Only 4 days before we set off on our 3 month trip. The mail is cancelled, the sleeping pills (Peter's) purchased and all the travel and accommodation booked. This might be our last big overseas trip, but then we have said that before. The Netherlands, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Irish Republic, USA (East and West) and Canada here we come! We are leaving at the beginning of Spring in our garden (see photos) and off toward Autumn in the northern hemisphere, hoping to see the glories of the New England Fall colours
We arrived in Amsterdam at 7am, and after a quick shower at the airport, and leaving our bags at the train station, we went on a 3-hour history walking tour of Amsterdam with one other couple (from Melbourne!) and a guide originally from Wisconsin. The stroll through the old parts of the city reminded us how beautiful European life can be, where bikes and pedestrians rule and, in this particular city, the scent of cannabis is literally in the air. The Kingdom of the Netherlands has a population almost as large as Australia, but all the cities are on a small scale and the biggest (Amsterdam - their capital, yes, not The Hague) is only just over twice the size of Canberra. We were told that they have 1.7 people per square metre on 48% of the land. The rest is for agriculture.
We are now in Delft for five nights - an exquisite medieval city of 98,000 and home of Vermeer (although none of his paintings are kept here). We have an apartment right in the centre, with a bakery round the corner which has been operating since the 17th century. As in many traditional canal houses, we have to be careful going to the toilet at night negotiating the very steep stairs. Our host left us two bottles of red wine as a welcome present: both Lindemans (!!) an Aussie Merlot and a South African Cab Sav - who knew they had expanded their brand to another country's produce? And after the bottle of wine, we were sound asleep at 7:30pm.
Various photos from our wanderings in Delft and The Hague (about a 15 minute train ride away). On Sunday we are going on a tram ride to the beach. All the Dutch royals are interred in the crypt of the New Church here at Delft (another bloody long 376 steps to the top). Yes, there is an old church as well. The sun is shining and 20C. Saw Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' in The Hague but the best Musuem was the Escher. His stuff was terrific. Some great modern architecture in The Hague. There are no fat people in this country. That's because they all ride bikes. And there are no post offices! It is all located in smaller shops, for example, the local supermarket.
Yesterday we went by tram to the seaside near The Hague. As you can see from the photos, rather dirty coloured sand and lots of ways to spend money on anything but swimming: cafes, bungy jumping, flying fox, beach tents, Ferris wheel, casino etc... A few kids braved the water, but not many.
Today was a trip to Leiden. A beautiful old university town (120,000 inhabitants) where all the new graduands were cycling around in black suits and white shirts. Home of Rembrandt and the second oldest botanical garden in Europe, the town was very picturesque, with working canals and (as usual) bikes everywhere.
For some strange reason, the blog photos all look clearer in the Mobile version of Get Jealous. If you are using a PC, try selecting "mobile" in the blue writing at the top of the screen
Bon chance!
We left Delft and four train rides and four countries later we were in Highgate. Oh the Eurostar is so civilised: a meal, wine, served by gorgeous men! Twenty minutes in a tunnel I could have done without. Today we went to my favourite Tate Modern and walked along the Thames before seeing God's Own Country. What a great movie. 5 stars by me, and 6 stars by Peter!!
We have had two days of good meals and lots of commuting. Yesterday we headed into the countryside with our Britrail passes to have lunch at a 2-Michelin-starred restaurant at a pub (The Hand & Flowers) in the Thameside Georgian town of Marlow (a good recommendation from Chris Wooldridge). Our travel plans were interrupted by cancelled trains due to track failures somewhere, but we found an alternative route. Back in London that evening we loved the slick and vibrant musical Dreamgirls, with great singing and dancing, and a standing ovation.
Today we visited The Charterhouse with Nick Wooldridge. Open for visitors from this year, it has a 600 year history as a plague burial site, Carthusian monastery, Tudor mansion, school (Thackeray was an unhappy student there) and almshouse. There are still "brothers" living there - not religious, just deserving poor gentlemen and now open to allow women too (still to be called brothers).
We had lunch with Nick at the Ottolenghi restaurant NOPI (North of Piccadilly - clever name with great toilets as well as food!), celebrating his recent graduation and ordination, then filled up the afternoon with a visit to the Tate Britain and an exhibition on Queer Britain. London is lovely but busy. We could not cope with the overheated and crowded underground if we had to commute daily. We miss the gentle Dutch streets of polite cyclists. Regent street on a Friday afternoon was jammed packed, along with every pub, as we sat watching from a ubiquitous red double-deck bus. Geoff's iphone tells us that leaving Highgate underground is the equivalent of going up 22 floors. We are definitely doing 10000 steps a day but now carrying, metaphorically, a bottle of wine around our tums.
We've walked 12 km today, enjoying the unusual sunshine, and exploring five of London's green spaces: Highgate Wood (opposite our house), St James and Green Parks near Buckingham Palace, Highgate Cemetery and Waterlow Park. Highgate is indeed high, with long views down to the CBD.
A highlight of our stay so far was a self-guided audio tour of the Houses of Parliament this morning, made more engaging since we have just read Julia Baird's absorbing biography of Queen Victoria. The tours are only held on Saturdays when Parliament isn't sitting so we were lucky with our timing. It is certainly grand and beautiful, if you like Victorian gothic splendour.
After lunch in Knightsbridge (and a tube ride where we were closer than sardines in a can) we explored the Highgate Cemetery and you can see photos of some of the better known residents there. Who knew that Sidney Nolan ended up here? And we are off to see Ben Whishaw tonight in a new play called 'Against'.
Did you know Coventry was: (1) the home of St George (& the Dragon), Lady Godiva, George Eliot and Philip Larkin; (2) where the modern bicycle was invented in 1885; (3) birthplace of Australian Prime Minister Henry Parkes; (4) where London black cabs are still made; and (5) where Monty Python's first performance occurred in 1971?
However we came to see the stunning new cathedral, built in 1962 after the bombing of the original cathedral by the Germans in 1940. In fact, the Nazis coined a new verb meaning "to flatten" derived from this town ("coventrieren") because of how they demolished the town. We can enjoy the sad fruits in this magnificent modern building. (The rest of the town is pretty forgettable except for the Transport Museum with its wonderful collection of bikes and cars, and St Mary's Guildhall, built in 1342). We await Nick Wooldridge's consecration here as a future Bishop with a seat in the House of Lords!
I had forgotten how imperial London is. Everywhere (in the Centre anyway) are statues of generals, memorials about war, and buildings named after India, Malaya or Africa. All designed to look grand and impress the colonials. The tourists may be bemused by the archaic traditions such as the changing of the Queen's horse guards (in gleaming helmets and swords), but we note that the guards themselves are now guarded by police with machine guns.
We went to Oxford two days ago to see Blenheim Palace (the only non-royal palace in the country), fondly remembered as the venue for the TV series Brideshead Revisited. Grand of course, with extensive beautiful green garderns, but the socialist in Geoff was less than impressed by the decadently extravagant interiors. Unexpectedly, Churchill was born there. His parents were visiting and he was premature. We saw the room and the bed where it all happened.
Old Oxford with the university buildings is lovely (Peter still prefers Cambridge), even if the shadows of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are everywhere (as everyone knows, many of the Potter films were made in venues here, and Tolkein was Professor of English at Pembroke and Merton colleges).
The theme of Peace has emerged in our theatre going. The play Against, with an impressive Ben Wishaw, was about a Silicon Valley billionaire wanting to do something to reduce violence in society; Apologia, with Stockard Channing, was a family drama and highlighted the need for forgiveness and reconciliation; and last night's Oslo (the winner of the 2017 Tony for best play) recreated the secret negotiations of the Oslo accord between Israel and the PLO in 1993. This last was our favourite - an outstanding production imported from Broadway.
We have enjoyed the delights of London (including one of our two best meals ever at The Ledbury) but are now finished with the big city (population due to pass 10 million this year) and looking forward to travelling to the peace and quiet of Papa Westray (population 90 people).
Yesterday we fled the raised bomb threat level in London and landed in Kirkwall (Kirkjuvagr in Norse means Bay of Churches), the main town of the "mainland" of the Orkneys, with a population of 9000. Wet and windy but with an impressively large St Magnus cathedral, consecrated in 1152. Then today in an 8-seater plane we hopped to Westray and thence to Papa Westray (colloquially Papay), the last segment being the shortest commercial flight in the world (about 1.5 minutes); you can see lots of amateur videos online (Geoff counted up to 113 from takeoff to landing).
We are staying with our friend Paul Maharg in his luxuriously renovated stone cottage near the new wharf on Papay - an island with no trees any longer but wonderful views to neighbouring islands and constantly changing skies, covered with lush green pasture for the very contented cows and fat sheep. The Neolithic remains of the house at the Knap of Howar are dated from 3100 to 3600BC - so there have been inhabitants here for well over 5000 years. Do you need to be an introvert to live with only 70 neighbours during a Winter with only 6 hours of daylight in howling gales? Probably, but at this time of year it is delightfully quiet, sunny and beautiful - a perfect retreat from a frantic world.
We are off to the only pub tonight for the weekly jam session, with Paul on his mandolin.
The weather was glorious today - here are some photos from our morning and evening walks
The medieval kirk of St Boniface dates from the 12th century, although there are stone crosses found in the yard that have been dated to 700AD. The church was abandoned in the 1920s and fell into disrepair, but was restored in 1993 to an ecumenical space (with no crosses anywhere).
We walked 7km around the northern tip of the island which is largely a protected bird sanctuary. Marshy heathland where birds breed is edged with stony cliffs giving constantly changing views.
Under a fabulous blue sky we took the ferry to the nearby island of Westray yesterday and a guided tour (with two other tourists) by local residents (Karen, born and raised on Westray, had returned after a 23 year abscence - she grew up in a house only 50 metres away from her current home). A particular highlight was having morning tea and lunch in their home (an old manse) with bread, cheese and eggs all from island produce.
Westray is much larger and hillier than Papay, with 600 residents and a bit of local industry (crab fishing and processing plant, organic salmon farming) in addition to sheep and cattle. There is a large 4 acre archeological site still being excavated and it was fascinating to see the team of people working there. Strangely, the neolithic buidling remains they discover are often filled over with sand to protect them after the excavation is finished.
Today is our last full day and we are heading for the post office to order some hand knitted socks (Geoff wants orange, grey and white to wear to The Giants games) and attend a weekly coffee morning.
We left Papay on a typical (?!) grey and wet day to fly to Edinburgh, via Kirkwall, then tram and train to Glasgow. The night before we ate dinner looking towards Westray with a delightful sunset. Paul, Nicola and their dog Sam were great hosts. Some Scottish accents still defy Geoff's ability to translate into Oz. The BBC Scottish news is quite comprehensible.
It feels like we are back in a big city - very like Sydney in many ways: sandstone Victorian buildings mixed with modern, the Armadillo (which seems like a rather poor cousin of the Opera House), good graffiti/murals, and LOTS of pubs, clubs and eateries. It was a bit drizzly today, so we headed for the indoors (the 12th century cathedral, Museum of Modern Art and the Centre for Contemporary Arts). Tonight we are booked in for a dinner of posh Scottish nosh at The Ubiquitous Chip - that really is its name! We have seen Ewan McGregor and Alan Cumming lookalikes. And a few Trainspotting characters!
Speaking of food - would you eat human flesh if it was meat cultured from ethically harvested cells? I read yesterday of a US company perfecting "vegetarian friendly" meat (i.e. with no animals killed), and one of the owners even suggested the possibility of creating meat from yourself and giving it as a gift to a loved one. If not, why not? Is it just the "icky" factor or is there something ethical that would hold you back? Discuss on the Message Board please!!
We went strolling around the University of Glasgow this morning. Founded in 1451 it is an impressive campus high up in the west end overlooking the city. A cleaner let us sneak into the chapel being set up for a wedding where we found a nervous groom in a kilt. Then after a walk through lovely riverside parklands to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, we headed back for lunch at a cafe recommended by Paul and Nicola (Kember & Jones).
Now this afternoon we are winding down at home before pizza and red wine in front of the telly tonight. Northern Ireland tomorrow. Will they too (like the English and Scots) park facing both ways, either side of a two way street? It looks very strange to our Australian eyes.
It was only a 45 minute flight from Glasgow this morning and Belfast (with 333,000 people) feels much smaller and quieter. There are some big new buildings but also many patches of run down areas too. A walk around town suggested that one or two days will be enough to see the sights. The few grand Victorian buildings are only around 120 years old.
We are staying near Queen's University, a nicely gentrified area. The housing terraces here are much more pleasantly presented in brick, coloured masonry and greenery, compared to the Georgian gloom of much of Glasgow. And the sun is coming out. Geoff is finding the thick Irish accents easier to understand than the Scottish; I find it the other way around.
Tomorrow morning we get to try calling the ABS to see if we can register for a security code to participate in the marriage survey by distance. I wonder how well that will work? Meanwhile we try to avoid thinking about the serious issues of the world, like Trump ranting about North Korea and Iran, the Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar, and the demise of Uber in London.
We haven't seen any of the Game of Thrones series, so we can't vouch for the authenticity of the film sites we were shown today on a bus tour to the Giant's Causeway, the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, and the Antrim coast north of Belfast. However the morning fog definitely gave a spooky filmic quality to the avenue of old beech trees called The Dark Hedges.
Our tour guide had that charming relaxed Irish blarney you expect and only a few strange pronunciations (it was a fairy tree he was talking about, not a furry tree!). We also kept up our exercise with a couple of long walks and steep climbs. The Giant's Causeway had some lovely coastal scenery, but the hexagonal basalt was really more spectacular at Staffa in Scotland. We were told the rope bridge was built for fishermen to get to an island to launch their boats and thereby avoid paying taxes to the landowner, but the reality may be more prosaic and today it is just a busy National Heritage experience, with timed entry tickets. But the country scenery generally was lovely and the houses and gardens much more attractively maintained than in Scotland.
The best news of the day was that Geoff and I have now both been able to participate in the marriage survey via an online procedure the ABS has made available for people like us who are out of the country for all of the "voting" period. Ironically we have done this in the only place on our holiday that does not have same-sex marriage (Northern Ireland)!
I have concluded that in Australia we immigrants are blessed to have none of the burden of history that we see still in Belfast today. The hotel where we were staying was in a comfortable integrated university precinct. Today we did a taxi tour (with a Catholic ex-prisoner driver/guide) which showed us the ugly sectarian divisions that still linger here. We were shocked to see the "peace walls" dividing Catholic and Protestant sections of the suburbs still (5km long and up to 7.6m high) and gates across streets which are locked at night to separate communities that still don't trust each other. It looks like Israel's West Bank. Our driver noted that the Catholics are breeding much faster than the Protestants, who are older and reducing as a proportion of the population. He said the peace agreement with Britain requires a referendum in Northern Ireland every 5 years about unification with the Republic of Ireland and predicts it will happen within the next decade. The Protestant areas were draped in British flags and pictures of the Queen and clearly seem on the defensive.
How sad to see sectarian/religious divisions surviving so long, but the stories of British police brutality and martyrs like Bobby Sands (depicted memorably in the movie "Hunger") - represented on murals throughout the city - mean The Troubles will not be quickly forgotten.
We were told that there are only 2 de-segregated schools in Belfast.
The train trip to Dublin was through beautiful green countryside and along the coast close to Dublin. We have seen cattle and sheep lying down completely flat on the grass - because they have plenty to eat?
We are sitting at home drinking a pre-dinner Guinness after another day exploring this fair city. I like it here very much - a comfortable size, cosmopolitan but not overwhelming. Like a nicer London.
Yesterday in the rain we toured Trinity College (founded by Elizabeth 1st in 1592) with an excellent student guide who is doing a PhD on the philosopher Berkeley. We saw its beautiful Long Room library (with 260,000 rare books and manuscripts catalogued by size), the somewhat underwhelming Book of Kells, and one old staff and student accommodation (red brick) which had no electricity until 1981 and still requires residents to go outside to line up for the bathrooms! Graduation ceremonies at the university are held in Latin still, with graduands called up in the descending order of their final marks. No hiding!
Today the sun was shining and we went on pilgrimage to: (1) Oscar Wilde's home and a very witty statue in Merrion Square; (2) the original Friends Meeting House (from 1692), which now also has the Irish Film Institute cinemas below (we saw a film about the Maze prison breakout in a cinema that used to be the main Meeting Room); and (3) Francis Bacon's London art studio, transported whole to the Dublin City Gallery, with all 7000 items of junk meticulously catalogued and put back in place. I didn't know Bacon and the Duke of Wellington were Irish till today. Did you?
All the signs here are in both Gaelic (which they call Irish) and English, but almost everyone seems to be speaking English. The food serves in Ireland seem very large to us, but only the American tourists appear to be overweight. Tonight we are drinking a Portuguese red wine made from three grape varieties I have never heard of: Aragonez, Trincadeira, and Alicante Bouschet. Travel does broaden the mind.
We visited Kilmainham Gaol this morning where many of the 1916 Easter Rising leaders were executed, and the Museum of Modern Art (a disappointing exhibition in a magnificent old building with beautiful formal gardens). Then this afternoon we saw a new Irish film (The Drummer and the Keeper) about an unlikely friendship between a person with bipolar disorder and another with Aspergers - 5 stars from from me and 10 from Geoffrey! Highly recommended if it comes your way.
Everything looks better when the sun is shining. A trip on LUAS (the light rail) gave us another view of Dublin. We walked 12.6 km today, but for the next week we have to be walking about 20 km.
People are very friendly and helpful here. We have also delighted in wandering through their food/supermarket options. We found Vegemite - Geoff misses it when we are away.
We missed a big protest march in Dublin today supporting abortion rights. They may have gay marriage, but women's rights still have some way to go here.
Instead we visited the really lovely National Gallery of Ireland, then travelled by train (mostly along the coast) down to the start of our Wicklow Way Walk at Tinahely, a little town surrounded by very green hills.
The people are very friendly but can also whinge (caused by a bus trip, because of track work, along the way and being an hour late arriving) - we have a lot of Irish genes.
This was our shortest walk - a mere 13km - but made slow by lots of muddy tracks through sheep fields. We started in fog, which lifted eventually to show the green hedgerowed fields, but we have yet to see the sun. Some of the walking was along "boreens": little narrow paved roads wide enough for only one vehicle. It is very peaceful, but the little red throated birds are great singers.
We arrived at the Kyle B&B around 1:30pm for a cup of tea, leisurely showers and an afternoon inside, including chatting with six Americans from Buffalo, New York, walking the Way in the opposite direction.
With 18km of walking and climbing ascents totalling 1040m, we spent most of today travelling through plantation spruce forests, with occasional glimpses to distant hills. Only at the end have we arrived at a pretty green valley (the longest glaciated valley in Ireland) and a welcome inn to spend the afternoon resting. It was a bit cold and windy, with very little sun, but at least it was dry under foot today. The thick forests can be amazingly dark - not at all inviting - and almost nowhere has there been anywhere to sit and eat. But we carry sandwiches, coffee, chocolate and fruit, and the waymarking is clear, so no grumbling from us.
We met very few other walkers today but one pair of young guys from Israel stopped and one of them asked if he could take a video on his phone of us sending a message to his mother for her 50th birthday. We obliged of course; I guess he is collecting various messages from strangers as he walks the Wicklow Way.
Tonight in our inn for dinner the local Gaelic football team was still celebrating their win from last Saturday - the first time in 27 years, with a winning goal in the last minute of play. Happy drunks but home early.
The sun was out so we left early (Geoff's theory: if it is fine leave early because it will get worse. If it is bad weather leave early because it will improve) for our longest walk so far: 19km over 5.5hours, with a long climb up 500m for great views over the upper lake of Glendalough, before descending down to the Valley of The Saints. Here there are two lakes and ruins of a 10th century cathedral associated with St Kevin (what an unlikely name!) who was born in 498. Our guide book says he "was reputedly a good looking man and with the added power of religious vocation had no trouble attracting the fairer sex, like many a priest before and since". Celibacy wasn't a requirement for priestly life at that time. Glendalough is obviously a popular tourist stop; there were buses and people everywhere. It was lovely weather so Geoff has lots of photos from today.
Today's walk started with views over Lough Tay, which is where the original home of the Guinness family is found, and where many movies have been made, including Brave Heart and King Arthur. It is now the site of ongoing filming of the TV series 'The Vikings' (we went past the accommodation caravans for the crew). We climbed to some high heathland hills that were extremely windy and covered in mist at the top. However the fog lifted eventually and we had grand views down to the coast and over the emerald green sheep fields that patchwork the hills and valleys. After four hours walking we are now relaxing after a hot shower at our last country B&B before our last trek to Dublin tomorrow. We did get to see some forestry workers today cutting and loading logs of spruce trees (a beautiful smell) and finished the day walking past grand estates with horses - a rich part of the world we assume, and an easy commuting distance to Dublin.
We are tired this afternoon, having done our longest day (36,000 steps and climbing the equivalent of 137 floors). But the sun was shining and there were some great views to the north and south, finishing with a long downward walk to a Dublin. It is definitely better to do the walk in this direction, starting with short sections to warm up; today would have been a serious effort to do as your first day on the trail.
For dinner last night we were driven in to a pub at Enniskerry, accompanied by five other B&B guests. We had dinner with a friendly Canadian couple from Ottowa but were bemused by their passionate walking holiday tales. This was the third walk they have done on this trip to Ireland, and recently they had been to New Zealand and done all nine Great Walks there: a bit obsessive I think!
We are looking forward now to a change of pace in Boston, hoping our timing for the Fall colours is going to be OK (according to the Foliage maps we might be just past the peak, but I'm sure we will still enjoy it).
This blog is a little rant about the things that went wrong on our arrival in the USA, after a pleasant British Airways flight from Heathrow. Arriving 20 minutes early at 8:30pm (ie 1:30am Dublin time) we had a series of events that tried our patience somewhat:
1) We waited 25 minutes on the plane before disembarking, because there were no ground staff ready to operate the air bridge
2) We waited a further 20 minutes in a long line to be processed through immigration because they only had 2 gates open for non locals who hadn't entered on a new visa before. Handprints, thumbprints on both hands and facial photo and questions were actually carried out courteously once we got there, but there were a lot of tired a grumpy people around us.
3) Our luggage had all been unloaded while we had this 45 minute delay, but on the wrong carousel according to the signs, and actually no longer going round on the belt. (Had the luggage staff gone home?) That would have been fine except mine was one of several bags stuck behind plastic curtains and only accessible by crawling through them along the stationery luggage belt to retrieve it!
4) We had filled out our customs declaration form on the plane (one only needed for the Willard family), but that section was closed and we just walked through and threw the form away.
5) Our elderly taxi driver did not know where we were going (it is an Air B&B near Harvard). He called a friend on his mobile for directions but ended up in an unrelated street several miles away from our destination. I got out my iPad, and used Google maps to direct him to our street. Of course he would only take cash, despite having a credit card machine in the car. Luckily I had expected that and had plenty of readies to pay. I had not expected that cabs wouldn't have GPS directions for the drivers.
Let's hope these experiences are not symptomatic of a general decline in efficiency under the new management here. The good news is that we have arrived safely and the apartment is very large and comfortable, in a nice area. We will explore tomorrow morning after catching up on sleep. Good night!
Geoff has come down with a cold - a rare thing for him, which I blame on the cold Irish wind.
We are living just down the road from Harvard Uni so we went for a stroll around the grounds there yesterday. Lots of new students showing their parents around and the inevitable tourists like us too enjoying the green leafy spaces (not much sign of Fall here yet 😩). It doesn’t have the age of Oxford or Trinity but does have a lovely set of buildings in brick rather than sandstone. We couldn’t get inside many, but the Harvard Art Museum with a new addition on top by Renzo Piano has a stunning collection of old and new works, much of it donated by wealthy graduate benefactors.
We attended a concert of the Boston Symphony in the evening, with an outstanding performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto by Gil Shaman: it got a 10 minute standing ovation.
Quirky things I have noticed: the light switches go up to turn on and the pharmacy sells breakfast cereal.
Today (Sunday) there were two street parades held in Boston. The traditional St Columbus Day Parade took place downtown but Geoff went to the radical alternative: the Honk Parade, where political activists and marching bands come out to make a noise together. (Moira: just like the Riff Raff band). He has taken LOTS of photos for you. At the same time I attended a Quaker meeting at Cambridge - a much quieter option in a lovely setting. Lots of kids, who stayed with parents in the choir loft above the main Meeting Room for 20 minutes before going off to their own activities.
After lunch we saw a great new movie called “Lucky” which hasn’t yet been released in Australia. It’s about a rather cranky old man coming to terms with his mortality in a desert town somewhere in the US. Highly recommended by me and a 97% score on the Rotten Tomatoes website. We followed that up with a stroll around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the other great university of Boston, where there is a quirkily tipsy new building by Frank Gehry. It is still surprisingly hot and humid here and we definitely have the air conditioning going.
We were disappointed to read this morning that Tim Minchin’s musical “Groundhog Day” (for which we have tickets for a performance later this month) has closed on Broadway. It was nominated for 7 Tony’s and won the Olivier Award for best musical this year in London - so why? I’ve just written to Ticketmaster to ask for some alternatives and an explanation of why we haven’t been told already!
Unlike on our European holidays, we are now swapping our tourist visits to churches and cathedrals for visits here to universities, museums and libraries - the true humanist cathedrals of free thought in the Land of the Free.
Boston has great ones of course: Harvard, MIT & Tufts; the wonderful Museum of Fine Arts, where we spent most of yesterday out of the rain (including a room full of top Monets all donated by rich benfactors); and the splendid Boston City Library today, with murals by Puvis de Chavannes and the inspiring motto outside: “The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty”.
At the more mundane level I am truly sick of seeing Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks everywhere! We really have to search hard to find somewhere that has coffee that is properly made and served in a china cup. Geoff refuses to eat and drink out of cardboard and plastic, so this is a bit of a challenge in this take-out culture, but of course there is the best and worst of everything here. (We are enjoying some lovely organic Champlain Triple cheese from Middlebury Vermont and Californian red wine as I write).
We took a harbour cruise this morning and learnt that 75% of downtown Boston is built on reclaimed land, this is the second largest Irish City in the world after Dublin, they were the first city in America to have an underground rail system, and their new sewerage reprocessing plant, designed to clean up the harbour water, cost $3.8 billion!
Geoff writing today (and some of words in the photos are to reflect upon):
We caught the train to Concord - a mere 32 kms from Boston. Read up on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, two of my favourite 19th century intellectuals; Emerson because of his writings on friendship and Thoreau for his challenge to live a simple life.
We walked to the cemetry where they are buried, then to Emerson's house, the Concord Museum and finally Walden Pond (strolling completely around the whole pond). I think Thoreau would be pleased that we, unlike most, actually walked (about 16 kms all up through Concord and around the pond).
Walden Pond has a beach at one end and is well used for swimming during the Summer season. Some people were swimming today.
Concord is a very clean, neat and tidy town, with a lot of very large houses. We are interested to see whether this is a New England phenomena.
One day left in Boston and then into the car.
This morning we experienced a fascinating virtual reality installation - "The Enemy" - at the MIT Museum, organised by a famous war photographer Karim Ben Khelifa. Wearing headsets that provided vision and sound, for 50 minutes we entered three different "rooms" and were confronted with 3D avatars of fighters from opposite sides of three different wars - in the Congo, El Salvador and Palestine. These fighters answered questions posed by the photographer and in their own words offered personal perspectives on war, including thoughts on motivations, suffering, freedom, and the future.
The participants were filmed using 360-degree imaging and recordings, and the project was further developed with MIT experts in articial intelligence and digital technologies. I wonder if this will be the future of film. It was certainly very engaging; the avatars appeared very real and would react as we moved around them - following our positions to answer questions and even casting shadows on the floor from light beams above. At the end of the experience we were told which fighter we were most sympathetic to, based on our body and eye movements. You can see a photo Geoff took after we had finished, showing what it looked like from "outside".
The exhibition is meant to travel around the world and here is more information if you are interested: https://arts.mit.edu/face-face-enemy/
After lunch we had a much more traditional tourist experience, walking the Boston Freedom Trail - a 2.5 mile path that leads past 16 historical sites around the city. They are very proud of their colonial history here and the role they played at the beginning of the war of independence. As a non-American I don't find it so enthralling and the history is not that much older than the Australian experience really. Sydney's Rocks area is similar to some of the older portside parts of this city. Nonetheless we both really like this city - the architecture, the culture and its size. Pity about the coffee...
Tomorrow we head off in a car for a week's tour around New England.
We picked up our hire car this morning and headed off with me driving and Geoff navigating, guided by Uncle Google. No dramas. We made a lunch stop at Northampton, home of the all female undergraduate liberal arts Smith College (Sylvia Plath and Gloria Steinem are just two of the notable graduates). Now we have arrived at the swank and secluded Field Farm Guest House, near Williamstown, where we will stay two nights. It is a 1948 Bauhaus era home with beautiful original furniture and a wide array of contemporary art and sculpture, set by a pond on a 300 acre property overlooking hills just starting to show the Autumn colours. Only five bedrooms - so it feels like staying in a friend's country house, without the friend to bother us and no TV to distract us. A wonderfully quiet retreat.
It is so beautiful and peaceful here. We had breakfast at the guest house and then went to the farmer's market in Williamstown, where we bought local ham, fennel pollen goat's cheese, fresh tomatoes, bottled pickled green beans, honeycrisp apples, and blackberry/raspberry/rhubarb jam, aiming to have dinner at home tonight with soughdough bread and red wine. I think we will be the only ones picnicking here, enjoying the lovely house and the views.
We spoke with a mother and daughter at breakfast. The mother is a psychologist from New York visiting her daughter who is attending the Williams College in town. It is typical of many of the small liberal arts colleges in America. Only 600 in her "class" (ie her year) so that means fewer than 2000 undergrad students all together, learning in a beautiful setting of amazing buildings (it feels like a movie set of a perfect New England town). We visited "The Clark", a privately endowed institute of art on the edge of town, with a world class art collection, especially of French impressionists - plus just a few by Turner, Constable, della Francesca, Ghirlandaio, Memling etc etc... You can see all their holdings online, all paid for by the Singer Sewing Machine magnate who bought a lot of the collection and then built the gallery for them.
But Geoff was most impressed not by the art but the beautiful modern extension and the landscape. You can see this in his photos today.
We are now in Stowe (Vermont), a skiing resort town with a population of 4500 at the foot of Mt Mansfield, the farthest north we are travelling in the US. Yesterday we drove from Williamstown via Middlebury, another small college town, where we enjoyed lunch with David and Jean Rosenberg, Quaker friends who spend some time each year in Canberra.
Stowe is where the von Trapp family finally settled in the 1940s after fleeing Europe and their Lodge here is “a little bit of Austria in Vermont”. It sounds corny but actually it looks lovely and has fabulous views across the valley to the Fall colours that cover the hillsides now. The scenery is very beautiful, even without the sunshine that would make it even more glorious I imagine. People have said this season is rather muted, but the colours around here look great to our eyes.
Our road trip from Stowe to North Conway today was one of the prettiest drives we have ever done. We scraped the frost off the windscreen then travelled through the White Mountains in full sunshine and much cooler temperatures, with bright autumn colours everywhere on the lower slopes, green conifers above and then a fresh dusting of snow on the mountain tops. Lots of other leaf peepers stopping to take photos, along with Geoff.
We are now in North Hampshire, where the State motto is: “Live Free or Die”. I assume this is meant to mean something like Follow Your Dream, but it sounds a bit creepy to me, bringing up visions of gun toting secessionists.
3 Fun Facts about Vermont: (1) it was the first State to have civil unions for same sex couples (2) it is the only State to have elected a Socialist senator in the 21st century, and (3) it is the only State with a capital city with no McDonalds restaurants!
We had a leisurely day today, taking a 5-hour round trip on the Conway Scenic Railway. It travels from North Conway (169m above sea level) to Crawford Notch in the White Mountains (570m) in vintage carriages on no longer commercially-used rail lines, climbing through forest with wonderful views of rivers and mountains and valleys. It must be fate, but the carriage we were in (built in Montreal in the 1950s) was called Mount Willard, named after the highest peak where we finished the journey. Our blog name has never been more appropriate!
The weather was perfect again so the mountains looked spectacular, covered in trees with red, yellow and gold leaves. The train often crossed roads or walking trails (including the famous Appalachian Trail) and at each crossing the driver rang a bell and gave three blasts on the loud steam horn - very atmospheric. Tomorrow we head to our last New England stop in Portland, Maine.
Portland feels bigger than the official 65,000 population (plus another 25,000 in South Portland). Established in 1632 as a lumber port, it has been largely destroyed twice: in 1775 when the British bombarded it during the revolutionary times, and in 1866 when a major fire ruined much of the downtown area. This means there is a nicely cohesive architectural style from the late 19th century in most of the city, with a mixture of brick and wooden commercial and domestic buildings. Geoff was very taken with them, as you can see in his photos.
We are staying in a lovely small boutique hotel with a cupola directly above our bathroom, with 360 degree views of the city. The town feels relaxed but sophisticated, and a short ferry ride today showed us how beautiful the 222 islands offshore in Casco Bay are. Some are just a short commuting ride away and others tend only to have inhabitants in the warmer months. Food is good here too - not just the ubiquitous lobster rolls (Maine lobster is renowned and prized), but we have also had the most amazing hot chips, fried in duck fat (delicious!). Tonight we are off to a place offering 19 different oyster varieties on the menu.
Geoff writing today:
For our last meal in Portland we had a variety of local osyters and then a lobster roll that was close to perfection. Yummo.
We travellled from Portland, ME this morning to Providence, the capitol of the tiny State of Rhode Island. [Rhode Island officially the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is the smallest in area, the eighth least populous, and the second most densely populated of the 50 U.S. states. Its official name is also the longest of any state in the Union. Rhode Island is bordered by Connecticut to the west, Massachusetts to the north and east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the south via Rhode Island Sound and Block Island Sound. It also shares a small maritime border with New York.] The sun is still shining and the colours as we set of from Portland on the US95 were the most vivid of anything that we have seen. Just spectactular.
Driving on turnpike 8 lane roads at fast speeds with lots of traffic is not my idea of fun, but we arrived in one piece (Peter driving).
After a welcome from our AirBnB host we set off for a walk. We are near the Ivy league Brown University (9380 students) that has a lovely, peaceful campus. Down the hill into the central district and back along the oldest part of Providence gave us a delightful variety of homes and buildings. We are here until next Friday when we train it to NY.
The locals are loving the continued warm weather. 26C today and a blue sky. It is hard to imagine as an Australian that it snows here in winter. Snow by the sea doesn't compute for me.
Peter went to Quaker meeting about a 10 minute walk away. I walked and took photos. We went on a river boat cruise this afternoon. Lots of walking but the heat and humidity has just about done us in.
I will let the photos do their own talking.
Newport (founded in 1639) is an hour’s drive south of Providence and will be our last excursion by car on this side of the country. It is famous for a jazz festival and tennis, but I went for the fabled Gilded Age mansions and Geoff wanted to see the old port and yachts. Together we walked 16km!
We decided to look over just one mansion and chose The Elms. Like most here it was built as an extravagant Summer house for a wealthy family living in New York, with huge gardens surrounding the house. This one - built in 1901 and modeled on a French Chateau - was used for only 7 weeks of the year. It was one of the first houses in America to be wired for electricity and was full of modern technologies such as dumb waiters for the food to be delivered, and telephones to call the staff. (It would have been highly rude to telephone friends: a hand written letter was the only polite way to communicate then).
After that we walked the Cliff Walk - a 5km path along a cliff top which many of the grandest houses backed onto. Not as spectacular as the Coogee to Bondi walk in my opinion, although the houses are certainly bigger.
Down at the port (where they pronounce Thames Street as “thaymes” rather than “temz”) we had a drink at America’s oldest surviving pub (1673), visited an episcopal church from 1698, and saw a Quaker Meeting House built in 1699 which was the largest Yearly Meeting in the world until surpassed by Philadelphia in 1720 - it is now just a community hall. It was definitely off-season in Newport with crowds gone, but we were grateful for that. The weather had been still warm and sunny but the clouds and rain are rolling in.
Of course much seems familiar, but even in Providence - which is a nice liberal university town - there are cultural practices that surprise us.
1. We are now used to tipping 15% for just about everything, but it seems a bit rich to do so in cafes where you are almost always expected to pick up your order after your name is called and “bus” your own dirty plates and cups (ie. take them to a central collection point and separate organic and recyclable waste and scrape the plates). Not much table service to be giving tips for. BTW: Geoff says the Irish and Scots are miles ahead in (strong) coffee culture. Good (Australian style) flat whites are available there served in cups, not cardboard. But we have discovered the Cortado here, which is a pretty good US equivalent.
2. Drive thru banks. Sometimes it is an ATM machine, but today we saw a system with a speaker and glass pneumatic tubes delivering money. It reminds me of department stores from my childhood when all money went to some central cashier via suction tubes. Why can’t people park and walk inside the bank? Do they really want to live in their cars? Charitably the only explanation I can think of that in snowy weather it saves them getting rugged up.
3. Free to air television - just awful, except for PBS. How blessed we are with ABC and SBS.
4. You never really know the price of anything until you pay: local city, State and a Federal taxes vary depending on where you are, and are never included in the advertised price of anything. They can add another 10-12%.
Enough of the negatives. On the positive side: houses and gardens are lovely and maintained with pride, people are genuinely friendly and helpful, there is a much wider selection of organic and vegetarian food available in supermarkets than in Australia, roads are universally good, there are excellent Vermont cheeses and Californian reds, everyone seems embarrassed by Trump, and the benefits of philanthropic donation means art museums everywhere are overflowing with masterworks. And Geoff likes the toilet flushing mechanism!! But of course there is a dearth of public toilets, as in almost non-existent.
Then there is the language to learn to use (most of which we know from movies of course): sidewalk=footpath; restroom=toilet; soda=soft drink; trash= garbage; check=bill; gas=petrol; Fall=Autumn; vacation=holiday etc etc... “Two countries divided by a common language”, as Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said. Some people pick our accent, others seem confused by it. Almost everyone we meet says they would love to visit Australia one day, but none has actually done so. It’s understandable when Europe is so much closer (and cheaper) and their own country has such diverse and beautiful scenery.
We have enjoyed our time in Providence, but this morning we took the express train to New York for the next stage of our trip: three hours along pretty coastal areas. Our Amtrak experience was much better than the poor reputation you read about. The Acela Express is not really up to the standards of a French TGV, and frustratingly allowed no pre-booking of seats, but it is still fast and comfortable, way ahead of the poor old Canberra Explorer.
Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn will be our home for the next five nights. It is known for its strong Italian-American influences, and seems like a lively and leafy area just over the river from Manhattan, with wide streets lined with Brooklyn brownstones, most of which are decked out at the moment with pretty tacky Halloween decorations. Kids with parents were out in force tonight wandering the streets to look at the decorations, as we do at Christmas. I confess it seems a stupid festival to me, and I have always resented the way it is somehow becoming a tradition in Australia as well, but perhaps I am just getting old and grumpy. Nonetheless we feel relaxed and happy to be here.
We called in at an Italian Deli to buy some food. The man asked us twice to repeat oursleves. When I commented 'You don't understand our accent' (with a smile) he asked us where we were from. We replied: 'Australia'. He immediately said: 'You don't have accents. We do!' And then: 'What do you say to: Aussie, Aussie, Aussie'. Of course we replied in chorus. And we all laughed. His wife has many relatives in Sydney and Melbourne.
Tonight we are off to see La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera.
La Boheme at the Met last night was a wonderful production: originally designed and directed by Franco Zeffirell, it was sung in this latest revival by two black American leads. Angel Blue as Mimi was terrific - a star to watch. (Geoff said it was the best opera production he has ever seen). The opera theatre itself was spectacular, with wonderful hanging crystal chandeliers that rose up to the ceiling before the show started. And the great 80 piece orchestra sounded so much better there than we ever hear from the crowded Sydney Opera House pit. Walking back past a Trump Hotel afterwards we noticed dozens of parked police cars and wondered if the great leader was present.
Tonight we walked 30 minutes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see a modern dance show, combining new choreography by two women and music, with a live cellist on stage: https://www.bam.org/dance/2017/boulders-and-bones. Supposedly a meditation on permanence and decay, it was inspired by work of the British landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy who installed a stone cairn and culvert sculpture in wild north Californian countryside. It was a fascinating mix of absorbing music by the cellist/ composer Zoe Keating, video of the sculpture installation, and great performances by the 10 dancers, reflecting the building of the sculpture.
To try and put a break on the expanding waistlines we made the most of the fine sunny weather in the morning, walking to Prospect Park - very large park in Brooklyn by the same designer who created Central Park - and took a subway to Queens in the afternoon to see a disappointingly underwhelming new contemporary art museum: MoMA PS1. The park was great: with a Saturday food market at the entrance, a dog swimming pond area, cyclists and joggers everywhere, and heaps of kids in costume, come for a Halloween party and a Haunted Walk in the woods. Geoff has lots of photos! The Brooklyn brownstones in tree-lined streets near the park are particularly grand; a very desirable part of the city to live we imagine.
I’ve been here four times since the 1980s and one of the most noticeable changes is how clean the subway is now. On my first visit the carriages inside and out were covered in graffiti, so much so that it was difficult to see out and they were definitely intimidating at times. Now they are clean and mostly airconditioned - a welcome contrast to the often stifling London tube. Most of the lines are just below the surface running along streets and avenues, so they are like underground buses and easily accessible with none of the really deep elevators down that you find in London. A third difference is that the trains here are really long, stretching the length of a street block or even three, so you need your wits about you to decide which exit to take when you disembark. There are buses, but travelling is much faster underground and more entertaining. We were recently serenaded by a band of four old black guys singing in joyful four part harmony as they panhandled down the carriage. Their witty pitch to the passengers was: “Don’t be like Congress, pass a bill!” I did.
Trying to avoid the pouring rain that lasted all day yesterday, we attended a meeting of The New York Society for Ethical Culture, an interesting humanist community that has been dedicated to ethics, social justice and education since 1876, where we heard a highly impressive but bleak presentation from Rabbi Dov Taylor on the horrors of the Israeli/Palestine situation. The Society puts up videos of the weekly talks on their website, and I highly recommend looking at this one. Opportunities like this must be one of the reasons people love living here. We followed that up with a visit to the episcopal Cathedral of St John the Divine near Columbia - somewhat unfinished, huge and impressive, but with no seats in the nave! Does this mean hardly anyone attends services there anymore?
In the afternoon we went to see another show: Miss Saigon, a retelling of the Madam Butterfly story in a Vietnam war setting, by the team that wrote Les Miserables. Spectacular staging of course and a remarkably relevant story of American imperialism going wrong, but despite a few good numbers I don’t think the music is that memorable - not like a Rogers and Hammerstein classic anyway, let alone Puccini. Nonetheless “The American Dream” is certainly a show stopper which has a go at all the excesses of US culture and in this updated revival added the words “make America great again”; there are lots of videos of it online, if you don’t know it. Geoff loved the show and the wind still blows your hair as the helicopter lands on stage (if you have hair, that is).
Our big splurge lunch today was at the three-Michelin-starred Le Bernadin: French styled, specialising in seafood and rated 17 in the top 50 restaurants in the world. We restricted ourselves and our wallets to the fixed price three course lunch option, which was wonderful enough. Every choice on the menu was tempting, but I settled on calamari stuffed with crab, skate in duck broth, and one of the most delicious desserts I can remember: caramelised corn with blackberries and a ball of light as air smoked meringue, filled with a blackberry sorbet. Amazing food and impeccable service.
Our mellow mood was somewhat dampened when our trip home was caught up in major train delays caused by an ‘incident’ being investigated at one station on our line. (Last year 48 people died on subway tracks). After a frustrating couple of hours finding alternative routes, we finished the day strolling along the nearby Brooklyn Heights Promenade, with its wonderful views of the Manhattan skyline, made famous in movies like Annie Hall and Moonstruck. Abraham Lincoln said in 1864: “There may be finer views than this in the world but I don’t believe it.”
Of course this place looks nothing like Old York in the UK now, but maybe it did once?
We spent today looking at the architecture downtown around the site of the World Trade Centre and then walked along the Highline, which is significantly extended from when were last here, now finishing at the enormous area where Hudson Yards (the largest private real estate development in US history) is emerging. We didn’t go into the 9/11 museum or up to the viewing platform for the new Freedom Tower, but we were impressed by the landscaped park, the two deep memorial pools (each on the site of one of the fallen buildings), and the new Westfield Oculus (basically a shopping mall and subway station). Geoff couldn’t keep his fingers off the shutter today, as you will see.
On our last night here we saw the multiple Tony award winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. It is the story of a high school boy with social anxiety who is caught up in his own loneliness and the suicide of another school student. It is a serious subject for this genre but I thought it was brilliant and touching, certainly worthy of the Best Musical award this year; Geoff was less impressed and still preferred Miss Saigon.
PS: this afternoon there was an incident in the Manhattan downtown area we had been earlier walking, when a truck drove into and killed several pedestrians and cyclists. We are quite unaffected, but glad to heading to Toronto tomorrow!
It is nice to be back in Canada, where they are celebrating 150 years of confederation, where we married 10 years ago, and where coins are called Toonies and Loonies. The weather has definitely cooled (11 degrees tomorrow) and it was cloudy all day, although the interiors of buildings can be stiflingly hot. This city of 2.7 million seems to live either up or down: in towering condominiums for sleeping, while shopping, eating and transiting takes place in a warren of arcades below ground. Understandable perhaps when the temperatures don’t rise above freezing in Winter for three months of the year and fall as low as -25C with snow covering the ground. We are staying on the 40th floor of a 44 storey building that looks down on a mini-Times Square, full of big bright advertising screens. I wouldn’t want to live here permanently but there is a definite Wow factor in the view, especially at night.
We spent most of our first morning at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), which has an interesting collection, in a building that was recently renovated by Frank Gehry (a native of this town). He has added a lovely woodwork and glass skin to an older building and opened up interior spaces with wierdly twisting staircases. This is the second of his buildings we have seen on this trip (remember MIT?) and we will see his concert hall in LA in a few weeks time.
Another architectural highlight is the still-controversial ‘Crystal’ addition to the century-old Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), designed by Daniel Liberskind. We had very much admired his Jewish Museum in Berlin, and he was the winner of the competition to develop the master plan for reconstruction of the World Trade Center site. Great stuff.
Despite its size, Toronto seems a less frantic and crowded place than New York, but very modern. It is said to the most culturally diverse city in the world with over 140 languages spoken and more than half the residents born outside of Canada. The Trudeau welcome is in stark contrast to the Trump wall.
Tomorrow we are going to be real tourists and take a bus tour to Niagara Falls.
We took a tour to Niagara Falls yesterday. My daughter Elly had said it was a bit tacky, but we were both impressed and delighted by the beauty and majesty of the site. There is one horrible tourist street, but it is kept well away from the river and surrounding manicured parklands.
As you probably know there are two sets of falls where the water spills from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario - one set on the American side and the bigger and more spectacular Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. They aren’t the highest falls in the world but they do have the biggest volume of water - 750,000 gallons per second (!) we were told. IThis creates a huge roar of falling water and surprisingly tall plums of spray/mist that rise up up into the sky. We were lucky to have sunshine again to see this from the edge of the falls above and then ride the boat up to the base in pink ponchos to protect us from the spray. A memorable experience we think.
After lunch we returned via a winery visit (the Niagara Region wineries produce 90% of the icewine in the world). Icewine is made from carefully crushed, frozen grapes handpicked at night, each grape releasing one drop of concentrated nectar: 3700 grapes are needed to produce one small bottle. We had one with dessert at our wedding dinner ten years ago; we’ll share this one with Ray and Gary in San Francisco.
Today we took a fascinating walking tour with a volunteer guide which focussed on some of the downtown area: a non-official and subversive look at Toronto history from a Cambridge graduate forensic psychologist, who does this for fun (and tips) during the 4 months of paid break from work he has each year, given by his employer to protect the mental health of their front line employees. We learned that: (1) Toronto was originally called New York but changed the name to a local native Indian word (meaning ‘swamp’) after the mail kept getting mixed up with that for New York City in the US; (2) A Trump Hotel in town was recently sold after occupancy had fallen to 10% - it is now up to 50% after being renamed the Adelaide Hotel - clearly Canadians have no love their big brother to the South; (3) Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America after Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles. Chicago is just a bit smaller. The greater metropolitan area actually has a population of around 6-13 million (depending on where you draw the boundary) and a growth rate of 500 people per day. There are cranes building new apartments everywhere. (4) Lots of movies and TV shows are filmed here, pretending it is NY or LA, lured by tax concessions from the Toronto city government. Geoff just had to take a photo of where “Suits” is filmed, a Netflix series we have much enjoyed in the past. Stephen Fry has described Toronto as “New York run by the Swiss”, and we can see what he means.
In the afternoon we took a tram to the Beach area in the east end of town. Lovely tree lined streets run down to a promenade along the lake, which was windy and cold today (the maximum temperature was 8C). It reminded me of a trip we took to Brighton in Melbourne, but the sand is greyer here.
The great coincidence today was walking into a random coffee shop near the food markets at lunch time and find Paul Maharg and Nicola from Papay! He is here working at the Uni and she is over visiting him for four days. What a small world and how unlikely that we would just bump into each other in a city of this size.
It was cold today in Chicago (5C max) but the sun was out so we set off downtown and spent the day around the Millenium Park area on the lake edge. A grand public space has been created there with the terrific popular sculpture Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor - looking like a polished mirrored bean, Frank Gehry’s bandstand for outdoor concerts (the third of his works we have seen on this trip), and the great Art Institute of Chicago where we spent most of the day. It has a new Modern Wing extension designed by Renzo Piano (opposite the Gehry, hence my blog title). We joined a tour of highlights of the modern collection by a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide, which we enjoyed immensely. The whole collection is a bit overwhelming, and it is especially rich in impressionist works.
The city is filled with lovely early 20th century buildings, which we will start to explore more tomorrow. We are staying out of the the central area on a delightful street in the North Center district, in a spacious 1920s apartment on the top floor of a building with lovely wooden features, stained glass and high ceilings, owned by a retired architect.
Our trip from Toronto yesterday was remarkably easy, leaving from a little airport on an island off the edge of the city which you reach by underwater pedestrian tunnel. Security was quick and pleasant and when we landed at the smaller Chicago Midway airport we were first off the plane and through in no time, with a very jovial immigration official welcoming us. What a pleasant change! Always wise to travel via small airports if you can.
I had heard that Americans like sweet food (and I knew for example that the Coke formula in Australia has less sugar than in the US), but we have experienced it ourselves now that we are buying food here to eat at home.The bread and porridge are all much sweeter than we are used to (even the whole grain versions), doughnuts are seen as normal breakfast food, not rare treats, and lots of coffee is offered with flavored syrups. Perhaps the idea of a treat has become a daily refuge from the horrors of political life? This was exemplified at a meal we had at the Art Institute; you can usually depend on art gallery cafes for good food. We ordered a dessert plate of “fruit, nuts, cheese and chocolates” to share. What we got was four types of chocolate (truffles, ordinary milk choc pieces, a dark chocolate log with dried fruit, and a white chocolate slab with dried fruit bits), candied pecans, and one soft goat’s cheese with cranberries added. No crackers. Not at all what the French would offer! It was delicious but we couldn’t eat it all. (The rest of the meal had been lovely, starting with Brussels sprouts chips - individual crisply baked leaves, served with aioli.)
Yesterday we walked around the nearby Lincoln Square area - an old Geman settler district with lots of restaurants and food shops - and had a lunch of the classic Chicago deep dish pizza (actually pretty nice, more like a tart with a pizza base). In the afternoon we took a 90 minute river cruise with a “docent” from the Architecture Foundation talking about the city buildings, and how the river flow was reversed in 1900: it now flows south to the Mississippi, via a canal, rather than into Lake Michigan (an early attempt to deal with a polluted waterway). Very interesting but cold (only 6 degrees) under grey skies, as you can see in Geoff’s photos. He does love the buildings - the beautiful Art Deco ones and the modern. Interestingly, when our docent heard we were from Canberra she immediately said there was a Chicago connection because Marion Mahony, the designer of Canberra, came from Chicago. No mention of Burley Griffin. Marion was one of the first licensed female architects in the world and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. When you read the Wikipedia article on her you realize how much she has been perhaps unfairly overshadowed by Griffin’s name, in Australia anyway - presumably because she was a woman.
Today it was still cold but sunny again and we decided to walk the 606, a disused elevated railway line that has been converted into a multi-use recreation trail and public park, like the Highline in New York. A great way to see some more of the city away from the downtown area. We do like this city - and have remarked how few police there are on the streets, a marked contrast to New York.
We finished the day at the movies, wasting the good weather indoors watching a disappointing film - The killing of the sacred deer. “Brilliant Shit!” Was Geoff’s verdict.
We took a 3.5h bus and walking tour of architectural highlights this morning, which included visits to the campus of the University of Chicago housing the 1906 Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright, buildings by Mies van der Rohe at The Illinois Institute of Technology, and even a peak at the Obama home. We could spend days longer exploring this city, but finished with a quirky curiosity: the Sky Chapel. The First Methodist Church (called the Chicago Temple) in the city is a 23 storey building, with a church on the ground floor, many levels of commercially rented space, and atop all that a gothic tower and steeple. In the hexagonal tower are three floors of accommodation for the senior pastor and above that a tiny round chapel of wood and stained glass, that holds only 30 people and is used for just occasional weddings or special services. It is the highest worship space in the world - i.e. highest from the ground - and open daily for tours at 2pm. The chapel was built in 1952 funded by the Walgreen family (a famous pharmacy chain in the US).
See Geoff’s photos for a taste of what we saw today. Tomorrow we leave very early to fly to San Francisco, leaving behind this lovely place. It doesn’t have the picturesque geography of Sydney, and is very flat, but for those who love architecture it is definitely a place of pilgrimage.
PS: almost every day we have been asked “Are you Twins?” We are bemused by this, but we are thinking of getting a T-shirt saying “No We Aren’t!”
We left Chicago in snow flurries (-7C) and arrived in balmy San Francisco (16C) where we immediately felt at home: gum trees, harbour views and hills - a welcome change from the flatness of Chicago. We are staying with our dear old friends Ray and Gary in San Mateo, about half an hour south of SF downtown, in their top floor apartment with great views in three directions.
Yesterday they drove us down to see the top section of the spectacular Big Sur coastline, still not open all the way to LA after landslides earlier in the year. A bit of walking, a lazy lunch with a view, and a drive around the famous 17 mile drive from Carmel by the Sea - a playground for the super rich. I am loving the warmth, but wish I had brought some shorts and T-shirts!
We have been walking and eating our way around town for the last two days. Yesterday Ray and Gary took us walking on the San Bruno mountain ridge nearby, providing great views of the city and the bay, and then over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin headland for more views.
Today Geoff and I took a guided walking tour around the Fishermans Wharf district and then wandered around other parts of the downtown area. We had seen a lot the standard sights on previous visits - the Castro, Haight Ashbury, Berkeley etc - so we just followed our noses a bit today, making sure to include a stop at the Mr Holmes bakery recommended by Beth Wooldridge.
Commuting on the double decker trains from San Mateo into the downtown area is reminiscent of Sydney, but the carriages here have a strange top level of two rows of single seats separated by an open atrium - a bit weird and inefficient we thought. On the other hand they all have great bike compartments.
Thanks goodness we got over the line with the same sex marriage survey. Perhaps the numbers are a bit disappointing, and I still believe it was a waste of money, but we can breathe a bit easier, But will the Parliament actually be able to enact this change without embedding new discriminatory exemptions?
We had planned to head to Yosemite today, but the forecast was heavy rain followed by snow and freezing conditions, with Winter Storm warnings recommending travellers take an extra flash light, food and water in case of an emergency! Needless to say this didn’t sound very appealing, so we took advice from Ray and Gary and headed south instead to stay at Morro Bay, just near the famous Hearst Castle. This turned out to be a delightfully quiet fishing village with few tourists but lots of barking sea lions and sea otters floating langorously on their backs. Very charming and relaxing. The town is dominated by a large rock that was once a volcanic plug, and a natural gas power generation plant from the 1950s, which produces enough electricity for 1 million homes. It also seems to have more public toilets than the rest of America put together- big tick from us!
We now plan to visit the Hearst Castle tomorrow morning and then drive to Santa Barbara for two days - in other words, do what we had originally planned before the Big Sur road collapse earlier this year forced us to change our itinerary.
Yesterday we drove from Morro Bay to Santa Barbara, stopping for a tour of the Hearst Castle on the way. In 1919 the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst hired a San Francisco woman architect Julia Morgan to build him a “ranch” as a holiday house on family land overlooking the coast at San Simeon. He spent the rest of his life (till the 1950s) adding more and more lavish buildings in a jumble of styles, with a total of 46 bedrooms, crammed full of loot from Europe and Asia: Italian wooden ceilings and paintings, carved choir stalls from German churches, Egyptian and Roman statuary, Persian tiles and carpets, Flemish tapestries, Irish silverware etc etc. It was never finished, but became a gathering place and playground for politicians, movie stars and others of the fast set, and a place at different times to house his wife and his mistress. If you have ever seen the film Citizen Kane, then you will have seen a similar story. It is a spectacular setting, 490m up on top of a mountain that you can only approach on a winding road in a tour bus from the coast. It’s a pastiche of course but with some lovely parts, like the indoor Roman pool that Geoff would be very happy to swim in.
The drive south to Santa Barbara showed us how dry the Californian countryside can be, but it is still beautiful with constantly changing mountain views. Poor old Barbara has been demoted as a Catholic saint, but her town here is a lovely playground for the rich just north of Los Angeles (and home to Ronald Reagan). Surrounded by high hills, with a long palm-fronted beach, there are familiar trees everywhere: Moreton Bay figs, eucalypts, she-oaks and jacarandas, and even a Billabong shop, so it feels a lot like home. We toured the beautiful Mission here, established in 1786 by Spanish Franciscans, sent from Mexico to convert the local Chumash Indians and keep Spanish control of this area, which was at the time also being explored by Russians farming seal furs on the Channel Islands nearby off the coast. The mission has been continuously run by Franciscans to this day. The church was built with Indian labour, and based faithfully on the only plans the brothers had to hand - in a book written by the Roman architect Vitruvius in 27BC, so it looks very much like a Roman temple in many ways! Of course much of the rest of the town is definitely secular: shopping, eating and drinking seem to be the main activities, but the Spanish/Mexican building style is very appealing. You do feel Mexico is very close.
Tomorrow we are going to travel by train to Los Angeles, instead of driving as we had originally planned (we have left the car here). We figured this would be less stressful than negotiating LA traffic, and more scenic and convenient, since we will be staying near the Union station downtown. The weather is a sunny 21 degrees, just delightful and probably why we are noticing quite a few homeless people here, pushing shopping trolleys piled high with their possessions. This would be a much better place to sleep out at this time of year than Chicago, or even San Francisco.
Do you remember that great film from 1997 with three Aussie stars (Russel Crowe, Guy Pearce and Simon Baker), plus a few other big names: Kevin Spacey, Danny de Vito and Kim Bassinger? Well Los Angeles is a bit different now. After a lovely train trip down the coast yesterday, we are staying in the Downtown area, which used to be shunned as dangerous and run down. There are still grotty parts and lots of evidence of poor and homeless Mexican and Black Americans on the streets, but there is obviously a revival going on amid the many fading Art Deco buildings.
Grand Avenue has a string of shining cultural monuments - two museums of contemporary art, an opera house, a theatre, a very modern cathedral, and the glorious shiny new Walt Disney Concert Hall. We went to a concert there this afternoon to hear the LA Philharmonic performing Purcell (Fairy Queen Suite), Bach (Suite No 3) and one of my favourites, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, although this is not to Geoff’s taste. Good performances with a French female conductor, Emmanuelle Haim - disrupted by a false fire alarm in the first half (I have never experienced that before). We half-heartedly started exiting before we were told it was all OK and to resume our seats. The concert hall (our 4th Frank Gehry building this trip) is fabulous both inside and out, as you can see if you look online.
But as well as modern LA, we also saw its more rustic Mexican roots this morning. There is a street market near the central railway station, full of Mexican stalls for clothes, trinkets and food, and also the oldest existing adobe house from the original Mexican settlement, dating from 1818. We hear Spanish spoken everywhere around town and there are more Spanish than English channels on our TV (the latter including Dr Blake Mysteries, would you believe). Of course this Spanish influence is not unexpected given the State’s history, but somehow we weren’t fully aware of it till now.
We are staying in an AirB&B in a very grand Italian Renaissance style building from 1925, which used to be a subway terminal and office building, but was converted 10 years ago into apartments with an opulent marble lobby. I had hoped that the central food market nearby would be worth exploring, but we found it pretty disappointing, more like a crowded shopping mall food court than a place to shop for local artisan ingredients. A pity, but the local Whole Food Market (a national chain) offers an abundance of organic and other quality groceries.
Tomorrow: Hollywood!
We caught the Metro to Hollywood this morning; yes they do have one in LA and it is clean, spacious and uncrowded compared to London, New York and Chicago. The decorations of the Hollywood &Vine station include a great ceiling of old film reels and several old movie projectors.
Hollywood Boulevard itself is pretty tawdry and disappointing - quite a few sex shops, run down theatres, beggars, and tourist trap souvenir shops. The glamour days of red carpet premieres at exotically themed picture palaces seem to have faded. Of course this does not deter the sightseers and we too looked at the stars in the footpath on the Walk of Fame, the footprints and signatures in cement outside the Chinese Theater, the famous sign on the Hill, and the site of the Academy Awards ceremony - all part of a one hour walking tour we took. But just as noticeable was the heavy presence of Scientology. Within two blocks they had three buildings and lots of advertising billboards, including a weird museum to L Ron Hubbard. Is all this funded by John Travolta and Tom Cruise? Of course you can ignore that and enjoy having your photo taken with a real life Edward Scissorhands, Spider-Man, Willy Wonker, Marilyn Monroe, Minnie Mouse or Sleeping Beauty, if you prefer movie fantasy to wacky sci-fi pseudo religion.
Our guide told us that the Donald Trump footpath star (gained for his TV work) was destroyed with picks last October, but replaced within 24h by the Chamber of Commerce, who run the feature and charge nominees a one-off fee of $40,000 for the privilege of being memorialised in the sidewalk. I was surprised to find classical musicians like Yehudi Menuhin sharing the footpath with Michael Jackson and Mae West, but there are 5 categories of entertainment that are recognised: film, TV, stage, radio and recordings. Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, is the only person to have a star for all five. That says it all.
Our time wasn’t totally wasted. We went to a cinema there and saw a fabulous new film: “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”. A rare but successful mixture of tragedy and laugh out loud comedy. Do see it.
We spent this last day near the LA airport at Venice Beach and Santa Monica (11km walking before the long trip home, leaving at 10:55 tonight). The former is pretty tacky on the beach itself, but there is a very cute area of Venice Canals back from the beachfront which are a quiet and delightfully secluded place - see Geoff’s photos. The canals appear to be very shallow, but still look nice (is that a metaphor of American life?)
Santa Monica is more upmarket but with the same very wide beach, without any discernable surf today. We asked a waiter if that was normal and he said they do get some waves for surfing at other times.
So after 3 months away what have been the highlights? Here is our list:
Best large city: Chicago (Safest: Toronto)
Best small town: Delft
Best retreat: Papa Westray
Best seaside village: Morro Bay
Best meal: The Ledbury (London)
Best concert: Boston Symphony
Best opera: Boheme at The Met (NY)
Best musical: Miss Saigon (NY)
Best theatre: Oslo (London)
Best scenery: Niagara Falls
Best university campus: Brown (Providence)
Best public library: Boston
Best public transport: Los Angeles
Best coffee: Dublin
Best art gallery: Chicago (closely followed by Boston, Toronto and Dublin)
Best airport: Billy Bishop at Toronto
Best architecture: The Clark art gallery at Williamstown and the Disney Concert Hall in LA
Best cruise: the islands off Portland (Maine)
Best train ride: Santa Barbara to LA
Best plane flight: Westray to Papay
Best AirB&B: Delft (+ Providence)
Best B&B: Williamstown
Best guided tours: Toronto and Belfast
Best Halloween experience: Brooklyn
Best art experience: virtual reality at MIT
Best walk: Walden Pond
Best Fall colours: Stowe
Best street strolling: Portland
Best breakfast: Tinahelly B&B
However, after all that, we still call Australia home and wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else. In fact Geoff had said he will never travel outside of Australia again. After a while all large cities tend to be similar. We have been lucky to be able to travel to lots of beautiful places, but perhaps we can learn to be content with more virtual experiences in the future.