blood’s a rover

Last month, my sister Amanda moved to Portland, Oregon. I promised to help her get here, but only on the condition that we take a scenic route, one that meandered through the south and southwest and hopefully would give us more to see than corn and wheat fields. It did.

Also, it wasn’t just the two of us- Amanda’s maltipoo Ginger was along for the ride. The trip ended up taking exactly 7 days, we covered exactly 5,014 miles, and I took over a thousand photographs. Below are my favorites with commentary.

5014 miles/167 photos=30 miles per photo, by the way.

DAY ONE: West Haven, Connecticut to Dickson, Tennessee

 
Here we go…

WESTWARD HO!

As we headed out of Connecticut and into New York, Ginger began barking incessantly and refused to stay leashed to her custom made puppy chair, and I became very concerned that she was going to act that way for the entire week. Luckily (for her) she eventually calmed down and I didn’t have to throw her from an overpass.

 
Amanda doesn’t know this, but I tolerate Ginger mainly because
she reminds me of Falcor from The Neverending Story.

Within an hour, we had left New England.

Then we did this for 12 hours straight.

Early on in planning the trip, I researched a number of famous barbeque places that weren’t too far from our route. The one I was most excited about was Ridgewood Barbeque near Bluff City, Tennessee- there seemed to be a clear consensus that it was in the running for best Barbeque in the country, and based on our first look at their smokehouse, I couldn’t have been more excited to try it.

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As soon as dawn broke, hundreds of Japanese tourists swarmed Buda castle like fanny-pack wearing, camera-wielding ants. I wandered around the perimeter of the hill while locals walked their dogs and the morning sun did its best to warm the day.

Whatchoo lookin’ at?

Eventually I stopped into a small restaurant to warm up and enjoy an early lunch. I ordered a beef and paprika stew that really hit the spot.

After that I began descending the hill. Nearest the top, everything was old and beautiful…

…but the architecture gradually became more modern, and by the time I reached the river I had returned to the present. It was a little like time traveling several hundred years in fifteen minutes. 

Now, about that bridge…

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It was just after 5 a.m. when I arrived in Budapest, and I was even less prepared than I’d been in Prague. I basically knew the address of my hotel and the fact that it was located across from the central museum. I was suprised at how packed the bus station so early in the morning, and after consulting a large wall map and exchanging €20 for some Hungarian Forint, I found my way to a shabby but pristine subway station and waited for my train. I had yet to go outside, but I could tell it was much colder here than anywhere else I’d been so far.

The subway station closest to my hotel was located directly beneath a major intersection, which created a sprawling underground plaza. It took a few tries to surface at the correct street corner, and when I did it was via a gigantic meat grinder that someone had refitted for use as an escalator.

Reaching my hotel, I pressed the door buzzer at street level, which woke up the attendant, which caused her to glare at me all during check in. Her mood lightened, however, when realized that she was about to ruin my morning in exchange for ruining hers.

“You may leave your bags here,” she said, “and check into your room when it becomes available at 2 p.m.”

Ugh. All I wanted to do was sip tea, read, and stay warm, but when I asked if there was an cafe open nearby, the woman balked. “Most places open at 10 a.m.” So once again, I found myself wandering around an unknown city at dawn.

The biggest problem with writing these posts almost 6 months after the fact is that although I can easily remember itinerary details and place names, the corporeal sensations have mostly been lost- I can say it was cold, sure, but I can’t tell if my hands were colder than my feet, or how the air smelled in each city, or just how it felt to cloaked in thick black wool as I walked through an ancient city that was itself cloaked in thick blue fog.

It’s like trying to remember a dream-the further in time from waking one gets, the less tangible those potent-in-the-present experiences become, and the more frustrating it is to try. Particularly so for a post like this, where nothing really happens, and what I felt is so much more important that what I did.

So: it was really cold. I found a small market and ducked inside to buy a few local pastries and a cup of vending machine hot tea, which was almost too sweet to drink.

Eventually I wandered towards the Danube River and the Erzsébet Bridge, a pretty, monochromatic suspension bridge named for a pretty, monochromatic Bavarian princess.

I was colder than those trees.

It was an exceptionally strange and beautiful morning. Everything seemed so immaterial that I began to imagine that I was a living person haunting the ghost of a city. It certainly felt that way.

Further north along the Danube sits the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, an engineering marvel that I’ll talk about more in a later post. Wanting to get a better look, I decided to walk across it.

Near the east foundation of the bridge I spied two homeless people asleep beside a heart-breakingly sparse Christmas tree. I shuddered to think of how painful it would be to spend a night exposed to winter in Budapest, and left the change clinking in my pocket on the table- more out of respect than pity. 

While walking along the Danube I had noticed several long, flat boats moored to each shore, but as I walked across the chain bridge one of them silently slid into view while I was peering down at the water below. For a moment, I felt like I was falling.

Prior to 1873, Budapest was two distinct cities- Buda and Pest. Today, Buda is considered more historical and scenic, while Pest is more commercial and has more to do.

Looking towards Buda

Looking towards Pest

Once I arrived on the Buda side I found hotel with a bar facing the street where I spent an hour warming up and drinking tea. It was amazing how long the morning seemed to be lasting- even as the time neared 8 a.m., the streets remained mostly empty and the fog remained thick over the river.

The city stayed that way as I climbed the hill towards Buda Castle, which afforded me some serene and spooky photo opportunites.

After the sun finally crept over the horizon, it didn’t take long for the spell I had been under all morning to be broken. If a city could be said to have cheeks, Budapest’s were soon flushed with the color of thousands of its tiled roofs. Finally able to see the whole city at once, I surveyed it with the eye of someone plotting a daring, two-day cultural campaign… which, of course, I was.

On my final day in Prague I woke up feeling surprisingly good considering how late I’d gotten in the night before. It was a gorgeous morning- the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the only plans I had were to do a little shopping, study some more beautiful architecture, and take a short trip out of Prague to visit a very special church outside of the town of Kutná Hora.

“Oh man, one time I got so drunk that woke up in Prague
completely naked next to a skull. When I was 3.”

Wenceslas Square

When a coworker of mine heard I was visiting the Czech Republic, he asked me to keep an eye out for Czech language graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. It was the only specific request that I’d gotten from anyone who knew I was headed to eastern Europe, so I took the search very seriously, eventually discovering Bontonland.

Is that guy drinking milk? He looks as hungover as that baby.

They weren’t very difficult to find.

While walking around on my first morning here I had come across a closed souvenir shop with a stunning array of Art Nouveau styled jewelry and items displayed in the front window. The outside of the the place was covered in beautiful dark wood, so I didn’t think it would be too difficult find it again…

But I ended up walking around in circles for half an hour looking for the elusive shop.

…before turning a corner and seeing it, not far from the Old Town Square.

A-HA!

Art Decoratif was more of a fine art gallery than a  souvenir shop- it housed a seemingly endless array of exquisite dishes, bowls, jars, all of which I would’ve been thrilled to display in my home.

A very old woman was tending the store, and she helpfully pointed out items or details that I had missed. While browsing though the place, I was mentally converting almost every price tag to USD, hoping that I could justify spending several hundred dollars on what were essentially glass, tin and lead formed into very beautiful shapes.

Eventually, this candlestick caught my eye:

It was a pewter reproduction of a 1906 German “Jugendstil” (meaning “youth style”, Germany’s term for Art Nouveau) candelabra. Originals of this same piece still exist, and they’ll set you back about $2000.

Almost as soon as I saw it I knew that I was going to buy it, which was extremely frustrating- I didn’t really have any money to spend on beautiful candelsticks, but I also didn’t know when I’d be back and in a position to aquire something like this, so I just stood there for a long time staring at it and feeling conflicted. Eventually I left the store, telling the old woman that I didn’t want to carry anything around and that I’d probably be back later. The half-smile that she gave me said that she knew that I would.

I spent the rest of the morning buying small gifts for friends and circling back to places I’d already see, but wanted to see again in the sunshine.

I was half hoping that when I did return it would be sold, but later that afternoon when it was still there and I still wanted to own it. Closing my eyes and gritting my teeth like someone does before getting a shot from a doctor, I handed over my credit card.

Now appearing in my living room.

*** PRESENT DAY NEWS BULLETIN ***

Moments ago I was searching online to see if Arts Decoratif has a website when I discovered this Fodor’s Review about the shop:

“The art nouveau artist Alfonse Mucha lives on, not only because of the posters splashed across the city, but because his granddaughter, Jarmila Mucha Plockova, has produced designs inspired by her grandfather’s work since 1992. You can even purchase a necklace in the same design that Mucha made for his wife as a wedding present. There are gorgeous vases, silk scarves, and other art nouveau tokens of the highest quality.”

OH MY GOD! THE OLD WOMAN WAS ALFONSE MUCHA’S GRANDDAUGHTER AND I DIDN’T KNOW IT! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

I really can’t express how frustrated and annoyed I am in retrospect at missing the opportunity to snap a picture with her. I mean, I was already taking pictures with everyone else I met. WHY NOT HER?

*** END OF PRESENT DAY NEWS BULLETIN ***

After buying the candlestick and storing it with my bags back at the hostel, I set off for the train station to catch a 3 p.m. train an hour outside of Prague to where the Sedlec Ossuary is located. I didn’t have much time to get to the station, and the ossuary closed at 5, so it was going to have to be that train or nothing. A major highway was blocking every route I attempted to reach the train station, so eventually I was forced to navigate a series of poorly lit underground tunnels, all of which were filled with trash, empty syringes, and thousands of empty methadone vials. Methadone is typically used by junkies trying to wean themselves from heroin. It happens very rarely, but that place made my skin crawl and I got out of there as fast as I could.

The station itself was an interesting mixture of crumbling grandeur and shiny (but dull) newness. I realized that I was only carrying enough Czech money to pay for a 2-way ticket to Kutná Hora and the entrance fee to the ossuary, which to me meant that I had budgeted perfectly. After buying a ticket and checking the departure board, I sprinted through the station and up the stairs to the correct platform.

Trainspotting?

Right on time, a train arrived and I got on. I found a comfortable window seat and settled in. I had brought a novel with me to read on the trip, and began to read it as I waited for the train to depart. After about 10 minutes I realized that except for me, the train was completely empty. I stepped back outside to find an equally empty platform, and above that, an empty departure board.

My only opportunity to visit Kutná Hora had been cancelled.

Pictured: Not me, not going anywhere.

I spent the next twenty minutes trying to get a refund on my ticket, visiting a series of humorless ticket vendors and customer service people along the way. When I finally did get a refund, it was a couple dollars short of what I had paid, so I knocked on the window and said:

“Excuse me, you only gave me back this much (showing her my hand full of bills and coins), but I paid this much (pointing to my ticket receipt.”
The woman glared at me and replied flatly, “Forty krowns is down.”
“Sorry? What?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Forty krowns is down!”

I realized that she was doing that thing that some people do to foreigners where they speak progessively louder and slower when attempting to communicate. It had never happened to me before and I was kind of enjoying it.

“You mean you’re charging me to return my ticket?”
“Forty KROWNS… is DOWN!”

I fully understood that this was a service fee of some kind, but I played dumb for a moment longer just to see what would happen.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said.
“FORTY KROWNS IS DOWN!”

Laughing now, I thanked her and said goodbye. I figured it was worth two dollars to discover such a bizarre catchphrase that no one but me would find so funny. To me, it’s like the ultimate non-sequitur- applicable everywhere and nowhere at once.

***

In any case,  I didn’t end up going to see Sedlec Ossuary. If I had I would been able to describe in detail that the small chapel houses the remains of between 40,000 and 70,000 people who had been interred there during the Black Death in the 14th century and Hussite Wars in the 15th century. I also would have gone on to explain that in 1870, a woodcarver named František Rint was hired by the family who owned the chapel to organize the bones as he saw fit, which led to him artistically decorating the space by creating massive sculptures, ornate chandeliers, towering candelabras, and a coat of arms, all from human bones.

But I didn’t go there, so I never got to see this:

Or this:

Or this:

 Or this:

It might be notable that the Rint’s macabre work began in 1870, and that the idea of incorporating curved, organic patterns into art became commonplace soon afterward. Or it might not.

Form meets function!

Instead of staying outside and freezing my ass off for the rest of the day, I bought some candy at an outdoor market with my returned ticket money (less forty krouns) and went back to the hostel to read and hang out until dinnertime.

What’s a ringwraith doing in Prague?

Dinner was to be my last splurge in Prague- I was going to Pivovarský Dům, one of Prague’s better regarded microbreweries. Though I had enjoyed sampling the fine Czech pilsner that is available in grocery stores, all of that was mass produced. I was eager to taste beer that was actually made on site. 

“Pivovarský” means “brewery”, btw.

It was early evening when I arrived at Pivovarský Dům, but the place was already packed and there was a line in the entry. The diners appeared to be locals and tourists alike, which I took as a good sign.

When I was finally seated, I spent a while studying a menu filled with interesting sounding dishes, and ended up ordering the venison ragout with potato croquettes because of my friendly waiter’s suggestion.

As much as I want to love every meal I eat, I wasn’t crazy about the dish. The sauce was thick and sweet- it didn’t taste homemade, and the croquettes weren’t bad, they just weren’t anything. So that was kind of a bust.

While waiting for my food and beer, I’d noticed a woman sitting at the bar who kept catching my waiter’s eye. Soon I realized that every time he entered the kitchen, he’d glance and smile at her, and every time he came out again, she smiled at him flirtatiously. A few times, I even saw my waiter brush her back with one hand while rushing by with a tray full of glasses in the other. Though I couldn’t tell for certain how serious the relationship was, I loved seeing a cute young couple surreptitiously wooing each other in the middle of a crowded restaurant, invisible to everyone except for them, and me. 

Eventually, my beer tasting tray arrived. Though I greatly enjoyed Pivovarský Dům’s light pilsner, bready wheat and dark porter, the place focused way too much on flavored beers, which weren’t as good. Rather than have the ingredients brewed into the beer itself, most of them tasted like flavored later using a base beer, which seemed like a dirty trick to me. Of the banana, coffee, vanilla, sour Cherry, and tokai beers, I’d only drink the coffee one again.   

Following dinner, I collected my bags at Miss Sophies and set off for the bus station, which was located beside the train station I’d visited earlier that day. There was no way in hell I was going to brave the junkie tunnels after dark, so I mapped a roundabout street route with some help from the hostel staff. They tried several times to convince me to call me a cab, but I couldn’t- I was broke. 

It was a nice night in Prague, cold but quiet, and the path to the bus station led me though a section of town that I hadn’t visited yet. By then all the shops were closed, but I had some time to kill so I stopped at several windows and looked inside. At one point I was walking down a street and saw a huge, incredibly ornate building to my right. I had no idea what it was, but it definitely merited a few photos:

Later I would learn that I had accidentally stumbled upon the Jubilee Synagogue- the youngest of Prague’s many synagogues. Built in 1907 by Viennese architect Wilhelm Stiastny, it is the largest Jewish place of worship in the city. Now that I think about it, I realize how lucky I was to have come across it the way I did. I mean, I came to Prague mainly to expose myself to its incredible array of architecture, and it was almost as though the city itself said, “Hold on, you can’t leave before seeing this.”

I arrived at the bus station to find large groups of people angrily interrogating the customer service people, sleeping on luggage, and pouting. It turned out that a bus going to Romania was hours late in arriving, stranding most of the people there in the increasingly bitter cold. Every time a new bus arrived everyone would stand and peer like prairie dogs to see if it was theirs. It reminded me of the first night of the trip and the scene I encountered in Seattle, when the air seems thick with the hopes and frustrations of holiday travelers.

And just as it had been Seattle, I had nothing to worry about. My bus arrived not long after I got to the station and  I was able to stretch out onto one of several empty seat rows. Settling in for my overnight overland trip to Hungary as the bus pulled away from the curb, I waved goodbye to Prague and to all the people still waiting at the station. Standing beside his grandfather, a pale little boy wearing a knit hat was the only one who waved back.

I’ve finally begun planning my trip to Europe this winter- even though I got my plane tickets back in April. My itinerary is:

December 23rd: Arrive in Brussels, Belgium
December 24th: Dresden, Germany
December 25th: Dresden, Germany
December 26th: Prague, Czech Republic
December 27th: Prague, Czech Republic
December 28th: Prague, Czech Republic
December 29th: Budapest, Hungary
December 30th: Budapest, Hungary
December 31st: Budapest, Hungary
January 1st: Vienna, Austria
January 2nd: Vienna, Austria
January 3rd: Salzburg, Austria
January 4th: Frankfurt, Germany
January 5th: Fly Home

So far I have overnight travel arranged between Brussels to Dresden, Prague to Budapest, and Salzburg to Frankfurt, which will save three nights of accomodations. I also have rooms booked in Dresden on Christmas and Budapest on New Year’s Eve, as well as tickets to see The Nutcracker at the Vienna State Opera, which I’m extremely excited about.

While researching each of the cities on my route I realized that every one of them is home to a historically or architecturally significant opera house. So if I have time I’m planning on visiting them all, which will give the trip something of a theme- besides drinking with locals, of course.

“Now to what phenomenon did I give primary concern in designing the Tower? It was wind resistance. Well then! I hold that the curvature of the monument’s four outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole.”

-Gustave Eiffel, on the shape of his tower

Once a year, the City of Portland allows its large population of bicyclists to take over for a Sunday morning and essentially arrest car transportion by taking over most of the major bridges, including interstate highway bridges that bikes are never allowed on during any other times.

Even though I’ve lived in Portland for almost a decade and been actively involved in bicycle culture the entire time, I’d never participated in the Portland Bridge Pedal until last weekend. Here are the pics:

Rise and Shine!

Approaching the Fremont Bridge

I love my pretty city.

On I-405

Climbing the Marquam Bridge

Another view

Pit stop #1

Better than a Powerbar

Yeah!

On the Sellwood Bridge (Portland is in the distance)

Hmm. Canadian?

Crossing the Hawthorne Bridge

The Fremont Bridge, free of cars

Crossing the Broadway Bridge

Speed Racer Emily

I’m no slouch, either. My maximum speed was 37 mph.

Second time across the Fremont

Slug Mobile

While riding down Highway 30, everyone’s blood sugar dropped simultaneously and people starting snapping at each other: pleasant “On your left”’s became snappy “Watch it!”’s, and nobody was smiling on the climb up to the last bridge, but we made it.

Crossing the St. John’s Bridge

After the St. John’s Bridge I headed home because it was a shorter ride than going back downtown again. For some reason, the ride back was the hardest of all- just when I thought it was over, I had another 5 miles to ride. Oh well.

Totally accidental, and my favorite picture of the set.

When first arriving in Rome, it’s very tempting to become cynical about a place where the culture reached its pinnacle 2000 years ago and is now filled with locals who will gladly take your money while glaring at you for being there, one of thousands of tourists filling the streets.

Each time we encountered a surly Roman I found myself thinking either, “The tourists aren’t the ones peeing in the streets, you (insert appropriate denigration here)” or “Yeah, I’m in Rome, great. But what have you done lately, Rome?”

“What have you done lately?” seems like reasonable question, but in light of the many engineering masterpieces that Rome is home to, it almost becomes irrelevant. It’s like finding a Ming vase in a dusty corner of someone’s garage- it doesn’t matter where you found it as long as it’s still there.

What follows is a tour of three of Rome’s most famous structures, and why one of them will never, ever be surpassed.

The Colosseum

Located just east of the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, originally called the Flavian Ampitheatre, was completed in 80 A.D. and could seat around 50,000 spectators. As everyone who has seen Spartacus or Gladiator knows, it was primarily used to present gladiatorial games, though mock hunts, staged battles, executions and mythology based dramas were also held there.

Structural Highlights:

The Colosseums’ dimensions are 157 feet tall, 615 feet long, and 510 feet wide. It is an oval, not a circle, and it’s also far from perfect. Hundreds of years of decay, vandalism, theft, and pollution have significantly affected its appearance, but it’s still possible to imagine what it must have been like when it was first completed and in use.

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Born in Valencia, Spain in 1951, Santiago Calatrava represents a rare breed of structural designer- he was educated as an structural engineer and went on to study architecture. To me Calatrava represents the ideal builder- a person who combines the technical knowledge of a structural engineer with the aestetic capabilities of an architect. Plus passion, lots of it.

I give architects a lot of crap, but had I been born a couple hundred years ago (or longer), I probably would have been one. The thing is, architects used to be the master builders of the world. They used to have to understand the physical limitations of building alternative and materials. An architect could come up with the most beautiful design in the world but if they couldn’t figure out how to make it work- it wasn’t getting built.

Times have changed. Now, engineers crunch the numbers, architects worry about sellable floor space, and interior designers pick out the wallpaper. Calatrava is one of the few people working today who has succesfully bridged the gap between architect and engineer.

In that way you could say that Calatrava is “old school”, even though his work all looks extremely modern. His iconic, innovative, expensive designs have been built all over the world, and that’s another reason to admire him- he gets paid to turn his dreams into reality.

***

The morning after I noticed the bridge from the top of Seville’s belltower we set out north towards the river to find it. With nothing else to do that day, we stopped for lunch, shopped, and Brianne got a haircut while I read The Onion and commiserated with a horse.

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