Paris views old and new

What I mean is: a couple on this short slideshow everyone has seen, others not.

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One day I’ll see inside the Yorkshire Air Museum

My whole reason for being in York one year ago was to go to the Yorkshire Air Museum to see the Canadian section and look up any information in their archives about my uncle Vince.  

But as I walked back to the hotel after a glorious first afternoon out in the snow, I started to realise that after waiting a decade or so to even make the trip and travelling half the length of the country just to get there, I was probably going to make it to the front door, but no further.  It wasn’t exactly high tourist season already – part of the reason I’d chosen to go in winter in the first place – but with the city looking much like an ol’ Mother Hubbard gingerbread house, I called the museum to make sure they were open.

I got an answering machine and the usual message about opening and closing times, but nothing more.

Not good.

What the hell, I thought, might as well give it a try and if nothing else at least I’ve seen the place.  So the next morning I headed back over a bridge into town for the stop for the half-hour bus ride out to the museum’s airport hangars.

The bus driver was pretty clear about what he thought of my idea of going to the museum.

“Yoo’ be’er looook i’ u’ I do’ owt ump rfhu toda’” he said, pointing to the sky.

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” I said.  ”But I have to go out there to see it anyway.”

Seeing as how the bus route had been changed on account of the snow, the bus driver didn’t charge me for the trip out, which I found quite friendly.  He and I – there was nobody else – quickly passed through the outskirts of York to arrive at the corner where he’d drop me off.  Normally I’d have taken another bus directly to the museum, but it wasn’t running.  Did I need any other clues the museum would be closed?

Since the sidewalk was covered in snowbank, I walked about a mile and a half at the side of the road to finally arrive at the museum entrance.   Deserted.  Already I could see planes – a massive bomber covered in snow was pretty hard to miss – but there wasn’t a soul around.

Placing my boots in a couple of tire tracks I crunched through the empty parking lot and  looked around to find a few planes, a hangar or two, and acres and acres of white.

But around a corner and across a small field I came across what must be the Canadian section.   The plane with two maple leaf flags is probably a Canadian-built Avro, but if you know it’s not, please tell me.  Of course I couldn’t go inside the building, so was left to contemplate from a respectful distance the course of history and my family’s small part in it.

Near the plane is a modest plaque of the Canadian Memorial Hangar:

Per ardua ad astra – Through struggle to the stars: the motto of the Royal Air Force but also others including the RCAF.

Despite the blinding morning sun I was by now freezing cold, so turning in my tracks I headed back for the trudge along the road whence I came to catch the bus back to York, telling myself I’d be back one day.

A rare Hamburg snowfall

We don’t get much snow around here, and when we do, it usually doesn’t stay for very long.  So when I had to go out this morning to do a bit of last-minute Christmas shopping, I brought along my camera to try to capture a bit of it.

Boy hitting the bricks

Sometimes it’s only after you get home that you notice the shot.  Just setting up a long telephoto down some stairs, framing the photo when suddenly this kid pops into view.

Click.

I like how his clothes match the railing and the bricks, how he’s caught startled by something and whirling around, and how the lens seems to place him on an impossibly uphill slope.

Maybe it’s better in black and white?

I don’t know.  What do you think?

Blue Monday

Blue-sky Monday, that is.

Blue’s my colour.  How can you tell?

With just a touch of green…

I’m sure my mother would love the turquoise hues in that one.

If she actually read this blog.

Hamburg hinterland who’s who: the birds

The Hamburg Tree-sitting Eagle-Eyed Hawk-Nosed Falcon Bird of Prey:

The Hamburg Parkside Focus-Challenged Great Squawking Pheasant:

Hamburg Yellow-beaked Balcony-Crapping Blackbird

Please note that I haven’t the slightest clue what kind of birds these are.  Hell, I can’t even differentiate between a cat and a dog or tell whether a woman is wearing a swimsuit or not.  But the blackbird sings beautifully,  and I’m looking forward to spotting a pheasant in Jenisch park once it warms up.  Enjoy.

10 things I learned about skating in Holland

1. The whole of Holland is crazy about skating.   You could be forgiven for thinking that every citizen of the Netherlands who wasn’t on life support or lying flat in the morgue was out on the ice this past weekend.   Tens of thousands of people, streaming by at the rate of dozens a minute, in pairs, groups or, like me, all by themselves.

Who can blame them?

The last time they had ice in Holland like this was a dozen years ago when it was so cold for so long, they even opened up the Elfstedentocht, a 200-km tour through lakes and canals linking 11 cities, first undertaken exactly 100 years ago by a man who just wanted to see if he could do it.  The last time it was run in 1997 the winner completed the tour in less than seven hours, for an average of just under 30 km per hour.

Conditions this past weekend were also ideal.   Sunny, below freezing but not too cold, no wind, thick frost covering the trees and reeds.

2. The Dutch have managed to keep this madness in check by organising canal skating into carefully planned and laid-out tours, complete with signposts, colour-coded arrows, and for a few bucks, cute little cards which you get stamped at cute little booths set up every few miles. 

Waiting in line for your stamp is a great opportunity to adjust your laces, chat with your friend or neighbour, breathe in the aroma of coffee, hot chocolate or traditional pea soup and – I hate to say it – call someone on your cellphone and ask them what, are you on life support or lying in the morgue?  Get the hell out here.

3. Only Canadians who spontaneously decide to drive more than 500 km in from another country wear hockey skates in Holland.  That was the first thing I noticed.  Nearly everyone skates with those long-bladed speed skates.  Occasionally you see a young girl or teenager on figure skates, but the speed skaters must out-number the others a thousand to one.   And it’s no wonder they use speed skates to cover those long stretches.  I’d be moving along at  a pretty good clip only to have skaters silently overtake me with what seemed like half the effort I was putting out.   Someone even asked as I was lacing up at the start of the 40-km tour Saturday whether I was really going to be doing such a long tour in those skates.

The hockey blades did come in handy Sunday morning though.  All alone on a backwater at sunrise I did a few turns with the stick and puck, stopping long enough to set up a self-timer shot.

But since playing hockey, like life I guess, gets old pretty soon if you don’t have someone to pass the puck to -  or at least bash into the boards – I went back to the car and put them away.  Besides, I didn’t like the idea of carrying that stick for dozens of miles.

4. Speed and hockey skates aren’t the only things that help you slide over the ice.  I stopped to look at one little boy who was flying along wearing nothing more on his feet than gumboots and skates that, had they looked weather-beaten, would have been well-placed in a museum.  I asked his mother if she’d fished them out of the attic, and she said yes – they were at least 60 years old.  Her husband had learned to skate on them after they were handed down from his father.

Another man used what I’ll call, um… Swedish strap-ons, because – strictly taking his word for it -  he said they were invented in Sweden for alternating between hiking through forests and skating over lakes.

5. Speaking of switching back and forth, if you’re doing a skating tour in Holland it’s absolutely essential to bring along a pair of blade protectors, because you’re not just gliding blissfully all day from one end of the country to the next without interruption.   At times, just when you’re getting into it and you feel you could go for another few miles without a break, you HAVE to take a break.   Why?

To get to the next canal.   After a while the ice you’re on just runs out, so you slip on the rubber or plastic blade protectors, climb up onto the road, and walk through town.  There’s even a word in Dutch for it: Klunen.  The awkward dance of balancing yourself at the edge of the canal to  get on and off the ice is also a rare opportunity to lose your balance and make groping bodily contact with someone in lycra tights, if that’s your thing.

Sometimes a bridge will get in the way.  For that, you can go through the hassle of putting on those blade protectors once again, or just crawl under.

6. The Dutch are really friendly when they’re out on the ice, and you don’t have to have skates to have fun.  Neighbourhood kids squealing with delight as they make a train out of sleds, couples out walking the dog, kids on bicycles, moms and dads pushing baby buggies or hauling sleighs – they’re all out there on the ice.  With hundreds of miles of track there’s room for most everyone.

7. This is something I’d forgotten: the ice makes noise.  Sometimes you’ll be booting along and all of a sudden you’ll hear a resounding BONGGGGGGGG and for a second you’ll think oh shit we’re doomed but then you tell yourself it’s just the normal process of the ice settling and it will ultimately make the track safer as long as the temperature stays the same.  Or so I’ve heard.

8. If you’re not careful, you can fall flat on your butt.  This has to be the biggest downside of having a hundred thousand skates and skaters on the same patch of ice every day.  The ice develops a few cracks which turn into deep gouges.

If you happen to be skating along a stretch that hasn’t been cleaned off by a Dutch Zamboni….

… you won’t see the crack and you’ll be on your ass before you know it.

9. Even if you don’t speak a word of Dutch, you have to check out the Royal Skating Union’s website to get the low-down on where to go.  At top left you’ll find a box to click on for the natural ice tours open.  Be patient.  Google translate actually comes in handy.

10. Near Rotterdam at Kinderdijk you can skate by a cluster of 19 of Holland’s grandest of icons.  They were built around 270 years ago and were still in use until 1950.  It’s now a UNESCO heritage site.  Some are thatched with the reeds that grow nearby, others made of brick or wood.  A couple were even turning, like this one on the Molentocht (Windmill tour):

OK… 11 things…

Skating in Holland can be an incredibly beautiful experience.

Elation, exhilaration, skipping like a puppy and bursting with a whoop of joy merely to be alive as I made those first  strides on a glistening, black surface that seemed to stretch out as far as the horizon.

Trees bristling with frost, every twig enveloped in a bottle-brush of crystal, sparkling in the orange-blue wash of the morning.  And all so still.

You hear a lot about the sweet spot of tennis, how good it feels when you hit the ball exactly the way you should and it lands just where you want it to.  There’s something about that in the rhythmic dance of skating when you hit the right cadence, when you’re cutting through the surface in a complete connection from your temples through your thighs down to the bottom of your feet, feeling the blades as if they were an extension of your bones as they scrape…scrape…scrape, a thousand times effortlessly across the ice.  You get the feeling you’re floating, as if you were falling into a trance.

I felt that at times this weekend.

2008 Blog Year in review

Happy New Year!  A look back at the high- and lowlights of 2008 as seen on this space.

January:

Germans launch New Year’s Eve assault, clean up operations reveal death and destruction.

All in one day: Hamster dies, wife faints, we find a €50 bill, and we call the cops after a crazy neighbour goes completely off the rails. She’s since moved out. Good fucking riddance.

February:

A long weekend in London. We still laugh about the night we took that photo.

March:

I go on a forum to check on what’s happening and I see and ad from a TV producer down in Munich. She’s looking for an American to bake an American-style pizza.

If I had to fake being an American to get on the show, I guess it’s only fair if they fake the results.

April:
In which my brother Gordon visits from Canada. Weird language ensues.

May:
A week in Paris. Just the two of us. Museums, exhibitions, two movies, restaurants, cafés, visits with friends.

June:
After blogging about a vicious smear campaign against Barack Obama, the very same post gets lifted, stolen, re-named and re-posted word-for-word on freerepublic dot com, hangout of even sicker creatures than the one  posted about in the first place.  They all have a good laugh ripping it apart.  Jeepers, Freepers, I didn’t know ya cared.

And nothing but the finest from Bild Zeitung:
Europe’s largest-circulation daily runs photo of naked 13-year-old.

July:

Ten facts and opinions about Canada. For Canada Day.

August:

Talking about dead sheep with an 11-year-old.

Summer, 2008 in the south of Germany.

September:
Little red-haired girl’s new bike gets ripped off.

Bloggers’ meet-up in Bremen

Cheap joke. But if you can’t get a cheap laugh on the internet, you might as well give up.

October:
How to make a new bike look too crappy to steal. So far, it’s working. Touch wood.

Playing chess with Hitler.

November:

A 10-part travel series on our trip to Istanbul and Cappadocia, Turkey.

December:
The long and cumbersome process of paying a traffic ticket in Germany.

Riding in her first tournament.

brushing up on my horse sense

I never knew there were so many ways to brush a horse.

But this girl does:

In fact, I never knew much at all about horses, but now after watching her take care of them before and after her lessons, brushing them down, cleaning out the hooves, hauling the saddle on and off, making sure the stall’s clean and a dozen other jobs to get done before she can go home, I’m getting to know how much work they are.  Good thing she’s crazy about them.

We’ve recently gotten her into a set-up where she shares the care of one horse with two other girls.  She gets three riding lessons a week and can go to the stables anytime to feed it, take it out for a walk, or just hang out.  The stables are about half-way between home and school, which works out well for managing both.

She’s got a riding tournament coming up this weekend.

We’re all excited.

Wish her luck!

Part 10: Going underground

Last in a series of 10 posts on our recent trip to Turkey.

Part nine: Despite Disneyfication, Cappadocia is still worth it.  Part eight: a dive into nostalgia. Part seven: knife fights, confusion and a freezing cold night. Part six: untitled, I suppose. Part five: underneath Istanbul. Part four: the Blue Mosque smells like cheesy feet. Part three: sleepwalking through Turkey. Part two: a look back. Part one: the long letter.

Our last day in Cappadocia was the best. We already knew we wanted to avoid the tourist buses as best we could, so in the afternoon before last day I asked the owner of our little pension if he could arrange a rental car for us. He made a couple of calls and within an hour a man drove up in this beat-up old thing with nearly 100,000 miles – not kilometres – on it, but since it was still running OK that was good enough for us, so I signed the papers and took it.  All very informal, no hassle.

Remember the two underground cities we visited south of the “central” Cappadocia area? We headed off in that direction, but instead of going to the same ones because they’re now just another parking lot crowded with white tour buses, we turned east to explore a town called Guzulyurt. It means beautiful home and is mentioned in Lonely Planet as also having an underground city and church frescoes, but much less visited because it’s a little out of the way.

What a delight. Drove through some very stark landscape that at times reminded me of our long sweeps through the emptier stretches of South Africa to arrive at a tiny town halfway up a long hill. I knew we were going to have a good day as soon as we took a short stroll. We were the only foreigners there! We got stared at a lot of course as we sat down for tea on the main square and later at lunch, but the place was so relaxed and we were so happy, we didn’t mind.

Besides, lunch was a fine break after a morning of poking through caves and marvelling at some beautiful Greek frescoes. Did you know that Turkey and Greece had a population exchange in the early 1920s? That’s another thing I want to read up on. Guzulyurt traded its entire Greek population for the Turkish population of a Greek town – houses, land, everything swapped. So what you have is Greek architecture and history in a Turkish town smack in the centre of Anatolia.

Unfortunately, an old monastery and centre of attraction was being restored so we couldn’t visit it, but that gave us more time to explore the nearby labyrinth of caves and passageways in the underground city.

K. is pretty claustrophobic and so went back in the sunshine after a few minutes, but I managed to coax the little red-haired girl to follow me down a narrow chute into another main room off which you find many other passages branching off – including a long vertical shaft we couldn’t see the end of and an actual toilet area.

She wouldn’t follow me down another, even more narrow passage, so I accompanied her back outside and went back in to go on my own. I had to grab hand- and footholds to arrive at a horizontal tunnel maybe three metres long which turned a corner and went up and then across.

I was about to go up it and then thought, OK, I’m already alone down here in this enormous structure, it’s not likely but there’s no way anyone can hear me should anything happen, it’s dumb to do this alone, so I turned back. It was well-lit and everything, I just didn’t feel right doing it on my own.

I wish we’d have had time to linger more in the places we drove through on the way back. We did stop off to see some lonely old ruins they simply call Red Church. Despoiled with graffiti, it was a reminder of how little regard some have for irreplaceable cultural artefacts.

And again, if we’d had more time, we’d have made the effort to walk the Ihlara Valley, referred to in Lonely Planet as the Grand Canyon of Turkey. Again, hard to get to without your own transportation, and most likely to be enjoyed alone if you make the effort. Nice to know there are still some places to see in the area that haven’t been trampled flat.

I’ve been writing a lot of this while listening to some music K. picked up in Istanbul. At the top end of a sloping street full of shops crammed with every type of musical instrument she spent a good hour or so one day talking to a young shopkeeper who recommended several CDs, a half-dozen of which she ended up buying. Great music – modern sounding yet traditional. I’m sending you my favourite on Amazon, along with the two books mentioned way, way above.

I think I mentioned this already – how to write about our trip to Turkey without changing your impressions of it? I went there eager to show ma family all that I’d seen and more, but also to get an update. I wanted to know what it looks like today, at least those parts we could see at a slow pace in only two weeks. I really hope I haven’t turned you off too much. It’s worth seeing again!  And if you check out my blog, I’m going to dig out some old photos from back then and juxtapose them with ones taken recently.  Wait ’til you see the view from the Ankara train station then and now!