Apparently, we're still working out a few bugs in this process.

Again this week, I heard that someone (Charity this time) had tried to post a response, but something glitched and it didn't work.

We really would like people to be able to chime in. So some of you try to post responses, to any of the blogs. If it works, great, you have become cyber-immortal.

But if not, please email me and Ken with details about what happened:

kmakers@ccis.edu

reboon@cougars.ccis.edu

thanks, bob

Greetings.

Two new travel adventures.

ITALY When we first set up this blog for Columbia College, we talked about including experiences from various individual travelers. So, I'm going to try that this next week or so, depending on web access. I'm going with my niece Ashton and her mom Reggie to Italy. Ashton has traveled a bit here and there, a summer in London with jaunts across Europe, and she went on our CC trip to Egypt, but this will be Reggie's first time in Europe. I know she wants to see Rome, and we wind up in Venice, but I haven't pinned down at all what she wants to see. She keeps saying, "it will all be new." And so it will. Maybe I can capture some of what this is through her eyes. Me, I much like Florence, and love Venice. I hope we can get to Pompeii (or I'll sneak off while they indulge in a shopping marathon in Rome...).

This will be my 3rd trip to Italy, but I suspect I can still find things to enjoy. Perhaps better this time, as that first time we visit those longed-for places, we spend so much excitment and energy on the big sights, that often we are left hollow and disappointed when the actual place can't capture that movie moment. I'll be happy to see the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum again, but sometimes those accidental encounters, those curious people with improbable hair or a less probably story or quiet balconies with sun-wilted geraniums are what we remember best. Like those tiny red ants crawling through the Temple of Athena at Troy, taking very little note of the centuries.


FRANCE For CC, the trip next year will be to France, between the spring and summer semesters. We liked EF Tours (they didn't feed me French fries every night...), and we hope to have Liz with us, the same guide we had in Spain.

To find out more, go to http://www.eftours.com/ and under the section Enroll Now, enter this number: 398567 For more details, email Ann Bledsoe (I can't spell her new name) at ambledsoe@ccis.edu

I rewrote a bit of the tour company's standard trip, to elimenate all the "one-night-stands"--those get-up-at-6-rush-to-the-bus, tour all day, have dinner in a new city at 9pm and then leave for another city the next day. Exhausting. So, all 2 nights per city this time, with two nights in Paris at both the start and end.

And, Liz suggested that Biarritz would be worthwhile, so we moved a section of the trip there instead of Bordeaux. And I put in a day of free time at the beach. Though we have plenty to go see if that is too stress-free.

So go sign up, even now. It's only money. And probably get the travel insurance. Things happen.



Ah--I meant to text Pam and have her insist that her niece go along with CC next year, but that text didn't arrive in time. Some things happen too fast.



bob

May 29, Day 11

Ah, this may be my last blog post for this trip, though I may go back and edit a bit. Such as spell Taylor’s name correctly, credit Suzy as my flower identifier, figure out how to pull the text up next to the pictures on some posts. Those things.

Lisbon

In the morning of our one full day here, we had a guided tour, which ended about lunchtime, with some headed back to the hotel on the bus, some headed to the beach, and the rest of us dumped out in the center of Lisbon to go our various ways.

But first our lunch tales--

A group of us, 7 or 8, wandered away from the center, looking around, checking out menus. We passed quite a few places, but everyone seemed to shy away, for one reason or another. At one place we passed, Dennis looked in the window and said "ptomaine there!" We finally arrived at another plaza, a block behind the other. The group gravitated to the umbrellas and open chairs. No waiter appeared, really for quite a while, but we found menus—sandwiches, burgers, some fish, salads, all with a Spanish twist, and not cheap.

I waited a while, but then defected, with David following. We back-tracked from the umbrellas over to the "ptomaine palace," a side-street restaurant not much entered by tourists. I had seen a 2 foot wide skillet of some sort of burbling meat—pork, it turned out—to which a cook would now and then toss in more raw slices along one side, no doubt with his own system of what was cooked or not. I found a clear spot at the counter, indicated we would stand there, and the owner put out two paper placemats. I pointed at the stuff in the window, again gestured “two,” and soon we had our own sandwiches and a couple beers. There was a bottle of spicy mustard, which put out oddly shining yellow streaks, just right. One of my best meals in Spain, and for both of us, all for 6.30 euros.

We rejoined the others, who still hadn’t ordered, then went off to look for the Metro station we would need for the bullfight. Lots of wrong turns, then back to the group, still eating. We joined them for ice cream, strolled, met others for the subway, bullfight, etc. A pleasant afternoon on our own.

Earlier...

That morning, we had all piled on the bus for our official tour of Lisbon—with a local guide, who was a bit too enthusiastic (and loud on the speakers) for a morning without enough coffee. She meant well, but... So we heard about the black and rose marble that many buildings are made of, the 7 hills, “like Rome,” that Lisbon is built on, the damages from earthquake and tsunami back in the mid- 18th C., saw street and neighborhood names that are echoed in Brazil.

From the bus we saw a cathedral, a pink palace, various other official important sights, but all of these we couldn’t get to because of an unannounced military parade. I snapped some pictures of the military folk, not because they were so interesting, but because I suspected I wasn’t supposed to.

Meanwhile, our bus contorted through open streets, but just couldn’t get us walkable access. Not very secretly, most of us were tired of cathedrals and magnificence, so bouncing along in the bus snapping pictures wasn’t a disaster. And we got more time at a souvenir/coffee area down near the ports and monuments, which turned out to be my only shot at buying a Portugal t-shirt, in our ongoing rush. (And what a tragedy that would have been, having already been rushed out of Morocco without the requisite t-shirt, not to mention, they didn’t feel like stamping our passports! How would I even know I’d been to these places? Memory? Not sufficient without a cotton product.)

So, shots of expresso, shopping, a couple nice monuments of Portuguese explorers setting out to chart, dominate and pillage the world. Then back on the bus, headed for a castle. Never did catch the name, as I was trying to protect my ears by putting my hands on the blaring bus speaker over my head.

But the walk up the hill to the castle was a highlight of Lisbon for me.

At the bottom of the hill, one of those ordinary cramped neighborhood roads. But that’s where we entered the narrow street? Alley? The Arco de Jesus—steps and cobblestones, twisting up and right, and left, and steep up again. There was quite a bit of graffiti, often about the Pope, and strange pictures we couldn’t quite connect with. Doors and small windows were decorated, often with vines and flowers and pictures. The outer walls in many places were covered in tile that gave the illusion of being 3-D, even without our Avatar glasses. Balconies spilled over with bright geraniums, an occasional pigeon, a woman who shouted down sort of in English that we should be careful of pickpockets.

Every so often we would come to a level place with a view out into the harbor and the cacophony of roofs below us. People moved around, intent with their own lives, which I often didn’t feel comfortable photographing. Many were preparing for that night’s Festival of St. Antony--street booths were under construction for the oncoming party that would later fill the neighborhood with revelers, music, lots of wine, and what Liz recommended, the grilled anchovies.

At the top of the hill, our local guide told us some history, showed us the harbor panorama, then gave us twenty minutes to relax. A small cafeteria provided me with a late morning cheese pastry, a small bottle of red wine and a table in the shade. A brilliant blue peacock strutted in front of us, one who seemed just fine with dozens of camera stalkers.

But let me explore a tangent here, triggered by the presence of so many jacaranda trees, with their purple blooms, almost a signature of Lisbon, and Seville. These trees explode with their blooms, well before any leaves or greenery appear, so they look like enormous twiggy bouquets rather than healthy trees. And these trees are not native to the Iberian Peninsula, nor the Old World at all.

Like Seville seated on the Guadalquivir River, making it an Atlantic port, Lisbon has been one of two places here of intense exchange in that explosive meeting of worlds. There are acacias, honeysuckle, oranges, azaleas, magnolias, dandelions, poppies, familiar weeds, sycamores, geraniums—where might these have come from? We are witnessing an aggressively changed biosphere, beautiful, pleasant, but not necessarily healthy or balanced. Most of us will simply not know how to see this.

I’ve been to Yemen, where despite the fact that they won’t, just won’t, serve anything except tepid Nescafe, they all are very proud of the (perhaps borrowed) story of a Yemeni goat who chewed those strange beans and induced his owner to do the same, thus discovering coffee. Certainly worth a trip to learn that! (though that page-size Yemen visa in my passport has caused me a bit of travel-trouble...)

One book that could help us begin to see is Songbirds, Truffles, Wolves,
which I would have used to teach a St. Francis class on the Italy trip, but alas, the class wasn’t approved. No St. Francis for those folks. In any case, the author Gary Nabhan is an ethnobotanist who is also a lay member of a Franciscan group. For that book, he was making a walking pilgrimage through Italy, to Assisi, assessing the mix of world plants as he went. He had no luck convincing Italian locals that tomatoes were not part of their ancient Roman heritage, nor had they ever been simmered down in any Old World sauce before the 1500s. Nor would corn nor potatoes have been on any plate, not even in Ireland.

Would that I had his knowledge, and could with a glance tag everything I see, with the ease a 14-year-old can tag photos on Facebook. Someday, I need to do some sort of Environmental lit class on food, but even that won’t let me see as fully as I need to.

So much of the world remains invisible to us.

later, bob

We now have a picture slide show of different sights in Spain!

May 30, Day 12

That last day—Brittany and Robert leaving on a 4:30 am flight, the rest of us headed to the airport a few hours later, the last-night-party crowd in sad shape, but all packed and present. Of course, the usual glitches, such as Chrissy misplacing her passport and needing to search her luggage in the terminal.

Then the easier daytime flight across the Atlantic and arriving in Newark--the seeming endless passport lines, waiting for luggage, Amy’s luggage disappearing, a train to terminal A, security lines, Fred and Dawn having a wild adventure working on getting a bottle of port bought in Lisbon duty-free onto the next plane, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, a Bud Lite with John, then me paranoid double-checking the gate, finding that the posted info didn’t match our tickets, more checking, then suddenly the whole group having to jump up and get a different bus back to terminal C.

But we boarded our flight and took off. I noticed another plane just off a runway surrounded by security vehicles, lights flashing, but haven’t heard of anything on the news. And by the window in this smaller plane, I actually glimpsed the copper-green sliver of the Statue of Liberty, the first time for me. I’ve spent time in Kuala Lumpur, but never NYC, which in my head is still the realm of The Out of Towners street gangs, garbage strikes, and Kitty Genovese. Friends have suggested I update this mental map. Of course, I was concerned for the Statue of Liberty, for I had just seen Wolverine slice through one of her rays at the end of X-Men on the previous flight...

Yet another bit of dissonance sprang up.

On the long flight, I had watched the post-apocalyptic Book of Eli, which suggested the tragedy of blaming Christianity and religion for the violence in our world. And I began re-reading Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, An Indian History of the American West, in prep for an Evening class:

It began with Christopher Columbus, who gave the people the name Indios. Those Europeans, the white men, spoke in different dialects, and some pronounced the word Indien, or Indianer, or Indian. Peaux-rouges, or redskins, came later. As was the custom of the people receiving strangers, the Tainos on the island of San Salvador generously presented Columbus and his men with gifts and treated them with honor.

“So tractable, so peaceable, are these people,” Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain, “that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decourous and praiseworthy.”

All this, of course, was taken as a sign of weakness, if not heathenism, and Columbus being a righteous European was convinced the people should be “made to work, sow and do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways.” Over the next four centuries (1492-1890) several million Europeans and their descendants undertook to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World.

Columbus kidnapped ten of his friendly Taino hosts and carried them off to Spain, where they could be introduced to the white man’s ways. One of them died soon after arriving there, but not before he was baptized a Christian. The Spaniards were so pleased that they had made it possible for the first Indian to enter heaven that they hastened to spread the good news throughout the West Indies.

Columbus and his Spanish sponsors have been much in view for us lately, in tombs and monuments, in the wealth of the great cathedrals, in the importation of species from the New World, as well as evidence of the great Portuguese empire, and it’s hard not to look back and wonder. It’s hard not to look ahead, and equally wonder, for we are the inheritors of all this.

But we arrived in St. Louis, everything except Amy’s luggage. We met our CC bus, and though on the trip I had forestalled Chrissy from rushing to American fast food in Costa del Sol and Seville, by saying that there they fried everything in fish oil and made the burgers with shrimp scraps, leaving Lambert Airport we almost immediately stopped at McDonald’s.

bob

Day 10, May 28

We left Evora and traveled the last few hours to Lisbon. We had long ago crossed the Spanish border, and the prospect of actually writing any postcards and using that stack of .78 euro cent stamps was vanishing. Alas, a downside of this blog-thing.

I managed to finish our play, going through my laptop battery twice on bus rides today and the day before, and exhausting Ann’s laptop 3 minutes after transferring the file to Liz’s jumpdrive. Check in, then me, David and Ann followed a hotel map to the Apolo 70 copy store, David sure of the way, Ann conferring, me just tagging along snapping pictures. Easy, efficient—much easier than Athens, which required 45 minutes of talking to one shopkeeper who referred us to his cousin through that alley, to another corner where there was a rumor of... and so on, and even easier that Fiji, where the sweet Indian lady looked at us strangely, like we might soil her sari, but got our copies made.

Then dinner, where we had a popular cod-hash, rice, bread. I sampled the vino verde, a champagne-like wine that I’m guessing is made with green grapes. And we got to sample port, in tiny thumb-size glasses. I never did get to try the recommended cherry port. Maybe another trip.

Then back at the hotel, there was the chaos of trying to get the whole group all together before showers, unpacking or nightlife, gathering props, finding a space—the hotel was quite certain this should not take place in their lobby-bar, though they were generous with scotch tape, so we performed in the street, just before twilight. The whole thing wasn’t quite perfectly organized, but it went well. A play, you ask? You know, the usual mixture of the Wizard of Oz, Don Quixote, Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Odyssey/Percy Jackson, with Moroccan rug salesmen, academic art wizards, street mimes, Interpol, the theme song to the Dukes of Hazard, and a chorus line. That sort of thing.

After that, a bit drained, I went with John across the street to a Chinese restaurant, where he got rice and jasmine tea for a queasy stomach, and I had my first Portuguese beer.

Later, I headed off with a group I thought on the way to have one quick beer at the end of this exhausting day, but after we had walked 15 minutes and then started heading down in the subway, I wished them well and turned around, by myself. All fine, except that I hadn’t paid too much attention to the one turn we had made, I had rushed around with the play and didn’t have the hotel’s card with me, nor as it turned out did I quite know the hotel’s name nor address nor phone number. Ah, you can see where this is going. I got lost.

Fortunately, I had paid attention to various billboards, like the hand painted like a bright tropical bird and a sign for an indigenous peoples exhibit. After quite a few side-streets, the evening ended not with the police, but a hot shower, cheap Spanish wine, and British TV.

I think I neglected to tell Ann or Liz about this...

bob

General view of Lisbon

Balcony and tile exterior


One of those sidewalks they're proud of

Just a good idea

Modern Lisbon

bob