This is a kind of second day of Christmas, and so the tuning I heard was for more “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Interestingly, the old guy is not popular in Austria, where we are now. Their Christmas vision is, as their are the first to admit, slightly weird. A roughly 10-year-old Christ goes from door to door delivering presents. The weird part is that Christ is always portrayed as a girl. Our Austrian guide had no explanation except for “tradition.”
Update II: Snow! It’s snowing hard enough to make me feel like I’m in an Euopean snow globe. Cold, wet, but pretty.
Dachau: Efficiency Instead of Morality
I expected to be horrified, but I ended up perplexed. Dachau is a memorial and not a museum, although there is a museum onsite. As such, it suffers the same fate as Gettysburg or other American battle sites–namely, it is so peaceful, clean, and quiet that there is no evidence as to what really happened there. It is a gun, but there is no smoke.
Virtually all the buildings that exist has been renovated to the extent that they almost look new. Places that held hundreds of dying prisoners stacked on tiers of rotting wooden “beds” with scraps for mattresses and no insulation or heating, now have newly lumbered bed racks and antiseptically clean cement floors and pasteboard walls. The “dormitories” look more like luggage storage rooms than human housing. And I guess the irony is that from the Nazi point of view the dorms were for storage of non-human contents.
You don’t see blood, gore, or gristly remnants. All that is left to see is a life size diorama of the master plan. And maybe that is the greater horror. Killing in anger, or slavery in retribution–these while horrible are not horrific. Humans are animals and sometimes our animal instincts take over. But the camps were constructed and run as a cold-blooded calculated industry. The “final solution” was just that, a mathematical and logistical solution to an intellectual problem. It seems that “extermination” to the Nazis meant the same as it does to us when we call Terminix.
One looks at the “showers.” Well, in those crowded train trips to the camps, wasn’t everyone dirty? Isn’t it so much more efficient to kill masses of people by having them walk into the gas chambers willingly?
And the crematoria: what’s the easiest way to dispose of the bodies? After all, mass graves take up so much space. The French writer Camus said of the Nazis that they substituted efficiency for morality.
There are a number of churches and religious icons on the site, including a Jewish memorial that says “Never again.” But of course, human history since WWII has had similar mass killings on an almost regular basis. Maybe memorials to horror might serve to encourage, rather than discourage, inhumanity. Gives people ideas.
And a last discouraging note: pre WWII Germany was as enlightened a society as any on Earth. Germany was a world leader in music, literature, science, and technology. If such a society could fall prey to the Nazi ethic and process, what hope does any society have of avoiding the same?
Deutsches Museum
This museum is similar to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago but the exhibits are is less involving and more staid. Still, there is definitely such a thing as “German Technology” and some prime examples are there to appreciate. I have chosen three examples of WWII tech because each alone were significant enough had they been developed slightly earlier, and/or their manufacturing plants had not been destroyed by Allied bombing, we might all today be speaking German instead of English. Or, at least those of us Aryan enough to still be around. You think of these things in Munich, which was the city where Nazism came into its own.
Depicted are the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first production jet fighter (flew twice as fast as the Allied propeller planes), the V1 buzz bomb–a loud cruise missile used to bombard London from Germany, and the spectacular V2–the first ballistic missile. The V2 flew faster than sound, so that the bomb actually hit and exploded before one heard it coming. In other words, if you heard the rocket, you knew you were still alive.
But, there are other examples of German tech at the museum that are more uplifting. Bayer developed aspirin (the name actually was a trademark). Gutenberg’s printing press was not kept for posterity, but is in facsimile. And how can one not love the pidgeon cam?
And, lastly, for those of you who know me well:
Haufbrau Haus
The waiter asked me if I wanted a large or small stein of beer. I opted for the large, the same size as the kids across the table from me ordered–there are no tables for two at German beer halls. Marcia opted for a small blonde lager and lemonade shanty called a “randler.” The small was 16 ounces. My large was slightly smaller than Lake Ontario. I mean you could either drink it or do the backstroke in it. Marcia, me, and about 500 of our closest friends drank and chatted as the oompah band played polkas and other music of German-conquered countries. But, everyone was jovial, even the short guy in the subway on our way to the beer hall, who I swear looked like Hitler right down the the mustache and forelock of hair.
Haufbrau House is a state-owned beer hall. The Germans have the right idea when it comes to spending public funds for the benefit of its citizenry. We drank our beers with a poached white veal sausage called weilbwurst and a pretzel. Pretzels . . . they actually serve them at breakfast. Quaint, but cute.
Driving in the Dead of Night
Some roadside rest stops have picnic tables. This one had crosses depicting all those who have died on a particularly bad stretch of highway over some volcanic hills northeast of Reykjavik. It is an effort by private citizens to get their government to upgrade the road and save lives.
The real problem is that even with round-the-clock plowing, ice, gale-force winds, and too many hours of pure darkness make driving an iffy proposition.
The Northern Light(s)
The celestial light show of the north depends upon solar activity and the weather. The sun did its best, but the weather was not as cooperative. Marcia booked a “super Jeep.” Each of these 4-wheel-drive vehicles has 40-inch tires, carries about ten people, and has a ground clearance of about 18 inches. They can go where no no Gray Line buses can follow.
So, the deal is find the North Star, and drop down about twice the width of the palm of your hand. Assuming there are no clouds, and a wave of solar winds has hit the atmosphere, you might see a green curtain of light stretching in an east-to-west direction. Now, the human eye is sensitive, but a digital camera is even more so. What looked a like a faint green smear to the naked eye, glowed neon green in a 6-second exposure. Not to get too philosophical, but what is reality, what your eye sees, or what your camera records?
Our first observation was the best (say, a three out of 10) as cloud cover and gale-force winds blowing snow pretty much dimmed or obscured our subsequent viewing. Still, 4-wheeling our way through unplowed service roads on a volcanic mountain spewing sulfurous steam, while racing to outrun the cloud cover, was exciting. And even a minor sighting of the northern lights for those of us who have never seen them bordered on awesome.
Note on the photo: shot at ISO 1600 at 6 seconds, so there is a lot of grainy noise that needs Photoshopping out. The orange band is the lights of Reykjavik, which even at a distance outshine the aurora. For scale, the green band covered the distance across the sky of a yardstick held at arm’s length, with a thickness of the height of a 1-liter bottle of Coke held also held at arm’s length.
The Fools-Golden Circle
Though it has its attractions, and the people are friendly, I am not sure that Iceland really qualifies as a country. In a sense, it seems more like a marketer’s concept of “what can we do with this place?” The Vikings needed a rest stop between the Old World and the New. Reykjavik fit the bill and was colonized. 1500 years later, the 300,000 inhabitants were wondering where the Vikings went. So, they looked around to see what they could do with what they had: a tectonic mid-Atlantic ridge, clean water, some sheep, and the northern lights.
OK, Disneyland it ain’t, but it certainly beats out Greenland. First, the water. It really is the best we’ve ever had. And the mayor of London is on the verge of buying Icelandic water by the tankerful to pump into the reservoirs of London. Since the oil disasters in the Gulf of Mexico and the Exxon Valdez, single-hulled tankers are no longer used to transport crude. If you want an old tanker, they are cheap. Cheap enough, that filling them with virtually free and plentiful Icelandic water, and selling the load to the Brits only costs about $2 more per ton than trying to unpollute Thames water to drink.
Now as to the rest. I’ll cover the northern lights in another post, and the sheep go for wool products and the famous and tasty Icelandic lamb–enough said.
Being situated on the mid-Atlantic ridge has it virtues. For one thing, upwelling basalt means that Iceland is growing by the length of a human fingernail every year. In about 62,000 years, the place will have grown a mile. So, in only about 156 million years, it will be as wide as the USA. The future is bright for Iceland. Right now, it’s the size of Kentucky.
Within frozen-spitting distance of Reykjavik are the geothermal features and one waterfall. You just can’t charge people $80 a person to see hot and cold bubbles. But, call the three features “The Golden Circle Tour” and you are, well, golden.
And so we sat crammed into a Greyline bus for six hours traveling around the countryside to see three potentially fascinating sights in poor proximity to one another. No kidding, total time out of the bus viewing the sights: 20 minutes each. And, we arrived at one site, “Geysir” (the place that gave it’s name to geysers), so late it was too dark to see anything. How much brain does it take to figure that you can’t take a 6-hour tour when there are only four hours of daylight?
In any event, here are a description and a couple of shots from the tour:
Pingveller National Park
We are astride the mid-Atlantic ridge. Photo left is the American tectonic plate where almost all Americans but us western Californians, and Washintonian-islanders live. Photo right, is the European plate. The Rift Valley in between is gradually widening as the ridge does its thing.
Gullfoss Waterfall
As far as I can determine, this waterfall is known for its accessibility though its name means “golden.” It is pretty enough in the snow, but the frozen trees nearby were more interesting.
Geysir
There is only one active geyser, and it isn’t Geysir. Geysir has been extinct for years. The current geyser erupts every 15 minutes or so and is about 10 feet high. We heard it, but since there were no lights and it was pitch black, we never saw it.
Land of the Midday Moon
If a photo is worth 1,000 words, a video is a novel. We were to meet a guided tour of the thermals and national park in front of our hotel at 1pm. Even the Icelanders couldn’t take the weather. The guys at the front desk bet we couldn’t make it to the corner. They were right–it took both Marcia and me to even push open the front door against the gale-force winds. I left the actual sound on the beginning of the soundtrack and then dubbed in a voiceover so you could hear my description above the wind.
Just click and pour yourself a hot drink while it loads.
Oslo
The main thought that comes to mind when I think of Oslo is “night for day.” In movie making “day for night” is a technique to use blue filters in daylight to mimic night on film. Saves money by not having to set up expensive lighting. Oslo currently is enjoying six hours of sunlight each day, so to the uninitiated everybody is walking around in the dark most of the time. Doesn’t seem to bother the locals, of course. But for the jet-lagged two of us, it always seemed like either bedtime or dinner time.
Here’s a suggestion for any entrepreneurs out there: bedtime theater. Instead of dinner theater, customers are dressed in PJs and are served in bed. Given we are in Norway, maybe Ibsen or Strindberg. Though “I love Lucy” in Swedish might prove more entertaining.
Speaking of the arts, the new Oslo opera is quite a statement. From the outside, the entire white marble complex looks like a giant ice flow. The wooden interior warms the place up. Unique among opera houses,and maybe buildings In general, is that you are encouraged to walk on the roof. You begin at street level and np just walk up the eastern roofline. Can be slippery footing in icy weather–i.e. Most of the year–and if one isn’t careful it could be a long and painful slide into Oslo bay. On one hand you do get a great view of Oslo. On the other, there is not that much to see.
The weather was just above freezing and raw with with occasional sprinkles. Since we were still staggering around from the SAS flight to Europe most of our time was spent at the opera and in the immense and confusing Purgatory called the Central Station. This transportation hub got us to and from our airport hotel and midtown, and resembled most the Port Authority in New York City.
Oslo is one of the world’s most expensive cities. If one is not careful, you could spend $300 for a dinner that might cost $100 in the States. Even fast food, like a hamburger, can cost $30.
The Holiday Train
We expected the sights to be seen would begin in Europe. That was until we caught the holiday train on our way from the airport to Topolobampo in Chicago for dinner. Unlike Santa Claus, this cross between a Christmas parade and transportation visits the city’s subway riders whether they are naughty or nice. Transit employees dressed like elves hand out candy canes. And, at the center of the train a flat car holds a live Santa and not so live reindeer.
Christmas lights decorate the outside of the train, and green and red neon illuminates the seating area. This does add a touch of macabre to the lurid murder headlines of the newspapers riders are reading. All the seats are upholstered in wrapping-paper-like fabric. What a trip!
I am writing this as the SAS 777 bound from Chicago to Stockholm is #6 waiting to take off. The pilot made this announcement in Swedish, which I understood perfectly though I don’t speak a word of the language beyond “smorgasbord.” This is because, as I have suspected since the Muppets’ Swedish Chef, Scandanavian languages are not real. They all actually are speaking English and are just screwIng with us.
Given fellow sailor Admiral Bergan’s lineage, I’ll allow an exception for some Norweigans. But Marcia just read me from Travel and Leisure that there are more people of Norweigan descent in the USA than in Norway. So, face it, they DO speak English even to one and other.
Update: SAS Stockholm to Oslo. I think we are the only Americans aboard. Everyone else is reading and speaking English into their electronic gear. But those sitting near us clearly are pretending to chat in Swedish or Norwegian to keep up pretenses. After all, if oil-rich Norway spoke English only, it would be Texas with herring.
Gone Packing
Years ago, in 1979, when Marcia and I took the cross-country trip that landed us on the West Coast, we were in Marcia’s parents’ Brooklyn backyard assembling a roof-top luggage rack for our luggage-challenged Toyota Celica. The contraption was cheap, which meant that the parts only approximated alignment and necessitated bending, hammering, pulling, screaming, and cursing to get mthe thing assembled. Nugget, the family dog, assisted by barking at recalcitrant bits of metal. The Toyota ended up looking like it needed baryatric surgery, and that was my last attempt at packing.
So now flash forward 36 years, and I am watching Marcia packing for our trip. So far, she has packed and unpacked twice. She is aiming for perfection – the perfect pack–a topological solution efficiency, wherein each sock, pant leg, and shirt sleeve is tessellated to its neighbors. Not that Marcia is being overly obsessive, but she is actually taking photos of each packing attempt so she can replicate and/or improve upon it the next time around.
Unlike the family dog so long ago, our cats are less interested in the act of packing the luggage, than in the luggage itself. The female cat has found a comfy spot in which to sit and pose (“I’m ready for my closeup now, Mr. DeMille.”) The male cat has blindly inserted his paw into one of the partially zippered compartments, trying to see what he can fish out.
One of the true miracles of nature is how cats continually reach into blind crevices or underneath objects and always emerge with their paws intact. I mean, you would figure that the world should be teeming with limping hoardes of 3-legged felines.
Update: Despite starting six days before departure, Marcia still was up to 4am the night before.
After ruthlessly discarding essentials like my prized mineral collection, each bag weighed in at 45 pounds–slightly less than the pack animal we will need to haul the things around. Still, from an airline standpoint we are not overweight. But what do companies that treat their passengers as cargo and pretzels as dinner know?