Athens

In Athens we got a review of basic mythology by our guide, a chain smoking story-teller who enlivened our rides with Zeus, Athena, Ari Onassi, and other more recent gods.

But the real revelation for me was the introduction to mass tourism...how do you move thousands of people onto a small site like the Akropolis and manage to give them a sense of the site itself. How do you create enough individual space for them to have an experience that somehow links them to the this piece of their cultural DNA?










Well, not always very successfully. But watching our bus driver maneuver us to the site and from the site was piece of work. And having us stay together...well, that was Vassah's job besides the story telling...both tasks she performed admirably.


But, then, there are the ruins...both in Athens and north along the Attic coast...as well as a lunch at the Intercontinental Hotel in between. Both good events...but it made me realize that I somehow needed to get the "mass" out of "mass tourism" and return to just being a traveller...










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Location:At sea on the Ha-day (Jade)

Dubrovnik

Our first stop on the cruise was in Dubrovnik. I was first here 49 years ago...it was my junior year summer abroad. I had been studying (well kind of) in Oslo. When school was over, I traveled to Rome with a friend; we took the train to Ancona and crossed the Adriatic on a ferry/freight boat of some sort. We slept on the deck. We spent a few days in this city at a hostel. I sketched (in a note book I recently found), ate figs, drank wine, sat on rocks which went down from the city walls to the sea.

But this time we only had hours to visit. We disgorged from the ship, got onto buses, and were driven to town to mix with other thousands from other cruise ships. We did not join a tour group...did not follow around a person with a sign saying "K" or "12" but we were to experience that later...




Instead we wandered down some of the narrow streets (doing some shopping along the way "How many kronos in a euro?") and up a flight of stone steps...a rather long series of steps....and found



the ethnographic museum. Housed in a stone granary built in the 15th century to supply towns and cities along the Adriatic with grain, especially when wheat became scarce. The edifice took 42 years to build...as long as the initial phase of a cathedral...perhaps due to price fluctuations.

The museum housed examples of folk art, clothing, farm implements, embroidery...well displayed...sometimes with explanations in other Serbo-Croatian (though I remain very unsure of Slavic languages)..







But the really impressive sight in Dubrovnik was the bridge spanning the river to the north of the town.








Dubrovnik was bombed and attacked in the war with Serbia which broke out when Yugoslavia fell apart. The city and its environs were shelled for a period of months before it was liberated by a reorganized Croatian army.

So few physical scars from that war...just twenty years ago...remain, though posters in the town remind one of the emotional and psychological scars carried by folks whom we meet, working at the ethnological museum, working in the stores selling souvenirs for our grandchildren, serving at the cafe where we have wine before heading back to the ship. War, for them, is not something that happens somewhere else.

So much is unsaid.

Location:Hvratska/Croatia

Cruising

So we are on this cruise ship...whose name we affectionately refer to as "Ha-day" with the emphasis on the "day"...being an attempt to bring a bit of Orientalism to the experience. Part of which is just having coffee in the morning on our own balcony overlooking the coastline of Greece? Turkey? Croatia?



Which is, I guess, part of the sense of dislocation which takes place on these huge machines called cruise ships. They are a kind of city-state unto themselves. Their size is overwhelming...and they certainly overwhelm any small port they access.













And, then, there is the dominant culture which is that of a beach resort...a kind of Ocean City, Maryland. People claiming their favorite lounge chair for a day in the sun, making forays from time to time to the buffet, dropping into the pool to cool off, then back to the sunlight.




But, then, this also takes place against the backdrop of being in a city scape...riding into a port of a capital city like Athens or a town like Dubrovnik.






So where is one when on a cruise ship...a kind of neither here nor there which is not necessarily bad...it simply tips the scale on what one may considered to be normal. Which is what a vacation for most people is about, no?

And then also are all those familiar locales: the library, the "card room" for playing games...open 24 hours, the gym, the restaurants, the "night clubs", the movies all reached on one of the ten floors devoted to guest activities.










Still what is amazing after six or seven days is just to be sitting having a cup of coffee...on the 12th floor above the level of the sea, watching an island go by or a port city on display, and considering the perspective...at times, I have felt, as great as sitting on a rock at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and contemplating time, space, and one's own existence.







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Location:On the Jade....

"Modern" art

Many of the city's palaces have been converted into permanent or temporary museums...we visited a few, sometimes as much for the cafes and wine as for the art itself. Here is Charlotte at the Peggy Guggenheim museum, waiting for our order to arrive. It hadn't arrived yet.




And the ones dealing with "modern" art and architecture have the effect of bringing the city into a contemporary perspective...so that its role in the world is ongoing as a arbiter of artistic sensibility.

And while the Guggenheim (much of whose original wealth came from a gold mine in Leadville, Colorado....it will take a long time for them to build a museum there) has an excellent collection of paintings and sculpture:







I was more taken with the free exhibits of the Venice Biennial of Architecture which provided a series of temporary venues for examining: Time, Space and Expression...in modern settings...




In the decaying attic of a former palace...



And in a small venue which presented a multiuse project set in Yanikapi, Istanbul...whose rail stations have already been completed and which I used during my time there to catch a ferry.




So the ties between Venice and Constantinople remain and form bookends to this part of my roadtrip.

And you may know that song: "No you can't go back to Constantinople, it's a long time gone, no Constantinople, You can't go back to Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul..."

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Location:Venice

In addition to the churches and palaces...

Art is everywhere in Venice...every street corner, every bridge, every building (even those which remain dilapidated) has a quality that transcends the ordinary...perhaps because the city itself is so identified as a whole artistic creation itself.

There are, of course, the churches: Saint Agnese...




Saint Mark's.....so patterned on the great churches of Bzantium...



Santa Maria della Salutore...



San Giorgio Maggiore....




The sculpture....sometimes tucked into cornices of these churches...




Sometimes embellishing the courtyards of palaces...






Sometimes just there...in glancing up from the map of Venice's streets and alleys and seeing a window with geraniums.

Location:Veneztia

On the road, well, the railroad

Another set of train rides from Prague to Vienna, overnight in Vienna...excellent dining on a major canal off the Danube...watching the city slip from late afternoon into dusk then into night...when we made our reservation, we were told we would only have the table for two hours...but we managed to squeeze our food and wine into that time...

a quote from Charlotte: "Sometimes it is good to drink liquids other than wine..." But when?



We got a mid-morning train to cross the high mountain valleys of Austria and, then, down the Alps on a most comfortable bus...you can see remnants of the old rail bed, parts of which have been turned into a bike trail...and, then, getting on the plains of Veneto, we arrived in Venice.


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Location:the Alps

Arriving

So you arrive at the bus station, get onto the train from the mainland, walk through the train station and, bam!!!, there you are in Venice. On the Grand Canal, no less, across from the Church of San Simonene. And, along with us are thousands of other people on tour...suitcases and cameras in hand...coming to or going from this city.




Some waiting for that boat to pick them up but others...




send their luggage ahead...and, yes, they crowd the city but...



what I found more impressive in terms of crowds were the thousands of students who come each day to attend the schools and universities in the city....passing over modern and not so modern bridges on their way to class.



The students, perhaps, represent more of the future of Venice and Italy...in contrast to those of us who have come to observe the famous past of this place. A city built on these lagoons for defense but grown wealthy by its control of trade routes from the Near East, the Black Sea, Constantinople, and the rest of Europe...even to those Germanic peoples living on the other side of the Alps we came down from yesterday.

Location:Veneztia

Santa Marta

We had a small but efficient apartment in a district of Venice named Santa Marta. It does not appear on many maps of the city...it is without major churches or monasteries...only a large coast guard station and a small vaporeto stop.




But it has that sense of being a "real place," a few blocks away is a small bakery (which I "discovered" one early morning when I passed a window and saw the baker putting in a tray of the day's rolls), a fruit and vegetable stand, and a "tabbak" shop that sold a little amount of lots of things, but mainly cigarettes.

It was the wash drying on the lines, though, that made it real for me. Using our time in Venice to go to a number of art and architecture shows may have made me more sensitive to the aesthetic nature of a clothes line. The fabrics moving slowly in the wind. The shapes and colors of the clothes. Some wash lines very organized (all the socks together) and others more random.

The clothes lines were set against the backdrop of the sky, of the varied colored apartment buildings, of the rows of windows...all kinds of combinations. Endless variety.
















So, who is going to organize the show? Whoever does it, the opening could be this hanging of St. Mark, patron of Venice and its residents, whose relics were taken from Alexandria by the Venicians...was it a raiding party? At any rate, this cloth could be a trademark for a spontaneous folk art show. We could call it "Santa Marta on the Line."



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Location:Veneztia