Kyoto

I returned to Japan for the second time this fall during what should have been the leaf-watching season, when the hotels in Kyoto are booked solid for months in advance. People arrive in groups of 30 and upwards to visit the temples and admire the local maple trees, which sport tiny leaves like the one on the Canadian flag, only about the size of a postage stamp. I happen to know the typical group size because it is only over 30 that the group rate kicks in at the temples. It was unseasonably warm this year, so only a few of the trees had turned, but they were a vivid red. I can well believe that the effect of the entire woods turning this colour is worth the trip, and I only wish I had arrived a week later to see more of it.

Spirited Away
Fans of the cartoonist Hayao Miyazaki will be delighted to know of the existence of an entire shop dedicated to his work. You can buy Totoro and his friends in a dozen forms, from ash trays to pocket mirrors, back packs and key chains. Okay, I was only joking about the ash trays, because of course there is a certain element of reverence even in this crass commercialism. The range of creatures was however astonishing when you see them together all in one place. In typical Japanese fashion, the form of the building also seemed appropriate to the subject matter. After entering along a corridor lined with other shops, you come to a spot with some wooden benches and natural stone steps, where the roofs of the buildings on all sides end to make a little patch of open sky. The shop is off this tiny courtyard, quietly playing soundtracks from the various movies.

A Keen Sense of Liminality
As my colleague Susan pointed out, the fact in Miyazaki’s movies of a different world being just around the corner is based on the exquisite use of even the smallest actual spaces in Japan to transport you to a new experience. It is not uncommon, for example, to walk from a congested street to a wide open area for bus transfers, only to step aside into a rock garden where all the traffic noise is gone and you are suddenly listening to a small stream while sitting on a wooden bench beside a grove of bamboo, with old moss thick on every side. It is amazing, astonishing, and charming, and I wish everyone on Earth could adopt local forms of this way of thinking.

With Bells On
You can’t throw a stone in Kyoto, a local saying goes, without hitting a monk. There are over 1600 shrines and temples in the city, and we visited all of them, walking generally through mixed woods, often accompanied by waist-deep crowds of school children. It is not uncommon for one of them to muster enough courage to say hello, then burst into fits of shy giggles when you answer. The temples themselves vary significantly, and the grounds are typically beautiful, so that a few steps in any direction gives you another enchanting view of a bit of water, an ancient tree, and part of a roofline. What many of them also have in common are bells. Some are tiny, hanging in strings from the eaves to guide the water into a terminal small cup. Others are about the size of your head, hanging decoratively from the corners of roofs. The premium versions, however, are old green bronze and bell-shaped, except they have no clappers. Instead, they are rung with a swinging beam. I wasn’t fortunate enough to hear any of them being rung, although I was told of the biggest bell, rung only at New Years and other significant occasions, that it takes half a dozen men pulling at the ropes of the striking beam, while one of the young monks rides on the wrappings near the front, so that after each stroke he can push off from the bell with his feet. I can only imagine that the right to be that monk is highly prized.

Tanuki
With a bottle of saki in one hand, a bag of money in the other, and exaggeratedly enormous testicles (often hanging far enough to rest on the ground), these ubiquitous fat little creatures are symbols of the good life. In some cases they resemble western raccoons, while in others they are closer to red pandas. There is even on rare occasions a missus Tanuki -- a bit, as someone pointed out, like a missus pacman, distinguished by her lack of balls and the colourful bow on her head. Tanuki himself wears a straw hat pushed back, the better, one supposes, to get a good look at this pleasant world.

Clinton

I arrived in this small town in upstate NY after an instructive hour-long ride with a local driver who was roughly the age and temperament of my older brother. We talked about politics (bad), the economy (worse), and education (terrible), as well as the aptitude of the people responsible for everything (disastrously poor). Along the way, we narrowly missed hitting one of the largest does I had personally ever seen. She was standing in shadow on the other lane of a two-lane highway, and only the quick reactions of the driver saved us from a messy and complicated interaction that the deer herself seemed to be interested in producing. When I told people about it subsequently, they explained that the area is heavily populated with deer, so that you often see them in or around your yard.

Poetry Slam
I had never been to a spoken word event before, and it was a lively and somehow cathartic experience. I have sometimes wondered if poetry is a dead art form, but it is alive and well with these young people, who were full of loud music, mutual encouragement, and charming conceits. Some people read their poems, some recited them from heart, and a few sang songs. At times I felt that I had been transported to a beatnik gathering from the 1950s, I think in part because to avoid applauding so loudly as to drown out the performer, the convention is to snap your fingers to make a sound like rain. Crying out encouragement or commentary was also not uncommon. One of my favourites was the single word “preach.”

A King-Sized Bed
I know it seems a somewhat trivial reason, but I generally avoid the bed and breakfast as though it were vexed, because I have never been in one where the picturesque and antique qualities that are so admired in the genre accommodate the fact that I am six foot two and two hundred pounds. I also do like a bit of sleep when I can get it, and I enjoy eating breakfast when I do manage to get up. Both are mitigated against in their various ways in the typical B&B, the one by the charming tiny beds, no bigger than your thumb, and the other by the tendency to serve breakfast between the hours of 6:15 and 6:17, after my hosts have been up and doing for hours, usually on the other side of the paper screen that serves as my bedroom wall. All of which to say that none of these restrictions applied to the B&B I stayed at in Clinton, where there was an unprecedented king-sized bed, a separate building containing my room, and breakfast at 9:30.

Osaka

I took a 14-hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo, then a 1-hour commuter jet to Osaka. On the overseas flight, despite having work stockpiled, I mostly slept and watched movies (/X-Men First Class/ and /Pirates in Strange Waters/). When I got to Tokyo, my original itinerary had me changing not just planes but also airports, from Narita to Haneda. However, after I consulted with a few people about the hour and a half bus ride, I arranged to get that changed, which was a good thing because the customs lineup took a while.

I had a few observations about the Tokyo Narita airport, largely dealing with how they manage to keep it feeling like a small and somewhat soothing place when in fact it is huge. For one thing, the ceilings are quite low for an international airport. Then there are the conveyor belts, which you normally expect to stretch for miles. Only here, they are short belts lined up, so it is quite easy to get off the system if you change your mind. Similarly with escalators, which take you for a short ride, a small walk, then the next ride, and so on. The chairs in the lounge area all face the same direction—toward the gates—and there is plenty of room to walk between rows of seats, and a ton of room in the stretch directly facing the gate, where they have a printed sign on a stand that tells you the status (e.g. “servicing” or “priority boarding”).

The customs area was also well managed, with polite people to show you where to stand and make sure you’ve filled out both sides of your form before you go and meet the teenager at the desk. Plus all the public announcements are made by impersonators of Hello Kitty.

The Green Rich Hotel
I am staying at a small designer hotel near the domestic Osaka airport, one of a cluster that includes the Hotel Nice, Hotel First, and somewhat confusing Hotel To. I seem to be getting along nicely myself, although as I had previously been warned, there is no English signage and no one outside the university seems to speak more than a word or two of English. Fortunately, I’d printed out my reservation in Japanese, so I can point to the part that I’ve been led to believe says I’ve paid for my breakfasts, and to the line that gives the name and address of the hotel, and so on. One of my colleagues, who travels quite a bit and is a vegetarian, carries a handy little card that says in Japanese “I don’t eat meat.” Features of the Green Rich Hotel include a “shower toilet” that “rinses your posterior” with either water or a deodorizing spray. It isn’t a separate bidet, but is built right in. They had something similar at the airport, only it seemed sufficiently technical that I elected not to try it—it looked like there were moving parts, perhaps designed to swipe across the toilet seat like a photocopier. The hotel also has public baths (one each for men and women), where you have a little shower on a stool off to the side, then climb in with your towel wrapped modestly around your waist (bathing suits are not, apparently, an option). Other delightful features of the hotel include a heating pad behind the bathroom mirror, so a rectangle of it never fogs over, your selection of additional robes, pillows, and dehumidifiers in an open case on each floor, and a talking elevator (featuring, of course, the voice of Hello Kitty).

Buffet Breakfast
I enjoyed peering under all the lids and opening the electronic gadgets that contained, respectively, rice, soup, and gravy. There was the kind of egg you get on tamago, next to pickled slips of something delicious and a plate of dried black shredded seaweed. The pineapple slices came from tiny baby pineapples and the orange slices came in your choice of orange or bright yellow. I had a fountain drink that I hoped would be carbonated apple but turned out to be carbonated water that glowed green in the dark. The bacon is not to be described, although later in the grocery store I saw that it comes already packaged in those neat rectangles and apparently just requires steaming for a minute or two once you get it home.

Outdoor Vending Machines
They are ubiquitous, standing wherever in North American cities you’d expect to see a newspaper machine or mailbox. Many of them are Boss brand, which is a can of cold coffee, although there are also various teas and Pepsi Nex Zero (I think the Nex means that it serves as a mild malaria medicine), as well as more recognizable Coke products. There are separate machines for cigarettes, which must be popular given the size of the machines and the range of choices. The restaurant last night had an ash tray at the table. I noticed it because one of my Japanese colleagues asked me to hand it to him, then went and sat in the doorway of the tatami room to smoke. He is fluent in something like eight languages, studies international Buddhism, wears Buddy Holly glasses, and is a Toshiro Mifune lookalike contest winner. The vending machine motif also carries forward into the student cafeteria, where you enter next to a glass display case of plastic dishes, make your selection on a large panel full of buttons that also takes your money, vending machine style, and gives you a ticket. You present the ticket to the cook and get your meal. It seems foolproof enough except that I was going by price rather than by Japanese characters, and ended up with curry on rice instead of vegetables on noodles.

Nerja

Marlene’s son Ezra had rented a car to drive us through the mountains to the absolutely beautiful southern coastal resort of Nerja. Ezra is a good driver, but the very curvy mountain roads provided me with an experience I haven’t had since Cape Town, where I needed enough gravol that the trip consisted of a series of snapshots taken between naps.

Wind Turbines
One of our stops took place at a set of giant wind turbines placed on the edge of a mountain. We were able to get out of the car and walk right out underneath the blades. From a distance, they look leisurely, even elegant. Standing underneath them, on the other hand, you expect to hear the voice of Blofeld saying: “And so, Mr. Bond, we meet at last.”

Tiny Lizards
They live on the cliff face and go like the dickens, especially when you are terrorizing the poor things by trying to capture them on video. Each one is a little brown/green jewel, about the length of your finger.

Granada

A flight of just over an hour will get you from Barcelona in the north to Granada in the south, and you have really flown to a different world. This is the Spain I had been expecting to see, with a strong Moorish influence in the architecture and a more powerful Catholic presence in the streets.

A Pearl Set in Emeralds
That’s a phrase Wikipedia mentions in describing the Alhambra, originally a 14th-century Moorish fortress and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Certainly there are some gorgeous buildings and some lovely gardens in this massive complex, which was sufficiently abandoned by the 19th century that Washington Irving could squat there with some gypsies. In fact, the modern curators have used him as the fictional tour guide in the little wii remotes you can rent to explain the place. Unfortunately, he doesn’t come with a reverence filter, with the result that you get to hear more poetry than facts. Luckily, you aren’t required to listen, so you can set it aside or take it in small doses. An amazing feature of the place is the intricate carving on the walls, ceilings, doorways and windows. As Irving puts it: "everywhere the same and yet each piece different." There are also silent pools for reflecting the architecture, and noisy fountains for cheering you up, all of them with goldfish swimming in their depths. One of my favourite uses of water is in the stone balustrades to one of the staircases, which have channels cut into their surfaces so that the water runs down under your hands.

Serrano Ham
Legend has it that the ubiquitous, deliciously cured Serrano ham was originally a test devised by Catholics to make sure they weren’t inadvertently feasting with people from religions where pork is forbidden. If it is true, from these ignominious beginnings has arisen the tradition of having plates of cured shaved ham available for every meal. Tostado with jambon for breakast, a plate of jambon for second breakfast, jambon on the tapas for both first and second lunch—it is hard to avoid it in Spain. I can’t, of course, speak from first-hand knowledge of its presence at dinner.

Barcelona

The three-hour train trip from Valencia to Barcelona passed without incident through some rather stunning landscapes. One thing that caught my attention is that the Spanish trains have a security checkpoint that scans your luggage. They don’t do anything else, like looking at your passport or metal-detecting your body, or even talking to you, really. There is just a guy watching a screen beside a luggage scanner and you put your bag down on one side and pick it up on the other. I don’t recall having experienced that before.

A Place Without Street Corners
A unique architectural trope in Barcelona consists of the absence of corners where streets meet. Instead, nearly all the buildings have faces on the diagonal, so that there aren’t two walls forming a corner, but rather an additional short wall. This has several desirable effects, such as making more room for pedestrians and improving the lines of sight for drivers, which is good because the drivers here have a bad habit of treating a red light as a stock car starting line. In fact, the motorcycles will routinely creep up between the cars, so that just before the light changes, there is a burst of a couple of dozen motorcycles leaping forward, and heaven help the hindmost pedestrian.

City of Nudes
One of the striking features of some areas of Barcelona is that they are chock-a-block with marble statues of ladies who forgot to wear their clothes. They are kneeling in the park, sitting beside fountains, wearing wings but no heads, and in at least one case getting up to no good with a bull. One of my favourites is an odalisque lying on a pedestal in the median of a major street, eating an ice cream cone.

Gaudi
You can’t spend any time in Barcelona without becoming aware that the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) lived here, and created some iconic buildings such as his 6-storey apartments, an extensive park, and a cathedral, for which he was apparently still trying to raise funds at age 74 by going door-to-door, when he was hit and killed by a tram. This is not the land of Don Quixote for nothing. The buildings are variously called art nouveau or modernism, but to my way of thinking they are not so easy to classify except to say they have a lot of at least potentially disturbing influence of the organic. Take for instance the glass case in the top floor of the apartment block, where there is the skeleton of a snake as a reference for the way the internal brick arches have been built. As Teresa said, “I’m not sure I want to think of myself as walking around in the belly of a snake.” You can always exit the snake, however, and go up on the roof, to be greeted by rows of penises with faces.

San Jordi
Just as Valencia celebrates St. Joseph by blowing shit up, the Barcelonians celebrate the attributes of their patron saint by giving symbolic gifts. San Jordi, or in English St. George, is not only known for slaying dragons, but is also associated with books and roses. Accordingly, on April 24 the city is filled with temporary stalls that sell these items so that people can exchange them, as the tour guide phrased it, as tokens of love.

Stacks of Fashion Models
I first noted a peculiar behaviour at the 1992 Olympic park, where we’d gone to see the absolutely fabulous futuristic telecom tower by Santiago Calatrava. As we exited the grounds, there was a pile of people sleeping in the sunny corner of the wall. I thought to myself: “That’s quite a few more derelicts than I’m used to seeing together,” but as we got closer, it became clear that they were in fact lovely young women, very fashionably dressed, just taking a little communal nap. At first I assumed this was some anomalous event, like perhaps the break between photos at a fashion shoot. But then I saw a couple of other similar stacks in a completely different part of the city, in fact down on the pier.

Ironic Spanish Guitarists
One rainy night, we went to the little brick chapel off to one side of a cathedral to see a couple of Spanish guitarists named Ksenia Axelroud and Joan Benejam. They played up a storm, including a lot of what I have now begun to think of as the characteristic irony of Spain. For instance, in the signature section of the concert, they played four movements of Bizet’s Carmen, reverse-engineered from the symphony score to Spanish guitar, which Bizet had claimed as his inspiration. The second encore was what they introduced as “a little musical joke.” It was a version of Mozart’s Turkish March with one performer standing behind the seated other so that they could play at the same time on the same guitar.

He Never Got a Dinner
This was a comic line from the celebrity roasts that were fashionable in the 1980s. The comedian would list famous historical figures, which in contrast to the current roast victim had some genuinely remarkable achievements, but had never been honored with a public dinner. I’ve been having a somewhat similar experience throughout Spain, where they eat five meals a day: two breakfasts, a 2:00 lunch, tapas at 7:00, and dinner at midnight. Despite my inability to survive a day long enough to actually get to dinner, I couldn’t be happier with Spain in this respect, since it often happens, even in relatively cosmopolitan world centres, that there is nowhere to eat by 10:00 in the evening. In Spain, they aren’t even getting started eating by 10:00 in the evening.

Sing Coo Coo
Spain is, apparently, the land of green parakeets. We had the chance to sit under a palm tree and watch a pair of them making a nest. They would fly in with a beakful of string, then chatter away while they wove it into a bundle they had set into the crease of a palm leaf.

Valencia

I stepped through the looking glass into this unbelievable Spanish port city with two colleagues, after 19 hours in the air. We descended through some of the blackest clouds I have ever seen—as-black-as-the-keys-on-my-laptop black—and I began to wonder if I would be able to breathe after we landed. On the contrary, the air seems fresh and beautiful down here, perhaps because it is being cleansed by the breeze off the ocean. It wasn’t long, however, before I began to develop theories about where the smoke might be coming from.

The Nineteen Days of Burning
The patron saint of Valencia is St. Joseph the carpenter. You see statues of him in the cathedrals and churches, which are easy to identify because he is carrying a two-by-four. From the connection to carpentry comes a local tradition, dating to the middle ages, that prior to the feast of St. Joseph on March 19, you should burn any scraps of wood you happen to have around the house. The next phase involved the logical step of saying why stop with scraps of wood, when you could equally well take the opportunity to burn any old furniture you had kicking around. I’m not sure what the other steps might have been, but in its present incarnation, the Fallas in Valencia consists of thousands of people building hundreds of giant wooden sculptures, “dolls” people said “as large as buildings” then setting fire to them all on the same night—March 19. The designs are too large to move, and have to be shipped in pieces to the places in the city where they will eventually be assembled, displayed, judged, and burned. I have heard estimates ranging from 400 to 1000 of these objects will appear all over the city beginning March 15, at a total annual cost of something like 300,000 euros.

Mascleta—“a symphony in gunpowder”
Prior to March 19, there are 19 days of explosions. Everyone gathers in a particular square at 2 pm. We went on the Sunday, and the crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages was so thick that I had something happen to me that has never happened before. I was following a string of people moving through a heavy crowd on both sides. Suddenly the line stopped moving, and I realized that as far as I could see ahead, for blocks in fact, no one was walking anymore. So I looked back, and no one was walking there either. I was immobile in the middle of a packed crowd. What we were all waiting for was a series of about 5 minutes of continuous explosions, like a fireworks display, except it is only sound. The windows rattle in the buildings nearby. You can feel it vibrating in your body. There is a steady orchestration of small explosions, punctuated by larger ones, until the climax which is almost unbearably powerful but consists of just an overwhelming number of small explosions. The air fills with the gunpowder smoke. It is like nothing I have ever experienced.

Firecrackers
A city that spends 19 days exploding things in preparation for setting fire to a thousand public sculptures is a city that appreciates loud and unexpected noises, and the kids seem to enthusiastically embrace this ethos. Boys and girls of all ages carry boxes of firecrackers, usually 100 to a box, and can be seen in all the parks and streets, with either lighters or matches or else borrowing their parents’ burning cigarettes to light them. And these aren’t the mild little snappy firecrackers that I remember from my youth. These ones pack a punch. I’m not sure if my nerves will ever recover.

Churros
Nearly as ubiquitous as firecrackers are doughnuts. Made fresh on the not-infrequent stands that sell them, they are available in a traditional doughnut shape, but more common are these long stringy loops, textured with straight ridges that run the entire length, delicious and sprinkled with sugar.

The Palace of the Arts and Sciences
One of the words that appears occasionally in the city collateral is “irony,” and I think the writers might be on to something. As an example, take the postmodern architecture of Santiago Calatrava at the Palace of the Arts and Sciences, where you have a conquistador’s helmet, a giant eyeball, somebody’s spine, and a harp. They respectively house concerts, an iMax theatre, a science museum, and I’m not sure what. On the far end there is also an aquarium. The path leading to the complex is lined with giant photos enriched with pop quotations from song lyrics and the Dalai Lama and so on. The path leading from the complex has cheerful, colourful cubist sculptures by Juan Ripollés of people with giant heads, wearing suns, clocks, and their hearts on their sleeves. As Teresa pointed out, everyone walking along the lane of sculptures was smiling and laughing.

A River Used to Run Through It
Until the 1950s, when they experienced a series of devastating floods, there was a river running through the middle of Valencia. Then they moved it outside the city, and converted the entire course of the old river into a long, serpentine green space, with parks and playing fields and ornamental orange groves bearing the sourest oranges imaginable. All the bridges are also still in place, making it simple and easy to cross from one side of the park to the other. The bridge outside our hotel is loaded on both side with flowers, and there are palm trees that grow from the river bed up through the surface of the bridge to provide shade.

Children in Disguise
As if the firecrackers weren’t evidence enough that the Valencians love their children, there is the further observation that the children are often seen running around in costume. I first noticed it on the plane, when a five year old in a wizard’s hat as big as he was exited just ahead of me. I thought it might be exceptional until I spotted two or three other costumes in the crowd. What finally cinched it was the Sunday morning sight of two formally dressed parents being accompanied into the cathedral by a two-and-a-half-foot tall version of Zorro, the desert fox.

Los Angeles

I first visited LA in 1991, when I was sent by the consulting company I worked for to get some specialized training in systems maintenance environments. I spent the time instead by roaring around the city in convertibles, going out to fancy restaurants, and sitting in outdoor hot tubs, firmly sharing the conviction of my hosts that a fistful of smuggled config files would meet the technical brief when I got back home. It didn’t, of course, but I have had ever since a soft spot for the easygoing life in the big city on the California coast.

L.A. LIVE
On this trip, I stayed at a luxurious conference venue right in the heart of the downtown. I don’t typically manage to convince myself to stay in the conference hotel, but I was sufficiently nervous about my first visit to a notoriously large and complicated event that I decided to break the bank and stay where the action was. And action it is, with about a million English professors and graduate students plunked down in the middle of a sort of social hotspot called L.A. LIVE. The stadium where the Lakers play is across the street, and a block away is the city’s main convention center, so the area in between is lined with bars and restaurants, large scale video displays about the size of the side of a barn, ten-storey towers that seem to exist just to broadcast light, and a dozen searchlights playing against the cloudcover. There is even a bronze statue of Wayne Gretzke. Everything is artificial, including the grey plastic rocks that line the path between the bars. The crowd it draws is in some cases wildly enthusiastic in matters of sartorial expression, so it wasn’t clear to me if I was seeing citizens or performers from the cast of Cirque Berzerk, which is currently playing at the Nokia theatre. They may have alternatively, of course, just been English professors letting their hair down.

Hot tubbing on the roof
Sitting in whirlpools outdoors continues to be a California staple. I spent some pleasant hours that way in San Diego in the spring, and I couldn’t resist it here, although in this case the lower temperatures (only around 60 degrees f) meant there weren’t very many of us out on the roof. I did, however, have a moment of dega vu when I realized the bird I was watching circle was a vulture.

LA is a Great Big Freeway
It was true when Burt Bacharach wrote it in 1968 and it is still true today, so I put a hundred down and took a taxi out to the Getty Museum, which Richard had advised me was not to be missed. It is unfortunately half an hour from LA LIVE, down a highway with more lanes than I bothered to count, but eventually I was deposited on a concrete slab outside a car park, and began to follow the signs that led me through a maze of nondescript concrete until I got to the tram that is necessary to carry you up to the Museum proper. Not really a walking city, LA.

The Getty Complex
Sprawling all over the top of a large hill, the J. Paul Getty Museum is well worth the trouble it takes to get there. The weather is sufficiently clement that a visitor can spend a lot of time outdoors, walking between the fountains and the massive rocks out to a variety of promontories, where the views of the city are amazing. The collection is as heterogenous as you like, packed into a kind of maze of relatively small rooms, which gives the illusion that the whole thing is at a human scale. There are also plenty of exits through glass doors taking you temporarily back out into the hilltop air. I think the principle of collection may have been “something for everyone,” an effect that is enhanced by the various instructional exhibits.

The Hague

I found myself spending a few days in the Hague for a conference and some research team meetings, and I have to say that I found it an absolutely charming city. The buildings, the canals, the sense of spaciousness in the streets coupled with the coziness of the shops and restaurants, and most of all the cheerfully helpful people, have convinced me that this is a city worth revisiting.

Everything on wheels
One thing that I did have to get used to was the close proximity of wheeled and pedestrian traffic. It is not unusual to find yourself sharing a few meters of what I would normally consider walking surface with a tram, a couple of cars, and ten women on bicycles. The cyclists in particular reminded me of their sisters in Copenhagen, each one a picture of the well-groomed professional on a sensible bike with a basket, going hell bent for leather past my elbow.

The girl with a pearl earring
The Mauritshuis art gallery, although unpronounceable by mortal tongues, does have a marvelous collection of Rembrandt, Steen, and Vermeer, including the famous girl with a pearl earring. In the gift shop, you can buy her on any number of items for around the house, including the usual postcards and coasters and keychains, but also an umbrella, a wristwatch, a box of wooden matches, and soap. Richard and I visited the place twice, applying our close scrutiny to the many details of Jan Steen’s paintings, which to my mind are in the same category as William Hogarth. We also joined Ruskin in subjecting to our critical judgment the many paintings involving water.

God of 5s
I was pleased to learn that the Hague was home to M.C. Escher (1893-1972), familiar to anyone who has ever bought a poster as the guy responsible for drawing hands, the 2D lizards who walk off the page, and an impossible set of staircases. I have a soft spot for him because I once took a senior math class in symmetry, where I painted a couple of tiled planes. I was particularly fond of one of them, which featured coelecanths and toucans, because I thought it combined one of the shiest creatures with one of the most flamboyant. It marks my only real commercial success as a painter, since my prof purchased it at the end of the term and hung it up behind the registration desk in the Math Dept. In any case, the Hague has an entire art gallery dedicated to Escher, with three floors packed full of prints of all kinds, as well as a few sketches and some sculptures. He had apparently once mentioned that some of the images should be read as small movies, so they also had digital films that people had made. On the fourth floor, there were a number of optical illusions, including a distorted room that made people look bigger and smaller than they are.

A Winter Wonderland
I woke up on my last morning here only to find that the night had brought a seriously heavy snowfall. It reminded me of Balgonie in some ways, with all the trees piled with snow and the snow on the ground up to your knees, when the night before there had been clear paving stones. I got to see a little toddler chortling with each step she took on the ice, clearly saying to her mother how interesting it was to try this out. There were also kids out sledding in the country, and ducks on the canal, standing around waiting for the water to open up again. Unfortunately, it also meant that the trains were shutting down and the flights back to Greece were being cancelled.

Hania

My introduction to Aegean Airlines involved them (one assumes) saving my hide. I’d made it as far as Athens, flying low over the various gorgeous islands, then waited a couple of hours to board to Hania. After we were all loaded, we sat and sat, waiting maybe an hour without moving, until finally they announced that we had to change planes, since there was something unresolvable wrong with the one we were sitting in. So we deplaned and road another bus back to the terminal, while they transferred our luggage to a replacement jet.

A Polite Harbour Cat
One of the first people I met here was a cat. She lives around the harbour and thought I might be interested in sharing my chicken gyros with her. Unfortunately, I had just eaten all the part that cats like. I finally spotted a scrap. It occurred to me, however, that the restaurant might have a policy, so I asked the maitre d’. “It’s okay,” he said, “I feed her something every night, from the side. She’s a very nice cat. She recently had kittens.”

The Skulking Hour
It turns out, of course, that the city is littered with cats, all of them feral. What this means in practical terms is that there are a couple of societies who take some responsibility for catching them, neutering and spaying them, giving them a little doctoring, and releasing them again. However, it is a never-ending struggle to keep the population at a reasonable level. Just up the street we have a set of garbage bins that are the stomping grounds of an entire colony of thirty or more, all of them ready to hiss at you while you are feeding them, as Susan quickly discovered, but also to bunt your leg and purr like idiots. As with cats all over the world, twilight is the skulking hour, when they spend their time in intense but silent negotiations with other cats. They wait until four or five o’clock in the morning before the negotiations turn noisy.

Staring into the water
One of the pleasant options available for the discerning traveler in Crete is to stand by the edge of the water and stare into it. You see all kinds of people doing it all over the harbour, from grizzled old ex-fishermen to round-eyed kids taking their first steps away from the strollers. Susan and I have spent a few hours now in this innocent pastime, and have seen shoals of minnows of at least ten different species, as well as a needlefish, a couple of kinds of crabs, and, on one occasion, a local brown dolphin who came up briefly for a breath of fresh air.

Scraping my knuckles on the antiquities
Here on the northwestern coast of Crete, we have a lighthouse, originally built by the Venetians in the sixteenth century, remodeled by the Egyptians in the nineteenth century, and subjected in the twenty-first century to a thorough renovation that ended in 2006. There are spotlights that shine on it every night, making for a picturesque harbour. There is also a stone pier, about a mile long, where young couples can take a walk that affords them some measure of privacy for discussion, while they remain in the full view of the entire city. Susan and I elected one day to stroll along the pier, walking at first on the second level. When we decided it was time to jump down to the lower tier, I managed to scrape, not my palms, not my nose, not even the improbable top of my head, but the back of my left hand. Luckily, the Greeks sell a very nice version of band-aids, made of paper white fabric.

Croissants with jam
Wherever you go, you need to figure out how to eat, and part of that equation involves learning what is normal or at least readily possible in each country, and what is odd or downright can’t be done. In London, for instance, there is instant custard from a packet. You can buy it at any shop and prepare it in a minute with a bowl, a fork, and a cup of hot water. Similarly with raisins and gruel. In Krakow, on the other hand, forget about custard, and watch yourself with the gruel, which may just as easily be barley as oats. In Hania, they’ve never heard of custard or gruel, but for entire shelves at the supermarket and at every corner cigarette shop, you can buy individually wrapped croissants already filled with chocolate or jam. The package for the peach version even has a glowing white halo around the sacred croissant in the middle.

A dip in the Aegean Sea
Crete is home to at least a couple of world-class beaches, but they both involve a bus ride from where we are staying. The buses at this time of year are not frequent, so it is a bit of a commitment to get there and spend a day. As an alternative, a ten minute walk along the sea wall will bring you past a sports arena, a little marina where the kids are learning to sail, a small fishing fleet, and on to a local beach populated by elderly people who are taking the sun and a dip in the Aegean as part of their health regimen. We’ve joined them now on several occasions, and the water, I must admit, does wake you up.

Milan

If you think Venice is a labyrinth, you should try driving in downtown Milan. It is Venice on wheels, right down to the approach to signage. We spent a couple of hours circling in on the railway station, which you think would be mentioned somewhere relatively prominent, but the city is large enough and we are illiterate enough that we weren’t able to figure it out. Piotr finally adopted the strategy of asking a series of random strangers, who helped us find our way, beginning with an elegant young woman whose answer was, as near as we could make it out, “it’s nowhere near here—I hope you aren’t walking.”

L’Eko Café and Cucina
Having eventually located our hotel, we decided to take a short walk to find dinner. There were some restaurants near the train station, but we hoped for something better and cheaper, so we headed away from the lights. After an hour and a half spent wandering in a desert of office buildings and closed retail outlets, we finally spotted a café. There were half a dozen people standing at the bar, and about three tables in total. We went in and said “Do you have food?” “Yes, we do!” was the enthusiastic response, so we sat ourselves down. More people kept appearing at the door, where they were greeted and introduced to the others. Eventually, the whole mob of about 25 people disappeared down the back stairs, and Piotr and I were left at our table. About half an hour had passed. “Can we order some food?” we asked. “We only have toast.” “Nothing else?” A reluctant pause. “One pasta.” “Just one?” “Yes.” “Okay,” I said. “We are interested in that.” It turned out that we had stumbled on a culinary night, where a guest chef from Rome was in town, and everyone had come for a private set meal. They kindly agreed to include us in, and since we didn’t speak Italian, we stayed upstairs at what was for all intents and purposes the chef’s table, since he was working in the open kitchen just a few feet away. We ended up staying and eating the best Italian food I could imagine for two and a half hours.

Padua

Piotr and I decided to take a few hours to explore Padua, since it is on the highway from Milan to Venice and is also home to our pals Jorge and Guille. They were unfortunately away at the time to give a talk in Edmonton, so we didn’t get a chance to visit, but we were able to enjoy the older area of the city, which features a small university where the architecture includes marble floors, ancient wooden arches, and interior surfaces of some of the entranceways and courtyards that are covered with commemorative plaques.

Not so fresh frescoes
Another thing worth spotting in Padua are the frescoes on the faces of some of the buildings. Worn with time, these frescoes may currently consist of just a few ghostly faces, in the palest colours imaginable, but one can readily imagine when they were bright colours freshly added to the wet plaster. Since these were so indescribably beautiful even centuries later, I began to wonder why all buildings don’t include frescoes by default, until I remembered that they require specialized artists to produce them.

Italian risotto
Speaking of specialized artists, those of you familiar with the apparently simple but in fact absurdly difficult things to cook on this planet will know all about risotto, which is a species of rice with a short grain and a tendency to absorb water and release starch. The result, if you add stock to it while stirring constantly, can be deliciously creamy, while if you do anything else, it can be an inedible crunchy or in some cases gluey mess. Piotr and I stopped for lunch at a restaurant that seemed to have the right attitude, so we risked a risotto with mushrooms. One of the indications was that they wouldn’t make it as a single portion but only if two people ordered it. So we took a calculated chance that if ever a place would have a decent risotto, it would be here. Our bet paid off.

Venice

My friend Piotr and I arrived in the vicinity of Venice after nightfall by car, having navigated in pure paramecium fashion a comically arcane set of highway switchbacks and roundabouts. Feeling a bit anxious after this experience about finding our way further at night in a strange city, we ended up ignoring Jan’s sage advice to park the car on the mainland, and instead drove over the lengthy bridge into Venice, then paid an exorbitant price to take it on the half-hour ferry ride over to the Lido district, which resides on an island shaped a bit, Piotr says, like a leg bone. I can’t remember ever having taken a car on a ferry before, so this was a tonne of fun for me. We were sure that the parking rates would be punitive, but were fortunate enough instead to find rockstar parking, right on the street across from our little hotel.

Water Buses
Taxis and buses exist as usual in Venice, only of course they are all in the form of boats. We climbed aboard the waterbus from Lido to downtown Venice on Saturday morning, then elected to simply not leave for an hour and a half, until it reached the end of the line and they threw us off. By this method, we managed a tour without narration of the main thoroughfare, which weaves along between some very impressive architecture. Imagine Rome or Florence or some other awe-inspiring Italian city made of marble, then put it up to its knees in the ocean. You can watch the water lapping at wooden doors as you grind by on your bus.

Frog Strangling
We eventually overstayed our welcome on the water bus, and climbed off to find an alternate route back, circumnavigating the archipelago instead of traversing it. We arrived at noon at a stop of interest, near one of the major squares, just in time for a monumentally torrential downpour, which turned into a good, steady, heavy rain for the remainder of the day. Tourists with an ounce of sense immediately purchased and donned colourful translucent raincoats and rainboots, which fit right over their shoes. Enterprising umbrella salesmen also made the rounds, taking advantage, as Piotr put it, of the harvest season. We of course had just arrived from Poland, where people pull down their hats and pull up their collars, shaking their heads in sadness at the weak folly of their fellow mortals.

The Absence of Paperwork
We sat out the first 45 diluvian minutes by taking refuge in a restaurant run by a couple of energetic men, one of whom was a Marcel Mastrionni lookalike contest winner in a somewhat shabby white linen jacket. This wasn’t the kind of restaurant that stood on ceremony. Instead of providing a menu, the waiter came up and said: “What do you eat: pizza or pasta?” We said “pasta.” He began naming sauces until we chose one. “What to drink?” We said. “Tea, with lemon.” “Limon, certa,” he said, and in due course, things arrived. Similarly with the bill, which consisted of him naming a number and us conjuring some Euros from about our persons.

The Labyrinth
Venice, the brochures tell us, is actually a micro-archipelago, with more than 100 islands joined by something like 350 bridges. I can attest to this because I crossed most of those bridges in the course of repeatedly, some might say obdurately, violating my principle of “don’t go up that alley.” In Venice, if it isn’t a Square, or rather a Piazza, it is probably an alley, situated between stone walls that rise several storeys on either side. In many of them, two umbrellas can’t pass each other, and in some, a single umbrella is too wide. They are all streaming with people going both directions or sometimes just standing in everyone’s way and having an Italian conversation. You have the option every few metres of plunging into a canal, but usually the preferred method is to cross it on a little rounded stone bridge about as big as a minute. I had to admire a country where those aren’t just flat paths with railings, but instead there has been individual attention to their nature as bridges.

Bridges
As you sail under the larger ones, you can see that the designs are varied and impressive. There are many stone arches, of course, but also some ancient wooden ones that are simply amazing. Down by the ferry to Lido, there is a modern footbridge, made of metal and enameled white, so that it looks like the extended spinal cord of some prehistoric beast.

Signage--now you see it; now you don’t
They have quite good signage in Venice, if by good you mean a clearly legible sign with an arrow pointing some direction. If, on the other hand, you mean a series of signs of that kind, intended to get you somewhere, then maybe you want another city. As far as I was able to judge, signs in Venice are produced as individual works of art, never to be corrupted in their essential purity by subjecting them to the mundane methods of mechanical reproduction. As Piotr said, staring at yet another list of ten arrows, each pointing different directions: “Rome, Cairo, and Peru.”

San Marco Square
One of the places we had hoped to see was this historical location of Church and State, where the paintings on the marble fronts of the buildings are rivaled only by the sculptures and other carvings that flank them. They are sufficiently overwhelming that it is hard to give them the credit they are due. Perhaps it will help to say they are like the Cathedrals I’ve seen all over the world, only moreso.

Random Bell Ringing
If there is one thing that has been a consistent theme of my first sabbatical, it is the bells, bells, bells. Like the hunchback of Notre Dame, I love them but sometimes I think it may have been a case of too much of a good thing. I heard Big Ben when he wasn’t ringing in London, and only stopped hearing him in my dreams when I got to Krakow and he was replaced, not only by a different set of bells but also by the mad trumpeter--a civil servant who climbs the tower in the square every hour, 24/7, to play a song that breaks off in mid-note. He does it to commemorate the brave watchman who was shot in the throat in 1241 while warning the city of invading Mongols. In Venice, it was the churches, completely removed from this postlapsarian world, joyously ringing out the 2:37 or 7:19 or whatever it happened to be. Piotr explained that they were likely doing it in memory of the moment of someone’s death.

The Casanova Tour
Venice was Casanova’s home town, where he worked as an 18th century alchemist and quack doctor, and where many of his adventures occurred, including a dramatic escape from the Leads--a prison notorious for its solitary confinement cells up in the ceiling, where the hot sun would beat on the lead tiles and make life an intolerable oven for anyone within. Hence the nickname for the prison. Today’s Venice honours young Giacomo by offering tours in his name. We wondered how his amorous adventures fit in to the tours. “Perhaps,” Piotr dryly observed, “they contain special opportunities.”

A Domino for the Masque
Casanova enjoyed a lot of things in his long and eventful life, and one of them was dressing up and going to a ball. The labyrinth contains many places overflowing with absolutely gorgeous masks, each one calling out to the impractical, improbable heart of the Frahnkenshteens. I was particularly drawn to the ones that featured coronas consisting of about a yard of feathers. Luckily, I had Piotr there to help me keep a steady head, or I’d have been drawn in like a moth to the flame and ended up shipping bits of colourful shattered enamel to my family and friends.

The Doge’s Palace
The name of the place is a bit of 18th-century humour, since it is actually the seat of government, a bit like the parliament buildings, and not a palace at all. Venice was a republic. But the Doge apparently did sometimes reside there. Casanova’s prison is connected to it by way of a bridge called “The Bridge of Tears.” That seems somehow more romantic when you aren’t aware that every ten metres there is another bridge connecting something to somewhere.

Ants of Glass
There is evidence of glass craftsmanship everywhere, from the many shops selling glass sculptures and ornaments down to the railings in our hotel, which were metal bars with coloured glass dumbbells, or maybe they were thighbones, strapped vertically on their middles. One store had a display with thousands of tiny glass creatures, each one no bigger than the fiery end of your elegant Italian cigarette. Among them was a whole platoon of glass ants.

Architectural Festival 2010
Piotr was eager to see the last day of this month-long event, and he had a map to the many locations scattered around the city. We settled on one of the two main venues, the Arsenale, which is a building about a mile long, originally used I think as a dock warehouse. Despite the appeal of architectural models, I was too wet and cold to enjoy myself, so I suggested to Piotr that he go ahead while I rested and dried out a bit at the rather extensive bookstore and coffee shop. It also gave me an opportunity to dry my hat under the hand dryer, while I waited in the half-hour bathroom lineup. I saved the exhibit's 20 Euro entrance fee, but what I missed were some amazing projects, including an indoor cloud that some lunatics had engineered, a giant art installation/sprinkler system consisting of running garden hoses suspended from the ceiling, and an audio installation where they had miked each member of a choir separately, then reproduced them on individual speakers, arranged in the shape of the original choir, but manipulated so that the songs could be deconstructed into their components. What I did get to see were several displays about architecture in Hong Kong, including the history of the astonishing Walled City of Kowloon, where our pal Rosan Chow grew up. Take the apartment block in Stephen Chow’s movie Kung Fu Hustle, and imagine the same design packed wall to wall inside a single square mile.

Peggy Guggenheim
We also had dreams of getting to see the collection at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery, but alas we arrived after it had closed. So we contented ourselves with hanging for a few minutes on the elaborate metal gates, which look like tangled bramble bushes where some fist-sized chunks of glass have gotten caught. I say contented ourselves, but really we were washed up against them by a surge of umbrellas turning the tight corner of the alley.

Santa Maria della Salute
To console ourselves on the way back to the water bus, we joined the eisodus of pilgrims heading into the cathedral of Santa Maria. I saw Piotr eyeing the three-foot-long white candles that you could buy outside for the choirboys to light, but we managed to sidestep that particular rite. We also narrowly escaped the lineup to go behind the altar, but only because I baulked and Piotr realized that none of the people who went back there ever came out again. Make of that what you will. We ended up instead watching one of the many large-screen TVs. Each screen showed a live video feed of the same closeup of the face of the icon of Mary above the main altar. Piotr said they were perhaps waiting for it to do something miraculous, like weeping. The TVs were mounted above head height, apparently at random on the walls between pillars, which were draped in decorative red tapestry. We conjectured that all the festive appearance must have been put there in commemoration of whatever was signified by the random bell ringing.

Grotesques and Gargoyles
If you are a fan of making fun of The Man by carving his face in marble, whether with his cheeks blown out or with an improbably and wickedly irreverent expression on his bad face, then Venice is where you should set up shop. You can hardly light a candle without being startled by some manner of grotesque or gargoyle either leering at you or gurgling water on you.

Catwalks on the Waterfront
The water being absurdly located as it is, the locals occasionally find it expedient to produce artificially raised sidewalks, which consist of miles of gritted plywood, supported on knee-high scaffolding. They resemble nothing so much as fashion-show catwalks, only in this case they are keeping tourists a few additional inches above high tide. When we arrived, workers were just dismantling them and stowing them away.

Hotel des Bains
The hotel used for the movie Death in Venice is now closed, but it still stands, another marble monument to Italian architecture, overlooking the beach that runs the length of Lido. We were there in the off season, so the sand had been bulldozed to make a six-foot-high embankment to help protect the inhabitants from the Adriatic. There were also 530 (they were numbered) little wooden shacks facing the water, which people could presumably rent when they brought their families and friends for a day on the beach. Imagine, I said to Piotr, all of those Italians in their designer bathing suits and sunglasses. It would be something to see.

Trieste

Piotr and Monika had previously been delighted by a few hours they’d spent in Trieste, so we made a special effort to drive down to this previously thriving port city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Built on hills that are terraced down to the sea, the city is absurdly picturesque from above, although it quickly becomes a labyrinth of narrow streets lined with 8-storey buildings and jampacked with cars that are routinely doubleparked for entire blocks. There also appear to be something like two vespas for every citizen. After the second world war, the city was equally populated by partisans of Slovenia and Italy, so Trieste remained a free city, with no national affiliation, until the 1970s, when it finally became part of Italy.

James Joyce
I don’t know how familiar this story is to people, but Joyce apparently spent 12 years in Trieste, working primarily as a teacher of English as a second language for the Berlitz company. I’m not sure how I would feel about being taught English by the author of Ulysses. Privileged, I suppose, but it could very well lead to some awkward moments in polite society when I deployed my extended vernacular. In any case, there is a very nice little bronze statue of him standing just on the edge of one of the bridges over the grand canal, with his plaque embedded in the sidewalk at his feet. I am always interested to see in these cases what part of the bronze has been rubbed shiny by people interacting with the statue. In this case, it was his shoulders, since, as Piotr explained, people would stand and put their arm around him.

Illy
Trieste is also home to the Illy corporation, so we stopped off at a coffee shop for an espresso. It turns out, of course, that we were a bit gauche to ask for espresso, since the local convention is to call it a café negre, but the decorative pair of young men behind the counter, replete with sailor tattoos, seemed to laugh it off with good grace, and the coffee was delicious.

Graz

Following three weeks of pampering by Piotr and Jan in Krakow, Susan flew off home to see her kids while Piotr and I rented a car and headed cross-country to Venice. We crossed through five countries in two days: Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, and Italy.

To Confuse the Enemy
On leaving Krakow, we were anxious not to miss our exit, since we had used something of a side road to avoid construction on the main route. Fortunately, we came across a road sign that showed that we were approaching a roundabout with three exits. The only problem is that there was no text on the sign at all. “It has been removed,” Piotr joked, “in order to confuse the enemy.”

A Cup with 2 Pieces of Chalk
We stopped for dinner at a roadside chain just on the outskirts of Vienna, where they kindly arranged to feed me some pasta that combined items that were not combined on their menu. For dessert, they had a special that provided Piotr with a coffee and me with a doughnut, and as a bonus they gave us a coffee cup. What was unique about this item is that it came with couple of pieces of chalk, because the surface of the cup is a kind of slate.

Peter Cook
Our first night was spent in Austria in the delightful little city of Graz, built on the pretty Mur river. Graz is home to a fanciful art gallery, designed by Peter Cook—an architect, like several of his 60s generation, famous for buildings that were impossible to realize. He once designed, for example, a city on legs that was intended to walk slowly across country. Graz, however, actually managed to instantiate one of his designs, in the shape of a giant plexiglass loaf with a row of nipples along the roof. Each piece of the cladding is a two-inch thick slab of translucent plexi, no two alike, averaging probably five feet across, and bound to the frame with giant rivets.

Sexy Female Robots
It was in Peter Cook’s gallery that Piotr and I went to see, appropriately enough, I thought, an exhibit called “Robot Dreams.” One of the items in the display was a reconstruction of the wicked robot who impersonates the heroine in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. Her face is currently plastered all over the city. The exhibit featured some interesting animated constructions, including a kind of complex array of cutouts and video cameras that filled a wall of video screens with constantly changing combinations. There was even a room of little spiders, about the size of your hat, who were triggered by motion detectors to begin scurrying around.

Artificial Handshake
As we were leaving the art gallery, we were stopped by two very polite information design students, who asked if they could videotape, not us, but just our hands, in the act of handshaking. They were making a collection for their web site. We tried it a few times from a couple of different angles, and they eventually cut us loose, but we really felt that we hadn’t managed to provide a satisfactory handshake that represented our actual manner of shaking hands. What they really needed, I think, for a natural-looking greeting, was to hire some actors who knew how to simulate it properly. Only later did I realize that we had missed what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance to carry out one of those elaborately artificial handshakes involving slapping our fingers and bumping our fists.

Open-Faced Sandwiches for Breakfast
We had breakfast in Graz at an absolutely delightful little sandwich place called the Café-Imbiss. It is a cozy spot with a very dynamic atmosphere, where tables of people are rapidly coming and going. All of them were there to enjoy oblique slices of fresh baguette that had been artistically supplemented with equally fresh delicacies. I ate, for instance, one open-faced sandwich consisting of folded prociutto that concealed at one end a small slice of melon, and I had another with a small set of smoked salmon slices, topped at one end with a tiny rosette of cream cheese and a miniature sprig of fresh dill.

The Abandoned Tollbooths of Slovenia
After leaving Graz, we drove through Slovenia, which reminded me in many ways of the Rocky Mountain foothills. It took about three hours to drive completely across the country, but every half hour or so we had to slow down to go through a tollbooth. Technology, however, has improved, so that the practice now is not to pay for each section of the highway, but instead to buy a highway pass that lets you use all the highways in the country for several days running. By the time we got to Venice, we had three of these stickers in the window, as well as a pay-as-you-exit toll pass, which is how these things are managed in Italy. Thank God I had Piotr with me, or I would have ended up in a series of confrontations with authorities over my lack of evidence that I knew enough to pay to use the highways. The guards at the final gate in Slovenia were pulling people over with submachine guns, so I was particularly pleased at that point that we had not been delinquent.

The Royal Lippizan Stallions
Who knew that Slovenia is the home of the traveling trick horses of my youth? I remember as a child that these magnificent white horses and their deft riders would make an annual appearance for three shows only in the city of Regina. Piotr tells me that they are considered somewhat of a national treasure by the people of Slovenia.

Arnold
Kim Hoyer tells me that the current governor of California (and former killer robot from the future) was born and bred in Graz, and sure enough, when I checked it out online, there he was, just as bold as brass. He actually came from a small town outside the city, although for some time he was apparently a carrier of the Honorary Ring of Graz, a gold signet given since 1954 to its most prestigious citizens. He returned it in 2005 for reasons unspecified, but one would assume political.

Ludlow

Having learned our lesson about train travel in the English countryside, we gave ourselves plenty of time for the next leg of our trip, and of course everything worked out beautifully. Our excellent fun on the trains ended in the most picturesque English countryside imaginable, replete with cascading river, quacking ducks, giant oak trees, and, in the near distance in the morning as you stand on your balcony, lowing sheep.

Loveliest of Trees
Those of you who are familiar with the work of the poet A.E. Housman may recall his famous poem about the cherry tree, and how since life passes quickly, it is good to spend time admiring it not just in the spring, but also in the winter. Taking this lesson to heart, the good people of Ludlow have planted a cherry tree in Housman’s memory in one of the local churchyards. We managed through trial and error to find this tree and its plaque. We were a bit troubled to see that it was quite a young tree, until we spotted, on the opposite side of the churchyard, another cherry tree, at least hoary with age, and although it did seem to have recently sported a leaf or two, perhaps actually dead. So we admired them both.

Ludlow Fair
Describing the tendency of rural people to have a drink or two when visiting the metropolis, Housman wrote: “I have been to Ludlow Fair, and left my necktie God knows where.” The fair itself is everything you could wish it to be, with tables full of local produce and small household items, but Susan couldn’t rest until we had found a shop facing the square where the Fair is held, and she bought me a neck tie. I’m not sure what people felt as I posed in front of the stalls to prove that I still had it before I left for home, but certainly I felt that I’d entered into the spirit of the thing. We also tried to pitch the local museum’s gift shop on the idea of producing ties for that very purpose, but we met with some resistance from the woman behind the counter. She didn’t say anything of course, but the words “loopy colonials” were written for a moment in the thought balloon above her head.

Birmingham

Susan and I spent August this year going to cultural institutions around London. Then in September, we decided that we’d make a pilgrimage or two. Our first adventure involved going to Shropshire to see the home town of one of our favourite English poets, A.E. Housman. Unfortunately, this effort also gave us a good taste of British rail travel, which consisted in this case of taking three and a half hours for a 45-minute trip to Birmingham, so we decided to stop the night and spend part of the next day exploring the town.

The Bull Ring
I had first visited Birmingham with Susan in 2004, when David Sless had a bunch of us to Coventry to talk about health information design. We had a few hours to spare when all the dust had settled, so we tootled over to Birmingham to take a look. She snapped a photo of me in front of a giant bronze bull that gives its name to the central shopping complex. I did my best to look as though I had no idea I was standing in front of this giant, charging animal, but I’m afraid the photo itself doesn’t quite manage to convey my fecklessness, since it is, after all, a statue of a rampaging bull, and not the real thing.

Pre-Raphaelites Galore
If there is one thing you can say about Birmingham, it is that they have an art gallery that is worth the trip. It is quite large and impressive, with a very good bronze statue of Satan in the lobby, and enough work by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood to make your head spin. If you’ve seen it in a book about the pre-Raphaelites, odds are good that the original is in the museum at Birmingham. Or rather, since many of the pre-Raphaelites had no compunction about painting the same picture more than once, it might be more accurate to say that one of the versions will be there. Perhaps, for instance, the Rossetti Prosperine where Jane Morris has red hair.

San Diego

I flew in yesterday after a lovely flight in an Embraer, which has become one of my favourite kinds of jets. They feature roomy seats with a headrest high enough for my head, and every seat includes an individual television set. I watched Bruce Willis in *Surrogates*, which was a movie that I believe confused its own PR people. I also got a look at a couple of episodes of *Better off Ted*, which Milena had recommended to me. It’s a sitcom about a team of people who invent things for a living. I particularly love the commercial they include, which is based on the theme of each episode. For example, they explain how the company is one big family, which is why they keep everyone together on evenings, weekends, and holidays.

Just say no to $100 worth of sea salt
Those of you who have followed my adventures for a while, and, I suppose, anyone who has met me or seen me in a store, will recall that I am a sucker. This is especially true while traveling, when I get into the frame of mind of going with what’s going, and end up wondering if a bottle of wine with three snakes in it will really clear customs, or if they would prefer to display it prominently in their glass case of absurdly ridiculous, in fact bordering on criminal, foreign purchases. Today, however, you will be proud to learn that while stopping by the Fashion Street Shopping Mall, I not only experienced an entire demo of how my hands could benefit from exfoliation using salt from the dead sea, but I also managed to thank everyone and get out without buying an unreasonable quantity of these viscous liquids, by which I mean more than I could possibly carry in my luggage. I even held my ground when they offered to ship it to me. Thank God the woman wasn’t somebody’s Chinese grandmother, or I’d’ve been toast.

San Diego Zoo
World famous for its decent treatment of animals, the zoo here is huge. It takes 45 minutes just to ride around it in a bus, which I did today while getting glimpses of a wide variety of earth’s endangered and critically endangered species. Then, once you have your bearings, you can get off and walk around to look at everybody in more detail. I saw, for instance, lions and tigers and bears. There was a herd of what the man beside me described to his child as “the Pumbas,” which were surprisingly cute. I also found myself at one point in a hummingbird garden, where I was soon nose-to-beak with one of the little flying jewels, and I stopped by a couple of gorgeous parrots wearing, respectively, red and blue, with tails down to here. One of the main attractions for me, however, was the flora, which is sufficiently diverse that the zoo is also classified as a horticultural gardens.

Outdoor Whirlpooling
Say what you like about the cold weather (two degrees above freezing last night), strong winds (up to 75 mph yesterday), and rain (I believe the adjective is “torrential”), you still can’t beat eating some fresh papaya for breakfast, then going and sitting in the outdoor hot tub until you begin to wonder how seriously they meant the signs that say there are limits on how long a person ought to soak in there. I stayed long enough today that a buzzard begin circling the back yard of the hotel, although after a while I must have sufficiently waved a languid foot or something, because he gave up on me. A couple of hummingbirds also zipped by, busy in what passes for a conversation among their kind.

P.S. I noticed the next morning that the buzzard was back, so I’m guessing it was nothing personal. The hotel is apparently just part of his regular rounds.

Addictions While Traveling
I’m not sure what it is about being alone on the road, but it tends to bring out the obsessive and repetitive aspects of my nature. Perhaps that’s enough said, but I’ll go on. For this trip, I started by leaving home in the middle of an addiction to the TV series JPod. One of my brilliant graduate students recommended it to me a while ago, and sure enough, I started to watch all the episodes in rapid succession. Since they weren’t available here on my not very good wireless connection, I switched to all of the first season of Better Off Ted. Now that I’ve seen them two or three times each, I logged in (again on the suggestion of one of our genius grad students) to www.hunch.com, and I find myself answering dozens of random questions in the hopes that the system will tell me about new things I can get addicted to. Is this any way to live? I think of the line from the standup comedian Marc Maron: “I feel sorry for anyone who has never been addicted to something. Imagine wanting something really bad, then getting it, again and again.”

Four Brothers (Spoiler Alert)
I watched the other night a Mark Wahlberg movie that is essentially The Return to the Shire, except it is set in Detroit. Four brothers revenge the murder of their saintly adoptive mother, succeeding through a combination of direct action and shrewd knowledge of the people in the neighbourhood. I particularly liked the red herring where three of the brothers begin to suspect the fourth, since he received a large insurance claim when his business is going broke, and they subsequently watch him handing money to an underworld character. It turns out that of course he had paid for his mother’s insurance—he paid all her bills. The insurance is for the next generation of kids she’d adopted, and the money to the underworld figure is a bribe—you can’t do business in their neighborhood without paying off the corrupt people in the system. In the end, they defeat the villain, or Saruman, by giving money to all his henchmen instead of bribing him; the successful brother had made his early successes in union organizing.

Charlotte and Rock Hill

Georgia Rolls
When I got into Charlotte, it was time for dinner, so Karen and Gerry and I went out to a local sushi restaurant. My usual approach to sushi consists of a plate of raw salmon and a bowl of rice on the side, but these guys had the most elaborate menu I’ve ever seen, and it was impossible to resist. Gerry ate a pile of shrimp tempura decoratively arranged on top of a pile of spinach in order to resemble one of the explosions at Pearl Harbour. I had some California rolls made out of smoked Georgian catfish. They had been rolled in corn flakes and lightly fried on the circumference. It was, I must say, surprisingly good.

Rapid Prototyping Jewelry
One of Gerry’s colleagues is well known for his sophisticated uses of rapid prototyping technology, where a laser is used to set resin in consecutive passes that build up complex objects. The objects are sufficiently complex that they can be made with moving parts in a single printing, provided the 3D models have been constructed carefully enough in their details. We looked today at an exhibit of resin jewelry, including pieces that had ball and socket joints, various elaborate insertions, and metal plating. Most surprising to me were a set of four-inch-square broaches, or perhaps more accurately nipple plates, designed to be pinned on top of the breast.

1960s Lunch Counter Protests
McCory’s lunch counter was the site of a series of protests by a group of African American men in the 1960s, resulting, according to the sign out front, in the first people who spent time in jail rather than paying fines. This strategy was subsequently adopted throughout the South. Gerry and I went there for brunch today: they still have the original lunch counter and the seats, recovered when the store shut down and the restaurant opened.
http://visityorkcounty.com/partner/92686/3123/friendship-nine-lunch-counter-at-old-town-bistro/

Rust Red Bird
I spent some time this afternoon sitting out on Gerry and Karen’s lovely new screened-in deck, listening to birds singing and cicadas shrilling, and watching a busy red squirrel. Whether or not all this activity contributed to the quality of the documents I was working on is another question, but someone who stopped by was a bird I’d never seen before, slightly longer than a robin but rust coloured all over, with a long tail and a long beak. I tried to find his image on the interweb but to no avail. He sang a couple of times, and it sounded just like the scream of a diminutive gull. Perhaps it was after all a white bird that had been rolling in the local red dirt—Gerry has a pile of it beside his driveway, brought in straight, I would opine, from the surface of Mars.

Bethesda

I am at the University of Maryland to attend the annual Digital Humanities conference, but before we begin, I had a chance to spend a few hours today with Poshen and Ritchie and their daughter Michelle, who just turned six in May. Poshen and I went to grad school together in the late 1990s when we were both doing our MDes degrees, but after she and Richie got married and moved to the States, we’ve stayed in only intermittent contact. Now she is working as a designer at Johns Hopkins, and he is a senior epidemiologist for a consulting company in Rockville. They came to pick me up for lunch and we drove to an attractive area of Bethesda known as Bethesda Row, which is one of the “walkable town-like neighborhoods.”

Penang Restaurant
We went for Malaysian food, and I have to say everything was delicious. I tried to locate something intelligent online about the restaurant, but their site was down and I found the variety of reviews intimidating. Someone didn’t seem to like that they had food from all over the place, but I do enjoy a little transparently thin Nan bread followed by curried seafood and a delicious lamb stew. For dessert, something I’d never even heard of—a rice pudding made with black rice. Poshen tells me that black rice is a staple in Taiwan and is considered very healthy.

Bethesda
Wikipedia says that the city (about 55,000 souls) is a bit unusual in that it isn’t incorporated, so it has no official boundaries. Home of the National Institute for Health and a lot of institutions related to the American navy, it is also listed as one of the best-educated cities in the U.S. We spent some time at the bookstore, where Michelle read some books with her Mom and then one with me: Goodnight Moon. On the ride home, she also printed all our names and provided some very good drawings of many hearts, a lollipop, a flower, a bag with a heart on it, a chicken wearing a jacket, a face of a bear, and me.

Tucson

It was a bit of an adventure getting here. I got up at 7 am to finish packing for an ostensibly noon flight that actually left at 4 in the afternoon. That flight got me as far as Denver but then I had to wait for a plane to Tucson. I finally go to the Doubletree hotel at about 1:00 in the morning. Did I mention it is beautiful here, with actual sunlight that seems to have a warming function?

Planes from Brazil
One of the women at the airline desk gave me her theory as to why United is always so fraught with delays, which in this case required an engine part. She said, “well, these are Embraer planes. They’re built in Brazil. They don’t do well in the cold.” That sounded reasonable to me, but when I suggested it to my colleague Mo, she said “It’s always cold at 40,000 feet.” Fair enough.

Orange Trees
So it’s one o’clock in the morning and I look out my second story window and there is an orange tree there full of ripe oranges. This morning, I see it is one of a row of hundreds of trees that line the compound. I once heard from a colleague who’d moved to California that expat Canadians are always crazy for oranges, until they’ve spent a few years shoveling up the fruit and throwing it out. Nonetheless, I am crazy for oranges. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the orange juice at breakfast was ghastly—thin with no flavour.

How Many Cactuses?
I guess that should be cacti. In any case, I took a few minutes at lunch today to stroll around the hotel, which is designed on the rambling model, something like a dozen two-storey motels strung together. In the course of circumambulating the building, I saw no fewer than 5 different species of cactus.

I picked a grapefruit
Stop the presses. I reached up and picked a grapefruit off one of the trees on the path between the meeting room and the swimming pool. It isn’t quite ripe, but I set it on the desk in my room when I went out for dinner, and when I got back, the whole room smelled deliciously of grapefruit. Who knew these things were so aromatic?

Ansel Adams
He lived from 1902-1984 and when he was in his seventies, he helped set up The Centre for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. We went to tour it last night and were reminded that a lot of the creative part of creative photography takes place in the dark room. So now I am left wondering how many of his amazing effects of shadow and light were actually burning and dodging. http://www.creativephotography.org/

Arizona – home of turquoise mining
Who knew? Maybe everybody except me, but the Navajo in Arizona and a lot of other people too have mined turquoise here. You strip mine it, apparently. Many of the historic mines are closed now, but a few are still running, producing 20% of the world’s supply of turquoise. Much of the rest comes, who knew? From China.

Guelph

I flew into Pearson Airport in Toronto, then took a Red Car van to Guelph. My flight was enlivened by a party of about a dozen school teachers from Spain, who were returning after a month of teacher education in Edmonton, at some teaching institute I don’t know about. They were full of fun, chanting a countdown to takeoff and singing little songs together, one of which they’d made up about how great Canada was, then at the end riotously celebrating our successful landing. I got the impression that life in Spain must be full of enthusiasm. I was seated next to a couple of lovebirds who spent the whole flight facing each other, murmuring endearments in Spanish.

Fool’s Gold
As a child, I always enjoyed the inability of Goldie Hawn to make it through an entire joke on Laugh In, so I have followed the career of her daughter Kate Hudson with interest. This movie was primarily about how even a college graduate can’t resist Matthew McConaughey’s naked torso, accompanied with a slapstick checklist of how many ways he could get hit in the head. This says two things to me about the women who enjoy chickflicks that I would probably have been better off not knowing. Donald Sutherland reprised his role as Kate Bush’s father in the music video for Cloudbusting, and we all felt better when the smart girl, played by Kate Hudson, finally told Paris Hilton, played by Alexis Dziena, that we’d like her to act smarter than she does.

Aberfoyle Puppet Idol
I’m not sure I can clearly express the sense of fun I experienced on seeing this sign. I don’t much care for the various idols that have been foisted upon a dissolute public, but a puppet idol might be just the kind of idol I would enjoy going to see. This part of Ontario, also known as “move here to raise your kids dot com” seems to feature all kinds of rural delights, from spreading views to the company’s own water. It seems to me a quiet place, with homey pleasures. The Red Car stopped in a cul-de-sac last night to drop someone off, and we’d gathered a little crowd of onlookers by the time we left.

Canadian Design
I’ve occasionally waxed lyrical on the subject of the design of Finnish, for example, hotel rooms, so I thought it might be interesting to hear about where things could stand a bit of improvement. I’m staying at a very nice hotel chain in a beautiful room. However, the roll of toilet paper is fastened in such a way that a vertical line dropped from its edge would land on the toilet seat. So it actually rests against your ribs when you sit down. There is an elaborate light system with a master switch at the door, but no way to control the lights from anywhere near the bed, meaning you’d better plan ahead, or else you’ll be making a little nervous excursion in a strange room in the dark. The air conditioner has a large vent, the direction of which can’t be changed, and it aims directly at the only chair in front of the only desk with the only internet connection. Fortunately, one of the decorative blankets doubles as a shawl.

Victoria

I’ve been to Victoria now a dozen times, almost entirely thanks to Ray S, who has arranged all kinds of enjoyable and productive activities for me, ranging from guest lectures to summer courses. I have the impression I may even be an Adjunct Professor here at the University of Victoria, which he arranged to make some of the paperwork easier. This time I’m in town for a week-long grantwriting session, and am staying in a dorm room on campus. I love the campus, in large part because it is littered with bunnies. There are often dozens in sight at any given time, and if you are interested, you can feed them, although it takes quite a bit of relationship-building before any of them will let you touch them. I saw Chris S. and Susan L. both manage it last summer when we were here for a thesisfest, and it was quite amazing. Under their influence, I even managed to pet an old veteran myself, which I would have given odds against any other time.

Hummingbirds and Deer
Feral bunnies aren’t the only neighbours you have when you are living in Victoria, and last night we were visited in Ray’s back yard by a hummingbird, who came and went throughout dinner. It was quite a large one, but as mobile as a shot, hovering for minutes at a time, then abruptly hovering somewhere twenty feet in another direction. I even got to see it perched for a while on a wire. Lynn says it is a regular there. Several years ago I was also pleased to meet some deer grazing early one morning on campus, and last night there was a big doe standing beside the road as we drove up. I like the idea that this environment supports all these creatures. As Susan says, the rabbits make it clear that there is a low bar for survival here, which should mean it is easier for us to survive too.

My Blueberry Nights
After I ate my dinner in the student pub, where the excitement included a very good soundtrack and a very dull array of television sets, nearly all of them dedicated to, of all things, watching other people playing cards, I decided to stop by the campus theatre and see if they’d sell me some popcorn. As luck would have it, they were just 15 minutes away from also showing a film I’ve wanted to see—the new one by Wang Kar Wai. So despite the fact that I was still wearing my sunglasses, I managed to round up a very bad latte and a very big bag of popcorn, then found myself a seat near the centre and about two-thirds of the way toward the back. The reviews of this film have more or less stated outright that it is gawdawful, but I wondered if maybe they just didn’t properly appreciate Wang Kar Wai, who does tend to put shit between the camera and whatever it is he’s filming, and he likes the occasional motion blur, and then there was that sequence involving Brigit Lin and all those East Indian guys. Nonetheless, he’d collected a lot of eye candy here, with Nora Jones and Rachel Weisz pretending to be most of the girls I grew up with, and Natalie Portman reprising a poker-playing version of my Aunt Lil. Unfortunately, Jones and Jude Law did contribute a lot of dialogue trouble near the beginning, but if they would only stop talking, I thought, this might be all right. Then they did stop talking, for a reasonable portion of the movie, with Jones just providing the soundtrack instead, and really it was quite good. There were all the broken hearts and homicidal, suicidal off-duty police officers you could hope for, and plenty of waitressing, all wrapped in at best a kind of bildungsroman and at worst a picaresque. I did think not understanding what they were saying would have improved the thing a great deal, but I’ve suspected that for some time now about Wang Kar Wai movies, and really this is the first one where I’ve had to face that fact head on. And, frankly, I do like seeing an actress wearing vintage clothing being poorly reflected in a wet dilapidated wall, and there was plenty of that kind of entertainment to be had. I’d give it three bad lattes and half a bag of leftover popcorn out of five.

What Rabbits Don’t Like
Well, I think they are a bit nervous about a guy wearing sunglasses after dark, which is something you could truthfully say about a lot of people, and fair enough. On the other hand, when I finally did coax somebody over, he couldn’t seem to believe that what I was actually offering him was a delicious piece of salty, buttered popcorn. It was as though I had decided to offer up a rabbit dropping. “If this is how you’re going to act,” he said, “you’re right to be wearing those sunglasses, matey. You wouldn’t want people to recognize you.” And off he went, muttering maledictions under his breath all the way.

Aberdeen

We flew British Airways to Aberdeen, and I have to say it was the hardest landing I’ve ever experienced on a commercial flight. When I took my flying lessons 25 years ago, they told me that the idea on landing a plane is to fly it just slightly above the runway and slow down until the plane settles gently to the surface. In this case, the pilot seemed more inclined to just fly the thing into the ground and trust the tires not to burst. Perhaps they have short runways.

One door, two doorways
The bathroom in our hotel room here in downtown Aberdeen has a feature I’ve never seen before. The room has a somewhat irregular shape, with the sink, toilet, and shower in three separate areas. They are configured in such a way that the door leading into the bathroom swings inward to become the door that closes off the part of the room with the toilet in it. There are two doorjambs, each with a proper strike plate for the latch, but only one door.

The Granite City
Apparently that’s what they call it, and they aren’t kidding. In the same way that Bath is made of pale yellow stone, Aberdeen is constructed almost entirely of pale grey stone. They claim it will glitter in the sunlight, but I haven’t noticed any particular gleaming. Maybe the sun has to be at the right angle. What I have noticed, though, is a hell of a lot of roses. Some of the sidewalks are lined with beds of them, stretching off as far as my eye can see, which admittedly is not that far, but its impressive nonetheless. They also have many different kinds, so that in a single block you might have a dozen colours and smells. To get this kind of intensive rose action in Canada, you need to go someplace like the Bouchard Gardens, not down the street to the chemist.

Bricks and Mortar
I asked one of our cab drivers about housing in Aberdeen. He said there are very few vacancies because of the oil industry. There is also virtually no board construction, but there are cheaper places that are made of grey brick, then covered with a kind of surface he called “herle” or maybe “herel.” You basically plaster the surface of the brick, which is in itself considered too unattractive, then spray pebbles into the plaster. I was also surprised to hear that there is no longer a local supply of granite, since the quarry shut down ten years ago. New buildings either use granite recovered from old buildings, or else they ship it in from places like China. Or maybe he was pulling my leg.

Oystercatchers
These are quite an attractive little bird, about the size of a magpie, with a bright red or orange beak and a loud shrieking cry. They next in the rooftops around the University of Aberdeen, which is something they apparently don’t normally do. We saw one of them roughhousing with a gull, of which there are many in Aberdeen, their voices echoing into the bedroom all night long. Susan also noticed one of the oystercatchers landing in an unusual way, luffing its wings as it got close to the ground, if luffing is the verb I’m after, in order to shed the lift.

London

I flew in from Oulu and spent a night at the cheapest hotel near the airport, a Comfort Inn, for the low discount price of $250. Then I went back to Heathrow in time to meet Susan, Michael, and Marley as they came out from the arrivals gate in Terminal 4. In the meantime, I’d also stopped briefly at Terminal 5, where they have a fountain I liked. It is a 5x10 grid of water spouts that shoot out from nozzles that are flush with the tiles. Each spout is about my height. The system stops them abruptly, so the water all falls to the ground at once with a loud snap. I only wished I could run around in there in my swimming trunks.

The British Museum
I made my maiden voyage to Europe in the year 2000. Since then, I have been to London more times than I can count, but there are still plenty of things I haven’t seen. Most of the British Museum goes on that list, although I try to get there for a few hours on every trip. As you know, it contains a good representative sample of the loot of an empire, so it is really more like conveniently visiting the cultural repositories of a dozen countries than seeing the culture of England itself. We scampered past the Elgin marbles, various winged Assyrian centaurs, a few Egyptian mummies and their cat statues, swords and bits of armour of every conceivable material and state of preservation (I liked the bronze ones best), and even a few dakinis and bodhisattvas. You often have to wonder, however, about the labels. A lot of supernatural Buddhist creatures, for instance, are depicted overcoming their own mental afflictions by trampling on them. The label in the BM says “Dakinis are usually shown standing on corpses.”

The Natural History Museum
This is another of my favourite museums, in part I think because it embodies the Victorian cultural obsession with nature. The arches on the entrances soar up fifty feet or more, and each arch has carvings of some living creature — birds on one, snakes on another — climbing up and over the top and down the other side. There is even one with monkeys. They also have huge ballrooms filled with, for instance, their rock collection, which is admittedly very fine. There's a vault room with some of their favourites, including a meteorite that they know came from Mars, because it had some small pockets of Martian air in it. There’s a huge diamond necklace from South Africa. They also have a fossil coelacanth, which is the only one I’ve ever seen. And in the dinosaur room they have a robot T-Rex. I watched a toddler lurch in, see the thing, and begin to wail. It seemed clear that this was just the sort of betrayal he had been expecting from his parents, who quickly picked him up and reassured him to the contrary.

The Phantom of the Opera
I’ve never been to a theatre in London, but on this trip we decided to find one, and I must say it was a lot of fun. The place was packed, although the Phantom has been haunting it nightly for 21 years now. They sell ice cream at the intermission, and the many stage tricks were just the kind of thing I like. The descent beneath the theatre was managed by having a catwalk lowered one end at a time while the actors walked on it. The Phantom had a stick that threw small balls of fire. The boat was exceedingly boatlike as it sailed back and forth on the stage. There was also singing and a plot of some kind.