Friday 1 September 2017

borscht belt

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we’re invited on an idyll odyssey with Pablo Iglesias Maurer inspired by a lot of vintage postcards depicting resorts of the Catskills and the Poconos during their heyday fifty years ago juxtaposed with their present state of wrack and ruin.
The ephemeral nature of the missives served their purpose—much like snapshots on social media—but isn’t meant to rubbish those destinations and experiences now abandoned, while at the same the medium romances both the nostalgia and the decay. What do you think?  Surely the portrayals are all the more awful for those with a connection to the places. We’ve a sudden urge to watch Dirty Dancing and inspect the facilities at Kellerman’s. Be sure to visit the links up top for a whole gallery of rather sad then-and-now transitions.

Thursday 1 June 2017

stockenten oder libellen

In Brandenburg not far removed from Berlin, there is a unique and protected natural reserve known as the Spreewald (the forested lands of the river that runs through the capital or Bล‚ota, the swamp, in the regional Sorbian language) shaped during the retreating phases of the last Ice Age and irrigated, kept from flooding at bay by a labyrinthine network of over one hundred and fifty “navigable” canals (FlieรŸe) spanning over fifteen hundred kilometres in all.
Many visitors to the area avail themselves on a punting tour through picturesque villages like Lehde only accessible by water (with no motorised traffic allowed) but a lot of tourist stake out their own adventures in kayaks readily available for hire and paddle through the landscape on eye-level with ducks (deserving of their own ethnographic treatment) and various tribes of dragon-flies and privileged pushing along as silent as a cloud to some remarkably peaceful scenery.
We ended up taking little footage of our drifting through the reeds due to a bit of gun-shyness with our not water-proofed cameras that was probably for the best after all in terms of travel time not to mention sites we are hardly worthy of seeing, plagued by mosquitoes and my inferior piloting as we were, but it was an experience that we’d recommend without stint to anyone and we’re sorry for the limited opportunity to explore—we’ll have to return for a longer stay one day soon.

Sunday 30 April 2017

lido deck

In what seems like a scene from an increasingly more daunting and improbable action, demolition movie, as Super Punch informs, luxury automotive manufacturer Ferrari and a Norwegian cruise-line are teaming up to furnish the Shanghai to Tianjin route with a leviathan of a boat which will have a double-decker race track on board, among other amenities. Would you like this sort of vacation experience?  That’s a far cry certainly from a nice and sedate round of shuffle-board.

Sunday 16 April 2017

cross-roads

Though I can’t say for certain that many hikers will cross our path, we discovered that our new home, remote and rather secluded as it is, lies just behind the intersection of two of the European Long Distance Routes (the nearest point of reference shared by both trails is the City of Coburg), marked and maintained hiking paths that follows ancient trade and pilgrimage routes. From north to south, one stretches from Lapland through Finland and Sweden through Germany and Austria to the Adriatic coast, and from west to east, the other spans from Spain following el Camino de Santiago (der Jakobsweg) through France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic onto the shores of the Black Sea in Bulgaria. What an amazing journey to embark on and to think we are at if not the centre-point at least a nexus of sorts.

Thursday 2 March 2017

moonshot

According to an announcement by SpaceX CEO and visionary Elon Musk, a manned-mission to the Moon will take place next year. The craft will not land but rather loop around the dark side of the Moon and make several passes, skimming close to the surface—close enough to fill the entire cockpit’s view with the lunar landscape. Two space “tourists” who’ll have much more than a passive role as astronauts are in training already and are fully committed. As exciting as this mission will be in its own right, it more importantly paves the way for future missions and significantly brings down the cost and cruises in space may in a few years be within all our aspirations.

Sunday 19 February 2017

agent orange

Revoltingly—and unclear whether the US ambassador thought of this stupid cruelty himself or it was part of some State Department hazing ritual to prove oneสผs absolute loyalty to the new regime, the president of the eastern African nation and one of the seven majority Muslim countries under Dear Leaderสผs travel ban was presented with a baseball cap with a variation of the white-supremacist dog-whistle of slogan, “Make Somalia Great Again.” Mohamed Abdullahi “Farmajo” Mohamed (who happens to be a US national) was not available for immediate comment but seemed to grudgingly accept the gift—which is far more patience and poise that could be expected out of anyone in such an awkward and inappropriate situation.

Monday 13 February 2017

asking for a friend

Of course having nothing to declare at customs is far more believable than not participating in social media but when travelling to the police states of the world—be it China that takes the full suite of finger-prints of its visitors or the US that just demands passwords to one’s social media accounts, one ought to be fully prepared to sacrifice something, like a decoy wallet with sufficient funds to score a high or a dummy but maintained account that might be enough to satisfy the goons at border control. One is penalised for opting out. As specious as the argument is that if one has nothing to hide, then one has nothing to fear, it is just as faulty as believing that the nebulous authorities already enjoy full-access anyway.
Granted that to a significant degree, we are individually protected by the size of the herd, there is still such a thing as privacy and personal space that the minions of security-theatre haven’t yet managed to infiltrate and some hosts with the integrity not to open the back-door to snoops and spies. Unlike in countries where private deportment can be punishable by death, the concern in the West is not so much that governments want to expose deviant leanings or infidelities—though that may not be far off under administration of holy-rollers, or would blackmail individuals with such information, but rather that incriminating materials or connections could be easily fabricated in order to assassinate the character of those not in step and critical of the regime and its policies. It would be a technical simple feat to scan one’s devices as they go through check-points and plant something illicit on them. Taking intrusion to the next level, social media access could be used to inflict all sorts of damage, setting off false daisy-chains of associations and label one as Status Non-Gratis for life. Forbidden materials wouldn’t be restricted to the physical memory of one’s devices, but could be deployed to the รฆther to be recalled when needed. Who knows? We subversives may already have a script floating out there somewhere, ready for our own consummation and famacide, once our usefully has lapsed.

Tuesday 3 January 2017

7x7

condominium: uninhabited islet switches sovereignty on a semi-annual basis

bright lights, big city: breath-taking nocturnal aerial photography from Vincent LaForet

bless this mess: encouraging, compassionate steps to take for better house-keeping

mid-west world: a small Iowa town is a draw for Chinese tourists wanting to experience the authentic American bread-basket, via the always brilliant Super Punch

cosmogram: an assortment of some of NASA’s best photographs of the past year, via the forever marvellous Nag on the Lake

brooding: long incubation periods may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs

bodensee: the international borders of Lake Constance mean different things to each nation that shares it

Tuesday 6 December 2016

cadenas d’amour

Parisian authorities at the bidding of a local preservation group are making the sixty five tonnes of love-locks removed from various bridges throughout the city available to members of the public who would like to own a piece (or a whole lot of pieces) of modern architectural history. Twenty tonnes alone were salvaged from the scenic Pont de l’Archevรชchรฉ. Proceeds will go to support those who help refugee families integrate and settle and despite the heart-ache that might have come about in knowing that symbolic bond was broken, it is a fitting end to a testament to love that wasn’t permitted to weather the ages. Perhaps other similarly besotted spots might follow suit.

Monday 14 November 2016

aan de amsterdamse grachten

After a week like the last one, H and I needed to redeem a gift and spend the weekend in Amsterdam.
Even if the rhetoric were to cool down and the candidate were to conduct himself in a more becoming manner, for the partisans in the US that elevated the forty-fifth presumptive to high-office, that pot has already been stirred. Even if genuinely capable of healing the polar divide of the American people and its broader mission that validates nationalistic leanings, those who put him in office are not wanting to see a conciliatory, contrite candidate who might retract some of the more outrageous hyperbole. There will be consequences for each campaign promise not lived up to—and sooner rather than later.  Maybe the city’s reputation as Pinocchio’s Island of the Donkey Boys is not undeserved as it’s always prepared and equipped for a good time—and not necessarily one tinged with regret and near-misses, and I wonder if it’s not some apt metonym for the hard repelling to the right.
It’s a living community obviously but limned with the extremes of revelry and reflection—in the history, the museums whose curation is an ancient one, and its once pinnacled past as the richest spot on Earth due to mercantilism and a service economy, whose tulip-based stock exchange is a cautionary-tale. I wonder what it’s like for the denizens to cope in that sort of environment. I’d imagine that it would be pretty fun to switch—if it weren’t for the crush of tourists and vested interest to make the Amsterdam the backdrop of their expectations, and I’m sure that individuals with a certain threshold gravitate to such places on a more permanent basis as well. Amsterdam is no political surrogate so no matter and it was a treat exploring the alleyways and canals and watching the juxtaposition and wondering how those forces of Nature that drove different proclivities had the wind knocked out of their sails just here at that moment—just short of cancelling on another out.
The XXX that’s featured prominently all over the city—on its banners and emblems, is not the origin of an explicit rating or highly potent liquor though that might seem appropriate but three crosses (saltires) of Andrew the Apostle—patron of fishermen who was crucified, tortuously tethered on the more common x-shaped construction—but according to legend represents the triple threat to the city of fire, flood and pestilence and are probably of a mutable character, given the drift of the times.

Sunday 11 September 2016

colossus and curio

After reading about Iowa County Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, a sprawling labyrinthine campus of connected wings built in the late 1940s by an eccentric collector to house an expansive and random collection of artefacts (whose provenance and authenticity could not always be vouched for, so there are no more labels or signs)—which includes the world’s largest indoor merry-go-round, an “infinity room” that juts off the edge of the cliff it’s perched on, a mock Victorian street, wax-figures, elaborate Glockenspiel and other musical automatons, besides displays of historic dresses, chandeliers and Santa Claus figurines, I was reminded of the time we visited the Colossus of Prora on Germany’s Baltic coast and spent a day in its museum.

The four and a half kilometer long compound hugging the beach was to be a monumental retreat for Nazi party members and service-members on shore-leave, a resort with accommodations for twenty thousand and available to all at nominal prices—but was never completed and abandoned.



The East Germany army had used a small portion of the building up until Reunification, when it was wholly deserted. When we visited, one could wander the neglected and graffiti-spattered but sturdy corridors freely, and there was only one central column that was put to any use at all, hosting a youth hostel and a museum, curated by a local family.
Being that Seebad Prora has been refurbished and sold off as luxury condominiums, I doubt the museum with its random exhibits of taxidermy, mock-ups of East German Command and Control and the typical resort room plus the typical East German living-room, geology, motorcycles, grade-three’s artwork, some exhibits defying explanation, a lot of Ostalgie and a Viennese cafรฉ are there any longer.
It does make me sad to think that there was no room for someone as passionate about history (and wanted to make sure that that place and those times did not fall into total obscurity) as the individual who commissioned the House on the Rock above—and despite the chaos, I do remember that every item was well researched and documented—but maybe all these artefacts got to stay together, somewhere.  That rugged and quiet beach is probably again off-limits to the all-comers as well.

Here are all the images of Prora that I could find from our visit and exploration back in the summer of 2010.  One ought to really visit such places when one has the chance, since one can never say if it will always be accessible to the curious public.

Sunday 4 September 2016

churfrankenland

We had heard of the Kurhesse region or even Churmainz previously (referring to the principalities’ electoral passing influence) but never before the term Churfranken, which was adopted not too long ago by a consortium of towns, villages and singular destinations along the River Main between the Spessart and Odenwald mountain ranges to promote themselves. We took advantage of the extended weekend to take a drive through this area and saw a few of the sites.
First, we toured the grounds of Schloss Mespelbrunn, an early Renaissance moated castle and keep still owned by the same noble family, governor of the Archbishop of Mainz six centuries on. We had the briefest of tours before being inundated with the crowds from a tour bus that had just arrived, but we were able to navigate through the trophy room ourselves and marvel at the authentic state of the elements and embellishments.
We clung to the river’s banks, crisscrossing several bridges and saw quite a lot along the way before stopping in historic Miltenberg. Here too, we unexpectedly found ourselves overwhelmed with crowds—there was a huge festival going on, but had a nice walk through the town nonetheless. Established as Roman fortress because of its strategic and defensible location, the town prospered throughout the Middle Ages because of its deposits of red sandstone, a distinctive building material much valued all over Europe.
The market, town gates and scores of half-timbered (Fachwerk) houses were absolutely charming and well-preserved. Among the main sites is the inn Zum Riesen (the Giant), whose registration documents dating back to the early 1400s make it one of the oldest, continuously running hotels in the world, with its guests including Holy Roman emperors, kings, generals, Napolรฉon, chancellors and Elvis Presley. We’ll have to return here soon and explore more.

Wednesday 31 August 2016

gas, food, lodging

Thanks to the resplendent Kottke, we learn about one man’s personal odyssey and motivational master-class to escape the tethers of mortgage and utilities and being roped to particular plot of real estate (the German and French terms Immobilie betray its Latin roots as something that can’t be moved) and live off (or along perhaps) the grid with a custom camper van.
The entire process is assiduously documented for any of those that might be inspired to do the same, plus follow on adventures cross-country. I particularly liked the poetic juxtaposition in that one of the places he visited was the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California—not only for the sheer delight in realising and then reveling in the fact that one probably would have never seen this place if not for a motoring lifestyle—articulated and embellished endlessly by the heiress to the rifle manufacturer’s fortune in order to confuse and confound the spirits of those who had been killed by fire-arms that haunted the mansion with stairwells to nowhere and labyrinthine architecture: minimalism in contrast to interminable elaboration. Of course, Lady is in a class by herself—but this installation is nearly, nearly as well outfitted.

Tuesday 16 August 2016

sturz oder post and lintel

Goslar has been honoured with an ensemble of UNESCO accolades, some tied to a place and some not, and so it was pretty remarkable to find another piece of World Heritage reconstructed in one of the suburbs of the town.
In Hahnenklee, there is a stave church, called the Gustav-Adolf (named after the Swedish monarch that reigned during the Thirty Years’ War and made his country a European power) and was constructed in 1907, inspired by those outstanding examples to be found in Norway.
Many of the main architectural elements come from the iconic edifice of Borgund, but the wooden structure is a pastiche of all then surviving examples. The interior felt like being in the galley of a great wooden ship, a reflection of the Vikings’ sea-going skills translated to architecture and preserved for the ages.
The organ, housed in all that ornate carpentry, was something brilliant in itself but the musical possibilities don’t end there. Just separated from the congregation hall stands a belfry that houses a carillon (Glockenspiel) and a very skilled carilloneur gives performances on the church lawn in the summers.

Monday 15 August 2016

unterkunft oder happiness hotel

Recently, H and I were invited to tour the Imperial City of Goslar near the Harz Mountain range (more on the city later) by H’s parents. I wanted to remark first on the accom- modations that they choose, this being the first time that they’d not consulted a travel-agent but rather booked directly.  I think sometimes we distain and down-play the institutional-knowledge of travel-agents to our vacation peril although most things can be arranged under our own agency, and they found a pretty posh hotel. We noticed after checking-in, there were a few unaccountable irregularities: every second room being labelled Frau or Herr So-and-So instead of just with room numbers and I room hidden in the back of our suite that contained one of those Craftmatic adjustable beds.
Little by little, we discover that this hotel, spread over several buildings in the city-centre, was embedded within a senior-residence, Altersheim. Perhaps this was no novel arrangement but it was new to me and struck me as pretty ingenious as a model of mixed-used properties and integration.   We didn’t dine with the home’s population—but I thought we ought to have, but they weren’t hidden and sequestered either and seemed to appreciate the new faces. Perhaps the suites were held in reserve for elderly parents and children visiting to see if this place was right for them, or for visiting children—that maybe sadly was not booked often enough. We weren’t shopping for assisted-living for anyone, so I hope no one felt like that or assumed otherwise but it was a valuable but not oppressive lesson.
In addition to the uniqueness of the temporary and longer-term residencies, the edifice was moreover a great house dating the early Middle Ages with plenty of artefacts on display and the birth- and death home of one apprentice apothecary Dr Albert Niemann, who famously chemically isolated cocaine. The good doctor’s short life, however, was not owing to smack, but rather for a more infamous discovery, the precursor catalyst reactions that lead to mustard gas, whose experiments fatally damaged his lungs.

Tuesday 9 August 2016

lost in translation

The Local, the German daily in English, recounts the unlikely misadventures of a Chinese tourist, who after losing his wallet, in Heidelberg, attempted to report it as missing, only to find himself in a asylum processing centre for over a week before be allowed to continue on with his European vacation. It’s unclear how this chain of events went unbroken for so long, but compliant and obliging, the man surrendered his passport in exchange for refugee documents and accepted the daily allowance that the centre distributed. Perhaps it’s not so strange or naรฏve to imagine that that might (or ought to) be the customary and expected reception for a traveler potentially down on his luck.

Thursday 28 July 2016

fjord fairlane

Although I was delighted every time we had to take a ferry whilst navigating Norway, I could imagine that the routine could get a little grating for a daily commute, and so as TYWKIWDBI informs—the country may soon be offering drivers an alternative in the form of tubular floating bridges that are buoyant at a point several metres below the surface of the water. The unconventional engineering is required, which should be rather seamless for drivers in a land already replete with underwater tunnels, as the fjords’ terrain is too difficult to raise a traditional bridge and delve too deeply to drill a regular tunnel—plus spoiling the scenery too, I suppose.

Monday 25 July 2016

ancinne rรฉgime

At first I thought that the high concentration of chรขteaux along the Loire, some three hundred and each more picturesque than the last, was at first something like a competition among the favoured and bourgeoisie, like the skyscrapers of San Gimignano that were built taller and taller to try to keep up with and out-do the Joneses, but I quickly realised that side-by-side comparisons of grand-opulence were not possible as the stately homes were located on vast, landscaped estates—well away from any prying neighbours. Once I thought there was another palace within view but found out that that was just the carriage house.
The monarch of France throughout the Middle Ages until the dawn of the Renaissance only ruled a very small kingdom—confined to the region around Paris, the รŽle de France, but consolidating power in the capital caused the landed-gentry to shift their power-base as well but rather than abandon their beloved countryside in Central France for the city, ancient fortifications were transformed into outstanding summer residences, maintained at great expense but keeping the fertile river valley (the Loire being the longest river in the country) in the hands of the aristocracy.
The walls, moats and high-ground locations betray their defensive roots but the structural elements of castle and keep were civilised after a fashion and converted into quite luxurious accommodations. Each rich with heritage and history, the three chรขteaux we visited were (from top to bottom) Azay-le-Rideau, Chambord and Chenonceau but we know we must return soon for more exploration.

Sunday 24 July 2016

house-arrest ou le chรขteau d’olรฉron

The settlement that has grown over the centuries around Le Chรขteau d’Olรฉron is arguably most famous as the place where Henry II held his troublesome but otherwise irreproachable wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine captive for sixteen years for conniving to replace him as sovereign of England and outremar with their eldest son.  

Surely not the worst of places to wile away one’s sentence, but it turned out to be all the more endearing to us with the hindsight of nine hundred years that we’d visited this place (at least the Vauban fortifications and harbour) a mere five years hence and had forgotten about it—like the Wizard Gandalf said, “I have no memory of this place,” but being as function follows form for citadels, certain patterns start to emerge that tend to blur together.
Happily we had not remembered as we got to discover more, including the rows of former oyster-mongers bright water-colour shacks that had been conserved and converted to boutiques and studios—which reminded me of the laboratories and dwellings of the court alchemists of Prague whose workshops around the castle were resigned to a similar fate but didn't cost an extra entry fee to see—strongholds of Protestantism where the Huguenots had refuge given the island’s remote location, the Jesuit abbey converted into the Mairie, the city hall and chamber of commerce, and the historic square with a fountain that marked in neo-Renaissance style the inclusion of รŽle d’Orรฉlon on the circuit of the Tour de France, acknowledged some ninety years after a jibe with competing publishers of a bicycle and a car magazines decided to put rubber to the road.  
Our bike trekking here, though no where near epic, took us through some really amazing landscapes of the island.

Wednesday 13 July 2016

campfire stories ou dame de la moselle

Our trip started with a bit of a fright and a mystery. Just back to the campsite just short of midnight after watching the football finale—and admittedly surprised and respectful that France, our and their host, had taken their defeat at the hands of Portugal with such model sportsmanship and rather than rioting, there were cheers and fireworks for the winners.

We were in Metz, not the game‘s venue in Paris but perhaps as we were more fearful of the former rather than anything else, this nightmare fuel did not really have the chance to settle in or register much further, and H, having arrived a moment before me, warmed me not to be scared of the ghostly apparition with her back to us in a white slip.  One never gets better than such grainy evidence.  Click to enlarge, if you dare.
Like something straight out of a horror movie, the figure was communing with something and oblivious to us. H clicked the door lock which reports a heavy clunk and flashes the parking lights. This only caused her to position herself behind the camper.

Now, with her out of sight, I was creeped out by the thought she might crawl under the bus to get me. The Lady in White however ambled on towards the shores of the Moselle where the campgrounds were more densely packed (we were in the last pitch) but strangely, no one was about to notice her.
I ventured that maybe it was her time to return beneath the waters. A few days later, it elicits a shudder. To dispel this visitation, please enjoy a few brighter impressions of Metz. Subsequent campsites were markedly less fraught with fright.