Monthly Archive

How much stuff does a family of three need for two months’ travel?

Well, you can’t pack 65 changes of clothes, so the question is really: how often will you be able to do laundry? With a washing machine in most of our lodgings, and a little bottle of laundry soap for hand washing as needed, all we need for luxurious living is a week + a day of clothes. Summers here have been hot, so heavy clothes like jeans and multiple jackets aren’t needed.

Likewise, voracious readers can’t pack enough books for two months, so there’s no point in packing any. It’s e-readers all the way.

The heaviest items are shoes (five pairs among the three of us) and toiletries. The heaviest acquisition has been a tube of Voltaren.

Most unnecessary item in my supplies: I prepped for chilly evenings by packing two pairs of leggings to wear as needed under light cotton trousers. I am often cold on planes, and as it turns out, that’s the last place I wanted them. It was so warm in Heathrow that I peeled them off at the first loo, and haven’t worn them since. Oh well, at least they’re light.

Two of us have birthdays during our travels, and we all promised not to give any gifts that would need to be schlepped. Nothing bulkier than a necklace, which is what I bought Joy in Murano. And of course, a nice meal in a restaurant weighs nothing . . . well, it depends how much one eats.

For me, intellectual / spiritual activities require a journal, sketchbook, array of pencils / pens / sharpener / eraser, and wool and knitting needles. I am going to acquire a couple more balls of wool and pairs of needles this week, but hey, that’s only another 200g or so. I have not touched the magazine of logic puzzles I tossed in my suitcase at the last minute.

Comically or sadly–you decide–the three of us brought three laptops. I was going to leave mine home, and borrow M or J’s when I wanted to blog or do some other writing for which my phone or notebook wouldn’t suffice. In the eleventh hour, though, I panicked–I wasn’t done with work tasks, some things I needed might be on my hard drive rather than in the cloud–and brought mine along.

Result: a 22-inch rollie each, plus a small backpack each as our “handbag” for carrying whatever we need around town each day. (Joy brought a small shoulder bag as well.) Two-plus weeks into our trip, we know it’s working out well. The sum total, easy to tote from lodging to lodging and load in a train’s overhead rack, is pictured here.

How do you pack? Do you err on the side of too much or too little? How has it worked out for you?

When people suggest that real friendships might not be possible in online space, I tell them about Harry Potter for Grown-ups (HPfGU). I joined that Yahoo group in late 2000, and during the three years that I was active, made several friends there with whom I’ve remained connected and even close. Most notably, I met and befriended the woman I married. Eighteen  years in, I can confirm that it’s as solid a relationship as any that has begun with a face-to-face meet, although we did make sure to meet in person before deciding to spend our lives together.

Over the years, we have met in person, visited, and hosted numerous other friends from HPfGU, and tonight we will meet for the first time the one, the only, the famous, Mike “Aberforths’s Goat” Gray and his celebrated wife, Susan. They live in Zurich, and will be our hosts for the next six days, unless they decide that we were a lot more pleasant online and pointedly book us a hotel room. I am so excited–more excited to meet them than to see Zurich, if truth be told, since they were the reason we put Zurich on the itinerary to begin with. But Zurich does look like a pleasant and interesting city and on our long train trip from Salzburg, which begins any minute now, we’ll make some plans s about things to see and do there.

Salzburg is beautiful. It too was put on the itinerary for largely extrinsic reasons, being midway between Ljubljana and Zurich, so I knew very little about it. I did not know, for example, that it is set in a valley that was once a large lake, and that one side is built right up against (and, to some extent, atop) sheer stone cliffs.

I also didn’t know about Salzburg’s role in western music. I knew that this guy Mozart was born there, but I didn’t know the much more important fact that it was the setting for The Sound of Music. My wife’s reputation as a curmudgeon is unsullied by her complete and utter love of this movie. She proved her mushiness by buying three tickets to a four-hour bus tour of the places featured in the fictionalized lives of the von Trapps, and her curmudgeonliness by compelling the grumpy teenager to come along. I was completely aboard with both parts of this plan.

The grumpy teenager redeemed the time by making and studying German flashcards on her phone.* We enjoyed singing along with the soundtrack, which played between parts of the tour guide’s spiel. And it was a great way to get an overview of Salzburg and get to places we probably would never have gone to any other way, although the guide (who was knowledgeable and funny) was kind enough to tell us all the exact city buses that would take us there.

One such location was the new home of the gazebo in which the external shots of two key love scenes were filmed. It wasn’t big enough for the cameras and actors to get inside for the interior shots, so they built a second one for those. (I don’t know how anyone who really sees movies with an insider’s view can stand to watch them. Aren’t they constantly noticing that the interior of a room has six windows and the exterior eight, etc.? Whatever–I am not blessed or cursed with that eye for cinematic detail.) Joy wanted to take a photo of it. Munchkin wanted to climb a lovely spreading tree near it. Uninterested in doing either of these things, I wandered off a ways and noticed that someone had adorned the scar left by a sawed-off branch.

Another stop was Mondsee, home of the church where (movie) Captain von Trapp and Maria got married. Needing a break from finely shaded pencil drawings, I followed Munchkin’s lead and did a quick black-ink drawing of the church’s towers from the restaurant where we had lunch. The one I did the next day, back in Salzburg, between ordering and receiving dinner (I’m noticing a pattern . . .) was more satisfactory:

I’ll be back to shading soon enough, though, because I loved this detail near the front door of the church and am itching to draw it:

Incidentally, there are over 100 Roman Catholic churches in Salzburg, population 160,000. There’s a story there. Why so many? Did every archbishop-prince (I recoil at the term, but that’s what they were) feel obligated to build one as a monument to his reign? I might be curious enough to do a little research, because I have time for that kind of thing. Gosh do I love sabbatical.

I always kind of figured that “Do-Re-Mi,” a.k.a. “How three generations of US Americans learned solfege,” was a montage of, I don’t know, the von Trapp estate. Or just various pretty places. Now I understand that it is very much a tour of famous places in and around Salzburg, the way a song set in San Francisco might show the kids waving from a cable car, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, sliding in the playground in Dolores Park, etc. Most of the shots in “Do-Re-Mi” are in the Mirabell Gardens: including the Pegasus fountain, the ivy-covered arbor, the dwarf statue they all tap (disturbing sign in the garden: “the most famous of Europe’s dwarf gardens”), and the steps that stand in for the scale at the end. (Well, the kids’ scale. Julie would have to climb a scaffold to get to her final high note.)

After we were deposited in the Mirabell gardens, Munchkin went off on her own adventures, while Joy and I got some snacks and parked ourselves in Salzburg Old Town to await the start of a concert of Mozart violin sonatas.

This building in Old Town illustrates the stages of clothing production, from shearing the sheep to buying the clothes.

Naturally I had to take this photo in honor of my dear friend Dan Schatz.

If I took a picture of everywhere “Zucker” shows up, it would overrun my photo files; it means “sugar.”

—

Reading: Oil and Marble, Stephanie Storey

Still learning a little music theory with the Great Courses series by Robert Greenberg.

*I stand corrected. The teenager says she wasn’t grumpy about coming along. She just thought her ticket was a waste of our money.

Aside from the Rembrandt etchings that particularly drew me to the National Gallery of Slovenia, two things I saw there said “Draw me.” One was “Drama,” a life-size bronze sculpture by a Slovenian artist named Franc Berneker (1905). It appears to be of a family: a man sprawled on the ground on his front, a woman flung backwards over him, and their toddler nursing at her exposed breast. Whether the parents are dead, exhausted-but-alive, or one of each, is left to our speculation. The expressions on the faces were powerful, but there wasn’t anywhere to sit on that side, and besides, the bodies were also powerfully expressive. So I drew them from behind the child’s back.

I was also taken by the shadows on these steps, and snapped a photo so that I didn’t have to block the stairs to draw.

—–

Read: (George), E. L. Konigsburg

Listening: Understanding the Fundamentals of Music, Robert Greenberg (The Great Courses)

Metelkova was a military installation of the Yugoslav army until shortly after Slovenia left Yugoslavia. The complex left behind has an interesting status in the city–have a look at the website. The munchkin had read about it and asked if I wanted to see it. What public art lover could resist?

Munchkin came ready to go biking afterwards, and I decided to go home via electric scooter, which like bikes are available to rent all over Ljubljana. It was really fun.

Those who read of these travels might reasonably wonder what the difference is between sabbatical and vacation, especially if (as is very likely) sabbatical is not a phenomenon in their profession.

Like other ministers of Unitarian Universalist congregations, I get three kinds of leave. Vacation, of course (four weeks/year), is to be spent however I like, and requires no justification of any kind. Study leave (also four weeks/year) is part of my contract “in recognition that ministers need extended time away from the stresses and demands of daily congregational life to deepen their calling and develop their skills,” and it “may include, but is not limited to, spiritual retreat, spiritual practices, continuing education, attending conferences and trainings, work-related reading and planning, study groups, writing, pilgrimage, or teaching/preaching at locations away from the minister’s primary congregation.” I am happy to say that UUCPA does not micromanage this time, but as it is meant to improve my conduct of my vocation, reporting on how I spend it is eminently reasonable, as well as a way to model how all of us can “deepen our calling and develop our skills” via activities that are quite distinct from our daily work duties. I list some of my continuing-education and spiritual-development activities in my monthly reports to the Board, and study leave is an expanded opportunity for those. Sabbatical accumulates at one month per year of service, is to be used every 4-6 years, and may be used “for study, education, writing, meditation, and other forms of professional, religious, spiritual, or personal growth.”

I have some study leave and vacation time to use, so at the moment I’m technically on vacation, just as for several days last week, I was technically on study leave, and will soon be on sabbatical. The borders are fairly fluid. For example, nothing I have done in my lifetime is so conducive to spiritual growth as being a parent, but of course I don’t count the tens of thousands of hours of my life actively devoted to parenting as my study time. For another example, travel is profoundly educational, even when I’m traveling for fun. Come to that, one of the things I find most enjoyable is learning, so . . . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Notwithstanding the indeterminacy of the categories, I do keep a log of the activities that are very much oriented toward study, education, writing, spiritual practices, pilgrimage, and growth. Here it is for the past 12 days.

• Reading, some completed, some in process: Minor Feelings (Cathy Park Hong), Mansfield Park (Jane Austen), Flowers in the Dark (Tucker Nichols), Oil and Marble (Stephanie Storey)

• Making art, which is my primary spiritual practice. I brought a sketchbook on this trip and have been drawing almost every day.

• Exploration of two art exhibits: Time Space Existence, a fascinating variety of architectural proposals for living sustainably and creating more equal and just communities, was one of many exhibits adjacent to the Venice Biennale (the Biennale is actually now an annual event, focused on architecture in odd years and art in even years). The permanent collection, Africa 1:1, and the Gemma de Angelis Testa Donation, at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice. I’ve already commented on how affected I was by one painting (I’ve tried to hunt down the name of the artist with no success); another piece that has stayed with me is one by Bill Viola, a video artist whose work I often love. I don’t remember the title, though I liked the curator’s comment that the piece evoked the myth of Narcissus. The top half was a woman shown waist-up, and the bottom half was an inverted image of a man also shown waist-up, so that they met in the middle, rather like the top and bottom half of the king, queen, or jack on a playing card. Their expressions, which also mirrored each other, changed in slow motion (as is typical of Viola). When I began watching, they each had an ambiguous expression, maybe pain, or desire, or sexual ecstasy. Each bent forward, their faces disappearing briefly, and reemerged streaming with water–I agreed with the commentary that it was rather like Narcissus bending to kiss an image, but that rather than meeting each other, this bending resulted in each touching only his/her own image and the surface of the water. From that point their expressions spoke of agony. I wish I had watched the whole loop, which for all I know ran for half an hour or more. Moral, twice taught: if you’re interested in a piece, jot down the title and artist or snap a picture of the information card . . .

• Research and writing on Yael (often anglicized as Jael), with inchoate thoughts of artistic, political, and spiritual explorations of this snippet of history/myth from the book of Judges.

Not recorded here, but sadly true: tying up several loose ends that I didn’t manage to tie before my “last day” of work. Almost done with those.

Lake Bled! A gem set in the Julian Alps, with a smaller gem of an island within it (Slovenia’s only island) topped by a small church. Munchkin dreamed of swimming to the island. Maybe we would also take a boat and rent bikes to circle the lake, and we would certainly swim at the beach, while Joy had her Kindle along and would enjoy a day of rest.

It was a 45-minute bus ride from Ljublana, a trip that lengthened considerably because when we walked over to the bus station, the 11 am bus we had planned on was sold out, as was the next. With an extra hour on our hands, we got a predictably mediocre bus-station-adjacent snack (though my crepes were quite good), then got aboard for what turned out to be a 75-minute ride, because the bus took city streets and made several stops along the way. We finally arrived at Bled; walked down to the lake, which was as gorgeous as advertised; got another snack because that’s how I roll, Munchkin chafing at the bit; paid the €10 apiece for me and Munchkin to enter the desired beach; popped back out to the ticket office to get a locker key (€3); put our things in the locker; and, as we spread our towel on the luscious grass by the swimming area, felt the first sprinklings of rain.

A few minutes later, we saw the first lightning.

It became clear that waiting it out might mean a very long wait. So we moved on to the biking plan. Biking in the rain, while not the most comfortable activity, was at least not life-threatening. Who knows, maybe the rain would even have stopped by the time we’d circled the lake, and we’d get to the island after all.

The bounce had pretty well gone from my bungee by the time M and I went back up the small hill to the information office, which lo and behold, doubled as an outdoor-equipment rental company, including bicycles. It was pouring. Absolutely pelting down. I wasn’t excited about a bike ride in these conditions, but damn it, we had left R & K’s apartment more than three hours earlier. We had invested a lot in this trip and we weren’t going to just get on a bus and go back to Ljublana. Nor did I want to spend the afternoon sitting in a cafe, reading and drawing, however pleasant those activities normally are. The cheerful and helpful young woman at the bike office empathized, got us set up with bikes, helmets, locks, and a backpack (“It’s better to get ours wet than yours,” she said, storing my backpack and its paper contents in their back office), and encouraged us to wait in the office for a lull in the storm.

A lull wasn’t really in the cards, but when things went from “utter deluge” to “steady hard rain,” we got on the bikes. And within a few minutes, the heavy clouds in my heart dispersed completely. After all, there’s a release in the fact that once you’re totally soaked, you can’t get any wetter. The lake, mountains and island were still beautiful, and although the temperature plummeted (not a bad thing in itself after the heat wave), as long as we were moving, we were pretty warm. Going through the puddles was fun. I don’t bike often, but I’m always so happy when I do, as it’s the closest experience I have, or am ever likely to have, to flying. It would have been fun to bike around the lake together under any circumstances; the tribulation turned a pleasant outing into a grand adventure.

Joy’s entire plan for the day was to sit around reading, so she was relatively unaffected by the weather. We never did get to swim, as the rain didn’t slow until we were eating dinner and about to get on the bus back to Ljublana. M and I were cold as we sat down to dinner, but we wrapped ourselves in towels, changed into what dry clothing items we had with us, drank lots of hot tea, and stoked the inner furnaces with a classic Slovenian dinner: soup (mushroom for me and Joy, pumpkin for M), venison goulash for M, who had never tried venison before (“Bambi,” Joy observed), struklji with porcini for me, and klobasa with a side of mashed potatoes with onions for Joy.

One other little gift of the downpour: back at the beginning of the adventure, as we trooped along the edge of the lake en route to the bike rental, dispirited, M let out a little cry: “Ducklings!”

We stopped to watch the three or four little fuzzballs around their mom (?–I tend to assume that brown ducks are female, though I know that that is not always the case). This is how we discovered that when it rains, mama ducks make their bodies into a shelter for their ducklings. I’m guessing that the little ones need help keeping warm, and maybe also that down doesn’t repel water as well as feathers, though I suppose the latter is not the case, because of course ducklings swim alongside their parents without getting saturated and weighed down. In any case, this is what they do. Within a few seconds, the fuzzballs had disappeared under her wings and you wouldn’t have known, walking past, that you were seeing anything other than an adult duck, slightly puffed-up perhaps, hunkered down and waiting out the rain on the bank of the lake. Once we knew to watch for it, we could spot other mama ducks whose wings had that pooched-out look that signaled the presence of ducklings beneath.

As for our first duck family, we stayed watching them for a while, and at one point the babies ventured out and looked around before ducking (heh) back under the tent of mom.

Between the ducklings, a swan we also saw, the unalterable peace of the setting, and the bike ride, it was a beautiful day at Lake Bled after all.

And the answer is: Ljubljana, Slovenia, a city I had never heard of until we started planning this trip. The sum total of what I knew about Slovenia, in fact, was that it was in central Europe, was not Slovakia, and was the home country of Melania Trump. A friend of Joy’s has recently moved here, and from him and others we heard good things about the country. Our first stop today, as R. showed us the center city, was the Dragon Bridge, one of whose dragons you see here.

Joy, Munchkin and I took the funicular up to Ljubljana Castle late this afternoon, not just to see the almost millennium-old castle, though it is interesting and offers a great view of the city; the restored archers’ tower also houses an exquisite restaurant, Strelec (https://www.restavracija-strelec.si/). Joy’s co-workers knew we were coming to Ljubljana, and for a retirement present, gave us a gift card for a meal there, and what a meal. A seven-course tasting menu, with a couple of “greetings” to start and a third dessert to finish, so that we have just returned from what was effectively a ten-course meal. Everything was a work of art: beautiful visually as well as in taste, smell, and texture.

To round out the senses, our ears were treated to a concert of traditional Slovenian music, since that was the big event elsewhere in the castle. It was hilarious. The band was good, but so incongruous. This food was classical chamber music and in the courtyard below, it was oom-pah, oom-pah, all the way. Truly the icing on the cake for probably the best meal any of us has ever had.

I’m in Venice with my daughter, and Joy got her passport and arrives tonight. Munchkin asked what I want for my birthday, which is today, and what else could I possibly want? Another day like yesterday? I am beyond blessed to have life, my family, work that sustains me, and time to enjoy this beautiful world. On top of that, I get to be in this city, created by artists–and I don’t mean Titian and Canaletto, but the masons, architects, road-builders who surrounded themselves and the generations to come with beauty. I will add a thank you to forward-thinking politicians and the people who elect them, because I saw workers repairing some infrastructure under the street yesterday, and they had pulled up the stones whole and were saving them to replace. It would probably be cheaper to replace them with asphalt (or else why did we do it, in the US?), but instead, the skill to lay stone has been passed on, and the expense has been taken on, in order to keep this city one of beautiful stone streets.

Yesterday, each of us went out when she woke up, though it was well before 8 am and it took a long time for either of us to find a place that would sell us food. (Text from me to M: “I am leaving in search of food and perhaps daughter.” Response from M: “Lmk if u find food and the daughter will probably appear.”) Even though this carving was too far away for good resolution, I had to take a picture. St. Mark is the patron of this city and his symbol is a winged lion, so images of lions are everywhere.

Later, on a street so narrow that I could put my bent arms out and touch either side with my elbows, I saw a ruder version. At least, the doorbell looked like a stuck-out tongue to me at first. On getting closer, I decided it was more like a lion sucking a pacifier.

I eventually found a cafe that was open, got a latte and two croissants, and texted the munchkin. While I sipped and waited for her, I drew a window on the other side of the canal:

It was low tide when I left the apartment, as you can see from this photo of the steps down to the canal.

Later, when we ate outdoors, the tide was almost at its height and lapping around our feet.

The main activity of the day, between meals, was our walk to, and up, the Scala Contarini del Bovalo. Bovalo means “snail” (though the more usual word is the one I know, since it’s the same in Italian as in Spanish: caracol) and it became the nickname of the Contarini family after they built this loggia and spiral staircase. That can’t have pleased them, because apparently they chose their building spot–at a rather out-of-the-way cul-de-sac–so that they and their ill-gotten gains would go unnoticed. So said a tour guide we listened in on. Or rather, Munchkin listened in. I caught the 20% of words that were identical with Spanish, and so got some of what she was saying, but Munchkin’s Italian (honed on reading The Lightning Thief, the first of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, in translation) is getting better with each day here, and she translated to me afterwards.

We had a struggle turning our tickets into admission, as I had bought them online and thought having them in my email would be sufficient. Good plan, except I was having trouble accessing email, and so after a long, fast, sweaty walk, we feared we wouldn’t get in. Italian bureaucracy worked against us; I could show them the email but not the attachment, and they had to have the QR code to admit us. But Italian kindness worked in our favor: they did considerable digging to find our reservation on the who-knows-which website on which I made it, and finally entered their wifi password so that I could access the attachment afterwards, being the souls of patience the whole time.

Once admitted to the spiral staircase, we photographed each other looking pensively into the distance.

Having her face entirely concealed by her hat was apparently more pensive than M was asking for, so I asked her to give me some more poses and got this. Now that’s the kind of drama that made Orson Welles choose this as a setting for his Othello.

We had intended to continue to a park with calisthenics equipment, being that M is missing her three-times-a-week gym routine, but my leg was beginning to twinge, I was hungry and tired, and it was a mile back to the apartment, so we parted ways. She went on to her park, and I made my way back through the tourist-crowded central streets, stopping to refresh myself with the first gelato of the trip. “After Eight,” a.k.a. mint with very large, dark-chocolate chips. Exquisite.

I have had increasing sciatica flare-ups over the past several months, and I asked my doctor for a steroid injection before I left, scared that I would end up sitting in our lodgings all summer while J and M explored. The injection was astoundingly successful, but not quite 100%. It’s okay. The twinge, which was a daily event pre-steroids, didn’t start until I had walked 11,000 steps yesterday, and even with another 7,000 on the day, it didn’t get any worse. I’ll call that a win. Credit modern medicine, or else the gelato.

So, this is 55. The leg is still a little grumpy, but I’m about to head out in search of a canalside mocha, to be enjoyed while reading Mansfield Park. I don’t have to contend with any real-life Mrs. Norrises to speak of. Life is good.

We are in Venice! Minus Joy, because she is still waiting for her passport. Public service announcement: If you need a new passport, imagine how long each stage would normally take and double it. This part of the State Department is so understaffed, or whatever, that it’s not even possible to get an appointment in a passport office anywhere in the United States right now. So Joy is in New York, at least, enjoying the opportunity to be there and see friends.

The Munchkin and I arrived late last night. There’s so much we could do and see here. We’re right by or in the old Jewish ghetto, which, if not the first such place in the world, was the one that gave us the term ghetto for a neighborhood to which people are confined. Nowadays the methods by which we keep people in their place are a bit more subtle, which enables the people outside the ghetto to tell themselves that if anyone is still stuck there, it’s their own fault. So we could go to the Museo Hebraico. We’ll go to San Marco and all its accoutrements, of course, but in the hopes that Joy will join us within a few days, I want to hold off on going to Murano, the island of glassblowers. We’ve seen a bunch of posters for the Biennale, and I’d like to go into some of those exhibits. The moment I was awake this morning, Munchkin (who had already been out and about) asked if I wanted to climb a spiral staircase to a great view, and I said yes, but the first available tickets are tomorrow at 11:30, so we’re going to go then: La Scala Contarini del Bovolo, a late 15th-century palazzo. Apparently, it was made famous to the rest of the world when it featured prominently in Orson Welles’s movie of Othello.

The main attraction of Venice, though—the reason it was top on my list of places to go this summer—is just the city itself. I wanted to wander the winding streets and cross canals and soak up the centuries-old architecture. In our two hours of meandering and getting some food, I was confirmed in my conviction that I could be very happy here without going to a single “historical attraction.”

For example: This was the view out my bedroom window this morning.

The building in the distance on the right has a Pride flag hanging out the window, third window from the right.