We arrived in Mörbisch, found Landhaus Luka and moved into our large “apartment”. (The A/C is an extra 8 euros per day, and using the kitchen in the apartment is extra as well.). We walked a couple blocks to the nearest restaurant, a factory outlet restaurant for one of the wineries in town. We had a sampling of four of their wines, one of which was pretty nice. The soup with julienned veal heart was the best.
Monday, August 29
Burgenland is not a place to improvise travel. Neusiedler See looks so inviting on the map, a long, thin, lake surrounded by towns buried under the icons for wineries and hotels and restaurants. But in fact, you can’t get to the lake. The whole thing is a walled off reserve. The only place you can actually touch the lake, from my experience, is at the docks for some small ferries that cross in the middle. The correct thing to do is: plan ahead for a tour, with a ranger who knows where the remaining birds hide out, and most importantly, rent a bicycle. The bike trails are so ubiquitous and wide that Google Maps sent us driving on several of them, and it takes a long time to determine that in fact you are on a bike trail, especially since some of them actually do accommodate cars, if the car or tractor belongs to someone who lives on that trail.
We did not plan ahead. Nor did it rain.
Eastern Austria is secretly Nevada. The ecosystem of the Seewinkel is that of every salt puddle in every valley you cross on the way from Fallon to Ely. The rains fill the lakes in winter and spring, and they dry out in summer, and the birds leave to find another lake from whose mud to suck the highly adapted creatures who live there.
A ranger sent us to one of the last remaining late summer ponds with water. We went there and watched a lot of geese. Also lapwings. A little less common were the black-winged stilts, who allow you to approach fairly close, and feed elegantly, balanced on their long thin pink legs, insubstantial as the stem of a wine glass.
The winery situation is also restricted. The wine bars are almost all of them tied to a particular winery. They feature the wines of those businesses. To experience the offerings of more than one vintner, you are reduced to tasting wine in the style of a pub crawl. Some of the tied houses are as much as twenty meters distant from their neighbors. Bring bearers and a palanquin if this is a problem.
The thing which really stood out about the area, and for which the guidebooks do not prepare you, is The King And I. Some time earlier this summer, a local troupe put on a production of that Rodgers and Hammerstein standard, and they papered the whole lakeside with posters and more elaborate displays — in the town of Rust, a whole sequence of placards gave the history of mid-19th century Siam, and of Anna Leonowens, and how she came to write her story, and how it came to be produced, and how Yul Brynner came to play the part and on and on and on.
In our hotel, on the floor with the rooms on it stood a full-sized mannequin, dressed in Siamese Hollywood costume, advertising the show. Was there one of these in every hotel? Mannequins are expensive!
The show had closed some time ago. I looked up Yul Brynner in Wikipedia. He grew up as a refugee in Harbin, China, just like Boris’s grandparents, and Boris verifies that his grandfather knew Yul Brynner in school there.
The important search string for learning about Yul Brynner includes “George Platt Lynes”. Lucky Boris’s grandfather.
Tuesday, August 30
We drove to the airport on a somewhat Googly route including yet another town whose downtown was torn up and they didn’t tell Google, turned in the car, took a train to Vienna Hbf, and then got on the train to Venice. We had lots of time to spare. You never know if there will be a thunderstorm washing out the bike route you’ve been advised to take. The train was super-comfortable: we had a table between us, there was Wi-Fi on the train, and there were power outlets to keep the laptops running. I was able to get some work done on the train.
We arrived at the Vienna airport, where we’d booked a nearby hotel in Schwechat, the “Millbrae of Vienna”. We drove to a restaurant there, which turned out to be very nice, especially the chanterelle soup. (Over the next few days, we found that chanterelles were the happening thing at the moment, and they were on many menu chalkboards.). The goulash, mixed salad, and poppy seed cake were good too. The hotel was pretty straightforward, except that the drain pipe on the bathroom sink was a bit disconnected, and water drained all over the floor until we popped it back in place.
Saturday, August 27
We had breakfast at Caffe Trieste, which had a photo blown up to cover the entire wall, of a scene that has caused me much wondering. It’s meant to depict the 1960’s but it has a 2020 sensibility. Compromise: it’s probably from the 1980’s.
The drive to Kobarid was methodical. Four hours on the Austrian autobahn, followed by one hour on tiny roads through beautiful Italian and Slovenian Alps. You have to psych yourself up for meals which are major artistic performance pieces by artists of the caliber of Ana Ros. We met our Berlin friends Lindsay and Kevin there. The meal itself lasted more than four hours. The whole thing consisted of several tiny pours of wine and perhaps fifteen or twenty bites of food, but at the end you feel more satiated than if you’d eaten a whole tray of lasagna. I don’t know how that works. Appetite is not well understood. Hisa Franko has guest rooms, so that after all the wine (and before- and after-dinner drinks) you can just walk upstairs and sleep it all off.
There’s a budget point at which you stop gaining weight. At the limiting case, spending an infinite amount of money on food, you would starve, because your meal would consist of an army of waiters repeatedly telling you how to eat a single molecule of air in one bite.
I won’t say the meal was indescribable, because every dish was described to us in perfect detail. Like Ferrán Adriá and Linus Torvalds, Ana Ros is open source: everything is in the cookbooks and every ingredient is on the menu for allergenic or perhaps forensic purposes (wouldn’t you love to read a murder mystery set at a tasting menu gastro pub?) If you could get the single-sourced trout from that one stream in the Austrian Littoral, and had a microtome to divide it, and the apples I saw the waiter picking in the afternoon, and the radish that probably didn’t come from Safeway or even Sigona’s, into a night’s worth of isinglass components, you could make that one dish. And Ms. Ros would tell you what went into the Toasted Yeast Water.
No, I’m saying I am not smart enough to describe it. Hisa Franko is good. You should go there. Save up your money. Pretty countryside.
Sunday, August 28
Staying at Hisa Franko includes breakfast. Breakfast is normal food. The most outré gastronomes want to have granola and juice in the morning, as they have every morning since they were in grade school. Dave ordered an omelet. It was perfectly constructed.
We left Hisa Franko and started back up the Soca valley towards Austria. We stopped and Dave looked at the multicolored trees on the slopes opposite us, and said “fall colors”. I said, “no, drought colors”. We continued, and headed back across Austria, going a different way. Dave is CarPlaying a lot of tracks by Wobbly and allied orchestras, as a way to avoid being totally immersed in foreign cultures which are most likely Ralph Spoilsport-influenced car commercials anyway. Every now and again he has to turn off the audio just as a way of checking that the samples being played are not in fact a car malfunction. Music has come a long way since the well defined conventions of Haydn, or Dogon tribal dance. There were always many more traditions than AM radio recognized, but none of them sounded like bearing failures. In a good way.
The drive from Iași to Sighișoara was straight out of 1950’s America. With no freeways north of Ploești, every 18-wheeler and touring family was jammed onto every two lane road with tractors and horsecarts (yes, you would see those occasionally on the road in 1950’s America) and the driving speed was a min function. After Piatra Neamt, the road gradually climbs into a gorge which must have been gorgeous at one time but is now packed on the bottom with cement plants and on the top with wall to wall souvenir shops, all identical.
Somewhere on this trip, we drove past a shop called “Cheap Chinese Stuff” or words to that effect; I thought that was way honest.
There were a few honey stands, which does us no good since the next act is going on an airplane and no checked luggage, and more than a few selling wicker baskets and brooms. But the great majority sold Dracula coffee mugs and Star Wars pillows.
That night, we stayed in a faux-kan in Sighișoara, called “Casa Lily”. Lily apparently fell in love with Japanese tourist hotels and in 2008 came back to Transylvania and built one, with her husband. The hotel has a humorous sense in its rendition — for example — when I looked down the hall to the rooms, I thought, oh wow, it really has sliding paper doors, but it turns out, and you can try this at home, if you take the coarsest pressboard, the kind with big chunks of wood splinters flattened out under thousands of pounds of pressure, and you paint that flat white, many layers, and tack onto it wooden frames of the style that hold paper, then, from a distance and properly lit, the result really resembles the hallway of a ryokan. Similarly with some other features, others are played straight, like the koi pond and the turtle pond and the torii delineating the place where the garden becomes the forest. The TV set is behind a screen. More people should do that.
We rented the Red Room, which hopefully has no significance in Hungarian or Romanian or on booking.com. It would be worse, if there were nobody else in the hotel, but in fact, it’s full up. We got the last room.
We went to Mimoza, a restaurant that Butza recommended because his wife Gabby made the designer cups that the restaurant uses for coffee in the morning. We got sausage, and bean soup and tomato-cucumber-cabbage crudités. I have just learned that you aren’t supposed to say “crudités” in public any more, lest people reach for their revolvers. And a glass of wine. They were in Romanian on the menu but misused; the soup wasn’t ciorba and the sausage wasn’t mici and the crudités weren’t salata but it all tasted good.
Thursday, August 25
We returned to Mimosa to have coffee in Gabby’s cups, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. On our way to the Clock Tower, there was a photographer waiting for the figurines to do something at noon. They didn’t do anything. Each of these figurines represents a day of the week, and they have a Changing of the Figurine at midnight, not noon. (We didn’t go back to watch that.)
We bought our tickets and walked up the stairs in the tower, stopping at each level to see a few exhibits in the History Museum located throughout the tower. The top level of the tower had arrows pointing to places, but instead of pointing to visible local landmarks, they pointed to distant cities. We continued our perambulation, and after stopping at a place with expensive antique postcards, walked up the Covered Stairway (which reminded Dave of the escalators in Hong Kong) to the Church On A Hill.
We’d heard of the Friday night organ concert which we wouldn’t be able to go to, but then on Thursday afternoon the organist was rehearsing. The main square in town was being set up for a cultural festival, featuring cultures from all over. We had an early dinner there, eating an enormous plate featuring three different form factors of bacon: one cooked like a ham, one deep-fried like chicharrones, and one as simple cubes of fat with skin attached. There were also pickles and cheese and tomatoes.
Friday, August 26
Travel days are given over to travel. This one was particularly trying. Romanian roads are pretty much where American roads were before President Eisenhower pushed through the construction of the Interstate Defense Highway System. Almost all the roads are two lane, and almost all the trucks are driving on them. Maybe NATO will assist in the construction of roads that can carry tanks against the Russians, though fiberoptics are more useful.
We spent one hour getting from the start of a traffic jam south of Predeal to Busteni, a total of ten kilometers. That was the slowest part. The worst parts were when the traffic was moving, because then you have to pass and jockey and dodge the cars and trucks and horsecarts. We got the car back to Hertz. Their shuttle was off somewhere, so a skinny tattooed teenage skinhead doing the Seven Holy Sleepers thing since a Suicidal Tendencies concert in 1979 announced to us that he was the driver and our car was the shuttle and dropped us off at the terminal himself. Then it was the usual hassle to get through security — the X-ray observer hadn’t seen the little skinny M.2 NVME 2280 form factor SSD backup drive before.
Once in Bucharest, we picked up our car from Hertz without much difficulty. If it takes less than an hour, it’s without much difficulty. It was a Toyota Aygo, the smallest model they make. Despite its small size and wimpy engine, it was well-equipped, with CarPlay, a backup camera, and cruise control. We drove to a cheap hotel in the southeast part of Bucharest, and had a snack at a Turkish restaurant.
We bought some Romanian stamps. They required cash. They are about 25 times as expensive as Lebanese stamps. I think most of the cards will be mailed from Germany on this trip.
Later in the afternoon, we visited with our friend Bogdan, from the turn-of-the-century party days. Bogdan is remodeling his house. I am always sorry to hear that people are remodeling. There is no difficulty in houses that is easier to fix than it is to get used to. That goes for writing macros and shortcuts on computers, too.
Saturday, August 20
In the morning, we had Sea Buckthorn Juice instead of orange juice. Cătină, they call it. On the six hour drive to Iași, I discovered that if you aren’t in the Google Maps app, it doesn’t issue audible instructions, which is a real problem if you are on one of the very few genuine freeways in Romania, and the next exit is 25 km away. After we finally got off the freeway, Dave plugged in his phone and discovered that the car was also equipped with CarPlay, the first time we’ve ever used it. From that point, we navigated with Apple Maps, getting a look at the Real Romania: honey, potatoes, onions for sale at the side of the road, horse carts in the road.
It has been my hope on this trip, to see some of the real Tourist Romania which we always seem to miss: all our trips end up hanging out on terraces drinking coffee and eating mici. Only now that they all have young children, the hanging out has been in playgrounds. But usually, when we get to Iași, going for a beer seems like a better idea than all the World Heritage Sites in Moldavia.
Using all the modern communicators, we got in touch with Radu and put all our stuff into the room next to Andrei’s apartment. The gang showed up next. Dinner was at a roadhouse out west of town, tripe ciorba and duck confit with celery purée and jam. Stef’s kids are cute and they kept wandering off.
Sunday, August 21
The best tourist days happen when Stef is driving. Not literally, as he was in a different car with his wife and two sons, but he chooses the best places. Today, we drove out to Mănăstirea Dobrovăț. After we had poked around and regretted not taking the Old Church Slavonic option for the Foreign Language requirement, a monk approached Stef and asked if we’d like to eat. Yes. They sat us down in a big plain monastic hall and came out with plates of fried carp, and soup, and pilaf, and bread. They don’t charge for this, but of course we left money.
Later that day, we joined with Radu and his kids and went out to the Danube Delta. It’s on a road that Hertz probably wishes we wouldn’t drive, a kind of fishing retreat plus playground. Luca and Nicolas were gripping each other in such a way that Nicolas smacked into a pole and started crying and then pouting and when he pouts he looks like every D&G and Armani model who ever glowered from a magazine. He could make a career out of that, if he never cheered up. At least the Abercrombie and Fitch models, back in the day, looked like they enjoyed having penises.
Dave and I left the party and went for a walk on the dirt road along a lake. We saw lots of birds we didn’t know. There were masses of birds flying around, but rather than swifts they had bluish and greenish long pointed wings. They darted past and occasionally skimmed the water. It might have been chromatic aberration in the binoculars, something that Merlin doesn’t take into account. Merlin is Cornell’s bird ID program. I just downloaded it, on advice of a friend, and am learning.
Monday, August 22
Today was the day we went out to visit the Churches of Moldavia World Heritage Site. It didn’t go very well. Waiting to see if your friends want to come with is a mistake for everything, including birth and death. So we got off to a late start. There was an interesting traffic jam, which we avoided by spontaneously, and without any input from Google, following cars who theoretically knew what they were doing, onto a succession of dirt roads through cornfields and sunflower fields. It worked.
We arrived at the main road at the same time we would have if we’d stayed in line (per Google Maps), and we got to see some more real Romania on the way. All the sunflowers are pointing down now. Somebody will come along and gather all the seeds up for oil, soon. The corn is dried out, too, harvested. There’s heat and drought through most of Europe, now.
We got to the Mănăstirea Voroneț around 3:30 in the afternoon.
The Golden Hour does not suit it; the color they are most proud of is Voroneț Blue and it doesn’t show up well in the reddening light of sunset.
Fortunately, clouds gathered. Less fortunately, they started raining a great deal, just as we were about to head into the next monastery on the list, Humorului. An alert appeared on my phone, in English, sent out by Romanian Meteo, saying that thunderstorms were imminent — apparently they haven’t got the memo from Orban that warning tourists off bad weather can get you fired. So we headed back to Iași, slim pickings for a day of driving. Naturally there was nothing to do but eat, and the rain caught up with us on the patio. The waiter was disinterested, despite the fact that the majority of the table were his regular customers from down the street.
Tuesday, August 23
Today was kind of a working day. Radu has a fast internet connection, and Dave took the opportunity to update massive amounts of source code, sometimes even twice. In the afternoon, we went to a nice restaurant on our own, Casa Lupu, after meeting Stef and his kids for sweets at Cuptorul Moldovencei. They make the best pastries in Iași, much too good for kids who launch after the first bite, so I ended up eating them regardless of what it would do to my appetite. Afterwards, we were invited to join the gang at a sauna in the basement of a friend of theirs. Andrei was surprised to find that Radu had invited his go-to endodontist, who had consulted with him about Dave some years back when there was a question of a hole in one of Dave’s root canals. Saunas are too hot and the pools are too cold, but it’s a social thing. I always wondered what happened when straight guys were in baths. Turns out they talk about their dental patients. Apparently it’s really difficult to work on people who have inflated their lips with chemical stuffing.
Wednesday, August 24
In the morning we said goodbye to Andrei and Ingrid and Radu and Alexia and Luca and Nicolas, and drove to Doina’s house to say goodbye to her and Fanel and drink tea, and Butza drove by with David in the back seat, completely by coincidence. He was on his way to get construction materials for something involving pipes and ditches, in his house.
Flying over, you realize how many places you’ll never go.
And so to the Levant. The people in this part of the world are so universally hospitable that it’s hard to believe their national pastime is killing each other based on their conflicting opinions about the prophets of a loving god. But that’s just atheist talk. The reality is that even if they were all Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 Northern Conservative Baptists of single digit consanguinity, there still wouldn’t be enough water to support all of them and the upcoming families of the adorable children carpeting the streets. And they are adorable. The family we are staying with are exemplary. The youngest daughter is a great beauty, and seems to have taken as a challenge finding a boyfriend better looking than her two brothers. It’s hard to say, among the three men. Someone will lob an apple into one of their wedding parties one day and reignite the Lebanese Civil War.
When we got out of the passport line (much better managed than the one in Stockholm) and past the officer (who was being pretend-thorough but could tell at a glance we were not the droids he was looking for and was just punching the clock since some piece of software in the back room expects him to spend 90 seconds interacting with each customer), Hind found us straightaway, and took us to the taxi she had retained. We drove an hour and a half through the night time city to her house in Batroun. The coast of Lebanon is entirely urban, from what I’ve seen, both the shoreline and on the hills rising into the distance. After eight thousand years, you don’t expect much wilderness.
Sunday, August 14
Hind and I walked into town to buy odds and ends. It was partly modern and partly traditional. The modern part was an ordinary supermarket, with procedures slightly revamped to accommodate runaway inflation: if you pay with a card you have to pay half again as much, in cash, to account for inflation during the period it takes the card to be processed. Everybody pays in cash. After that, we went to an ice cream shop run by a childhood friend, who also grinds coffee and changes money. It’s important only to change the dollars that you need on a particular day, since the Lebanese Pound is currently losing about a half a percent per day.
(The official rate against the dollar is about 1500 to 1, while the actual rate is approaching 32000 to 1. On receipts, the government requires the amount in dollars to be printed at the official rate, which leads to silly printouts like an $1800 trip to the grocery store. Officially, the government has the power to forbid websites to post the actual exchange rate. They asked for help in implementing this from the U.S. government a year ago…this didn’t lead anywhere…)
In the afternoon, we decided to go visit the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Byblos, which is just down the road. One of the features of the site is the Old Souk, which continues to operate vigorously. There is also a citadel:
There are capers growing out of the 5000-year-old walls. The same plant that you get marinated in little bottles all over the culinary world. All stages seem to exist at once – the buds, the flowers, the berries. Pretty little flower, lots of stamens sticking out, like Passiflora. An old railroad track runs out toward the ocean. Lebanon had railroads until the 1970’s, when they were torn out probably for the same reason American railroads were torn out, except here they forgot to build freeways to replace them. A wedding photographer was photographing a bride and groom with ruins in the background. I suppose it evokes Cultural Continuity but it might be taken Ominously.
We got another taxi back up the coast from Byblos, to a resort with a seafood restaurant in Batroun. Again, far too much food. Food waste is the mark of the middle classes of a lot of different countries, as are pudgy little kids waddling out of the ocean to the outdoor showers and back to the safety of their video games and hotel rooms.
Monday, August 15
Hind’s clan showed up in the morning with a tour bus. The objective was Baalbek. The bus took us up the Kadisha Gorge over a pass and into the Bekaa Valley. Properly one should spend many days here and not just drive past the gorge, but it is a spectacular bunch of views and hairpin turns ensure that people on both sides of the bus will get a chance to see the monasteries and hermit caves and vineyards and a good amount of traffic where people decide to double park in Bsharri. At the pass, a man was selling roasted almonds.
We had the almond seller take a group photo. Clearly he was hip to the conversation, and noticed that the coming thing (minus n years) was framing diagonally, and among the other photos, he took that one. Do you notice how good the public-facing people are getting at taking pictures? Waiters, tour guides, security cams? The selfie stick turned out not to conquer the universe and render human interaction superfluous, as I had hoped. I’ve seen two selfie sticks on this trip. They were specifically invented to avoid having to hand your phone to strangers, but people just crave the company, now.
On the Bekaa side, our driver pointed out the marijuana fields along with the vineyards.
We got to Baalbek in the afternoon. It isn’t a huge site, and I think I got a look at the important parts. And checked the tourist box of getting yelled at for taking photos. A Japanese lady with a very nice voice was singing in the Temple of Bacchus (for which there is no evidence of Bacchic intent, said the guide, but it is called that nowadays.) I made a few seconds of video and one of her entourage came up and asked “English”? “What are you doing?” and I said, I’m a tourist, I’m taking pictures. I was being un-Japanesely abrupt I know but that’s a lot of nerve, expecting someone to not take photos at a world heritage site because — because why? She was singing. How did this get to be Intellectual Property or a Reasonable Expectation of Privacy or even A Bunch Of Mohammedans With Guns or any of the traditional reasons you stop taking photos?
Baalbek is an impressive site but only one guy in the souk had post cards for sale, at least where we were wandering. It’s hard to pursue hobbies in a fast paced crowd of ten.
The feast afterwards had more constraints, as Hind’s daughter and her boyfriend are vegan, so it was required to order more than Mixed Grill. One of her sons and his girlfriend are vegetarian. And the other son and his girfriend eat everything. The icons of Lebanese food are vegan anyway — hummus, tabbouleh, babaganoush, olives, falafel, muhammara, dolmas — and I sat at the end of the table with Noura so I got a lot of that. Dave was more in the middle.
Tuesday, August 16
We took a day off of violent touring, instead blogging and writing post cards — all these words take time, you know — and at the end of the day, going into town to sit at a rooftop cafe on the beach and do whatever one does at rooftop cafes overlooking the beach. I had hoped for a green flash, but there was a marine layer close to the ocean that turned the sun red before it got to the horizon. Maybe the same people who are blocking the GPS.
Doing ordinary stuff in another country is time consuming as well. I got lost on the way to the money-changer’s, despite that I was nearly standing in front of it, and had to FaceTime with Noura in order to get the last ten meters straight. I barely know how to use FaceTime, either. And the door to the post office fronts onto a parking lot behind a guard who didn’t care that I was there so that’s one problem less. The postage to America is about 8 cents, at this day’s exchange rate, but if you read online what people have to say about LibanPost, and do the Expectations = Probability x Winnings things or the Dollar Cost Averaging thing or any of the other popular forms of risk analysis — I only bought a few stamps, to send to an experimentally chosen focus group. When I took the stamps back to the post office, the lady hand cancelled them in front of me. The post office had nobody in it either time, and the people were very nice. I gather everybody real uses DHL. (It turned out they were reliable: the cards I sent arrived to America in eight days!)
Wednesday, August 17
We all piled into taxis to go to the Gold Souk in Tripoli. When we got to Tripoli, a short drive up the coast, we all piled into the Tic Tac Cafe. It was never about the gold souk, it was only about eating.
Tripoli is a generic big noisy commerce-drowned city. Lots of beggars. The women dressed entirely in black burkas are all beggars. Regular women have varying, less complete, covering. I first encountered the all-in-black beggar phenomenon in Bucharest in 1999. It must represent some formality. In Bucharest, they were bent over in balasana holding their cups out in front, but the ones here are walking around and sometimes even tugging at your sleeve for attention.
Hind is a regular at the Tic Tac Cafe. The proprietors have lived in California and Florida before, is my understanding. Father and son and maybe another generation or maybe just hired hands. The food is wonderful, especially the fuul, but just too much of it. Traveling with vegans is a good way to assure that you’ll have the tastes of a place and not just piled up mixed grill all the time.
The second food stop was a candy store such as you might find in Vienna or Berlin, except with all different stuff. Everything feels air conditioned.
The third stop, was more of a coda: a boring jewelry store in which all the guys sat on benches while Noura and Hind and Sarah were treated deferentially by the store owners.
After about a half hour of this, the remaining six decided to go home — well, Sami and Elias decided, and we follow them — but the taxis roaming around the area were pretty sketchy and a half hour of talk happened and then Dave and I and Elias got in one taxi and Gaby and Rachel and Sami got in the other taxi and we drove off to Batroun, except that our old guy had to stop to fill up with propane, and then on the slope up to the tunnel which lies 5 km north of town, he pulled over and told Elias that his brakes had stopped working.
He added brake fluid. It did not fix the problem. By this time the other taxi had pulled up and they talked and they talked and eventually the decision was to all six of us pile into the working taxi and drive the last 5 km to town. Rachel sat on Sami in the front seat, Gaby and Dave and I in the back, and then Elias levered himself by using the door for compression. He told me later he was sitting on the door handle. I turned sideways a bit. There are worse things in the world than being pressed up against a stud like Elias. Sami and Elias argued all the way back about where to turn. Not with each other, so much, as with their phones. Google Maps kept offering verbal instructions to turn right where there was not even the trace of a road. Don’t know where it thought we were. When we got back, there was a lot of discussion about money. The first taxi driver had insisted on being paid most of what was agreed upon (600,000?) because he’d made it most of the way there. The second taxi wanted some unspecified amount more money because his taxi had been commandeered as a Clown Car. I hope they worked it out.
Thursday, August 18
Travel days are consumed with travel, even if the flight is on the following morning at 4:30 AM. We made a reservation at the premier airport hotel in Beirut, the Assaha, and around 9 AM got in a taxi to go to that hotel, stopping briefly for last minute shopping at the much nicer souk in Byblos.
When we got to Beirut, we found that Google Maps did not know where the Assaha hotel was. Took us to some parking structure. Our driver didn’t know either; he works in Batroun. There was a lot of guessing and chatting and everything moved very slowly in Beirut and ultimately it turned out that Google Maps thinks it’s the Alsaha hotel. Apple Maps had it right the whole time, and Dave reported the mistake to Google, who has been very effusive in its praise ever since.
The Assaha is a very nice hotel, over the top, even, in Disney Aladdin decor. I don’t know how busy it is: a pigeon had laid two eggs in out balcony planter, and seemed shocked that there were people in the room. I hope we didn’t scare it off. We had one really nice last meal in Lebanon, of sausage, dandelion greens, pastries, and pudding.
We went to sleep super early (6pm) and got something like a night’s sleep.
We got up around 1am and met the taxi the hotel had arranged for us (their own dedicated shuttle), and got to the airport and on to the plane without any particular hitch. I’m getting to hate my friends with diplomatic passports, though.
The GPS failed coming out of the Beirut airport and didn’t come on again until over Cyprus. Once a philosopher, twice a Google Search, and there are a LOT of articles since about 2018 about GPS failures in the Eastern Mediterranean. most of them are advising pilots and ship navigators that they should be prepared to use alternative means. I didn’t surf long enough to get to any theories about who is doing it.
We flew to Stockholm. Travel always takes the whole day. At the tail end of it, we went out with my long lost third cousin once removed Pia. We spoke of things that happened in the 19th century and ate at a kind of Thai street food place in Södermalm. (Our hotel stood in Älvsjö, a suburb two train stops to the south. We called it “Alviso”.) It was called “Motel L”. The hellish thing about it was the LED hallway lights. The impressive thing was that while it was located directly next to a commuter train line, the soundproofing was so good you never heard a train.
Friday, August 12
Friday was full. We went to a Konditori for breakfast. I bought some post cards at a second hand shop across the street from Motel Hell. Our friend David and his familiar, Isabelle, got us at noon and took us downtown where we sat for a long time at a vegan cafe. It was not accessible at all. No restaurant aspiring to the hip status of veganism in the states would be so insensitive to the needs of tall people walking with a cane. Wouldn’t be legal, for a start. The bathrooms were up a long flight of stairs, and the stairs came with a warning against tall people. The seating area had stairs all over and then a jackhammer started up. Dave walked to a DHL to mail the Tesla key back to Brian, and was not successful. We drove to a Mailboxes Etc. and waited in the car while he did that, with better results, then to Isabella’s uncle’s leather workshop where I got some gay post cards, free. Then to a park where we all wheeled David up a hill and back down and then to our friend Tim’s house. The roads were not as Google thought. A large apartment complex is being built immediately west of his house. Cousin Hans and his wife Lena joined us there. David left early for a long drive to Gävle. Isabelle stayed much longer.
Not a whole lot of genealogical talk. Hans told the story of his job in the Grand Hotel as a young servant, asked to bring champagne to Madonna’s room — he stepped out of the elevator just as her entourage passed, and landed between her and her bodyguards. They were not happy with him. He also said the Rolling Stones partied extremely hard even though they were in their 50’s.
Tim made tacos, including tortillas by hand since all you get here is flour tortillas but you can buy masa. Tim’s take on why Sweden did not make a big deal out of Covid was that they were not afraid their hospitals would be overwhelmed. They had enough bed space: they converted some wards to Covid, built some tent hospitals, but didn’t end up using them. The US operates with much less margin, and if the outbreak had spread the way it threatened to, people would have been dying in the streets. Also, Sweden has enough social net that people don’t have to starve if they stay home from work.
We walked to the train station before it was too dark, past all the construction. There seemed to be a lot of parties happening. School begins soon.
Saturday, August 13
Traveling always takes the whole day. We left the hotel before noon, got to Batroun near midnight. Nothing went particularly wrong, except we took the train away from Stockholm Central one stop before realizing it was the wrong direction, and we stayed too long at the SAS+ lounge and got worried in a long, slow passport line (but one of the other officers let us go in his EU line, when all his other customers were done).
Why we were in the SAS lounge is a mystery. It just showed up in our boarding pass, that we were SAS+ and had fast entry to everything except leaving Schengen. Seats 2A and 2B. Maybe they want to get us addicted to that sort of travel. Premium mediocre buffet food, hold the premium. The experience is only arguably premium to the extent that the boarding pass scanner — not even a guy at the velvet rope! — allows us into the lounge (but not the “gold” lounge, which looked the same as “+”).
Cloudy weather most of the way. Glimpses of Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. It cleared up off the coast of Antalya. The flight path avoided Kaliningrad and Belarus and Ukraine. GPS failed as we descended into Beirut. It had been working so well — I lock it into the window using the window shade, to give it the best view of satellites — I almost suspect the Israelis, Hezbollah, Russia, Lebanon, SAS of jamming on purpose, to prevent any GPS triggered terrorist actions on the ground or in the air. But GPS fails a lot on its own.
Flying over, you realize how many places you’ll never go.
Traveling while demented will present its own peculiar problems, to be documented in the years to come. We have a storage locker where important papers are less likely to burn in the event of a wildfire, and moments before we left, I managed to lose the padlock key in the course of less than a minute. I felt the key in my pocket, walked up the stairs to the car, and when I got there, the key was missing. At least that’s what I remember doing. A search has turned up nothing. The memory is so well-defined, and challenged so soon afterwards, that my best hypothesis is that aliens entered my mind and caused me to place the key someplace intentionally between the kitchen and the car, and then erased the memory.
In the midst of all the fuss, Dave forgot to give the Tesla key to Brian, who is keeping the car for us while we are gone.
The flight from San Francisco to Dublin was uneventful. It was an ordinary amount late, and flew an ordinary route slightly south of a great circle, surfing the jet stream, dodging a bank of thunderstorms at the corner of Manitoba, Ontario, and Hudson Bay. Didn’t get dark enough to see northern lights, if there were any.
Greenland is still monochromatic.
Tuesday, August 9
We arrived early in Dublin, where we sat on the taxiway thinking about things while someone located a gate. Doesn’t pay to arrive early. The luggage had indeed traveled on the same flight — Dave decided to check his at the last minute since it was free, and there may never again be an opportunity to experience that. We took the 700 bus to Sussex to the cheapest lodging in town, which is within 30 miles of Temple Bar and doesn’t have reviews on Tripadvisor or airbnb describing a recent infestation of rats with active cases of brucellosis and yaws.
Our room has a view.
Our friend Samuel, whom we will miss this time in Dublin as he is vacationing in Southeast Asia, left us some suggestions for eating and entertainment. His favorite restaurants are all closed on Tuesday, and his favorite theater has a website that doesn’t work in at least three ways (“+” not accepted in phone number field, “continue” button not visible, credit card not accepted after all that) (I see these errors in other on line commerce sites; why do they all copy each other’s flawed code?)
We found on our own a really nice tasting menu at a restaurant called “Delahunt”, whose food and staff are delightful and absolutely deserve your business. Dave spent the meal trying to navigate the theater website and finally wrote an email, to which the management immediately responded saying the Best Available Seats will be waiting for us at Will Call.
Wednesday, August 10
The play, Translations, was not what I expected. I thought it would be about Indian school scandals, except in Ireland, based on the description. Instead, it was one of those Tom Stoppard pieces about words. Fair enough, it’s Ireland. I read the Wikipedia entry during intermission and Dave bought the script for ten euros. Turns out I had surmised most of it. It will be nice for the next decade or so, to be able to say that the most recent theater production I went to was at the Abbey, in Dublin.
Dinner was at the Winding Stair, which we have been to before. Our waitress was less charming than I remember their waiters being in the past. The people seated next to us were two rows in front of us at the theater. I bet half the people with 5-5:30 reservations were there, or other theaters. I think the demographic is parents dropping their kids off at college. Might account for both venues.
The modern art museum, which we went to in the afternoon, was a bit disappointing. Lots of artybollocks and not much skill. ONE HAD HOPED, that the presence of petabytes of collage fodder and light years of Markov chains with which to animate characters, would give unskilled but imaginative artists a leg up in making their ideas known to the public. And it has! Reddit, Tiktok, YouTube. Only the museums haven’t caught on yet.
