Sunrise and sunset are my two favorite times of day.
(Sorry about the Facebook “Like” buttons appearing at the top and bottom of each post — I haven’t figured out how to just get them to stay on the top of the post yet. I’ll worry about it when I get home.) :-)
Changing light at the Cologne Cathedral, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie. Click on the picture to view a larger version.
I’m playing catchup right now, writing blog posts offline and going through pictures to figure out which ones to use. I have WAY too many pictures, and that’s just my cameraphone pictures!
We’re heading home the day after tomorrow — I’m not very enthused about this, but all good things must come to an end. I have to admit that my own bed will feel pretty good… but there’s also something really neat about waking up in a different place every few mornings and listening to the new sounds of the morning where I am.
Anyway, in the meantime until I catch up, here’s a fun picture. Last Thursday night we were waiting for our Couchsurfing host to pick us up at the train station in Cologne, and so I pulled out my cameraphone and took these pictures of the Cologne Cathedral picking up the last rays of the sunlight. I timestamped them so you can see not only how late it was, but also how quickly the light changed as we waited.
I love catching golden light like this.
Euro Trip Day 40: Getting to indulge my love of Gothic cathedrals AND geology, all in the same day!
AKA, Why I’m the biggest nerd EVER. :-)
On Wednesday we headed up to Prague Castle to check out St. Vitus Cathedral, a HUGE Gothic cathedral. Now, I’ve known since my freshman year of high school in Spanish class, when we learned about Santiago de Compostela in Spain, that I’ve been fascinated by cathedral architecture. But if I’ve learned one thing about the dozens of churches I’ve seen in the past three years since I got my last passport, it’s that not only do I have a thing for Gothic architecture, but I don’t really care all that much about Renaissance, I like Romanesque, and I can’t stand Baroque. Sorry, but there it is. As I commented to John a couple of days ago, if it ain’t Baroque… DON’T. Just don’t. Unfortunately, some really really neat churches got Baroqued over time. Fortunately, in the late 19th century there was a huge classical architecture revival all over Europe, and so some dilapidated and Baroqued churches got restored to their Gothic glory (and in some cases, completed. Heh.)
Ok, so back in an entry about Budapest, I mentioned that Matyas Church (on Buda Castle hill) is one of my all-time favorite churches. Well, I’ve decided that St. Vitus Cathedral is now in my top five. It’s absolutely flipping AMAZING. I honestly think that, no matter how many Gothic churches I’m fortunate to see in my lifetime, I’ll never get sick of them. Ever.
Cathedral from the outside. This thing is at the absolute tip of the hill that Prague Castle is on, so an already huge church looks even bigger. It's just AMAZING.
.
Be still, my Gothic-architecture-loving heart...
.
St. Albrecht!
.
St. Wenceslas chapel in St. Vitus Cathedral. The walls are inlaid with semiprecious stones, and the whole thing dates back to the mid-1300s. It's INCREDIBLE.
.
The rose window.
.
Front of the cathedral.
.
John, being the wonderful man that he is, didn’t drag me out of the cathedral, but after almost an hour, he started strongly hinting that maybe we should let the other tourists enjoy it too, so we left, but not until after I’d found out when the daily church service times were so that I could come back and go to a service here. :-)
On our way out of the castle hill area, we decided to walk through the castle gardens. This was a GREAT idea, because we got to see BIRDS! LARGE ONES! And we got to HOLD THEM!!
If I thought the church was going to be the highlight of my day, I was sorely mistaken. I think this was the highlight of my WEEK. Can you tell by the grin on my face? That's a peregrine falcon, by the way. And why the heck am I wearing the same shirt in every picture?
.
John holding an eagle owl. He really was thrilled about this, we were just having a hard time getting Mr. E. Owl to look at the camera. :-)
.
Apparently it’s a tradition at Czech castles to keep birds of prey, so Prague Castle has turned theirs into a demonstration kind of thing. For about $5, you get to hold the bird of your choice. AWESOME.
.
After John pulled me off the ceiling, we headed down to the National Museum of Natural History to see what there was to see.
Main hall at the museum.
.
Being the nerd that I am, I made a beeline for their geology exhibit when I saw the sign. I can’t help it — I like rocks. Maybe it’s because I have plenty in my head. Anyway, since I’m a bit of a geology nerd, I generally judge a museum’s geology exhibit (however fair/unfair this may be) by if they have a sample of benitoite, California’s state gemstone, which is found only in San Benito County in central California. Picky, I know. Usually when a museum has a sample of benitoite, it’s a very small sample, and it’s usually polished to look like the lovely blue gemstone it is. Prague’s Natural History Museum didn’t have a very pretty, polished sample, but darned if it isn’t the LARGEST sample I’ve seen… it’s just a trip to see it all the way over here. So cool!!! And to be fair, they did have quite a nice display of other rocks too, including some really neat meteors.
California's state gemstone.
.
We closed down the museum and headed across the street to McDonald’s for dinner. I know I know… McDonald’s. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here on my blog or just on Facebook, but we’ve been going to McDonald’s on this trip for several reasons. #1, McDonald’s in Europe almost ALWAYS have free wifi and free bathrooms. If we have time to kill while waiting for a train, it sure as heck beats waiting at the train station, and there’s almost always a McDonald’s near a train station. Second, their local menu is somewhat interesting. In Krakow, I had a chicken curry burger, and I swear I’m starting a petition to bring these to the US. Who’s in? I promise they’re really good! I mean, it’s not like having real chicken curry, but to me it was quite an acceptable substitute!
So anyway, I’d been seeing ads in the metro stations for a tzatziki beef burger. I had no idea what this was, but the picture looked interesting, so I figured I’d give it a whirl. And it had these really interesting seasoned potatoes that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
The potatoes were good, but the burger… not so much. The burger had feta cheese and fresh cucumbers in it, as well as some sort of pinkish sauce that wasn’t Thousand Island, and I think that’s dried dill as the seasoning on the bun. I kind of liked the feta and the sauce, but the cucumbers and the dill… notsomuch. To be fair, I’m not a cucumber fan anyway, but even after I took them off the burger, it was still really cucumber-y. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well, I tried. I’m now 1 for 3 in liking foreign McD’s burgers (the chicken curry was great, but I had a McCountry in Zagreb that I couldn’t finish either. Oh well — you win some, you lose some. Even at McDonald’s.)
Seriously. Fresh cucumbers. The fries in the background are John's, by the way. He's not quite as adventurous when it comes to McDonald's as I am... which makes sense given that he's always been happy with and able to finish his meal. :-)
.
After dinner, we headed to a DVD store to amuse ourselves with the cheap Czech offerings (I still think they’re pirated, but John doesn’t think so) and then we headed home. It was the perfect relaxed day. :-)
**********
Where we are now:
.
Euro Trip Day 27: Anyone know what flavor “Smurf” is?
Yesterday we slept in… we’ve been doing that a lot on this trip, oddly enough. I think yesterday I was tired because a horde of angry mosquitoes woke me up at 3AM. Well, the mosquitoes didn’t wake me up so much as the violent itching.
Have I mentioned that I don’t think I’ve seen a single window screen the entire time I’ve been here? Yeah. Just open windows.
And as it’s been hot in Pécs (mid-to-high 90s yesterday) and these dorms aren’t air-conditioned, we’ve had no choice but to sleep with the window open. Amusingly enough, the town’s name of Pécs (pronounced PAY-ch) is of Serbian origin and means “furnace”. No kidding. Although I suppose it beats Sacramento at this time of year.
I’d prepared myself. Despite the heat, I was sleeping in long pajama pants, socks, a long-sleeved shirt, and I pulled the comforter over my head. But the darn mosquitoes took advantage of anything they could find, which was my hands (which gripped the comforter) and my ankles, where there was the gap between my pajama pants and my socks. UGH.
I really, REALLY hate putting mosquito repellent on to sleep, but anything’s better than waking up itching like I did. I have hydrocortisone cream, but that didn’t help. I ended up in the fridge’s tiny freezer compartment, trying to dig out slivers of ice with my fingernails to ice the bites (which were incredibly swollen and almost painful.) After about an hour, the itching subsided enough that I could sleep, so I took the comforter out of the comforter cover and crawled inside the cover, pulling it over my head like a sleeping bag. Don’t laugh, it worked. I only got one more bite the rest of the night — on the tip of my nose. Lovely.
Here's our dorm. We're on the second floor on the one end, on the backside of the building.
.
We finally got out of the dorm around 11 and headed downtown, first stopping by the store to pick up bread and cheese for lunch. We ended up in a park in a square near the town’s cathedral, and we found a nice bench in the shade where we could make our sandwiches. It was so nice that I ended up taking a nap there, while John just relaxed and waited for me to wake up.
Before we went to the cathedral, we first went to check out the town’s UNESCO World Heritage site, the early Christian necropolis, a cemetery that dates back to the 3rd and 4th centuries BC. I took pictures with my big camera, but none with the phone, so I don’t have any to post yet, but it really was beautiful, and amazing to look at some of the tombs that still have original frescoes in them. Neat! (And bonus–as they’re underground, they’re NICE AND COOL. Yaay for natural air-conditioning!)
(As an aside, there’s something I’ve learned this trip. John and I, being the geeks that we are, and especially being the museum geeks we are, can spend almost as long inside a museum when none of the exhibit info is in English as we can when all of the exhibit info is in English. Go figure.)
After that, we headed to the cathedral, which was GORGEOUS, inside and out. After staring for at least 15 minutes in amazement, John dubbed it the most beautiful church he’s seen (and I’ve dragged him to some pretty nice churches in London, Amsterdam, and Rome, not to mention on this trip.) I don’t think it makes my top favorites list, but it was nice. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a sucker for good architecture anywhere, but I tend to prefer churches that haven’t been obviously, visibly renovated to the hilt, and I also tend to prefer Romanesque and Gothic. If I had to pick, I think my favorite churches have been St. Mark’s in Venice, the Duomo in Milan, Westminster Abbey in London, and Mattyas Church in Budapest. No particular order for those, though — I can’t pick.
Pecs Cathedral.
.
Inside the cathedral.
.
Have I mentioned how much I love my new lens? The wide-angle? These pics were taken with my phone, of course, but just wait until I post the other ones… Wow. SO AWESOME. (Why am I not posting them now? Because it takes enough time out of my day just to write these blog posts… no time to go through my camera pics and do post-processing and post them online. I will though!)
Archway in the cathedral.
.
Staircase to the choir loft. Amusingly enough, there was a bicycle parked at the bottom (out of the picture, though.) Talk about out of place!
.
Crypt under the church. This was my favorite part, for some reason. Don't get me wrong -- I liked the cathedral, but there was just something about the spare, simple interior of the crypt that I preferred.
.
I took another one of this crypt… well, actually it was the original of the above shot. I tinkered with the saturation and contrast for the above picture to try to get a more interesting effect, but if you’re curious, click here to check out the original.
After the cathedral, we headed in search of ice cream, since even though it was creeping toward late afternoon, it was still hot and miserable, and we’ve been eating a fair amount of ice cream on this trip. (Despite that, both John and I have lost weight… not that he needed to lose any, unfortunately. I just hope he doesn’t disappear by the end of the trip. Fortunately, Hungarians seem to subscribe to the philosophy of cooking good food, and then smothering it with sour cream, since sour cream makes everything better. I’m hoping he can put back on some of that weight… and hoping I don’t, since I’m already enjoying Hungarian food!)
Anyone know what flavor "Smurf" is?
.
Seen on the way to ice cream. Someone please get this guy some fashion sense. OMG.
.
Also seen on the way to ice cream. Underneath this sign, the guy actually has a small cooking area to cook you your sandwich on the go. Awesome.
.
After ice cream, the next order of business was to find somewhere that sold prepaid SIM cards for our phone, so we could contact someone for our evening plans. We’ve picked up SIM cards in a couple of other countries (Croatia and Bosnia) and it’s a matter of going to the nearest newsstand and trying to make yourself understood as to what you want. Apparently Hungary doesn’t roll that way though. We found out we had to go to the T-Mobile store, and received incomprehensible directions, which resulted in us taking refuge in McDonald’s to use their free wifi. We made it to T-Mobile a few minutes after they ostensibly had closed, although the doors were still open and they were still serving customers. This was no in-and-out thing like I’d planned — it took almost 20 minutes of waiting for the sales guy to enter information into the computer and signing papers. WTH?? This wasn’t even for a phone contract, just a prepaid SIM. When we left, they gave us such a large stack of papers that they gave us a plastic T-Mobile shopping bag in which to put them. It’s great. Oh, and the papers I had to sign were in Hungarian. Even better. It IS prepaid, though.
The nice thing about T-Mobile, though, is that we can top it up anywhere (a lot of ATMs even do T-Mobile top-ups) or online, and we can still top it up when we’re in other countries. The problem we had with the ones from Bosnia and Croatia is that they were for local cell providers, so to top them up, you had to buy top-up cards locally. So once we were in Bosnia, for example, we couldn’t buy a top-up card for the Croatian phone company (which almost became a problem when we ran out of credit trying to communicate with our host for where we were staying in Sarajevo. Whoops.)
So I now have a Hungarian phone number. Whee.
After that, we headed back up to the cathedral to meet up with some people. I’m signed up with CouchSurfing.com, which is a network of people who want to host travellers to stay overnight, or just meet up with them and hang out while the travellers are in their city. I’ve been hosting off and on since I moved to Sacramento, and we couchsurfed when we were in Amsterdam last summer and will in a couple of days when we’re in Budapest. It’s a fun way to meet people from all over when I host them in Sacramento, and also to meet local people while traveling. And hey, if we can get a free place to stay, that’s nice too… but that’s not the point.
So anyway, each city has a Couchsurfing “ambassador” (this is an official position) who helps keep the local CSing network together and oversees things. When you log onto the CS website, it collects your location based on your IP address, and gives you a listing of couchsurfers near you. Yesterday morning I received an email from the Pecs ambassador. She was hosting a Slovenian CSer, and was planning on going out to drinks with him and some friends of hers last night, and invited us to come along. We thought it sounded like fun, so we arranged to meet up. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures, but we had a TOTAL blast. Besides the Pecs ambassador and her CSer, it was another couple of her friends, and an American guy from Missouri who just arrived from teaching English in South Korea and is now looking for a job teaching English here. Drinks turned into dinner, where conversation and eating continued at such a leisurely pace that we got up to leave thinking we’d already paid… WHOOPS! :-D (Not just John and I — all of us! Heheheh…) Some of us are going out again tonight — it was totally fun. :-)
Oh, and the dinner? John and I had WAAAY too much food. I ordered a main dish (pork chops with rosemary potatoes, covered in a mustard and sour cream sauce), and then a “half” side of chili, mostly because I wanted to try the lavosh (fried bread) that came with it. The “half” turned out to be a small saucepan’s worth, and the pork chops and potatoes were also a huge plate’s worth. Fortunately, they had take-out containers, so John and I now have lunch and dinner for today. :-)
One more day in Pecs, and then it’s off to Budapest. While I’m enjoying Pecs, I can’t wait — I’m SOOOO looking forward to going back to Budapest!
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 23: Sarajevo to Zagreb
This post is coming a bit late because it seems like our internet access always seems to die on us in the evening, which is when I’d prefer to be sitting around working on things like reservations for upcoming cities and blog posts and the like. In any case, most Zagreb museums are closed on Mondays, for some reason (we had this problem in Dublin too!) so it gives me time right now (now that the internet has decided to work again) to get stuff planned. I’m trying to make hay while the sun shines (or the internet works) I guess.
Anyway, before I post a few Zagreb pics, here are a few leftover pictures and videos from Sarajevo that I wanted to post. There are more pictures on my Flickr than I’ve posted here, so feel free to go look at them. :-)
Here’s a video I took of pigeons in the Turkish marketplace in the old section of town:
.
Here’s another video from the marketplace.
Here’s a video I took of the main street in Sarajevo — to me the main street (Austro-Hungarian influence, from when it was a part of that empire) is a really interesting contrast to the marketplace (Turkish influence, from being part of the Ottoman Empire.) Regardless of empire, it’s a beautiful city.
.
Not to get too morbid (that was Day 21′s post) but here are more roadside graves from the war, right in the center of town.
These were on the main street right across from a huge shopping mall.
.
While we were sitting at the train station waiting for our night train to Zagreb, we heard the evening call to prayer (Sarajevo has a fairly large Muslim population as it was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries.) I’d been trying to catch this on video (well, audio) the whole time we were there, and I finally succeeded just before we left. What I think is really cool about this one is that you can hear two different calls from two different mosques. Neat.
.
Here are links to two other videos (video 1, video 2) of it that I took–I kept them both because they both have different things that I liked about them (in one of them I look around the train station where we are, and the other one I just like the sound.)
The night train to Zagreb wasn’t bad, even though there were no sleeper cars so we had to sleep on the seats. Seating is in compartments, so you can shut the curtains and door and it’s a bit more private than open train seats, although the conductors come in periodically for ticket checks and three different people came in to check our passports around 4AM when we crossed the border from Bosnia to Croatia. That was pretty irritating, because they didn’t come all at once. One came in, we fell back asleep. 10 minutes later, the next one. We fell back asleep. 15 minutes later, the third one. At that point, when that guy left, I sat up and looked around and said, “ANYONE ELSE??” GEEZ.
Other than the sleep though, the ride was quite enjoyable. We ended up sharing a compartment with a late-20s British guy living and working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He’s a reader (although he prefers fiction like John does, rather than nonfiction like me) and has a BA and MA in international relations, so we ended up talking books and politics (British, Irish, American, and Bosnian) until almost 2AM. He was REALLY interesting to talk to! He made an observation that John and I both were amazed by — he pointed out that both Northern Ireland and Sarajevo (well, Bosnia in general) went through a really war-filled, violent period in the 90s. However, if one looks at both cities now, Sarajevo has transformed into what appeared to all three of us to be an atmosphere of peace and tolerance, whereas he said that Northern Ireland is still very filled with tension and is very segregated — that the peace largely exists because Catholics live in neighborhoods that are 90%+ Catholic, and Protestants live in areas that are 90%+ Protestant, and all you have to do to tell which neighborhood you’re in is look around to see if the flags being displayed are for the UK or not. It’s neat to see how far Sarajevo has come, and it’s sad that Northern Ireland hasn’t managed to do the same, despite centuries of tension in the respective regions.
Although to be frank, I’m pretty sure not all of Bosnia is as tolerant as Sarajevo appears to be. In the city of Mostar, where we spent the night before Sarajevo, by law, 50% of the city council is Muslim, and 50% is Christian. They also live on different sides of town and support two entirely different soccer teams. And the country of Bosnia itself is actually divided into two regions per the 1995 Dayton Agreement — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is mostly Croats and Bosnian Muslims, and the Republika Srpska, which is the (88%) Serbian region of the country. Each has its own government, flag and coat of arms, president, parliament, police & customs departments, and postal system. Technically the country has one armed forces, but both entities maintain their own armies. To make things even more crazy, there’s one city that’s claimed by both FBR and RS, so it’s currently under international supervision. So they’re still very, very divided within their own country.
Anyway, so it made for an interesting train ride that passed quickly, and even though we ended up sleeping on train seats, hey, it was one night we didn’t have to pay for lodging for. I’m all about that. :-)
John, trying to sleep on the seat at around 5:30 AM.
.
When we got to Zagreb, it was about 7:45 Sunday morning, and we realized that nothing was going to be open for a while, so we found a comfortable place to relax that had free wifi (outside a hotel) and we hung out there for a couple of hours.
About 10AM, the Zagreb Archaeological Museum opened, so we headed over there, and I have to say that I am REALLY impressed with the breadth their collection. The whole museum only took about an hour and a half, so it wasn’t a huge collection, but what they had, they had a lot of and quality examples of.
900,000-year-old stone hand tools -- COOL!!
.
I had to laugh at this. This is a stash of coins from a Greek hoard that was found in the pot in the picture, but whoever put the display together snuck in a 10 lipa (about 1.7 US cents) coin right in the middle. If you click on this picture and then click on the picture on the Flickr page it goes to, you can see where I put a note on which one is the modern coin. :-)
.
After the museum, which closed at 1PM, we wandered up to the Zagreb Cathedral and caught the last half of the church service. I missed Bosnia, but so far I’ve managed to go to a church service in all of the other countries we’ve been to. Neat! Anyway, the cathedral is a Gothic cathedral, but it’s not actually all original — the main nave collapsed in an earthquake in the 1800s and the whole thing sustained serious damage, so it was mostly rebuilt back then, and it’s been remodeled/reconstructed at various other times in history as well. Still, it was really neat, and there’s been a church on that site since 1094, so that’s something.
Doorway of the cathedral
.
Crucifixion at the back of the church. This was one of the more interesting ones that John and I had ever seen -- I can't remember if I've ever seen the complete scene like this as statues within a church. Also, the way the guy on the right is looking down on the onlooker is kind of creepy. Finally, anyone know what language that is above the scene? We were trying to figure it out. Aramaic, maybe?
.
I know I’m a horrible person, but I took a couple of videos during the service, just because the choir was so beautiful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking and held my phone vertically to capture more of the scene, and when I used a program to rotate the video, it lost image and sound quality. Oh well. Here’s one video, and here’s a link to the second (shorter) one.
.
Inside the cathedral. Don't worry, I took this (and the other pictures) AFTER the service was over.
.
After church was over, we went back to the train station (where we’d stashed our backpacks in a locker) and went in search of our lodging for the night, a guest house we’d booked through hostelworld.com (which has been my go-to website on this trip when we can’t find somewhere free to stay.) I was a bit leery of this place when I booked, because it had no reviews and because it was considerably cheaper than other double-room accomodations in Zagreb. Well, turns out that it’s a bit of a ways outside the city (but a few minutes walk from a tram stop that serves several tram lines into the city) and because it’s pretty new. I don’t care about either one — John and I both agreed that this is a really nice place. Everything’s new, it’s clean, it’s quiet, the owner speaks fairly decent English, and while we share a bathroom, there’s only one other person staying here right now, and there are two bathrooms, so it’s really one to ourselves. Excellent. :-)
Lovely room!!
.
We ended up taking a nap for a couple of hours since we still were exhausted from the train ride, then we woke up and went in search of a McDonald’s. I know, we’re horrible typical American tourists… but after 23 days on the road, we both wanted something familiar. Well, as familiar as one can get at McDonald’s in a foreign country. I ordered a burger called a McCountry… is this something that only exists overseas? ‘Cause I don’t usually eat at McDonald’s at home, but I don’t ever remember seeing it on the menu the couple times I have been there in the past few months. It was two chicken patties (slices of chicken, not McNugget style) and a funky beige sauce that was VERY mustard-y. Too mustard-y, actually — I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. And it really wasn’t a big sandwich, either — maybe the size of a regular McD’s burger, only with the two patties instead of one? Oh well. The fries and strawberry shake were good, even if it did end up being quite a bit more pricey than at home. :-)
Odd McFlurry mix-ins. I believe Cornetto is chocolate-dipped (on one side) ice cream cone pieces, I know Smarties are kind of like M&Ms, and a Kit Kat is a Kit Kat (do we have Kit Kat McFlurries in the US though?) But I'm not entirely sure what Daim is. And also, can we order just plain strawberry, chocolate, or caramel McFlurries in the US? I may have to go back just to try one of these. :-)
.
**********
.
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 21: A depressing historical post (with past and present pictures)
I’m warning you in advance that this is going to be a depressing post, so don’t be leaving comments that this made you want to go eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s or something. Sorry, my lame attempt at humor here.
With today’s post, I’m going to post some before and after pictures of the way stuff was and the way stuff is now. Some of the things look better now, some don’t. But I thought it’d be an interesting contrast.
Disclaimer: I really do like this city. I really do. It’s beautiful, and it’s got some neat historical stuff. But it’s difficult sometimes to look past the reminders of the war — they’re everywhere. For example, a picture I have on my camera but not my cameraphone (so hence it will be posted much later) is of some of the city cemeteries. During the almost four-year Siege of Sarajevo, the citizens of Sarajevo couldn’t get outside of the city to bury the thousands of people killed, so they started appropriating whatever open public spaces they could find. Like parks, and like the sports complex from the Winter Olympics. I don’t have a picture of those graves — that’s just on my camera as well. But looking at it is… well, I don’t have a word for it. And it’s in this really busy public area (as are many of the other graves) and people just go about their daily lives. THOUSANDS of graves.
Something else that’s a constant memorial — the Sarajevo Rose. I saw one of these our first day here and guessed what it was, and my guess was confirmed when I started to read the Wikipedia article on the Siege of Sarajevo (that I linked to in the previous paragraph.)
This is where a mortar hit during the war and killed one or more people. The mortar holes were filled in with red resin as a memorial.
.
Today we started off our tour of gloom by heading to the city’s old synagogue, which dates back to the 1500s. It’s now a museum (there’s a new synagogue elsewhere) so we wandered through it to see what there was to see. It was an excellent exhibit, culminating with a display on Sarajevo’s Holocaust victims as well as the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. I don’t have any pictures of the museum that I took with John’s cameraphone (I do with my regular camera) but one of the things that struck me the most was a huge book they had with the names of the 12,000 Sarajevo Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Intense stuff.
After that, John still wasn’t feeling well, so he headed back to the apartment while I climbed up the hill to the Olympic Stadium — it’s about a mile walk from the apartment where we’re staying (courtesy of a college friend of Joel!’s sister, who is apartment-sitting for another friend of hers. We totally scored — it’s a really nice place, and VERY central!) Anyway, I couldn’t get inside the stadium, but I did take some pictures outside. I kept forgetting to get out my camera phone (I was using my DSLR) so I only have a few pictures for today’s post, but like I said, I’ll post more later whenever I get around to going through the thousands of pictures I’ve taken this trip (and I’ll narrow down those thousands of pictures… somehow…)
This is the only picture I could find online that was even close to what I took today with my cameraphone. I found some better pictures of the opening ceremonies, but I don't have a cameraphone picture of them.
.
The back side of the Olympic Stadium today, including the Olympic torch.
.
The stadium is built into a hillside, and this is the downhill side. In an attempt to see into the stadium (it was closed) I walked around to the uphill side to see if I could look down into it. I couldn’t, but when I turned around to see the view from the other direction, well… yeah.
View from the Olympic Hill, standing with my back to the stadium. Click on this picture to enlarge it. No, really. Click on it.
.
Those are all graves. Pretty much that entire lovely valley.
I don’t know why it hit me so hard, but it did, and the only thing I could think of to do was say the Lord’s Prayer. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know what else to do.
After that, I walked down the hill and took a right turn onto the main street and, then took a left and headed toward a few other landmarks.
I remember seeing this on TV -- it's the Parliament building after being shelled by the Serbs.
.
Here, have another picture.
.
Now it's been completely repaired, of course. I actually saw this as we were on the bus on the way into town a couple of days ago, and recognized it immediately. Oh, and the yellow Holiday Inn on the right side of the picture is where all the reporters holed up during the war.
.
Here's a "before" picture of the Holiday Inn. I'm not sure if it was during or after the war.
.
After taking the above picture, I kept heading down the street to where it crosses the Miljacka river, the river that runs through the center of the city.
Vrbanja Bridge, AKA Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić bridge, aka the Romeo and Juliet Bridge.
.
The above bridge’s original name was the Vrbanja Bridge, but it was the site of the first two victims of the Siege of Sarajevo, so it was named in their honor. However, it also bears the nickname “Romeo and Juliet Bridge” for the following incident, which I’m shamefully cribbing from this website:
A War Between Crazy People, Between Monsters
By Kurt Schork
Reuters
SARAJEVO, May 23, 1993 – Two lovers lie dead on the banks of Sarajevo’s Miljacka river, locked in a final embrace.
For four days they have sprawled near Vrbana bridge in a wasteland of shell-blasted rubble, downed tree branches and dangling power lines. So dangerous is the area no one has dared recover their bodies.
Bosko Brckic and Admira Ismic, both 25, were shot dead on Wednesday trying to escape the besieged Bosnian capital for Serbia. Sweethearts since high school, he was a Serb and she was a Moslem.
“They were shot at the same time, but he fell instantly and she was still alive,” recounts Dino, a soldier who saw the couple trying to cross from government territory to rebel Serb positions.
“She crawled over and hugged him and they died like that, in each other’s arms.”
Squinting through a hole in the sandbagged wall of a bombed-out building, Dino points to where the couple lie mouldering amid the debris of Bosnia’s 14-month civil war. Bosko is face-down on the pavement, right arm bent awkwardly behind him. Admira lies next to her lover, left arm across his back.
Another corpse, that of a man shot five months ago, lies nearby. The dead man’s body is so wasted his clothes seem hollow.
The government side says Serb soldiers shot the couple, but Serb forces insist Bosnian Moslem-led government troops were responsible.
“I don’t care who killed them, I just want their bodies so I can bury them,” says Zijah Ismic, the dead girl’s father. “I don’t want them to rot in no-man’s land.”
Government and Serb authorities have discussed the matter, but so far are refusing a cease-fire around Vrbana bridge to permit recovery of the couple. The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), charged with providing humanitarian assistance in Sarajevo, maintains the bodies are a local issue.
“I’m an auto mechanic and I know a lot of people in this city,” says the girl’s father. “Everyone is washing their hands in this case, Bosnians and Serbs alike.”
In a country mad for war, Bosko and Admira were crazy for each other. The university chemistry students dated for seven years before moving in to live together nine months ago. With his father dead, no one would have blamed Bosko had he left Sarajevo when his mother and brother fled before war broke out last year. Instead, he stayed in the city.
“He had no one here, just Admira,” explains the dead girl’s mother. “Bosko stayed in Sarajevo because of her. Admira wanted to repay him by travelling with him to Serbia.”
Mystery, and perhaps treachery, surrounds the couple’s death. Government and Serb officials admit they agreed to let them pass through the lines last Wednesday afternoon at 4.00 pm. Bosko and Admira walked at least 500 meters along the north bank of the Miljacka river, fully exposed to soldiers on both sides.
As they passed Bosnian lines and headed for the Serb-held neighbourhood of Grbavica, someone shot them.
The young couple had been dead two days before Admira’s parents found out. Ham radio operators in Serbia contacted them trying to confirm rumours of Bosko’s death.
“I spoke to his mother then and she gave me permission to bury them together in Sarajevo,” says Admira’s father. “We want them to lie together in the ground, just as they died together,” he adds.
Frantic to retrieve the bodies, Admira’s parents are bewildered by unresponsive Bosnian and Serb bureaucracies, and by UNPROFOR’s hands-off policy. Zijah Ismic claims he begged UNPROFOR to let him drive one of its armoured pesonnel carriers in to get his daughter. He says the U.N. told him armour-piercing rounds from machine-guns and cannon around Vrbana bridge would go through the vehicle.
“Love took them to their deaths,” Ismic says of Bosko and Admira. “That’s proof this is not a war between Serbs and Moslems. It’s a war between crazy people, between monsters. That’s why their bodies are still out there.”
Here’s a link to a picture of the couple as they lay there. I was going to post it in the post, but I just can’t… so click on it if you want. Also, PBS’s Frontline did a really good piece on the incident — you can read the transcript here.
Incidentally, the reporter who wrote the above piece was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone in 2000. Half of his ashes were interred in Washington, DC, and the other half were buried next to Bosko and Admira in Sarajevo. Also posthumously, a street that connects the Sarajevo Airport and the main street in the city (called “Sniper Alley” during the war) was named after him.
If there’s anything I got out of today’s tour of gloom, it was how amazingly lucky we are as Americans to live where we do and have what we have. Don’t ever take that for granted, folks.
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 9: In which we get to Korčula and I wonder why we didn’t just go straight here
(Side note — the island’s name is actually pronounced “KOR-chula” — the č in Croatian is a ch sound.)
So today I discovered one of the little problems with traveling and not really having a set schedule… one forgets what day it is fairly easily. This morning I woke up gradually shortly after 8, as the sound of jackhammers infiltrated my consciousness. As I came slowly awake, I tried to figure out what the sound was and from where it was coming, and then my next thought in the as of yet groggy, dimly-lit recesses of my brain was, “Dude, it’s Sunday — can’t they take a break from work for one stinking day?”
And then ZING!, the lightbulb went off and I came wide awake and reached for my phone, where I’d saved the bus schedule for the bus we were going to take to Orebic, where we’d catch the ferry to Korčula.
I looked at the schedule and reread the words I’d read before and somehow glossed over: “Departs 14:15 every day except Sunday.”
SUNDAY.
At this point the adrenaline kicked in, and I kicked off the sheet and grabbed my clothes to change out of my pajamas so that I could grab my laptop and run down two flights of stairs (outside stairs — the hostel we were in is built on a hill, so even though it’s three stories, it’s more like three terraces on the hill) to the patio where the wifi was. Fortunately, I’d saved some links with a couple different transit options from Dubrovnik to Korcula, so I was able to relatively quickly find alternate transportation. The bad news was that it was a more expensive ferry direct to the island, and that it left from the ferry terminal (a 15-minute hike down the hill and a ten-minute bus ride away) at 10AM.
I ran back up the two flights of stairs. At this point, John, having heard me exit the room in a rush, was awake and wanting to know what was amiss. When I told him, he sprang out of bed about as fast as I had, and much packing chaos ensued. The bus that we’d planned to take didn’t leave until 2:15 PM, so we were under the impression that we had plenty of time, and hadn’t even begun to pack… whoops.
We got everything packed as quickly as we could, checked out of the hostel, ran down all 514 steps as fast as we safely could with all of our luggage, and caught the bus to the ferry port just as it pulled into the bus stop. We got to the ferry terminal, and after accidentally getting into the wrong ticket line once, got our tickets and were seated in the ferry lounge with about 30 minutes to spare. WHEW.
Big ol' ferry.
.
John managed to put his head down and go back to sleep for a few minutes, but I was wide awake and the adrenaline was still going, so there was no way I was going to fall back asleep. Heh.
.
In retrospect, both John and I were glad that we were forced to take the earlier, somewhat more expensive transportation option. It ended up not being as expensive as a travel website had led us to believe, and it sure beat the heck out of a bus ride. First and foremost though, we got to spend several more daytime hours than we would have originally had exploring and enjoying an absolutely smashingly gorgeous place. Neither of us can get over how beautiful it is here.
When the ferry got in, we were met by the owner of our hostel, who was there to give us both a ride and some bad news. The bad news was that he’d inadvertently overbooked, and we weren’t going to be able to stay at his hostel. The good news is that his mother runs a hostel as well, and she had a room, and he’d arranged to get us a room there for the duration of our stay at the same rate we would have paid at the other place.
This was good. Very good. Excellent, in fact. Why? Well, first of all, his mother’s hostel cost 20 Euro more per night than his. Second, it has air conditioning in the room (although the weather has been so pleasant we haven’t needed it yet.) Third, it has an in-room bathroom (rather than a shared one… I don’t mind a shared bathroom, but it is pretty nice to have our own!) Finally, his is a 15-minute walk from the old town… hers is RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF TOWN. I mean, RIGHT there. 50 yards from the ocean, 100 yards from a nice low, flat, broad rock that people use to sunbathe on and to swim in the ocean from (there’s even a metal pool ladder bolted to the rock to aid in getting out.)
We SERIOUSLY lucked out here. He kept apologizing for the inconvenience, and we were both like, “Uhhh, ok man… apology accepted.”
But it gets better… ok, not better, but at least more hilarious. While we were checking in and he was going over the hostel’s policies, he asked us where we were from, and John answered, “The US — California.” The guy’s eyes LIT UP, and the next thing out of his mouth (I kid you not) was, “So, California? Do you know anyone in the film industry? Because I have written these two screenplays…”
It was all I could do to stifle a snort. Seriously. Clearly because we live in California, we must be somehow connected to the film industry, right? The poor guy seemed so let down when we told him that we were in northern CA and had absolutely nothing to do with the film industry whatsoever. If there’s a “Native Californian Bingo”, I’m pretty sure I just crossed off a square there.
After we got settled in our room, we tossed on our swimsuits and headed for the beach. It was a pebbly beach, and I stepped on a sea urchin while wading in (I didn’t have my glasses on, so I can’t see anything, even though the water is really, REALLY clear) but it was still unbelievably beautiful. We hung out until John was toasted a lovely shade of pink, and then we headed back for showers and laundry (which has to be my least favorite thing about traveling thus far.) After that, I grabbed my camera and we wandered around our end of the island a bit. This island was once part of the Venetian Empire, and that’s quite represented in the architecture of the old city, which is walled and doesn’t have any vehicle traffic within its walls. The main church in the center of town is even called Sveti Marko, or St. Mark’s, just like in Venice. It’s SO BEAUTIFUL.
It occurred to me when I was uploading it that I've only posted two pictures of me, and I'm wearing the same shirt in both of them. Get used to it--I have four shirts that aren't long-sleeved.
.
We looped around once, then stopped at a pizza place right around the corner from our hostel for dinner when we both realized that we hadn’t eaten lunch, and come to think of it, we really hadn’t eaten breakfast either, owing to our mad rush to the ferry. We’d had a couple of granola bars and an apple, but that’s not much for a the day. The pizza place was right in front of Sveti Marco Church, and while we were sitting there, the church bells rang, so I took a short video so y’all could hear them. I love church bells so much.
.
Another view of the church.
.
After dinner, we went back to wander a bit more and enjoy the gorgeous sunset, picking up ice cream cones along the way.
I think when I get home I'm going to take all of the door pictures I've taken on this trip and put them together in a collage frame, or something. So many neat doors! And yes, I know I'm odd.
.
Old city of Korcula near sunset.
.
Y'all have NO CLUE how many takes I had to do of this on a cameraphone (difficulty -- HUGE lag between pressing the shutter and it actually taking the picture, and can only do one picture at a time) so that I could get a swallow in the foreground (they were out hunting at the time.) I love this shot, though.
.
Tomorrow we have no plans other than to go to the beach, and to wander around town seeing what else there is to see. We’re debating pushing back Montenegro a day or so and staying here instead… not sure yet though. We’ll see on Tuesday what our thoughts are on that. :-)
This is definitely my favorite place thus far, though.
**********
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 6: A lovely lazy day.
A 600-year-old fountain, a bell tower, and the front door of a monastery-turned-museum that is home to a pharmacy that has been continually operating since the mid-1300s. No, really. Way too cool!
I used to not be so Type A. I used to be much more unscheduled and willing to fly by the seat of my pants. I’m not sure when this changed, but somewhere along the line I decided I needed to have everything planned, and now when I don’t have a plan or things don’t go according to plan, I start to get twitchy.
Except for Ireland and Croatia, this trip is fairly unplanned. I booked a hotel in Dublin because I didn’t want to show up exhausted from the flight and try to find somewhere to stay. I booked a place in Dubrovnik because it’s a resort town and I didn’t want to wait until the last minute and pay more. But due to changing plans, I cancelled the other places I had reservations for in Split and Zagreb. Now I know where we’re going next (Sveti Stefan, Montenegro; Sarajevo, Bosnia; then on to Split) and I know where we’re staying (with a coworker in the first, and the friend of a friend’s sister in the second) but I don’t know exp sure when we’ll be coming and going, and so I can’t book a place in Split. So this is making me antsy, to say the least.
In fact, I don’t know where we’ll be staying in three more nights — there’s a gap between when our hostel reservation ends here and when we can go to Montenegro… so I need to figure that out. Not sure if I want to stay here or find other cool places to go. We’ll see. :-)
Anyway, we got up this morning and left our hostel without any idea of what we were going to do. This is pretty unusual for me. We walked down to the old part of the city, and we spent the day wandering the side streets and in and out of churches and museums. Just wandering is something I really need to do more of, and I do have to admit that it was really nice.
Tomorrow though we have a bit of a plan — to get up earlyish and walk the old city wall… it was way too hot mid-day today.
Good times. :-)
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 5: This is where I’ve wanted to be for MONTHS
City wall of Old Dubrovnik.
Before I start my post, I have to say one thing: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!! :-)
Ok, moving on. :-) This is part of the old city wall in Dubrovnik, southern Croatia. It’s ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS, and, unlike Dublin, there’s stuff to do after about 5:30 PM that doesn’t involve spending money. And the weather is considerably more beautiful. Just before we took off from Dublin, the pilot came on the PA to announce the flight time and destination time and weather, and when he said the temperature (29°C) the entire plane broke out in cheers and applause. So funny. :-)
This morning we had a lovely Irish breakfast, then went back to the National History Museum for a couple of hours before heading for the airport. We got to Dubrovnik around 7:45 PM, but due to technical difficulties, our luggage didn’t make it off the plane for almost an hour. Fun!!
We took a bus into the city and got there shortly after 9. The next bus to near our hotel wasn’t for almost an hour, so we looked at a map, decided it wasn’t far, and opted to walk. Whoops.
First, it was warm and humid, and we both were wearing pants. Second, this is a city built on a hill, and it has STAIRS. Approximately a brazillion of them just from the bus stop to our hostel, actually. Third, the staircases that mostly serve as streets are poorly marked.
Our hostel is called the Marco Polo, and just before we got there, I quipped to John that that was because you had to be an explorer to find it. All in all, I think we saved about ten min. or less over taking the bus. Oh well, it was an adventure… although I think there’s a fine line between being intrepid and being stupid. :-)
Anyway, it’s a bit after midnight, so I’m going to call it a night so we can get up tomorrow morning and enjoy the day!! I’m so happy to be here!!! :-)
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 4: See that “no photography” sign? I’m pretending I didn’t.
Let me preface this post by saying that I don’t expect everyone to have a huge level of technical expertise when it comes to photography. I really don’t. Honest.
But for the love of pete, if you don’t learn ANYTHING else about how to operate your camera, PLEASE PLEASE learn how to shut off the flash. Please. I do realize that many camera manufacturers make it somewhat challenging to do so, but not knowing how to do so is, to me, akin to owning a car and not knowing how to operate the windshield wipers, so you drive around with them going all the time whether or not you need them.
Please, for me — your friend/relative/coworker/someone whose website you randomly stumbled upon, just try it. Somewhere there should be an option that looks like a lightning bolt. You need that lightning bolt to be in a circle with a little line through it. Often cameras don’t let you shut that off unless the camera’s settings dial is turned to the P. So do that.
Why am I griping? Because it’s because of people who can’t operate their flashes (or who are just jerks and won’t turn them off) that photography is prohibited in a large number of museums and other cool places of historical interest. Flash photography can damage old stuff, so rather than outlawing flash photography (since so many people can’t operate their flashes) they just outlaw photography altogether. And then I miss cool pictures, and I get sad. :-( Actually, we all miss cool pictures.
See that sign with the picture of the camera and the circle through it? I'm a bad, bad person.
.
I know that ignoring this sign is a real jerk move, and it’ll probably end me up in trouble someday, and I just shouldn’t do it. But seriously, how can I be in a room that awesome and not take pictures??? See those shelves??
THOSE ARE ALL BOOKS.
Over 250,000 of them, as a matter of fact. This is Trinity College’s Long Room, where some of the university’s oldest books are found. It’s absolutely INCREDIBLE. Cribbed from the brochure:
The main chamber of the Old Library, the Long Room, is nearly 65 metres in length, and houses around 200,000 of the Library’s oldest books. When built, it had a flat plaster ceiling, with shelves for books on the lower level only, and an open gallery. By the 1850s these shelves had become completely full. In 1860 the roof was raised according to plans by the architects Deane and Woodward, to allow the construction of the present barrel-vaulted ceiling and gallery bookcases. Marble busts are placed down either side of the room, a collection begun in 1743, when 14 busts were commissioned from the sculptor Peter Scheemakers. Other sculptors represented are Simon Vierpyl, Patrick Cunningham, John van Nost and Louis Francois Roubiliac, whose bust of the writer Jonathan Swift is one the finest in the collection.
THEY RAISED THE ROOF TO FIT IN MORE BOOKS. THAT’S HARDCORE, YO.
So yeah, I ignored the sign. So shoot me. Three things helped me get these pictures:
1.) A great wide-aperture, wide-angle lens.
2.) A great incognito camera bag (I’ll be doing a review on this camera bag at some point — suffice to say, it’s awesome!
3.) The entrance of a group of noisy schoolkids, who sufficiently distracted the two security guards that I could sneak these (even though I couldn’t look through the viewfinder to do so.)
I absolutely love the barrel vault ceiling. Love it. Want to run my hands over its lovely glossiness.
.
It was substantially darker in this room than these pictures indicate. Yaaay for my new lens. :-)
.
In retrospect, I really should have shot these at 1600 ISO, or dropped the exposure and upped it in post-processing, or something else so that they weren’t a bit blurry. But I couldn’t exactly futz around openly with my camera, could I? Even with my cool little incognito camera bag, I still risked being noticed. Oh well, these aren’t horrible, at least. I’m just picky about blurriness.
One of the room's many busts. I wish I could see who -- in the large version, I can make out the letters of the first and last name--T.L.
.
"The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them." ~Samuel Butler
.
The rest of today was ok, but it had a start I’d rather not remember (which is, of course, why I’m writing about it here.) I’ve slept horribly the past two nights. Yaay jet lag, I know. It’s insanely frustrating to me though, because I NEVER have issues with jet lag. Ever. Joel! and John can verify this. So the fact that it’s been kicking my butt these past two days is really really ticking me off, to put it mildly. So anyway, I couldn’t fall asleep this morning until almost 4AM… and I woke up shortly before 1PM. Ummm, whoops. I didn’t bother setting my alarm, because honestly, how often do I oversleep? How about never? The absolute latest I ever sleep, regardless of bedtime, is around 9 or so. Which would have been a bit later than I wanted to be up, but still fine… So when John woke me up at 12:45 and announced the time, to say that I was a bit upset was an understatement. Profanity was said, chaos ensued, and we finally got downtown and to Trinity College (to see the Book of Kells, a 1200-year-old illuminated manuscript) about an hour later.
The thing that frustrates me about Dublin (well, and a lot of places) is that the museums and other cool historical places tend to shut down around 5PM. I liked London because a lot of the museums had one day a week where they were open until 9 or 10–what a great idea! Here, the only public exhibit that’s open that late is the National Library, which had one measly exhibit on Yeats, which I liked, except that they somehow COMPLETELY omitted one of his most famous poems (“The Second Coming”.) To be fair, they did have lots of neat manuscripts and letters and recordings and such, but still. DUDE. That’d be like doing something on Walt Disney and forgetting to mention Minnie Mouse, as far as I’m concerned.
The other frustrating thing, besides the early close times, is that in Dublin, the National Gallery, National History Museum, and Museum of Modern Art are all government-run, so they’re free… but they’re not open Mondays. So I was going to try to cram in all 3 today (since we have to be at the airport at 1 tomorrow) and instead, since I overslept, we made it through about 45 minutes of the history museum before they kicked us out because they were closing. Oh, and since it’s government-run, they say they close at 5… but they really start pushing you out of the exhibits at 4:45. LAME.
Anyway. At least we got to see the Long Room — that was so worth it!!! That’s why I decided to go to the effort of hooking up my camera to my computer to get these pics online–it was just that cool.
Ya know, you’d think that with all the jet lag I’ve been dealing with and related late-night wakefulness, I’d have all of my other pictures processed and uploaded… nope. But I have spent untold hours reading up on 20th century European history, specifically the Balkans and the rise and fall of Communism. Ahhh Wikipedia, my love and my nemesis. It’s like crack. I can’t help it. So many lovely little links.
Anyway, I’m going to go shower now and try to get some sleep, since it’s almost 1:30 AM. I am NOT going to oversleep again, darn it!!!! :-p
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 3: Swimming through Dublin
It was just a *tad* wet today. Just a bit. Stupid weather report said yesterday that it was going to be partly cloudy today… I think he was talking about Dublin, CA, ’cause there weren’t no “partly” about today. It flipping POURED. Anyway.
So I slept really poorly last night, and finally fell back asleep around 9 (when we should have been leaving) and got about a 1.5 hour nap in. I don’t usually get jet-lagged, so I’m not sure what that was all about, but at least I got a bit of a nap. As a result, we got a late start. The original plan was to head over to see the Book of Kells, but apparently there was some sort of charity walk/race downtown. I’m not entirely sure what charity though, as we saw people wearing matching t-shirts covering everything from breast cancer to autism to some childhood disorder. And apparently the whole thing centered on Trinity College, or at least that whole area. We got as far as the gate to the college and I saw the hordes of people wearing race numbers and matching t-shirts and decided I was done fighting my way through the masses. So we turned and went the opposite way down the street to Christ Church, which was blessedly uncrowded.
Leaning wall at Christ Church, Dublin.
.
Random historical fact — both the Anglican and Catholic churches claim this church as the seat of their archbishop. However, it’s an Anglican church in the sense that that’s what denomination worships here, with this one Catholic in name only, and the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin uses another church as his acting cathedral. Kind of weird.
This picture captures another random cool bit of historical and architectural history. So the camera’s straight and there’s no lens distortion — check out the top of the wall on the left side of the picture. It’s almost 2 feet off the vertical — apparently the original roof of the building was too heavy, and pushed down on the walls, causing the entire foundation to slip (it was built on peat) and that wall to bow outward. That wall was the lucky one — two other ones collapsed completely in the 1500s. Whoops.
After the church, we walked to Dublin Castle. Why? Because it was pouring rain (still) and that was the closest thing on my “things we might want to see” list. It was… eh. Nothing I’d recommend anyone going to Ireland absolutely has to see. About the best thing about the tour was that I finally had answered a question I’d wondered about, but never really enough to actually go research it.
It's a screen! That's been covered!
.
So I’ve read references in a number of Victorian novels (including Pride and Prejudice) about women covering (embroidering) screens. I never understood what these were — I always just figured that they were like room dividers or something. Well, our tour guide today on our tour of Dublin Castle answered my question unintentionally as part of her tour patter. Apparently the screens were kept in front of fireplaces to protect ladies’ makeup. That way they could stand in front of the fireplace to keep warm, but their heavy lead makeup wouldn’t melt from the heat, since it was deflected by the screen.
Kind of weird, but whatever. This same room also had petticoat mirrors so they could check and make sure nothing was amiss. I am SO INFINITELY GLAD I was born in the 20th century. Really. Petticoats. :shudder:
Gothic and Norman and Georgian, oh my!
.
Exterior of Dublin Castle. This is what happens when you try to add on. “Oh, we have a Norman tower! We’ll just add a Gothic chapel on one side, and hmmm… Yes, I think Georgian looks great for the other wing. Yes, we’ll just do that.” The whole thing just comes off as slightly schizophrenic to me. But hey, I don’t have to live there.
This never fails to amuse me. I'm just weird like that.
.
I love how England and Ireland (and probably other former British colonies, although I don’t remember this in Singapore!) defer to the fact that the rest of the world drives on the CORRECT SIDE OF THE ROAD and paints reminders on their streets. Heh. And yet I still keep looking the wrong way first — it just feels so wrong to change that!
Anyway, that’s it for today… Oh! I ate french fries with mayonnaise. Ugh. I can say I’ve tried it, at least, but I really don’t get why the Canadians think it’s a good thing (and it was even garlic mayo!) Hey, let’s take these potatoes, fry them in grease, and top them with… more grease!! Sounds like a plan!! The good news is I won’t need chapstick for approximately the next two weeks.
Overall today, we really didn’t do much… but it was our first full day in the country, we both were kind of dragging, the weather was lousy, and frankly, I’m trying to convince myself with this trip that not every second of every day of the trip needs to be planned. It’s kind of hard on the Type A in me, but I’ll get the hang of it eventually.
So after getting thoroughly soaked waiting in the rain for a ridiculous amount of time before a bus came (and it wasn’t just us griping — there were Irish people at the bus stop complaining about the bus’s whereabouts as well) I wanted nothing more than to come back to the hotel and have a hot bath and a cup of tea. And while I think Christ Church was my favorite part of the day, that cup of tea had to be the most satisfying.
Oh, and potential slight change in plans — looks like we might be heading to Sarajevo after Montenegro but before heading back into Croatia to go to Split. So much cool history there, and a great potential for free lodging (thanks to the friend of a friend’s sister — thanks Joel!) that come on, how can I pass it up? :-)
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Euro Trip Day 2: Where we got to Dublin, got lost, and went to church
Trip Day 2: Where we got to Dublin, got lost, and went to church, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
I probably should mention that I’ll be posting most of these daily picture posts from my cameraphone. Of course I have my regular camera… it’s just that it’s infinitely more convenient to post from my phone than having to dig out my laptop, hook up my camera, copy over all the pictures, find which one I want to post, convert it from RAW to jpg, upload it… See the problem here? :-) So I will get my regular camera pictures posted periodically… but with my phone, I take a picture and click on “share”, write up a post in the email field, and then it’ll automatically send whenever my phone finds wifi. It couldn’t be easier. :-)
Anyway, our flight from Philly to Dublin actually got in almost an hour early this morning due to some gnarly tailwinds (which also gave us some crazy turbulence… but I’m weird enough to enjoy that!) We got to the airport and proceeded to wait long enough for our bags that I was starting to panic that they’d never made it out of Philadelphia. They were the last ones off the conveyor belt… better late than never!
Then it was time to figure out how to find a bus to our hotel. Bus maps are oddly hard to come by, and after a couple of false starts, we got headed toward city center, where we’d catch another bus to closer to the hotel. Again, this proved easier said than done, and we may have gotten lost, or at least misdirected, at least once. Maybe twice. We were off the plane at about 8, had our luggage and were through customs by around 9, and finally got to the hotel at… 11:30. Ugh. Did I mention it was raining the entire time we wandered around lost exploring? It is Ireland, after all, and I suppose to get the full experience one needs to wander in the rain lugging a large backpack. At least that’s what John and I kept trying to convince ourselves.
We got to the hotel damp and exhausted, only to discover that check-in was at 1, not 12. Thankfully, they let us leave our bags there, so we did, I grabbed my camera bag, and we headed down the street to check out a church we’d passed on the way in. We got there about ten minutes after mass had begun, so we snuck down a side aisle and grabbed a seat. The church, St. Peter’s (Catholic, of course — did this really need to be specified?), is built in the nineteenth century Gothic revival style. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and it was a total treat to catch a service there! Sometime while we were there, John suggested that we try to catch a church service in every country we’re in — I think that’s a great idea. :-)
After the service ended, we wandered around the church a bit before heading back to our hotel. Our room wasn’t ready yet, so we hung out and dozed in some comfy chairs. I have to say, for €29/night, this is a REALLY nice place. We even get our own bathroom!! So we’re going to enjoy it while we can, since I know we’ve got plenty of hostels in our future over the next two months. Not that I’m complaining — honest. :-)
Ok, time for a bit of a nap… neither of us slept much on the plane, and jet lag is kicking in.
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.
Quintessence of a spring evening in Sacramento
The Capitol at sunset, again
.
Scenes from tonight’s run
First Capitol lap
Kids in identical t-shirts
Racing on the lawn
Taking pictures of the dome
Castle and children vivid gold in the setting sun.
Second lap
Kids herded to their bus
Waiting at my end of the block.
A few bolted to it
I sprinted toward them
We slapped hands as we passed
Laughing in the gloaming ether
Faces luminous in the fading light.
What a piece of work is this
The lovely quintessence of a spring evening.
.
Scenes from a run
I finally decided a couple of weeks ago to get off my lazy behind and start running again. It’s been far too long, and I really don’t have an excuse not to. And I can’t wuss out after a week, since Darryl goaded me into doing the Race for the Cure on May 8th. I always forget how good I feel when I finish (ok, most of the time anyway) but I’ve discovered a new bonus to running–enjoying the lovely spring evenings in Downtown Sacramento. Now if only I’d remember to put on mosquito repellent before I go out…
The front of the Capitol at sunset
.
Dogwoods at the Capitol
.
Reflection on the outside of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco
Reflection on the outside of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
Today we went to San Francisco to see the King Tut exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, then we met up with Carrye and Aron for dinner in Half Moon Bay. Such a nice day! :-)
.
Here’s the rest of those Gladding, McBean pictures
I know that the company is called Gladding, McBean, but I still feel rather awkward and ungrammatically-correct putting that comma in there.
Anyway, here are a few more GMB pics–as always, check out the rest on my Flickr gallery.
The kiln room. I could have spent all day in here, just watching the light change. So so beautiful.
.
Glaze on a kiln wall. I'm posting this here because my mom said it was her favorite shot because of the color. I don't think it's all that great, but I'm glad she liked it. :-) It was pretty neat how the glaze coated and dripped off of the walls and ceiling of the kilns. I wasn't expecting to see that.
.
Part of an original facade from the RCA building. Can you spot the typo? Yep, they really did that. Whoops!
.
Have I mentioned how much I loved the lighting? I have? Well, I'm going to mention it again. Because, wow.
.
Close-up of the capstone. I love the detail on it, and as always, the light...
.
Urns.
.
Gladding, McBean Factory in Lincoln, CA
OK, so I’ve been sitting on these pictures since, er, May. I’ve been meaning to get around to processing them, and it just fell down the list.
Anyway, back in May, I went on a photography tour of the Gladding, McBean factory in Lincoln, CA (about 30 miles or so from me.) The tour was set early in the day, so that we could have the best light possible for this beautiful location, and while the old buildings themselves were neat, the light was absolutely incredible. In fact, now that I’ve had plenty of time to sit on these pictures and then go back and process them, I’m kicking myself because I see shots I would have liked to do differently, and I really feel like I didn’t do the lighting justice. It was so beautiful. Oh well, I tried…
Before I get into the pictures, here’s some background from the tour:
Established in 1875, Gladding, McBean began its long and prestigious history when rich clay deposits were discovered in the town of Lincoln, California. Many historical landmarks throughout the United States were originally made with or are currently being restored using Gladding, McBean products. Gladding, McBean artisans have worked with some of the greatest architects, past and present, creating terra cotta pieces ranging from archways to exterior facades and gargoyles to graceful fountains. In all, Gladding, McBean has produced terra cotta for more than 10,000 buildings around the world. The tradition continues today as Gladding, McBean graces impressive contemporary buildings and landscapes with finely crafted terra cotta and garden pottery, sewer pipe, roof tile, floor tile, and brick.
Here are some pictures from the tour. Because I took so many pictures, I’m going to split them up into a couple of posts–this is the first one, and tomorrow I’ll post one more.The complete set is, as always, in my Flickr gallery.
.
Bricks.
.
Looking through a kiln, playing with depth of field to get the bricks in the back in focus. Didn't quite get what I was aiming for, but I still like how it turned out.
.
Paging Little Boy Blue... Little Boy Blue, to the warehouse please
.
A pile of very large pipe. Ignore the green glare off of my lens filter. I'm still kicking myself for that. Need to get a better filter!!
.
This was pretty cool! This is our tour guide, explaining the measuring process they use. They have the shrink rate of their clay (from when it's fresh to when it's been fired in a kiln) precisely calibrated. So this is a ruler they use to make their models/molds with--it's sized up so that when you make something and it shrinks in the kiln, it comes out the right size. For example, say you want to make a tile that's two inches on each side, you measure out two inches on the ruler he's holding, which is actually more like 2.5". But when the piece shrinks, it's two inches, just like you wanted. COOL.
.
Who would have ever thought that piles of sewer pipe could look so neat?
.
Piece of old facade being used as a model for restoration work.
.
Obviously this is an old sign. For some odd reason, I always channel Ayn Rand when I look at this picture. Fountainhead, anyone?
.
Wide angle fun, day 4: Haunted house
Last Halloween I was wandering around town looking for Halloween-themed pictures for an October photo challenge when I stumbled upon a really creepy-looking house several blocks from where I live. I snapped some pictures which I posted to my Flickr but later decided not to use, but then I promptly forgot about it until a few weeks ago, when I was talking to a friend of mine and the subject of the house came up.
It turns out that the house is called the Martinez House, and it it’s over 100 years old. It’s been vacant for decades, and and while there are a number of conflicting (and interesting!) stories on its history, the current owner is adamant that it’s not haunted.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but if anything were going to be haunted, I’d put this place on the prime candidates list for sure.
Pic from last Halloween
.
Another Halloween picture
.
Full-front wide-angle shot. This is all the way zoomed out, and you can definitely see the barrel distortion of the lens on this one.
.
Here’s a couple more links on the place, in case you’re curious:
.
I miss Italy
The brightly-colored stucco of the house down the street from me makes me really want to go back to Italy. Sigh.
Orange house and a flowering ornamental pear tree.
.
