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I Would Like to Have Been Him, Part 2

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Patrick Lee Fermor (1915-2011)

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

A long time ago—certainly before I moved my blog to WordPress—I wrote about Sir Richard Francis Burton, how I would like to have lived his life.(I’ll look it up for you and re-post it sometime in the next week or two.) The other person whom I admire so much that I would like to have been him is Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor. Both were knighted; both were world travelers; both had superb intellects; and both were superb writers.

At the age of eighteen, Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, starting from Holland and ending up in Constantinople. Most of his trip was covered by two volumes he wrote years after the fact: A Time of Gifts (1977), covering from Holland to the Hungarian Border, and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), covering Hungary and Romania. When he died in 2011 at the ripe old age of 96, he will still working on the third volume. I was heartbroken at the loss, feeling I would never find out how his trip ended.

Thanks to his good friends Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron—himself no mean travel writer—the third volume has finally come out. It bears the title The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (2013). Fortunately, enough of the text is pure Fermor, which is quite a complement. Take this passage, for example, describing Romanian Orthodox art:

I was fascinated, and slightly obsessed, by these voivodes and boyars as they appeared in frescoes on the walls of the monasteries they were always piously founding — crowned and bearded figures holding up a miniature painted facsimile of the church itself, with their princesses upholding its other corner, each with a line of brocaded, kneeling sons and daughters receding in hierarchical pyramids behind them. Still more fascinating, later portraits,hanging in the houses of their descendants—some by unknown local artists who travelled through the principalities early in the nineteenth century—showed great boyars of the princely divans, men who bore phenomenal titles, most of them of Byzantine origin, some of them Slav: Great Bans of Craiova, Domnitzas, Bayzadeas, Grant Logothetes, hospodars, swordbearers and cupbearers, all dressed in amazing robes with enormous globular headdresses or high fur hats with diamond-clasped plumes, festooned with necklaces, and jewel-crusted dagger hilts.

What a whiff of Eastern Christianity is in this passage from pages 183-184! It is typical of Fermor’s obscurely beautiful lists that can pop up anywhere in the text.

As if his travel and writing were not enough, Paddy Fermor was a legitimate war hero. During the Nazi occupation of Crete, as a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), he helped organize the Greek resistance and carried off the German commandant, General Heinrich Kreipe, over several mountain ranges to a waiting British submarine. At one point, the captive Kreipe was so impressed by the scenery, that he quoted some lines by Horace in Latin. Fermor finished the quote, also in Latin, at which the astonished Kreipe could only mutter, “Ah, so!” Fermor commented that both he and Kreipe had “drunk at the same fountains” of learning.

Other books by Fermor include the following titles which I have read:

  • The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953)
  • A Time to Keep Silence (1957)
  • Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958)
  • Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966)
  • Three Letters from the Andes (1991)

All are travel books except the first, which is a novel. The only book of his I have not yet read is The Traveller’s Tree (1950), about his sojourn in the Caribbean. Also well worth reading is his wartime colleague W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950). Most of Fermor’s books are available in attractive paperback editions from the New York Review of Books.

“The Enigma of Arrival”

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One of My Favorite Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico

One of My Favorite Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico

I remember the first time I landed at the Manuel Crescencio Rejón Aeropuerto in Mérida, Yucatán, in November 1975. It was my first real trip out of the country (I don’t include Niagara Falls and Tijuana as being quite outside the U.S.), and it was a real eye-opener. It was night, and the vibe was tropical. In the cab to the Hotel Mérida, I passed a huge Coca Cola bottling plant before we took the turn to the right toward Calle 60. So many businesses were open to the street, and families were seated at card tables with beers and sodas. The local men were all dressed in white; and the women wore colorfully embroidered huipiles.

What was different between this and all my previous travels was that I was alone in a strange land and feeling an unusual sense of the remoteness of all my previous experience to what I was experiencing in the moment. I felt like the two huddled figures in Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, “The Enigma of Arrival” (shown above)—except that the streets of Mérida were crowded. I didn’t get much sleep that night, much of which was spent leaning out of my sixth floor window onto Calle 60. All night long, figures walked up and down the street, occasionally stopping in mid-stride to stare right at me. (How did they do that?)

The next morning, I had breakfast at the Restaurant Express, which was right across the street from a 17th century Franciscan church and the old Gran Hotel, which used to be the only one in town around the turn of the century. Eventually, I grew used to the crowds, the food, the warm, humid, floral air. I loved Yucatán and went back there four or five times.

In 1987, V. S. Naipaul wrote a novel entitled The Enigma of Arrival, which discussed the strangeness of his life (he was born in Trinidad) in the English countryside.

I have grown to love the actual enigma of arrival in a different country. I am more alive to everything around me. It is a good feeling.

 

Disaster Days?

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What Fresh Hell Is This?

What Fresh Hell Is This?

Hólmavík in the Strandir region of Iceland’s West Fjords is a strange place. Its main claim to fame is the presence of the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. Now it seems there is a second reason to feel apprehensive about a visit to Hólmavík, especially this time of year when many of the roads are closed.

The reason? In a word, Hörmungardagar, or “Disaster Days.” According to Páll Stefánsson of The Iceland Review:

On Friday’s program, among other activities, is a course in self-pity, a complaint service and an ugly dance performance.

On Saturday, head to the library to find bad books and later listen to the worst Eurovision songs [this could the most dreadful event of all] and the worst poem competition, where very bad coffee will be served. In the local church, sad (and bad) songs will be performed.

On Sunday, an anger management game will be held and a program about what has happened in the region.

The festival is directed by Ester Ösp Valdimarsdóttir, the so-called [huh?] spare time manager of the Strandir region.

I would like to have stayed in Hólmavík for a day or two, but I just couldn’t book a room; so I didn’t want to risk getting stuck there. I did change buses there, however. Toward the end of my trip, I had an all-day bus ride from Isafjorður to Borgarnes, during which I changed buses in Hólmavík in the local supermarket parking lot. The long bus ride from Isafjorður was uncomfortable because the bus was full of backpackers and all their gear, so there was barely room for my feet. Fortunately, the second leg of the trip on on a large and comfy Stræto bus.

I’m sure that if you can find your way to Hólmavík this weekend—fat chance, that!—you’ll find that, after all, you don’t have all that much about which to complain.

By the way, if you’d like to see a sampling of truly dreadful Eurovision songs, click here. And please don’t hold me responsible! You will find that there are musical acts that are far worse than anything even Lawrence Welk could have imagined.

Italy West

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Tourists Wandering the Caminito

Tourists Wandering the Caminito

I was thinking today of Buenos Aires, especially that colorful—but fetching—tourist trap known as La Boca with its short Caminito, a diagonal street about a block long. La Boca (“The Mouth”) was literally the mouth of the now polluted Ria Chuelo. It was also the center of life for the thousands of Italian immigrants who found their way to Argentina between the 1870s and the early 1900s. At one point, the residents declared their independence of their new homeland and raised the flag of Genoa. But President Julio Argentino Roca personally ripped it down.

The bright colors originally were marine paints left over from the shipping that docked here. The neighborhood has an edgy blue collar vibe that finds its center in the soccer football stadium known as La Bombonera (“The Chocolate Box”), home of the Boca Juniors, one of Buenos Aires’s premier football teams.

In 2011, Martine and I took a hop-on, hop-off bus tour of BA that included La Boca, where we stopped for a couple of hours to take pictures and take in all the tacky souvenirs.

Art on the Caminito

Art on the Caminito

Because it is so far distant from the United States, not many Americans find their way 6,000 miles south to Argentina. In our case, we went even farther south, all the way to Tierra Del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia.

I would dearly love to go back there some time and see some of the places we missed. And I’d even like to hang around La Boca some more.

 

Cellphone Hell Is … Other People

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Another Technical Innovation That Has Overstayed Its Welcome

Another Technical Innovation That Has Overstayed Its Welcome

We’ve all seen it. That shit-eating grin and the walkie-talkie walk that says, “I have somebody with whom to carry on a meaningless conversation—and you don’t!” And now the FAA and FCC have okayed the use of mobile phones on planes. Is this a good thing? For every call that actually has to be made, there will be half a thousand stating “We’re in the air over Kansas right now” and “We’ve just landed at ORD and are taxiing to our gate.”

Then there will be the fake business calls just to make the caller look important. I can just imagine the guy at the other end, “What are you saying, Jason? You don’t own any stock, and last I heard you were in bankruptcy proceedings.” Of course, we never hear the tired, slighty pissed off voice at the other end of the line, just the mock triumphalism of the caller.

There are several ways of fighting these self-important a-holes who force you to listed to their bloviating:

  1. Sneeze all over them without covering your mouth.
  2. Spill part of your drink on them and offer to pay their dry-cleaning bill, giving them a false name, address, and telephone number.
  3. Read out loud from your book, making occasional significant gestures in their direction, as if it were all for their benefit.

In the end, I suspect this will not become a major problem, if only because most people are virulently against it. In today’s news, two airlines have come out against allowing cell calls on flights: Delta and JetBlue. If any other airlines join them, I may well vote with my feet, choosing only airlines that place restrictions on the nefarious habit.

It would be nice we could do something about that other noise-making nuisance on long flights: crying babies and whining small children. But on humanitarian grounds, I think I’ll just shut up for now.

Surrender Monkeys? Freedom Fries?

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Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse

Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse

At some point in the recent past, Americans have decided that the French were “surrender monkeys” for their lack of interest in acceding to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Around the same time, French Fries were officially renamed Freedom Fries in the U.S. Congressional Cafeteria.

To me, this is very much a “But what have you done for me recently?” type of judgment. We seem to have forgotten that if it weren’t for French help during the American Revolution, we would be calling them Chips instead and revering the memory of King George III. Not only did we have the help of Lafayette and the Comte de Rochambeau, but a substantial French fleet headed up by Admiral de Grasse (shown above) precipitated Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

When the French had their own revolution a few years later, they paid us the supreme compliment of imitating our Constitution.

In the years since those heady times, we have decided that the French don’t like us. In defense, we’ve decided not to like them. Most of our present attitude is a misconception based on the notion that the French pretend not to understand good plain American English and persist in their twonky little European language. (Far be from us to learn another language, especially since we are the world’s only legitimate certified superpower.)

Martine and I have visited France twice (actually, Martine was born there), and we’ve always met with courtesy, even in Paris. Of course, we both speak French after a fashion—ungrammatical, perhaps, but sufficiently clear. We’ve even been praised for our valiant attempts at speaking the language. I suspect the French know that Martine and I like them, and it shows in our demeanor.

I remember one visit to Paris when I decided to risk ordering a tripe dish. After I nibbled away at it for a bit, I simply mentioned to our waiter, “Monsieur, j’étais trop brave.” (“Sir, I was too brave.”) The waitstaff and surrounding diners broke out laughing, and I joined them. Another time, we were at a little brasserie in Montparnasse, and I found I didn’t have enough francs (that was before the euro) for a tip. Instead, I asked our waiter if he would accept Paris Metro tickets as a tip in lieu of cash—since we were headed out to the airport immediately afterwards. He gratefully accepted and wished us a safe journey back.

With the French, I suspect it’s simply a case of showing attitude and getting attitude in return. Best to leave our attitudes behind in the States and enjoy ourselves among an intelligent and courageous people.

Of Mexican Beer

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One of My Favorites

One of My Favorites

Today I walked into Santa Monica to use a 20% off coupon at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Promenade. Because Martine has another bout of irritable bowel syndrome, she is on a diet of chicken and cookies for now (though I am not sure that is the best thing for her). After buying a couple of DVDs (Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu and Federico Fellini’s 8½) and a Ukrainian mystery novel (Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin), I decided to stop for a quick lunch at La Lotería Grill.

Although beer is one of the beverages which is discouraged because of my Type 2 Diabetes, I decided to risk ordering a Dos Equis Lager to accompany my two tacos de huachinango (that’s Pacific Red Snapper in Nahuatl). I thought as I sipped the beer how much I loved Mexican beers during my many travels in that country between 1975 and 1991. In Yucatán, there was Carta Clara, Montejo Clara, and Léon Negra by the now defunct Cervecería Yucateca, which sold out to Modelo. In Mazatlán and along the Pacific Coast, I would drink Pacifico Clara. And just about anywhere, I would drink Cerveza Superior from Cervecería Cuautémoc-Moctezuma or Corona, the only good beer produced by Grupo Modelo.

Today turned out to be an unseasonably hot day in Southern California, so the beer went down smoothly, as did the fish tacos. It may be months before I venture another bottle of beer, but I will eventually return for that same sensation. And it will probably be another Mexican beer. I have many happy memories with Mexican beers going back a long time.

I don’t write very much of my travels in Mexico. That is mostly because I would have to convert a ton of Kodachrome 25 slides to digital format. I’ll probably do it eventually, and I will regale you with my adventures in Mexico, mostly in Yucatán and Chiápas, but also including Veracruz, Puebla, Oaxaca, Teotihuacán, and Tula. Those were good times, and that’s when I caught the travel bug big time.

Thirteen Trolls for Christmas

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The Icelandic Yule Lads Make Up for Santa Claus

The Icelandic Yule Lads Make Up for Santa Claus

Icelanders celebrate Christmas with the thirteen Yule Lads, or Jólasveinarnir. You might say it’s the 13 Days of Christmas, except these begin on December 12. As they come, day by day, they reward good children by placing gifts into their shoes which have been left on window sills. And if the children are bad, there are always rotten potatoes.

Here is a description of the Yule Lads:

  1. Stekkjarstaur, or “Sheep-Cote Clod.” Harasses sheep, but is impaired by his stiff peg-legs. Arrives December 12, leaves December 25.
  2. Giljagaur, or “Gully Gawk.” Hides in gullies while waiting for an opportunity to sneak into the cowshed and steal milk. Arrives December 13, leaves December 26.
  3. Stúfur, or “Stubby.” Abnormally short. Steals pans to eat the crust left on them. Arrives December 14, leaves December 27.
  4. Þvörusleikir, or “Spoon-Licker.” Steals long-handled wooden spoons (þvörur) to lick. Is extremely thin due to malnutrition. Arrives December 15, leaves December 28.
  5. Pottaskefill, or “Pot-Scraper.” Steals leftovers from pots. Arrives December 16, leaves December 29.
  6. Askasleikir, or “Bowl-Licker.” Hides under beds waiting for someone to put down their askur, or bowl, which he thereupon steals. Arrives December 17, leaves December 30.
  7. Hurðaskellir, or “Door-Slammer.” Likes to slam doors in the middle of the night. Arrives December 18, leaves December 31.
  8. Skyrgámur, or “Skyr-Gobbler.” Likes to steal skyr, the yummy Icelandic equivalent of yogurt. Arrives December 19, leaves January 1.
  9. Bjúgnakrœkir, or “Sausage-Swiper.” Prefers to hide out in the rafters and snatch sausages that were being smoked. Arrives December 20, leaves January 2.
  10. Gluggagœgir, or “Window-Peeper.” A voyeur Yule Lad who would look through windows for things to steal. Arrives December 21, leaves January 3.
  11. Gáttaþefur, or “Doorway-Sniffer.” This one has an unusually large nose and an acute sense of smell which he uses to locate laufabrauð. Arrives December 22, leaves January 4.
  12. Ketkrókur, or “Meat-Hook.” As you can probably guess, he uses a hook to steal meat. Arrives December 23, leaves January 5.
  13. Kertasníkir, or “Candle-Stealer.” Follows children around in order to steal their candles (and eat them), Arrives December 24, leaves January 6.

The above illustration differs slightly from the above list, which is taken from Wikipedia, You get the general idea, though. Instead of a quick slide down the chimney with presents to leave under the tree, and leaving as soon as the milk and cookies have been imbibed, these snarky little trolls will take up more than three weeks of your time in all stealing your food, rogering your wife, making your dog pregnant, and causing various other types of mischief.

Just between you and me, I’ll take Santa.

Where Everbody Knows Your Name

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Not Always an Advantage!

Not Always an Advantage!

The theme song of the old Cheers TV sitcom touts the advantages of hanging out “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.” But what if you lived in a small city in an even smaller country where you can’t go anywhere without recognizing friends, acquaintances, and co-workers? Such is the case in Reykjavik, Iceland. The population of Reykjavik is only 199,000, and the population of Iceland stands at 322,000.

I was reading an interesting article on The Reykjavik Grapevine by Valur Gunnarsson entitled “Why Is There No Dating in Iceland?” according to which:

If you were to go out on a date with someone, say to the movies or a coffee shop, you would invariably bump into someone you know. Said person would give you a curious glance, perhaps followed by a smirk and then ask everyone you mutually know: “Are those two seeing each other?” The cat is out of the bag by now and your first and perhaps only date suddenly feels more like an engagement ceremony.

Much better then to wait until the lights go out, everyone you know has gone home, is too drunk to care or engaged in their own business. In other words, going out, getting hammered and then heading home with whoever happens to be standing next to you at closing time carries much less social penalty than meeting in broad daylight. It is widely understood that what happens at the bar doesn’t really count. Leave it until the morning after to figure out if you two really have something in common and if the same thing happens again next weekend with the same person, you have yourself a relationship.

One of the reasons the dating scene in Reykjavik is no notorious is that men and women can’t get to know each other in a social setting without being observed and commented on by their peers. Young Icelanders tend to hang out in bars and go home with one another for an “afterparty” around closing time. What happens at or after the “afterparty” is anybody’s guess, but the word is that it’s a pretty wild scene. There is even a book by the notorious Roosh Vorek entitled Bang Iceland: How to Sleep with Icelandic Women in Iceland, which is a popular item among the more randy international travelers.

(Allow me to say that I have had no such dealings with Icelandic women during my two trips to their country. I’m a respectable old man who needs his sleep.)

Gunnarsson continues:

The flipside of drunken sex is that Icelandic relationships actually develop quite quickly. Whereas in bigger cities the whole vetting process may take weeks or even months while you are asked about everything except your bank statements and family history of mental disease (and sometimes even that), people here tend to jump directly into a committed relationship right after the second sleepover, or thereabouts. In fact, it is generally considered bad form not to. Once doesn’t matter, but do it twice without following through and you start to get a bad reputation.

This all goes back to point two again. The smallness. Dating several people at the same time is socially impossible. Everyone would know. Fistfights would ensue. Better to do the trial and error one person at a time, which is why Icelanders tend to have a series of either one-night stands or serious relationships, but no overlapping dates. So now you know.

One result of this non-dating sexual behavior is that there is a large number of illegitimate children born on the island. Fortunately, there is little or no stigma attached to a single parent entering into a marriage. It does have the advantage of stirring up an otherwise rather static gene pool. (In 2013, it was estimated that 93.44% of the population is of Icelandic ancestry.)

A Two-Tiered Highway System

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Bus Accident in the Andes

Bus Accident in the Andes

Peru is a major destination for international tourism. It can also be a deadly one. While the nation has improved the highway system connecting such tourist magnets as Lima, Arequipa, Nazca, Cusco, and Arequipa, many large towns in the Andes are linked by roads that are unsafe. This is compounded by the fact that not only the highways, but also the long-distance bus lines, are also two-tiered. A point-to-point Cruz del Sur, Oltursa, or Ormeño bus will generally get you to your destination safely; but a second class bus plying the roads between such cities as Huancayo and Ayacucho takes much longer, picks up and drops off passengers whenever requested, and is likely to have an overtired driver who has been at the job for over twelve hours. When that is combined with night driving, inclement weather, and bad roads, the result can be a fatal accident such as the one illustrated above.

According to the Peru This Week website:

Congresswoman [Veronika] Mendoza has highlighted the inequality inherent in the consistent state of disrepair of roads in rural Peru. “It absolutely cannot be that only roads on tourist routes are in a good condition while the internal transport highways that Cusquenos use aren’t being cared for in the same way,” Mendoza stated, later adding that “We also have to consider the additional difficulty for transportation that the arrival of the rainy season will bring.”

Statistics released by Sutran, Peru’s national government land transport authority, reveal that road deaths have risen dramatically in the past year. According to El Comercio, deaths caused by road accidents from January to August 2013 have risen 36.5% compared with the same period last year.

Many American tourists are interested in following the line of the Andes and visiting the highland cities with their spectacular mountain views and native arts and crafts. While this is not impossible, there is considerable risk attached to such an itinerary.

Photo of Serrano Boy

Photo of Serrano Boy

Part of the problem is that, as in other countries that are racially divided, Peru suffers from racism against serranos and cholos, descendants of the Incas and other peoples inhabiting the Andes. We tend to think of the Andean tribal peoples as being the majority in Peru, but that is not the case: The narrow coastal desert zone holds the majority of the population as well as the economical and political power. The result is that the rural Andes are underserved by good roads and public transportation.

If and when my planned trip to Peru takes place, I will be careful to take the first class buses to major tourist destinations—at least until I have been able to scope out the situation myself.