Category: Travel

From Kirk Yetholm to Edale: On the Road Again

Nancy Vieira CoutoLeave a comment
The Pennine Way by Humphrey Bolton, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

After my stop in Xi’an, I was eager to resume my walk. But was I ready for a difficult multi-year trek to the Russian Far East and the Bering Strait? Would I arrive in winter, and would the strait be frozen solidly enough so that I could walk across the ice, possibly wondering whether Sarah Palin was watching me from her house? Did I have warm enough socks? (Even on a virtual trip it is always important to have good socks.) After serious weighing of pros and cons, I decided it was time for something completely different. Of course it was!

Here’s what I did: I transported myself to Kirk Yetholm, a Scottish village close to the English border. My plan was to walk the Pennine Way north to south in the footsteps of Simon Armitage, as described in his book Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey. I should add—not that you haven’t already guessed—that my footsteps would be completely virtual, although Armitage’s footsteps were earned, every one of them.

Most hikers walk the Pennine Way from south to north, but Armitage chose to walk in the wrong direction because, as a poet, he was “naturally contrary.” Well, yes, poets are contrary, but the real reason was that he wanted to walk toward rather than away from his home, which happened to be at the southern end of the route. Makes sense to me. He borrowed a rucksack from his mum and planned to rely on the kindness of strangers and friends to drive his heavy suitcase from each stopping point to the next, because who on a three-week walking trip wants to stop and do laundry? Besides, a poet never travels without his books, and the books were in the suitcase. The walk was well planned. Armitage posted his schedule on his website and announced his plan to give a poetry reading at each village along the way (with the exception of Once Brewed, where he would arrive on the day of the World Cup Final). To raise money for incidental expenses along the way, he planned to pass a hat; when the time came, he decided on a sock instead of a hat, as the sock provided a measure of privacy for the contributors. He did quite well with the sock, although the many £1 coins he received made his suitcase even heavier. At one point he was able to “launder” them—the coins, not his dirty clothes.

Simon Armitage is the current Poet Laureate of the UK, but I heard of him when he was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2015, five years after his hike down the spine of England. Of course it was his walking that interested me. Poets tend to be walkers—think William Wordsworth, John Clare, and, closer to home, A. R. Ammons, who once wrote a famous essay about poetry and walking. The essay, titled “A Poem Is a Walk,” first appeared in print in Epoch 18 (Fall 1968) and is now all over the internet for anyone who knows how to google. Ammons—called “Archie” by those of us who knew him—said this: “How does a poem resemble a walk? First, each makes use of the whole body, involvement is total, both mind and body. . . . The pace at which a poet walks (and thinks), his natural breath-length, the line he pursues, whether forthright and straight or weaving and meditative, his whole ‘air,’ whether of aimlessness or purpose—all these things and many more figure into the ‘physiology’ of the poem he writes.” Archie had much more to say about poetry and walking, and his essay is well worth reading.

Of course Archie is right, and I am oversimplifying a complex argument when I say that poems are made of motion, footprint by footprint. Iambs are footprints, heel toe, heel toe, and if you trip on a pebble or get momentarily stuck in a mucky peat bog, you might get something resembling an anapest or a dactyl. Even if you don’t count your footsteps, they are there, heel-toeing across the page, returning home. Writing poetry is hard. You need warm socks and sturdy boots if you are to go the distance.

I am reading Simon Armitage’s book as I make my virtual footprints along the Pennine Way. I am almost keeping up with him, headed toward Hawes village, which promises furniture stores and pastry shops. I will enjoy the pastry shops, I think. So let’s go walk some poems. I already have the boots.

Kashgar to Xi’an: I Did It!

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Image by Christel SAGNIEZ from Pixabay

Yes, I did it! I walked most of the way across China, starting at Kashgar, a city near China’s western border. Although I walked the miles actually (really, truly), I accomplished the trip virtually (not really, not truly), tracking my progress on a spreadsheet and a map, putting one foot in front of the other wherever my feet happened to be, which was not China. I have never been to China. I would like to go there someday, but in the meantime walking is good exercise, and for me the exercise is more meaningful—i.e., less boring—if I feel I’m getting somewhere. 

My walk from Kashgar to Xi’an was the third leg of my great Silk Road adventure. Part one, which I started on August 1, 2018, took me from Istanbul to Tehran, a distance of 1994 miles. I completed that journey on November 24, 2019, and immediately started part two, a 1948-mile trek from Tehran to Kashgar. Heading still farther east, I left Kashgar on March 12, 2021, and arrived at my destination last Sunday, September 25, 2022, having walked (virtually) 2582 miles of deserts and orchards and glacial waterways. That’s 6524 miles in five years, one month, and twenty-five days. I didn’t rush. 

Bernard Ollivier, a retired French journalist, did me one better by walking approximately the same route as mine back at the turn of this century—an in-person walk—and then writing about his experiences in a three-volume set of books: Out of Istanbul, Walking to Samarkand, and Winds of the Steppe. I was more than halfway through my own journey when I learned about his books; I haven’t read the first two, and I’ve only dipped into the last one. 

Kashgar, which was a major stop along the Silk Road, is famous for its Sunday market and for its varied citizenry. According to Ollivier, “every single Central Asian ethnic group is represented. Local Uyghurs wear Western dress. but the others—Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Mongols, Tjiks, Uzbeks, and Afghans—are often in traditional garb.” 

After Kashgar, I hiked through the deserts and mountains of the Xianjiang region, stopping in Aksu and Korla to eat (in my imagination) the delicious apples and pears that those cities are famous for. You can read about that part of my trip here: 

Slow: Kashgar to Aksu

And finally, as they say in the GPS world, I have reached my destination: Xi’an, capital city of Shaanxi Province and the oldest surviving capital of ancient China. More specifically, I have arrived at Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum. Although the buried army of clay soldiers was constructed from 246 to 206 BC, it was uncovered relatively recently. The soldiers, each with individual facial features, were designed to guard First Emperor Qin in his afterlife. More than 700,000 workers were required to construct them. The artisans used molds for heads, limbs, and torsos, assembled the parts, and then applied more clay to the surfaces of the heads so that artists could add individual features to faces and hairdos. In 1987 UNESCO designated the tomb as a World Cultural Heritage Site. I would love to visit that museum in person, but I am grateful to all the wonderful photographers who have made their images available on the internet. 

Having reached my goal, what should I do next? I could check out the famous Bell Tower and the city’s crenellated fortifications. Or I could spend a couple of days sampling the fare at Xi’an’s best restaurants—after doing laundry, of course, and washing my hair. But no, the world is big and full of wonders. I have other places to go and other things to do. In fact, I have already mapped out my next journey, which I’m excited about, and I’ve started walking. More about that next time. However, before I left Xi’an I couldn’t resist paying a quick visit to First Noodle Under the Sun—this delightfully named restaurant does exist in Xi’an, and it gets good reviews!—for a nourishing (imaginary) meal to sustain me as I set off for new adventures.

My (Not Typical Tourist) Visit to the Capitol 

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United States Capitol, East Front—public domain image courtesy of Library of Congress

            It was a kinder, gentler time, or at least I thought it was. I was unemployed and unhappy, and I wanted—no, needed—to go somewhere. My friend Joyce, who was about to move to Washington to seek her fortune, offered me a ride. Although Washington was not on my list of places to go for a fresh start, it was definitely somewhere. I started packing. 

            Joyce had already made arrangements to move in with a college roommate, so I got a room in McLean Gardens, a conglomeration of red-brick apartment houses and rooming houses with a Marriott Hot Shoppe on the grounds for those of us without cooking facilities. McLean Gardens was conveniently located on Wisconsin Avenue, just a bus ride away from downtown Washington, the White House, the National Gallery of Art, and the Capitol. 

            Before either of us started job hunting, Joyce and I spent a couple of days seeing the sights. We visited the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and JFK’s grave at Arlington Cemetery. And then we went to the Capitol; we walked up the front steps and through the front door, looked around briefly, and used the ladies’ room. On the third day, I decided to try my luck at the temporary typing agencies. 

            Joyce was looking for her dream job. I wasn’t so ambitious, but I could type 65 words a minute on a manual typewriter. At the first temporary agency I went to, they let me take the test on a manual and then offered me a two-week job at an insurance company. I would, however, have to use an electric typewriter, which I had never even seen up close and personal. “Bluff it, honey,” said the woman at the agency. 

            Imagine my surprise when Joyce showed up at my room a few days later to tell me she was giving up on Washington. Jobs were scarce, or at least the good ones were, and she was driving back to Massachusetts to reassemble her career plans. Once again she offered me a ride, but this time I said no, thank you. The people at the insurance company were friendly, a nice co-worker had already pointed out the switch that started the electric typewriter, and I wanted to see how this latest phase of my life was going to play out. Joyce left, and I was on my own.

            When the insurance job ended, I got lucky. I was one of several recent college graduates hired by the National Academy of Sciences to administer fellowship applications for the National Science Foundation. We were not scientists. Mostly we just opened envelopes and filed the contents in dossiers. But it was a congenial office, and I liked working there. This temporary job lasted all fall and winter, culminating with the arrival of the panels of senior scientists who would select the fellowship recipients. 

            Each weekend, after laundry and shopping, I took advantage of that Wisconsin Avenue bus—I think it might have been the 30-something—to visit one of Washington’s magnificent museums. A whole year of Sundays wouldn’t have been long enough to fully appreciate the treasures in the National Gallery of Art, and my last stop each visit was the room with Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings. I went to other museums as well, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, which shared a bus stop with the Capitol. That’s when I got into trouble. 

United States Capitol, West Front—public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

            You see, it had been a long bus ride, possibly longer than usual because of traffic or crowds, and I had to go to the ladies’ room. For some crazy reason, I thought the Folger Library, being a smaller museum, might not have a ladies’ room. Since I knew the restrooms at the Capitol were right near the front entrance, I thought: Why not pop into the Capitol, do what I have to do, and then head over to the Folger Library? 

            Here’s what I didn’t know: The Capitol has two fronts, the East Front and the West Front. I don’t know which front Joyce and I had entered through on that first week in Washington, but this time I was certainly at the other one. There was no ladies’ room at the entrance or even around the corner. I kept thinking I was remembering wrong and if I just took another turn, went a few steps farther, then there it would be in all its porcelain glory. No luck. After a few wrong turns, I was lost. I couldn’t even find my way back to the door. When I saw a line of people who seemed to know where they were heading, I joined them. Soon we were entering a large chamber, possibly the House of Representatives, and someone was taking tickets. I didn’t have one, so I quickly said excuse me and backed out into the hall. I wished I had brought a compass or at least a map. 

            After a few more anxious minutes, I found myself in a corridor that seemed to contain offices. There were names on the doors, but I didn’t recognize any of them. And then a distinguished-looking older man came out of one of the doors and asked me where I was going and whether he could help me. I didn’t want to tell him I was looking for the ladies’ room, so I said I was lost and couldn’t find my way out. He summoned a young man, probably a page and asked him to show me the way. The young man must have had nothing better to do that afternoon, because he gave me a leisurely tour of the parts of the Capitol that we walked through. I wish I could remember every detail, but what stands out most prominently in my memory is Statuary Hall with its gleaming marble and its sculptures. It was beautiful! 

            My temporary job ended, and I left Washington in March of 1968. Earlier I suggested that my Washington adventures happened in a kinder, gentler time, but I was wrong. On April 4 of that year, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Washington responded with four days of rioting. In retrospect I think no one should have been surprised. Tensions had been building for a long time.

            Many years later, in another world—maybe kinder and gentler, but maybe not—I spent a few days in Washington with my husband. He was attending a conference, and I was mostly on my own during the daytime. I decided to visit the Capitol. This time it was not possible to walk through the front door, either East Front or West Front, and just start exploring. I had to let someone search my tote bag, and there probably was a metal detector as well. I took one of the tours and remember seeing the Crypt and the Old Senate Gallery. The best part of the tour was Statuary Hall, because this time everything was familiar and my long-ago tour guide’s words were still resonating in my memory. 

            Happy Fourth of July! And in case anyone is wondering, the Folger Shakespeare Library does have restrooms. 

Slow: Kashgar to Aksu

Nancy Vieira Couto1 Comment
“Wenzhou Road, the Pedestrian Street in Aksu,” photo by Eric Feng, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

 

          There are many ways to get from Kashgar, China’s westernmost city, to Aksu, about 300 miles to the east. If you left on train #7558, you would arrive in Aksu 9 hours and 28 minutes later. On this slowest and cheapest of the railroad options, a ticket costs only ¥53, or about US$8. That’s for a “Hard Seat” ticket. The Hard Seats are, I understand, hard, and you might arrive stiff in the joints and more skilled at using squat toilets than you were at the start of the journey. Or you could travel more comfortably with a “Hard Sleeper” or a “Soft Sleeper” ticket. Soft Sleeper carriages have both squat toilets and Western toilets, and that alone, I think, would justify paying the extra $16. Even if you didn’t actually sleep during the journey, you would have a comfortable place to sit and prepare yourself mentally for the transition from a busy Silk Road market oasis to an agricultural area famous for its apples.

            Yes, apples. If you were in a hurry to sample apples so sweet that their sugar content is visible in the shape of translucent sugar stars hugging their cores, you would want to get to the Aksu Prefecture as soon as possible. In that case you could travel on the T9518, an express train with limited stops that will get you to Aksu in 4 hours and 44 minutes. A “Soft Sleeper” ticket will set you back ¥231, which is only about US$36, a real bargain! Of course the T9518’s speed will cut down on your transition time, but, oh, you’re looking forward to those apples!

            There are other trains on this route, too, and these aren’t even the high-speed bullet trains that we’ve been hearing about. As far as I can tell, the bullet trains don’t run between Kashgar and Aksu, but they sound wonderful. The newest trains have sleeper compartments with bunks arranged so that sleeping people are facing in the direction the train is moving towards. Nobody has to sleep backwards. And it is possible to fly from Kashgar (KHG) to Aksu City (AKU), although China Southern has only one flight per day and their fares are considerably more expensive than the train fares. Flying takes only 1 hour and 10 minutes—not long enough, in my opinion, for transition time. I don’t like getting where I’m going before I’ve stopped missing the place I’ve left. I don’t like flying. If I were in China in real life, I would choose the train.

            But in real life I’m not in China. My trip is virtual. I’m on the third leg of a virtual Silk Road walking tour that began in Istanbul on August 1, 2018. As you can see, I’m traveling slow. Very slow. I left Kashgar on March 12 of this year and didn’t arrive in Aksu until May 16. It took me just over two months to go a distance I could have done in under five hours on a Chinese train. But I’m getting there. I record my distance on a spreadsheet—actual miles that I walk wherever I am, and during the pandemic it has been mostly indoor walking, which is walking nonetheless. For this latest part of the journey, I have also been recording my progress on a website called My Virtual Mission, where many other virtual travelers are tracking many other virtual journeys and none of us is crazy. If you want to follow my progress toward Xi’an, my final destination, you can do so here:

https://www.myvirtualmission.com/missions/104399/nancy-s-great-silk-road-adventure-part-three

             About those apples, I Googled to see if I could buy them, either here in Ithaca or online. No, the local supermarkets don’t have them, but I did get my hopes up when I found the website of a family-owned business that sells Aksu Sweetheart Apples. Unfortunately their delivery area is restricted to New York City, parts of New Jersey, and Long Island. If I lived in one of those locations, some Aksu apples would be on their way to me as I write this. For now they will have to remain on my list of delights to be enjoyed in the future. Not now, because I’m walking again. Walking slow. I’m on my way to my next stopping point, Korla, where they grow pears.

Looking for António Ferreira Couto

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I have an ancestor from Santa Maria, Azores. His name is António Ferreira Couto, and he was born probably between 1660 and 1680. He married a woman named Catarina Velho, who was probably also born on the ilha de Santa Maria, but I don’t know that for sure. António and Catarina are my 7th great-grandparents. Their son Manoel Pacheco de Sousa, who was born on the island of Sao Miguel, married Catarina de Sa on December 21, 1718, in Rosario, Lagoa, São Miguel. I don’t know why António and Catarina Velho left Santa Maria for Sao Miguel, and I don’t know why they settled in Santa Maria in the first place. But since I am here in Santa Maria exploring the beautiful beaches and the green fields—green as the fields in Ireland, greener even, and it is the day after Saint Patrick’s Day as I write this—and the mountains and the contented cows that produce the delicious butter that is better than any butter I could get at home, I thought I would try to find out more about him.

The path from António Ferreira Couto to my father, Edward Couto, should be a direct one, father to son to son to son. But no, it isn’t that simple. Azorean surnames do not get passed down in that way, and in fact Antonio is the ancestor not of my paternal grandfather, João do Couto, but of my paternal grandmother, Carlota Julia Ferreira. And it gets still more complicated. Carlota’s father was a Ferreira and her mother was a Pereira. António is her ancestor not on the Ferreira line but on the Pereira line. Here’s how the descendancy goes:

António Ferreira Couto is the father of Manoel Pacheco de Sousa.
Manoel Pacheco de Sousa is the father of Maria Moniz.
Maria Moniz is the mother of Manoel Moniz Pereira.
Manoel Moniz Pereira is the father of Francisco Moniz Pereira.
Francisco Moniz Pereira is the father of Francisca Jacintha.
Francisca Jacintha if the mother of Maria de Jesus.
Maria de Jesus is the mother of Carlota Julia Ferreira.

There was a period not long ago—mostly in the 19th century, which, to anyone who does genealogy is not long ago, in fact so recent that we can almost remember it—when women did not have last names. They did not automatically take their fathers’ names. They almost certainly had a middle name, as well as a religious name that they chose later. When they married they did not take their husbands’ names. That doesn’t make Azorean genealogy any easier to sort out, but it does strike me as sensible, feminist, and modern.

So how did my paternal grandmother’s ancestor manage to get hold of my paternal grandfather’s surname? Are my grandparents cousins? Am I my own vovó? I thought the Biblioteca Municipal might hold the answer. The librarians were friendly and fluent in English. They showed me to the room where they keep the genealogy books. And in no time I found my 7th great-grandfather’s name and learned that he was born on Santa Maria and married to Catarina Velho. But I already knew that.

The church records for all the islands of the Azores are on line, thanks to the Centro de Conhecimento dos Acores, the CCA. Santa Maria, the oldest of the nine islands, has the oldest records. Some of the record books have pages that are torn. Others have been damaged by salt air, moisture, the wrong kind of ink, or mice. The volunteers from the Church of Latter Day Saints did their best to piece the pages together before filming them. The earliest records are difficult to read, and the records do not go back far enough to cover the first inhabitants of the islands. As I sit here surrounded by the beauty of this island where he once lived, I have to admit that António Ferreira Couto has escaped me.

Bohemian Pleasures: Revisiting the Labyrinth

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Prague is a labyrinth. Seen from Google Maps satellite view, it is all red roofs twisting and winding into one another. There are streets and street numbers, but they are hidden under the labyrinthine turns of the red roofs, and a first-time visitor is likely to get lost. At least we did. Last October, when we arrived in Prague, we took a taxi from the train station and were left off in the center of a picturesque part of Old Town. The driver indicated that our hotel was close, but for some reason he couldn’t take us there. We had the address but couldn’t find the street. Wheeling our suitcases over cobblestones for at least an hour, we asked for directions from shop owners and restaurant waiters and tried to follow their leads, but all we did was walk in circles. Finally, someone pointed us toward a narrow alley that appeared to go nowhere, and we entered, veered left, passed some hanging flowerpots, and found our hotel’s office. To call our accommodations quirky would be an understatement; the “hotel” was an assortment of apartments located in very old buildings with creaky stairs. Our apartment was furnished in mid-last-century Hit-or-Miss, but it was roomy, with a large kitchen and sitting room, and it was located exactly in the center of Old Town. Now that we knew our way into and out of the labyrinth, we were exactly where we wanted to be.

That was last October, almost a year ago, and it was a real-life trip. We were early into a whole month’s adventure in Central Europe, having just spent some time in Berlin and Dresden. Our train pulled into Prague in the middle of the afternoon, but by the time we found our apartment, freshened up, and set out to explore the city, night had fallen. At night Prague is golden. It glows.

Last Thursday I returned to Prague, but this time I experienced the jumble of sensations virtually and with the aid of memory. I had reached the final destination on my Sagres-to-Prague virtual walking tour, having, since my last post, enjoyed the delights of Venice, Italy; Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Graz and Vienna, Austria. I walked every step of the way, tracking my progress with the help of my Apple Watch and an Excel spreadsheet. I was not there and I was there, both at the same time.

What is there to do in Prague? First off, the new visitor must buy a trdelník from a street vendor and eat the spiral of roasted pastry dough while walking around the square taking in the sights. Trdelniks originated in Transylvania just like someone we all know and love, but there’s nothing vampiric about them. I wish I had taken a photo, but I was in too much of a hurry to sink my teeth into that flaky, sugary goodness. Next, the visitor must check out the Astronomical Clock, locate the statue of Franz Kafka, walk across the Charles Bridge and of course back again, sit in a heated outdoor cafe and enjoy a glass of wine or beer, and stay out of the way of the horses that clop along pulling tourist carriages. It isn’t necessary to ride in one of the carriages, but it is de rigueur to admire the horses, especially the dappled greys. On a less frivolous note, a tour of the Old Jewish Cemetery and the Jewish Quarter is a must. In a restored synagogue there is an exhibit of children’s drawings that will break any visitor’s heart.

After a few days of seeing the sights, learning the history, eating the food, and admiring the horses, and before moving on to the next stop in the incredible journey, a visitor must, of course, go shopping.  Prague is a great place to buy Bohemian garnets, which are deeper in color than garnets mined in other parts of the world, and Czech glass beads, which are very pretty and surprisingly inexpensive. I couldn’t resist.

I allowed myself some time some time to wander virtually around this charming city of twists and turns, but, because the world is large and because other destinations are calling my name, I have already started my next virtual walk. Where am I going this time? Here’s a clue: For part of my journey I will be following the route of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.

Survivors: A Visit to the Berlin Zoo

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According to Wikipedia, during World War II the Berlin Zoo was destroyed, and “only 91 of 3,715 animals survived, including two lions, two hyenas, an Asian bull elephant, a hippo bull, ten hamadryas baboons, a chimpanzee, and a black stork.” Not having a firm grasp of World War II history, which was too recent to be taught when I was in school, I’m not sure exactly how the animals were destroyed, but I believe at least some of them were eaten by hungry Berlin residents. Most of what I know about the Berlin Zoo during the war (and to me “the war” is World War II, not Vietnam or any of the wars that  followed) I learned from reading Richard Zimler’s The Seventh Gate, a novel that mixes Jewish history with a compelling mystery story. The zoo appears and reappears several times during the Zimler novel, although one of the most important animals in the novel was not a zoo animal at all but a squirrel.

I like squirrels. When I was a child, my imaginary playmate was a squirrel named Zipper. I don’t remember why I chose that name, but, when I’m sitting on the porch off our kitchen and I see a squirrel in the cedar tree outside, I always call him or her Zipper. My original Zipper was a lighthouse keeper, and I always explained Zipper’s absence from any birthday or Christmas party I attended by saying he couldn’t leave his light. I’m proud of inventing an imaginary playmate with a solid alibi.

On our last day in Germany, Joe and I visited the Berlin Zoo in the Tiergarten and saw many of the 20,000 and some animals now present, although some were probably already hibernating or just shy or uneasy around people. The giraffes and zebras were particularly impressive, and a lone polar bear with a solid sense of self surveyed us from his habitat. We saw animals that looked like squirrels and animals that looked like house cats. We saw parakeets that resembled my old friends Tippy and Roscoe. And we saw elephants. I love elephants, although my political leanings are solidly Democratic and of course I also love donkeys.

I couldn’t help but remember a passage from The Seventh Gate about the fate of the zoo animals during the war:

Hans asks me if we can go now to the Berlin Zoo. I’ve told him about it as a bribe. “What a good idea!” Else exults, plainly trying to please my son. “We’ll walk through the Tiergarten. I think the zoo might still be closed, but we can look at ducks in the ponds on the way. A few have come back.”
          “They left?” I ask.
          “We were starving. We ate ducks, rabbits … anything we could catch or raise.”
          Hans turns up his nose.
          “Yes, it wasn’t pretty,” she tells the boy. Whispering to me, she says, “The zoo animals were slaughtered too . . .”

 We were glad they were back, and we enjoyed watching the elephants, meerkats, rhinoceroses, and oryxes in something approaching their natural habitats. We were glad to see that they were well fed. And I actually got to spend some time in a monkey house, although I felt sorry for the large gorilla sitting with his back to the crowd trying to enjoy his dinner in peace. He was a little too close to human—a loner whose sense of privacy was being violated. I’m sorry about that, about being one of the violators, although I think it’s important for children to see these animals up close and personal, accompanied by all the zoo smells they produce.

Wikipedia reminds us that human history can produce its own variety of zoo smells: “In 1938, the Berlin Zoo got rid of Jewish board members and forced Jewish shareholders to sell their stock at a loss, before re-selling the stock in an effort to ‘Aryanize’ the institution. The zoo has now commissioned a historian to identify these past shareholders and track down their descendants.”

I wrote most of this post on my iPad on the Amsterdam-to-Detroit leg of our return flight. By the time we arrived home to an empty refrigerator, it was morning in Berlin, and our bodies were still running on German time. The next day was Election Day. We voted and went grocery shopping, and then we went out for pizza, wanting to compare it to the flammkuchen we had eaten just three days earlier. Then the election returns started to come in.

On Wednesday I was depressed about the election and still jet-lagged, no longer familiar with either my habits or my wardrobe. My disorientation was so complete that I seemed to be walking around in a different kind of zoo, one run by pigs who walked upright and engaged in neverending battles. They governed themselves according to a familiar principle: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

A River Runs Through It: Vienna

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The river is still the Danube, but it’s less evident than it was in Budapest, where we walked by it or across it every day. In Vienna we feel the presence of the Danube as a musical time signature, curved and sweeping, superimposed over our daily activities. Music is everywhere. In the gift shop of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Jesus and the Virgin Mary share space with Mozart and other composers; rosaries and tiny music boxes get equal billing. You can hardly eat a chocolate bon-bon without having to peel off a very attractive wrapper with Mozart’s face on it.

That’s high classical—Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert—but there is also the waltz, the Waltz King, and “The Blue Danube.” On our second day in Vienna, which happened to be Halloween day, we visited the Haus der Music, a modern, high-tech museum devoted to the history and science of Viennese music. We rolled dice—Joe threw the red die and I threw the blue one—and a giant screen made aleatory music out of the results. The composition wasn’t half bad, either. Then we let Mozart write music based on the spelling of our names. He seems to have composed a brief phrase for every letter of the alphabet, and the results could be played back in their original form or orchestrated. And that was just the first floor.

The next level was devoted to the science of music, and that’s where everything got very high tech. I learned that my ability to discern musical pitch was somewhat better than a grasshopper’s and nowhere near as good as a dog’s. On to the next level, with rooms devoted to various composers with Austrian roots, including Johann Strauss, called the Waltz King, who composed “The Blue Danube.” I remembered watching Kathryn Murray demonstrate the Viennese Waltz, and I wished I had sent away for the footprints. The museum’s app, which we had downloaded to our phones, contained additional information about each composer, along with links to You Tube videos of each composer’s music. Last stop was the virtual conductor room, where a large, interactive philharmonic was playing on the big screen. Anyone could attempt to conduct, and there were choices of three or four different pieces of music. We watched a couple of children make the effort, including one who was still a toddler. They both did quite well at waving the baton, but at a certain point the musicians stopped playing and started laughing at their ineptitude. It was all good fun, but I didn’t give it a try because I didn’t want the musicians to laugh at me.

But the Danube isn’t all waltzes and music. One odd association that I brought to it comes from research I did some years ago for a series of poems that I’m still trying to turn into a book. My main character’s gentleman friend—I’ll call it that, but it was more than friendship and certainly less than love—had an uncle who was instrumental in encouraging settlement near the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. The uncle, David Parish, was born to a wealthy Scottish family in Hamburg in 1778. He was associated with an international banking firm in Antwerp that sent him to the United States, where he supervised the transfer of Mexican silver to Europe via New Orleans. In other words, he was laundering money. In upstate New York, he invested in land purchases, iron works, and sawmills and built a mansion in Ogdensburg; the mansion is now a museum housing Remington bronzes. He returned to Europe, settled in Vienna, and, in an uncertain financial climate, made some bad investments and lost all his money. He drowned himself in the Danube in 1826. 

We had been spiraling higher and higher in the Haus der Music, and by the time we took the elevator back down to the ground floor, night had fallen. Halloween night. The nice people at the ticket desk were all wearing costumes, and the large ground-floor room was filled with children, little girls dressed as witches, little boys dressed as skeletons. Time for us to waltz out the door and look for a place to have dinner. 

A River Runs Through It: Budapest

Nancy Vieira CoutoLeave a comment

The river, of course, is the Danube, which in my mind is always associated with dance. “Take this waltz,” sings Leonard Cohen in three-quarter time, and I’m back in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, when every school dance (not that I went to that many of them) included a prize waltz as the highlight of the evening. I learned to dance by counting: “one, two, one, two” or “one, two, one.” I remember a particular prize waltz competition when the eliminations were faster and more furious than usual; instead of spotlighting a small group of the best dancers among us, the teachers who were running the shebang eliminated everyone. The dance floor was bare. We thought we were waltzing, but we were all doing the fox trot, the popular dance of the day.

We could have learned to dance by watching the Arthur Murray Party on TV, hosted by Arthur’s wife Kathryn. Those people knew what they were doing and never would have confused a waltz for a fox trot or a lindy hop or anything else. And If we had been serious about it, we could have ordered paper footprints for the various dances. I think there must have been different footprint combinations for men and for women, but I don’t really remember. I do remember that there was a class of waltz—a very classy waltz—called the Viennese waltz, but I’ll save that for another city.

Right now I am on a train leaving Budapest, where Joe and I have spent the past four days. We walked along the Danube, crossed the Chain Bridge, admired the views, both upriver and downriver. We photographed Buda from Pest, where our hotel was, and Pest from Buda, where the castle was. We saw small tour boats, those that took tourists on ninety-minute cruises, and large Viking River Cruise ships looking not quite as spiffy as the ones we used to see in donor videos (i.e., commercials) before every episode of Downton Abbey. Budapest is a beautiful city, and the Danube runs through it.

On both sides of the river the city contains memorials to Hungary’s heroes from various historical periods. Some of these examples of public art employ traditional sculptures of men on horseback, while others vary from the expected by being whimsical in design and execution. The most unexpected, most simple, and, in my opinion, most moving memorial is called Shoes on the Danube. It is on the Pest side, down from street level, close to the water, and it looks at first like a scattering of old shoes perched on the edge of the walkway. The shoes look old, musty, worn out, as if they had been in some old grandmother’s closet since the 1940s. When I searched for further information, I learned that the eighty pairs are not the real shoes but rather replicas cast in iron by the Hungarian sculptor Goulart Pauer. Pauer and his friend Can Togay created the memorial in 2005. A website about the display tells me the following: “The Shoes on the Danube is a memorial to the Budapest Jews who were shot by Arrow Cross militiamen between 1944 and 1945. The victims were lined up and shot into the Danube River. They had to take their shoes off, since shoes were valuable belongings at the time.”

According to Wikipedia, Arthur Murray was born in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, in 1895. His parents, Sarah and Abraham Teichman, named him Moses. They brought him to America in 1897 and raised him on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Because of anti-German sentiment after the start of World War I, Moses changed his name to Arthur Murray. He was an immigrant kid who loved to dance and made a career out of teaching others to dance. How would he feel to see the sad shoes of people who never danced again? 

Time for a Little Leitmotif

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I began to notice a pattern. First there was an organ grinder in Berlin, right near the Brandenburg Gate—a real, live organ grinder, but without a real, live monkey. Instead, so that we’d get the idea, he had hung from his organ a toy monkey, useless as a collector of coins but cute and still a monkey. Then we went to Dresden and visited the Zwinger, an elegantly groomed estate with a couple of museums, one of which was devoted entirely to porcelain from the collection of Augustus the Strong. In addition to his other interests, which mostly had to do with ruling countries, Augustus was a champion of porcelain arts. His collection includes impressive pieces from Japan and China: large vases, cachepots, pieces that look like gigantic ginger jars, teapots, and figurines. Augustus was also instrumental in establishing a home-grown porcelain industry. The galleries devoted to Meissen pieces were my favorites, especially those showcasing Augustus’s porcelain menagerie. I saw lions and lambs and rhinoceroses, but what I liked best was the grouping that included a set of monkeys engaged in everyday activities like taking snuff or eating grapes.

When I was a child and lived in New Bedford, my mother would often take me to Buttonwood Park. I would play on the swings and slides, and then my mother would buy me a box of Cracker Jacks. I didn’t like the popcorn part of the Cracker Jacks, but I liked the peanuts, which were not plentiful, and the toy hidden somewhere in the box. I would find the toy, eat a few peanuts, and hand the box to my mother, who liked Cracker Jacks quite a lot. Then we would head over to the park’s zoo. There were bears inside a double-fenced enclosure that included a pool to splash around in and a cave to hide in when they got tired of being gawked at. There was a buffalo that was very careful not to step on the chickens walking around him. There were goats and geese, as well. Two or three years after my brother was born, one of the geese bit him on the finger; I guess my brother shouldn’t have been poking his finger through the wire fence and calling “Mother Goose, Mother Goose!”

There was also a monkey house. I thought the monkeys were cute, and I liked visiting them, but I never got to spend much time there because my mother was always yanking me out the door. She didn’t approve of the monkeys’ behavior, but I was a little girl and didn’t notice that they were doing anything wrong. Maybe one of them was taking snuff and setting a bad example.