WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2015
Shetland Islands
While the Shetlands are now Scottish, their Norse history is long—Vikings started settling on the islands around 800 A.D. and they belonged to the kingdom of Denmark and Norway until 1469 when they were mortgaged to Scotland as the dowry of a Danish princess. Norn, a Nordic language directly descended from Old Norse, was spoken on the islands until the 1800’s. As a result, nearly all place names on the Shetlands are Nordic, and I thought it was really cool to be in the know about what the names of the various villages, bays, hills, and coves meant. Do the residents of Lerwick, the only real town in the Shetlands, know that the name of their town means “Muddy Bay?”
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| Lerwick |
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| Faerdie-maet in Norn, färdig mat in Swedish, "ready food" = take-away in English. |
Despite the fact that their Nordic heritage is a defining characteristic of Shetland, the Vikings actually were fairly recent newcomers to the Islands. The islands were first settled about 6000 years ago, and one of the highlights of our trip was seeing so many vestiges of the ancient cultures. There are two major archaeological sites on the islands, but the majority of the remnants are out in the fields and hills; they are generally unsigned, often unexcavated, and it feels like they are just waiting for you to stumble upon them and “discover” them.
Jarlshof is the largest, most complex excavated site on the islands. The site was more or less continuously used for 5000 years, and inhabitants continuously modified older buildings, built new buildings using stone from earlier buildings, and built on top of earlier settlements that had been covered by sand. This continuous use and reuse is of course a challenge to archaeologists, especially since newer buildings must often be removed and destroyed in order to dig down to older buildings. I thought that Jarlshof was really well presented because a layer from each major time period has been left exposed and highlighted. Your visit moves forward in time, and with each stop, you move slightly up in elevation. You get a very good sense for the layered context of the history of the place as well as for how architecture developed and changed over time.
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| Photo from https://digitaldirtvirtualpasts.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/jarlshof-cgi-and-kites-with-kieran-baxter/ |
The earliest Neolithic buildings on the site were small oval houses with low stone walls and large, steep thatched roofs. Bronze Age buildings from about 1000 B.C. were much better preserved and easier to “read.” Shaped like an irregular clover, rounded cells radiated from a central hearth area.
From 3000 B.C. until 800 A.D., the architecture at Jarlshof developed along a similar, round concept. While the buildings did become more regular and the structures more technologically advanced, the evolution is smooth and obvious. It wasn’t until the appearance of a new people, the Vikings, that architecture shifted off of its round trajectory. Suddenly, buildings were rectangular.
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| Photo from http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2665446 |
Another of our favorite archaeological sites was an Iron Age Broch on the island of Mousa. Brochs are a phenomenon only found in northern Scotland, and they were all constructed within a hundred years of the time of Christ. There are about 550 known brochs, and Mousa is the best-preserved of all of them.
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| The broch, and the very steep staircase in between the two layers of wall. |
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| Left: Looking up from the interior of Mousa Broch. Right: From the staircase, looking into the interior. The openings in the wall let light into the narrow space in between the walls and lighten the load over doorways. |
Brochs are prominent in the common, romanticized cannon of Scottish history and culture. However, archaeological evidence is so scarce that we don’t really know why the brochs were built or how they were used. We do not even know if the central space was roofed. The most common theories are that the brochs were defensive or that they were the “castle” of the local chieftain. I personally felt that Mousa broch had more of a ceremonial or religious vibe, but this is hardly based on any scientific fact.
Most of the other archaeological sites we visited are accessible only by a hike. We hiked nearly every day during our two week stay, and we generally chose a hike featuring both “spectacular scenic beauty” and at least one ancient settlement, standing stone, cairn, grave chamber, broch, or Viking long house. In Shetland, mankind’s long occupation is visible just about everywhere, once you start to look. It seemed like every field had once been host to a Stone Age settlement, with the outlines of a stone house and stone field walls still discernible to the untrained eye. Standing stones dot the landscape, often with beautiful, scenic backdrops.
One of our favorite spots was the Ness of Burgi, which translated to English means the Headland of the Fortress. Out on a tongue of land with cliffs tumbling into the churning sea, this Iron Age blockhouse is magnificently and inaccessibly sited.
Another favorite was the Stone Age chambered burial cairn atop Ronas Hill, Shetland’s tallest “peak” at 499 meters. From afar, the structure looks like a messily, hastily built cairn—a jumble of piled rocks. But the cairn has an entrance and a small, narrow tunnel leading to a larger chamber. The tunnel is just big enough for one person to crawl through, and the chamber is big enough for two people to sit comfortably inside. Four people could fit in a pinch. Because it was raining when we reached the summit, we crawled into the chamber and ate our picnic lunch out of the rain and wind. What a picnic spot—inside of a 4000 year-old structure!
The islands are also peppered with more recent signs of settlement in the form of hundreds upon hundreds of ruined croft houses, many of which have stood empty since The Clearances of the late 1700's. These ruins add to the atmospheric quality of the Shetlands which is a unique blend of natural beauty tempered by the human hand.
After last year’s rainy experience in Iceland, we were a bit tired of camping in the rain, so we decided to book ourselves a dry bed for about half of our nights on Shetland. The local heritage trust maintains a network of historical böds, which range from fisherman’s cottages, historic townhouses, croft houses, and the like. Beds are quite cheap and the buildings are very atmospheric. Some of them are quite rustic with no running water or electricity, but the ones we stayed in were fully equipped with electricity, hot showers, a kitchen, and peat-burning stoves for heat.
When we weren’t staying in a böd, we hiked out to a scenic spot and camped. Like Sweden, everyone has access rights in Scotland, and you may hike and camp wherever you want as long as you’re not too close to a house or disturbing livestock. One peninsula was crazy windy, so we camped inside of the ruin of a croft house; the stone walls blocked most of the wind. Otherwise, we camped in beautiful, seaside spots. Once we even camped right below a ruined, hilltop broch!
Our last night on Shetland we splurged on a hotel and four course dinner with wine and whisky. Although Busta House was first built in 1588, many additions over the centuries made it the grand, landowner’s house it appears to be today.
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| Airing out my boots at Busta House |
Distances are small on Shetland, and although we hiked just about every day, the hikes weren’t very long or too strenuous. We had a lot of time for taking breaks and enjoying the scenery and atmosphere while reading, sketching, talking, snacking, and watching waves break. The unusually good weather also lured us to stop and to enjoy the fine views in the sunshine. While we did get some rain, it didn’t rain often enough or long enough to get tiresome or to interrupt our plans. Most days were dry, and we even enjoyed several sunny, warm days. “Warm” is of course a comparative feeling—most days I hiked in long johns, hiking pants, a hiking shirt, a thin down jacket, and a rain jacket/windbreaker. Several windy evenings found us enjoying the views in all of the above clothing plus rain/wind pants, thick, puffy down jackets, and hats and gloves.
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| July in the Shetland Islands can be a bit on the chilly side... |
Shetland hadn’t really been on my travel wish list, but being fascinated by isolated North Atlantic islands, Carl has been longing to go there for ages. There’s comparatively little information to be found on the internet or in Lonely Planet, and I am guessing that the Shetlands receive very few international tourists (except for the occasional cruise ship). While I wouldn’t put Shetland on my top 5 list, I was pleasantly surprised and taken by the beauty of the place. The landscape isn’t hugely dramatic—there are no jagged mountains and the sea cliffs aren’t the highest I’ve ever seen—but the scenery is quite pretty and very soothing. Green, green headlands rise one after the other, then fall dramatically into the churning sea. The headlands make golf make sense—the grass on the headlands is perfectly green and perfectly smooth, and you can understand why the game of golf originally comes from Scotland.
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| I really am a sucker for these beautiful stone walls! |
Generally, I found the Shetland landscape pretty but not super dramatic, but there was one “beach” that was truly impressive. Grind o da Navir at Eshaness is about 30 feet above sea level, but it is piled with person and car-sized boulders that have been hurled onto land by storm waves. It is hard to imagine such a powerful storm and I am very glad that we didn’t experience one the night we were camped just a half kilometer away. We had read that this section of coast is the highest energy coastline in the world, and after seeing those blocks of stone that were strewn on land by waves, I don’t doubt the statistic.
Another highlight of our time in Shetland was the wildlife. We became almost numb to seals, who constantly pop up in bays and who lounge on quiet rocks. We also enjoyed seeing puffins and their funny antics as well as gannets diving into the sea from 100 feet up in the air. Seeing a few gannet colonies at Hermaness Nature Reserve was also quite an experience. From afar, the white rocks just seem to be white rocks. But up close, you realize that the white rocks are actually composed of individual white dots. Through our binoculars, we could see thousands upon thousands of gannets and fuzzy gannet chicks.
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| Puffins! |
Our wildlife highpoint was seeing wild otters hunt. While otters elsewhere are generally nocturnal, the human population on Shetland is so sparse that they are comfortable being out during the day. We watched a group of four otters systematically hunt for fish through a barely-submerged kelp bed for about twenty minutes, until they had moved too far down the shoreline for us to see them. They almost looked like small dolphins they way that they constantly jumped and dived through the water. Sometimes they clambered over rocks in order to reach the next pool, and I even saw one otter sit up, eating a still-flopping fish, with blood running from its mouth. I was surprised at how weasel-like the otters looked in profile; I suppose they might be related on the evolutionary tree.
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| Photo from: http://www.shetlandphototours.co.uk/tag/shetland-otter/ |
Shetland is a small place. Even the mainland is only about 50 miles long. The only town, Lerwick has a population of only 7,500 people. Other than one main north-south road which has two lanes, all other roads have only one lane with occasional wider places for passing oncoming traffic. The main road even crosses the runway of the airport! Traffic lights ensure that cars and airplanes don’t get entangled. Although the roads were small, I was surprised by the fact that they were all paved and in good condition. I was also surprised by how frequent the car ferries to the islands of Yell and Unst operate. Being a major oil terminal, the Shetlands are wealthier than most of Scotland and this is manifest in a higher level of services than you’d expect from its small, mostly rural population.
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| Left: The average, one-lane Shetland road. Right: Shetland's main road crosses the airport runway! |
Eventually, sadly, it was time for us to leave the Shetlands and head back home to Stockholm. I'm not sure if we'll ever be back to the Shetlands, but the Orkneys, the Hebrides, the Highlands, and the Isle of Skye are all on our list. We'll definitely make it back to Scotland eventually!
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| One thing that I found amazing about the Shetlands were these telephone booths which are scattered in random places around the islands. The best part: the telephones still work! |
MONDAY, AUGUST 03, 2015
"Bonus" Trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
I almost didn’t make it on the plane from Stockholm to New York, however. I got to the airport in plenty of time, but it turned out that while I had a confirmation number, I didn’t have a ticket. The credit card payment hadn’t gone through for one reason or another. The lady at the check-in desk was wonderfully nice and patient, and when I burst into tears upon learning that I didn’t have a ticket, she suggested I sit down for a few minutes and come back to her, without standing in line again, after I had called my bank to make sure that the money hadn’t been drawn from my account. When I got back to the counter, the wonderful lady helped me to buy the ticket. My reservation was less than 24-hours old, so it was still valid—I had the exact same itinerary and the ticket was the exact same price as the night before. The whole ticket situation was incredibly stressful, but the professional but caring agent made the situation manageable, and I made it through security and passport control with time to spare.
The surgery was supposed to be on Saturday but it got postponed to Sunday because Mom’s blood work was late coming in to the anesthesiologist. Needless to say, between the worry of my mom needing emergency surgery and the stress of leaving my job so suddenly and the tension of buying a last-minute ticket and the strain on my bank account and the jetlag from flying over the Atlantic, I was an exhausted ball of anxiety by the time Mom had her surgery.
Luckily, everything went smoothly and the surgeon was able to fix the several issues. Mom woke up on schedule and was almost immediately bored and restless despite the pain. To her doctor’s surprise, she basically insisted on going home merely 24 hours after the surgery. Since the surgery was in Querétaro, the nearest big city, it was a long taxi ride to Mom’s house in San Miguel de Allende. The taxi driver was very understanding of Mom’s pain and drove exceptionally slowly and smoothly, and didn’t even charge extra for the longer-than-usual journey.
Although I loved Mom’s cute casita out in the beautiful campo, I was very relieved when she moved into the city this winter. Out in the campo Mom had no telephone, very spotty internet, and only one unwell neighbor. Trips into the city required an expensive taxi or a long and exhausting ride on the local bus, which meant that she didn’t get into the city super often and she was isolated from her friends. Now she lives in a bustling city neighborhood within walking distance of the central square and many of her friends. She has even rejoined the 21st century with reliable telephone service and internet access. Furthermore, she has been adopted into her neighbors’ extended family who all live off of the same courtyard where my mom lives. When mom began having back acute pain a few months ago, the extraordinarily friendly and sweet neighbors started looking in on my mom and bringing her dinner regularly.
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| Mom's street and neighborhood church |
Mom had doctor’s orders to rest in bed for two solid weeks. She managed to sleep for long chunks of time, but when she was awake she was fairly bored. She was in a lot of pain the first week, but it gradually eased up, making it even harder for her to stay in bed.
While mom was resting, I managed to work a few hours every day. I did the grocery shopping and ran a few errands. I cooked and did some housekeeping. It definitely wasn’t vacation, and I didn’t do any sightseeing at all. But I did take her dog on long walks everyday,
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| Little Bits |
Mom lives in the neighborhood of San Antonio. Although it is only a 15 minute walk to the central square, Mom’s area wasn’t developed until about 15 years ago. While new, the neighborhood has a classic Mexico feel with colorful facades that are inspired by colonial architecture and walls that directly abut the sidewalk.
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| the "real" Mexico |
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| Some of the fancier houses in the neighborhood. |
My favorite thing about the neighborhood of San Antonio were all of the trees in the middle of the roads. I suppose that since the area was developed so recently, the value of a good, in-town trees were highly appreciated in the dense, dusty city. Although the neighborhood does maintain the city’s fairly strict grid, nature is allowed to intervene. And it’s not just one or two streets in the area that have an old tree in the middle of the road—a pretty good percentage of the streets have such “traffic calming devices!”
In addition to her wonderful neighbors, I also had the opportunity to meet a few of Mom’s gringo friends, all of whom are writers or painters or photographers. The artistic community is what drew Mom to San Miguel in the first place, and every single one of her friends has an interesting life story, a fascinating outlook on life, and an incredible artistic talent. These retirees are not the stereotypical retirees who don’t know what to do with their empty nests and with all of their new-found free time; rather they are determined to live life to the fullest, to take advantage of every opportunity for enrichment, to surround themselves with fascinating people, to immerse themselves in new cultures and new challenges, and to create to the best of their abilities.
I was in San Miguel during the rainy season, which meant that it rained every afternoon for 30 minutes or an hour, often accompanied by thunder and lightning. The rain and clouds helped to hold the temperature down, so it was actually a bit cooler than when we visited in November. However, the daily rain did bring daily humidity, so some days were quite sticky even though the temperatures weren’t overwhelming. The rain also brought an unpleasant horde of mosquitoes to torture us in the evenings.
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| I never think of the mountains of Mexico as being particularly lush, but San Miguel is surprising with its greenery. |
This trip I really noticed the high number of ATVs zooming around town. A much cheaper alternative than a car, ATVs seem to be quite convenient in San Miguel where incomes are low, the roads are rough, the precipitation is minimal and predictable, and where speeds rarely exceed 30 kilometers per hour. With an ATV you can transport your groceries plus a couple of kids. I even saw a number of souped-up golf cars with giant all-terrain tires, but the ATVs were far more common.
My two weeks in San Miguel were soon up, and I left Mom with a stocked pantry, a freezer bursting with home cooked meals, clean sheets, and a rearranged house so that everything is within easy reach (Mom’s not supposed to do much bending). My shuttle to Mexico City left at 2 a.m. on Friday. I then flew to Atlanta, and then to New York City. I had a 24-hour layover in New York, so I had the opportunity to visit with some dear friends in Manhattan.
My levels of stress on the trip were extra super-duper high because of my Swedish residency permit. When we came home from our trip to Russia, the passport control person mentioned to us that the paper version of Swedish residency permits were expiring and that all permanent residents needed to procure the more technologically advanced card version. When I looked it up online, I found out that the paper version was only accepted three more days after we got home from Russia! I was absolutely furious that the immigration agency hadn’t informed me via letter or email or SMS about the change, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. I made an appointment to get my photo and fingerprints taken for the new fancy card; the appointment turned out to be the day before I left for Mexico, but I wouldn’t receive the card for another week. So I could leave Sweden, but I couldn’t get back in until I had the new residency card. We didn’t trust the delivery system in Mexico, so I scheduled a 24 hour layover in New York so that Carl could fed-ex my residency card to our friends there. To make matters even more stressful, the residency card got held up in customs for a week! Luckily, the card made its way to our friends the day before I arrived.
Once I had my residency card in hand, I began to relax and enjoy the trip a bit. But after a walk on the East River, an Italian dinner, a New York brunch, a walk through Central Park, and lots of catching up with my friends, it was time for me to head to the airport for the next leg of my journey which was to Paris.
I had a full day in Paris, so I took the train into the city and visited one of my all-time favorite churches, Sainte-Chapelle. Because I had visited the church so long ago, and before I began my architecture education, I was a little worried that the chapel wouldn’t live up to my heightened expectations. But I needn’t have worried: the minute I entered the chapel, my heart swelled, my face couldn’t stop smiling, and I literally twirled in order to take in the overwhelmingly magnificent space. The interior of Sainte-Chapelle is magical because there is so much glass. Even today it would be challenging to engineer a building with such slender columns, so much glass, and such tall proportions. The secret is revealed on the exterior where the columns which look so slender on the interior are seen to be much more substantial and chunky on the exterior.
After an afternoon of wandering through the Latin Quarter, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the left bank of the Seine, it was time to head back to the airport for my final flight home. Despite having to go back to work a mere 12 hours after I landed, it was such a relief to be home! There is a saying in Swedish “borta bra men hemma bäst” which means “away is good but home is best.” I generally don’t agree and I am generally sad to be home after a trip, but this time, after such an exhausting trip, it felt wonderful to fly back to Stockholm and back to my husband and back to my home and back to my cat.
Next time, I hope that it's not a surgery that takes me to Mexico, and that I have more than a day the next time I'm in New York and Paris!
FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2015
Gliding through the Stockholm Archipelago
Carl and I took a bus Friday evening to meet Carl’s parents at a dock south of the city, and they picked us up in the sailboat within an hour of our leaving work. We anchored in a bay off of Kymendö that I have actually been in to couple of times now—both in a kayak and in a sailboat—and it’s pretty cool that I am starting to recognize my surroundings out amongst all those islands! After sailing most of the next day, we anchored off of Nämndö. I hadn’t been there before, and Carl and I enjoyed taking the dingy to land where we hiked around exploring some of the island’s trails, clifftop viewpoints, and cute cottages.
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| Carl's parents' boat from one of Nämndö's clifftops, and one of Nämndö's forest trails. |
As always, Carl’s mom managed to cook up a feast in her tiny sailboat kitchen, and she treated us to three-course gourmet meals both evenings. Carl and I rarely devote entire evenings to savoring meals, so we always have a lovely relaxed time with Carl’s parents on their boat.
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| Being close to the summer solstice, the sun didn't set until around 11 p.m.! |
It seems to be a pattern that we have gorgeous weather on Friday and on Saturday and that Carl and his dad get stuck sailing us home on a rainy Sunday. This time at least, the rainy conditions weren’t too harsh as it never rained all that hard and the temperatures didn’t dip all that low. By the time we got to the dock the rain had stopped so we were able to load up the car without too much fuss.
Thank you to Carl’s parents for another lovely weekend out on the sailboat; I am already looking forward to our next trip!
FRIDAY, JULY 10, 2015
St. Petersburg
The visa process was cumbersome, but doable. The nerve-wracking part of the process is that you have to book and pay for your plane tickets and your hotel before you apply for your visa, so if you don’t get the visa for some reason, you’ve potentially lost a lot of money. Living in Stockholm helped with that part because the round-trip plane tickets were about $120, so we weren’t going to lose a month’s salary if the visa fell through. I was most interested to see how Carl’s visa application differed from mine. Being a Swedish citizen, Carl basically only had to give his name and date of birth. Americans, however, must fill out a 10 page form listing every school and university you’ve attended, which degrees you have earned, and dates of study; every country you have visited in the last ten years as well as dates of travel; every political, professional, and leisure-time organization you have ever belonged to; every job you’ve ever had including dates, your position, and your boss’s phone number; if you’ve ever worked for a government; and if you’ve ever been in the military or somehow been caught up in a war or have ever been a refugee. In the end, we both received our visas so all the worry was for naught.
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| Random image: Almost summer in the summer gardens. |
Most people I have talked with haven’t realized that St. Petersburg/Leningrad was one of World War II’s grizzliest scenes. Surrounded by Germans for 900 days, Leningrad survived modern history’s longest and deadliest siege. The numbers are fuzzy and change depending on the source, but over one million citizens died of starvation, and another million were killed by artillery and such. Several hundred thousand managed to escape across the winter ice of Lake Ladoga (Europe’s largest lake), but tens of thousands perished along the way. By the end of the 900 days, fewer than a million of the city’s inhabitants were left. My grandmother was one of the ones who were lucky enough to escape alive.
It was therefore extra poignant that we arrived in St. Petersburg on the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, which is a Russian national holiday and one of St. Petersburg’s yearly highpoints. We came up from the subway straight into the middle of a parade. After marching along with our rolling suitcases, we managed to turn off onto a side street and find our hotel. We checked in and then wandered to the gigantic Palace Square where there was an hours-long concert in progress. I was moved by how many were carrying posters with photographs of their loved ones that were lost in or whom had survived the Siege. After the Siege, every survivor was awarded a medal, and those medals were hung with black-and-orange striped ribbons. Just about everyone was wearing a similarly striped ribbon; some were even wearing their relative’s survivor’s medal.
The Victory Day celebration culminated in a Russia-sized fireworks display. As the rockets exploded, I couldn’t help but think about how terrifying the same sounds and explosions would have been during the Siege. Instead of a murmuring of oohing and ahhing, the Russians really get into fireworks, shouting “Hurrah! Hurrah!” every time a new rocket bursts into color. The fact that I had finally made my way to St. Petersburg combined with the personal significance of the day and the emotive fireworks display caused my emotions to overflow into tears.
The next morning, Carl and I braved our way into the suburbs and onto a bus. Buses are often quite tricky to navigate in foreign cities, but adding a foreign alphabet into the foreign language mix makes taking a bus in Russia seem outright adventurous. But we had copied our destination onto a piece of paper and showed it to the mini-bus driver when we jumped on board, and he was very nice to let us know where to get off. Luckily, taking our first Russian bus turned out to be a rather adventure-free experience.
It is probably not the first thing that most tourists go to see when they travel to St. Petersburg, but the destination of our bus non-adventure was Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery where 420,000 people who had starved to death during the Siege were buried (after the fact) in mass graves. While I do not have specific information about relatives being buried in the cemetery, chances are great that some of my grandmother’s family are buried there. We were correct in assuming that the cemetery would be filled with flowers the day after Victory Day—there were heaps upon heaps of red carnations lining the mounded graves.
Even in mass graves and twenty to thirty bodies deep, 420,000 people take up a lot of space. The graves stretch on almost as far as the eye can see. The mass graves are furthermore mounded up above the walkways, emphasizing their sheer size. The emotional effect was strengthened by mournful music which crescendoed and died away as we wander past the loud speakers. Looking closer at the grave markers, I saw that in addition to carnations, people had left candies, cookies, and even slices and loaves of bread. Seeing the bread, that essential missing element which had caused all of these deaths, sent me over the edge into tears again.
The next stop on our St. Petersburg best hits was a prison where my great-grandfather was imprisoned for several years due to his political beliefs. To Carl’s relief, our touristing got a little more traditional after the cemetery and the prison, and we spent hours upon hours wandering along St. Petersburg’s canals.
Peter the Great built St. Petersburg starting in 1703 in a swampy river delta in territory newly won from Sweden as Russia’s “window to the west.” He was enamored of both Venice and Amsterdam and endeavored to build a city where canals were the main means of transport. He was so single-minded in this aim that he refused to build bridges across the canals, forcing pedestrians to use rowboats to cross the canals and making transport very difficult with horse and cart. While the groundwork for the city was laid during Peter’s time, most of the city and the canals weren’t developed until later.
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| Random image: Built in the 1700's, Gostinyy Dvor is the world's oldest shopping mall and it is HUGE. These photos only show a small piece of the building. |
Like the scale of the city in general, St. Petersburg’s canals are quite grand. They are much wider than Amsterdam’s canals, and the palaces lining them are wide, pompous affairs quite different than Amsterdam’s narrow, gabled houses. While Amsterdam was populated by the wealthy merchant class whose canal houses were generally practical in nature and were built foremost as storehouses and secondarily as dwellings, St. Petersburg was populated by the nobility and gentry whose canal palaces were grand and stately and built first and foremost to show off wealth and status.
(Carl and I joked that between Amsterdam, Venice, and St. Petersburg, we have been touring Europe’s canal cities one by one. Next on our agenda should be Bruges, Belgium!)
Today, the palaces lining the canals are almost all in perfect condition, at least on the exterior. The paint jobs are so perfect and new that you can almost catch a whiff of new paint when wandering along the canals. The pristine condition of huge parts of the city was surprising to me—I was expecting a large percentage of dilapidated, damaged buildings, but derelict buildings are in fact a tiny minority of the city’s building stock.
St. Petersburg is also unique due to the color scheme. Most guidebooks describe the colors as pastels, but I don’t 100% agree because the colors are deeper and richer than pastels. I was especially fascinated by all of the sherbet colors—raspberry, orange, pistachio—and I absolutely fell in love with the varying shades of sea-foam green. I was also entranced by the ice blue of St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral and the various shades of ice blue at the Smolny Cathedral and convent complex.
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| St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral |
Stone was a precious commodity in St. Petersburg, and the nobility and gentry simply didn’t have the money to face their buildings in colorful marble as they would have wanted. Colored plaster was a way to give the colorful effect of marble without the cost. Additionally, Empress Elizabeth decreed in the 1700’s that facades were to be “cheerful” pastels in order to brighten up dreary, grey winter days. Although colors have changed over the years (the Winter Palace was originally yellow and white, today it is emerald green), the tradition of bright and vibrant facades has remained.
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| Sherbet! |
Everything about St. Petersburg is over the top, including the scale of its public spaces. Built to impress, St. Petersburg preceded Paris with its extraordinarily wide boulevards. Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s most famous boulevard, is 60 meters wide! (The word Prospekt is the same as “prospect” in English and indicates that the boulevards provided axial views to important landmarks.)
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| The admiralty building provides a focal point for Nevsky Prospect. |
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| While the central portion of the General Staff Building is curved, the wings aren't as crooked as they appear to be in this panorama. |
Even normal blocks in St. Petersburg are oversized. There were several occasions when our next destination was only a couple blocks away, but it took ages to walk there because the blocks are so huge. On a map, the blocks look like ordinary city blocks, but it’s easy to forget that everything in St. Petersburg is Russia-sized.
While we decided that the city planning of St. Petersburg “out-Parised” Paris, the palace interiors made me come to the conclusion that Russians invented the concept of bling. I have been in many palaces during my travels, and nothing, I mean nothing, has ever come close to Peterhof’s or to the Winter Palace’s bling.
Peter the Great had been a guest at Versailles, and he built Peterhof as his own personal Versailles. Peterhof has its own mirrored ballroom (bigger than Versailles with more surface area of window and mirror, and of course more gold) and its own manicured park with a profusion of fountains.
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| Peterhof from the Baltic side and from the land side. |
Carl and I spent a lovely day wandering Peterhof’s woodsy and more formal gardens as well as visiting several small, seaside palaces on the grounds. I fell in love with the golden onion domes of the palace chapel.
I was also particularly amused by one of the fountains which shows Samson killing the lion, but the allegorical meaning alludes to Peter the Great defeating Sweden, whose symbol has always been the lion. We were also interested by displays which showed photos of how the fountain statuary had been preserved during the war. As soon as the Germans invaded Russia, teams dug huge trenches in the ground, dismantled the statuary, and buried as much as possible. It was a good thing because the palace was taken by the Germans early on in the war and used as a command post; needless to say, the Germans weren’t so respectful of the architecture and they carted away as much art as possible.
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| Peterhof's woodsy Baltic garden. Wood Anemones are about twice as big in Russia as they are in Sweden. |
We didn’t make it to any of the other royal country palaces which encircle St. Petersburg, and I would love to see them some day. Instead, we concentrated on St. Petersburg’s incredible art museums, the Hermitage being the best known, of course. We bought our tickets ahead of time online, something I would definitely recommend in order to avoid very long lines. Saving time with the tickets allowed us to spend 11 hours (!) in the museum! I have been to the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, I have been to the Met and to the Modern in New York, I have been to the National museum in Amsterdam, and I have been to all of the museums in London. None of those museums compare with the Hermitage, not in the extent of the collection, nor the quality of the art, nor the grandeur of the setting.
Housed in the Winter Palace, the Hermitage consists of over 300 rooms whose walls are crammed with art. The collection contains over 3 million works of art spanning from ancient archeological finds to post-impressionism, and the majority of the paintings are unequivocally priceless. For example, the Hermitage has an entire room of 40+ Rembrandt paintings, an entire room of Monets, an entire Renoir room, at least several of each of the Italian masters including Caravaggio, Titan, and Vernese, and the list just goes on and on and on.
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| The grandeur of the Winter Palace |
While Peter the Great had been a collector of oddities as well as a patron of the arts, it was Catherine the Great who really started the royal art collection. She sent agents all over Europe to scour for art, and she bought entire collections when the collectors fell upon hard times or died. Needing a place to display her acquisitions, she built an entire building beside the winter palace. The Small Hermitage quickly ran out of space, so she built yet another large museum, called the Old Hermitage, next to the Small Hermitage. Today, the collection is also displayed in the Winter Palace and in the General Staff building, but despite occupying 300 rooms, the vast majority of the works are in a storage facility outside of the city center.
Later tsars after Catherine the Great added to the collection, but it was actually the Soviets who more than doubled the collection when all private collections throughout Russia were confiscated. The collection grew yet again when the Russians marched home from Germany at the end of World War II, sweeping along with them as many priceless pieces as possible. Like in most museums, the label stating the name, artist, and date also describes the paintings’ providence. Some paintings were donated by so-and-so, and others were donated by this-and-that, but the confiscated paintings were “from the collection of XXX.” I kind of had to laugh—I guess you wouldn’t really print “stolen from XXX” on the placards…
We also spent a day slowly meandering through the Russian Museum which is an entire museum of Russian art from early Christian icons to nearly contemporary art. Other than a few more modern artists such as Chagall and Malevich, I’ve never heard much or learned much about Russian art. Interestingly, there really wasn’t much Russian art except religious icons until Peter the Great imported European artists to teach Russians how to paint and sculpt. The shift from religious art with no sense of perspective or proportion to realistically painted secular subjects was instantaneous during Peter’s reign. After Peter, Russian art more-or-less followed the European trajectory through Romanticism to National Romanticism to Impressionism to Art Nouveau to Modernism, but each movement was filtered through a lens of Russianness which lent it a slightly eastern, slightly different feel. Even the Russian Museum has over 1 million paintings in its collection, so what you see in the galleries is definitely only a small taste of the entirety.
Another thing that surprised me about St. Petersburg was how present and visible the Soviet period is in today’s city. I have spent several months living in Budapest where every trace of the Soviet past has been removed from the city and placed in a badly maintained outdoor museum out in the city’s suburbs. While I wasn’t expecting St. Petersburg to have been expunged in such an extreme manner, I was still quite surprised to see so many Soviet flags waving at the Victory in Europe Day celebrations,
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| I just love the juxtaposition of the communist stars on the facade of the Ralph Lauren store. |
While I was a bit surprised by the abundance of Soviet symbolism still in place, I wouldn’t have expected all of the Soviet architecture to have be torn down, and it seems that huge parts of the Soviet city still remain. Most notable was the truly over-scaled new city center which Stalin built away from the historic and corrupted, lavish, and imperial city center. Stalin and his architects took St. Petersburg’s over-the-top and over-scaled themes to a new level, building a new city to a scale that truly boggles the mind. Each block is about a kilometer long, and the wide thoroughfares are lined with huge, towering apartment and administrative buildings which relentlessly march without a break from street corner to street corner.
Not only are Soviet symbols and architecture prevalent throughout the city, but Soviet propaganda is alive and well in St. Petersburg’s museums. One gets the distinct feeling that the display placards have not been changed since Soviet times. Carl was a good sport and accompanied me to several Siege of Leningrad museums as well as to a couple of Siege memorials, and the text was littered with descriptions of “brave Russians” and “fascist, barbaric Germans.” It is true that St. Petersburg suffered greatly during the war, but a balanced, objective point of view wasn’t even attempted in any of these museums. Needless to say there was no mention of the atrocities that Soviets committed against the Germans later in the war.
The St. Petersburg subway is another Soviet tour de force that is still alive and well in today’s city. Because my great-grandfather was one of the architects involved in the design of the subway system (in exactly what capacity I don’t know), we stopped and photographed all of the original stations. Although the system was designed in the 30’s, it wasn’t built until the 50’s due to the war. Even so, the original theme of “A Palace for the People” certainly wasn’t diluted. Each station has a theme, and each station is so over-the-top that you would never guess that it was a subway station and not a prominent government building.
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| Two of my favorite stations |
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| The temple-like exterior and entrance hall of one subway station. |
The St. Petersburg subway is very, very deep, so the escalators are incredibly long, possibly the longest I’ve ever seen. The escalators are all original, some even with the original wood siding and trim. I loved the lighting fixtures, and was totally fascinated by the escalator attendants that sit in a little enclosed booth, watching to make sure that no one gets hurt on the escalators. Instead of having the emergency stop buttons out in the open, only the escalator attendant has access to them. I was fascinated by the fact that Russians have turned watching escalators into a full-time job, and especially by the little hats that the escalator attendants wear!
A new subway line opened in the last few years, and while the new subway stations aspire to be artful and beautiful, they unfortunately fall short of the mark. Cheap materials and uninspiring designs make the new stations pale imitations of the originals.
All but one of St. Petersburg’s churches were closed during Soviet times, and they were used as storage facilities, offices, or even as a natatorium. Today, the churches have been beautifully restored and seem to be quite busy with services and worshipers. The older churches date back to the 1700’s and include the ice-blue St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral (photos above) and the multi-toned Smolny Cathedral whose super tall proportions make it look like it is reaching to the sky.
Alexander Nevsky Monastery was another complex whose idyllic site on a canal, sumptuous Baroque buildings, and overgrown central graveyard makes it a lovely spot to stop and relax for a bit.
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| The main church to the left and the communist cemetery to the right. |
The small Chesme church was another favorite. Catherine the Great had the church built on the spot where she learned of Russia’s victory over the Turks in order to give thanks for the victory. Even in a city filled with unreserved pastel buildings, these pink-and-white stripes are unforgettably gleeful.
The 19th century National Romantic Church on the Spilled Blood is St. Petersburg’s show stopper. Our hotel was right around the corner so we passed by the church many times, enjoying it in the rain, in the sunshine, at night, and from all angles. The colored onion domes made me think of it as a Candy Land church, and its canal-side location lends the church even more splendor.
St. Petersburg is a bit like Rome or Venice in that a week of intense sight-seeing is enough time to only scratch the city’s surface. There is so much more to see! Since we concentrated on Siege museums and monuments, art museums, and churches, there are many scrumptious palaces and enticing city neighborhoods that we missed out on. Since our plane tickets were so cheap (and direct!), I am already scheming about future weekend trips…
We didn’t take photos inside the palaces, so the Peterhof interior images came from:
http://www.saint-petersburg.com/peterhof/grand-palace.asp
and
http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/khillski/7/1407161298/tpod.html#_
and the Winter Palace Gold Room image is from:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dbroberg/2550912295/
THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2015
Opening the 2015 Camping Season at Häringe Nature Reserve
We read about this “little known” nature reserve in a magazine on a Wednesday, and by Friday, the promise of water views, spring wildflowers,
During its 1000 year recorded history, Häringe has always been a large estate with a prosperous farm and a manor house. From a prominent Viking, the estate made its way into the hands of the Danish king. Gustav Vasa--the hero king who united Sweden, kicked out the Danes, converted the country to Protestantism, and established Sweden’s first hereditary monarchy—eventually claimed the estate as his own. Häringe was passed down from king to king as part of the royal assets until it was given to a count in a land exchange. It was Count Gustaf Horn that had the current manor house built in the mid 1600’s, but it was given its current look during a renovation in the 1770’s. In the 1900’s, carriage roads were built around the peninsula so that the owners could leisurely enjoy their grounds, but the estate was still foremost a working farm.
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| the central portion of the manor house's main building |
In 1998, most of the estate was donated to the non-profit Skärgårdsstiftelsen (Archipelago Foundation) who had the peninsula officially protected as a nature reserve (the manor house is now a privately owned hotel). Very little of the peninsula is “natural,” and the fields are still worked, horses still dwell in the barn and run in the paddocks, and meadows are still maintained and kept open. In Sweden, “cultural landscapes” are considered to be just as important as “natural landscapes,” and the loss of fields and meadows to regenerated forest is frowned upon. This is quite a foreign concept to me, but I do appreciate the idea that history isn’t just encapsulated in buildings, monuments, and cities, but that landscapes can also represent a specific historic moment in time. The concept of keeping history alive through the maintenance of landscapes which were created in specific patterns due to specific historical circumstances is interesting to me, and I do have to admit that the combination of fields, meadows, oak groves, stands of pine forest, and coastline make for a stunning composition.
We followed the meandering carriage roads around the peninsula, following their rhythms as the oscillated between open pasture and moss-coated forest, rocky outcropping and sandy beach, ancient oak grove and reedy shore. We managed to find a secluded, beachfront spot to pitch our tent—our site was a little risky given the water proximity, but we had luck and the wind never whipped up any larger waves.
Before heading home, we had fika at the wonderful manor house café which occupies most of the piano nobile. The café occupies several rooms and uses the house’s original antique furnishings. While it was a little sad to see condensation rings on the leather top of our 18th century table, I did like that visitors get to use and enjoy the house, and that it feels more like a home than a museum. Pets are even welcome to accompany their owners in the café!
TUESDAY, MAY 19, 2015
Scoping out Malmö
Once we got to Malmö, the weekend was wonderful. Susanna and Johannes are thoughtful hosts and they devoted their entire weekend to showing us their city. Johannes is an architect and Susanna has a master’s degree in urban planning, so they knew exactly what I’d be interested in seeing (and Carl seemed to have fun, too). The first stop was the beach, which is within walking distance of their apartment, and then the new-ish seaside development of Västra Hamnen, or the Western Harbor, and the famous Turning Torso.
Our walk continued through Malmö’s castle (which is one of Sweden’s less impressive castles), Malmö’s Old Town and downtown, and a few residential areas and parks just outside of downtown. Carl and I both liked the feel of Malmö, although it is decidedly not as gorgeous as Stockholm. There are some major plus sides to the city, however: real estate is about 30% the cost of Stockholm, Malmö is a 45 minute train ride from Copenhagen, the region of Skåne is a gorgeous pastoral landscape with an almost endless number of possible weekend trips, and the European continent is much more accessible to Malmö than Stockholm. Carl and I don’t really have any thoughts of moving, but I do have to say that the real estate market is quite tempting—for the price of our small, 1950’s apartment in the suburbs of Stockholm, we could buy a twice-as-large apartment in a historical building in downtown Malmö.
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| The prettier side of the castle, from inside of the ward (or bailey? not sure what the right term is!) |
Susanna was eight months pregnant when we visited, and wow, what a trooper! Our Saturday walk was fairly long, but it didn’t seem to phase her too much. We even went out and met some of their friends for drinks Saturday evening!
On Sunday, Johannes took us on a bike tour of a new development just outside of Malmö that’s pretty interesting from an architectural point of view, and then we biked along the coast for a ways until returning to their apartment. After a game of boule and an ice cream cone, it was time for Carl and I to rush off to the train for a thankfully non-eventful ride back to Stockholm.
A week after our visit, Susanna gave birth, a month earlier than expected! Both Susanna and Agnes are doing well, and we are very excited for the new parents. Welcome to the world, baby girl!
Thank you for a great weekend, you two!
MONDAY, APRIL 13, 2015
Easter in Copenhagen
One of my work colleagues is Danish and has spent a couple years working in Copenhagen, and she was kind enough to create personalized maps of a couple of neighborhoods for Carl and I. She pointed out favorite cafes, restaurants, and bars as well as fun strips of funky boutiques, interesting architectural projects, and good bicycling routes. Carl and I didn’t have a beer in every bar she pointed out, but we did walk and bicycle just about every block that she mentioned. Thank you Katja for the excellent recommendations!
Copenhagen has suffered a series of catastrophic fires over time, so very little of the historic fabric remains. However, I did enjoy discovering a number of surviving half-timbered buildings sprinkled throughout town,
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| Left: citadel ramparts and moat. Right: barracks in the middle of the citadel. |
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| We had a water view from our room! |
My city-planning curiosity was also piqued by the Amalienborg Palace complex. Instead of one gigantic, impressive, overwhelming palace, the 18th century palace was split into four symmetrical buildings forming a large, formal square. The palace church sits slightly behind the ensemble, but two of the palaces frames a symmetrical view to the impressive dome.
I also fell in love with several in-town residential neighborhoods of townhouses. I don’t know much about their history, but I am fairly confident that they were built around the 1880’s as low-income workers’ housing.
Copenhagen is a slightly edgier, grittier city than Stockholm. Uniformity doesn’t seem to be quite as celebrated as in Stockholm, and it seems to be more ok to be slightly different.
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| Two "different" playscapes. Left: Slide down from preschool rooftop terrace playground. Right: Historic gable / skateboard ramp. |
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| This type of rooftop addition to a historical building would be very hard to get approval for in Stockholm. |
One disappointing thing about the boat ride was that neither Carl nor I could understand the narrator at all. Because I can understand Katja quite well, I had assumed that I would be able to at least get the gist of what was being said on the boat tour, but it turns out that Katja’s Danish is much easier to understand than many other Danes. While I can read Danish without much confusion at all, understanding the spoken language is another thing entirely! Danish is a much softer language than Swedish. For example, “street” in Swedish is gata while in Danish it is gada. The softer consonants tend to blend together and I discovered that Carl’s description of Danish as “Swedish spoken with oatmeal in the mouth” quite apt. Additionally, Danish isn’t spoken with the same sing-song rhythm as Swedish, so it’s harder to detect where one word ends and the next begins.
One of the highlights of our trip was spending an evening at Tivoli, one of the world’s oldest amusement parks. I have always loved amusement parks, mostly because I love the rides—everything from frightening roller coasters to motion-sickness-inducing swirling rides to the simpler entertainments of bumper cars. I found Tivoli enchanting. Although small by today’s standards, the gardens, lighting, fountains, lakes, and buildings create an delightful atmosphere, magically transporting you to another world.
SUNDAY, MARCH 22, 2015
Val Thorens
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| A couple of Carl's beautiful photos of his group skiing off-piste |
Getting to Val Thorens turned out to be a bit dramatic because a giant boulder rolled into the road the day we were supposed to arrive. Because there is only one road up the valley, we had to wait for the boulder to be removed before we could proceed up to the village. I was really impressed with how well UCPA handled the event and how smoothly everything went considering the circumstances. Instead of taking us directly to Val Thorens, our airport transfer drove us to the nearby ski village of La Plagne where we spent the night in an astonishingly empty UCPA center. During the night, road crews dynamited the boulder, removed all of the debris, and repaved that section of road, so we were able to proceed to Val Thorens the next morning. In the end, we only lost a few hours of skiing due to the boulder.
Val Thorens is Europe’s highest ski resort, and the bottom of the resort is well above tree-line. The altitude pretty much guarantees great snow, but high winds are also quite common. The weather during our week in Val Thorens was quite varied from wet, snowy, windy days to sunny, warm, still days. While all the new snow was great for off-piste skiing, the sunny days gave us magnificent views of the surrounding Alps.
Being so high and unprotected, Val Thorens is not a historic village, and is therefore not very cute or super charming. However, the scale of development is quite modest, and there are no ugly concrete high rises from the 60’s like in many other French resorts. The UCPA center is ski-in-ski-out, and it was marvelous not to have to take ski busses around like in Chamonix.
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| Val Thorens village, and sunny, warm evening on UCPA's porch |
The Three Valley resort consists of 600km of trails and is one of Europe’s largest ski systems.
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| One of the runs dropping into the Maribel Valley |
This year, Carl joined an off-piste randonnee group, and they spent just as much time walking up the mountainsides as they did skiing down them.
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| Putting on and taking of skins was also a big part of Carl's group's day. |
While I was technically in an on-piste group, we spent the vast majority of our week off-piste. Some days I found the off-piste skiing to be fun and enjoyable, but most days it was just hard work. I think that I’ll enjoy off-piste skiing a lot more in a few years once I’ve become a more experienced skier. Partly due to all of the off-piste skiing, my UCPA experience wasn’t as positive as it has been in past years, and I didn’t make the same leaps in skill level that I have in the past. Several of the days I skied at a much lower skill-level than I am capable of—I think it was a combination of exhausted legs and the uncertainty of skiing off-piste that threw me off my game. By the last day, however, I felt like I was back up to par, and it felt amazing to finally ski at the level that I know I am capable of. We even skied one ugly, frightening black run that had nearly put me in tears a few days before, but on our blissful final day of skiing, the run was challenging but no big problem.
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| me! |
I definitely think that we’ll ski with UCPA again next year. I’m hoping that my less-positive experience this year was an aberration and not the average. I hope that next year I’ll get back on track with leaping ahead in my skiing skills!
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| Random shot--I have never seen a "moving walkway" lift completely enclosed in a tunnel like this before. Spiffy! |
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2015
New Year's Week in Venice
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| Venice's most well-known landmark, the Basilica of San Marco |
We spent our week in Venice walking and museuming. Venice has a seemingly infinite number of alleyways to wander and courtyards to discover, but after seven days of steady wandering, I am positive that we covered more than half of Venice’s streets, even in the more outlying areas. We even covered many of the streets several times as they were “direct” routes from our apartment to various areas of the city.
On my previous trips in Venice, I have spent the better part of the trip lost, often even lost on purpose. Just wandering and letting the alleys lead you is part of Venice’s charm; wandering Venice is sort of like reading a book—you just turn the page, go around the corner, and your next adventure is ready to meet you. You don’t have much control over the story, and the city unfolds, very slowly, alley by alley, courtyard by courtyard, before you. Many authors have described Venice as a city-sized theater where the inhabitants and tourists are the actors, constantly walking on and off stage as they flit over bridges and around blind corners. I am sure that this sense of theater contributed to my impression of the city as a story unfolding before me as I walked.
Venice really can be disorienting. The streets are so narrow that there are no visible church towers or other landmarks to guide you, just buildings towering directly overhead, often even leaning over you.
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| Alleys often dead end into canals. |
Even though the city can be extremely bewildering to navigate, Carl was never, and I mean never, lost or even slightly disoriented. His internal compass did not waver and he always knew exactly which direction we needed to head in order to find a specific canal or plaza. I’ve always known that Carl has a great sense of direction, but his navigational skills through Venice was truly impressive. I am sure that many locals can’t even navigate through the city like Carl.
There is a subtle rhythm of open and closed, constricted and open when wandering Venice. Although the alleyways tend to be claustrophobically constricted, most dead-ends culminate in a small courtyard and the dense city is frequently punctuated by large, open campos (plazas or squares) which are the center of neighborhood commerce and social life. Although a tree or two might occupy the center of the campo, there is surprisingly little greenery in these open spaces. However, we did notice a good bit of verdant greenery spilling over the tops of walls, so Venice must contain a large number of private oases. Oh, to be able to catch a glimpse into those secret gardens! The imagination runs wild.
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| In the summer, the campos are a lot more lively, but in January, it's just too cold to do much socializing in the campo. |
Some of Venice’s streets are surprisingly wide until you realize that they are filled-in canals. Like the campos, these rio terra (rivers of earth) provide another counterpoint to the city’s dense urbanity.
Today, Venice consists of 118 islands, but there used to be even more before the rio terra were filled in. Historically, the bridges were privately owned and pedestrians had to pay a toll to pass over them, so daily life was generally constrained to one’s own island neighborhood. Every island had a campo, and every campo has its own church and well (rain which fell on the campo was collected through slits in the campo paving stones, filtered through sand, and stored in cisterns under the square). I can’t say that I noticed a distinct neighborhood character of each island as we wandered through the city, but I am pretty sure that you’d be able to distinguish differences if you paid enough attention and spent enough time observing.
I remember being a little put off by Venice’s decay on my first visit to the city. I found the city and its canals captivating, but it all just seemed so faded and deteriorated. By this trip, however, Venice’s decay felt like an essential part of the enchanting experience. An unblemished Venice would be too Disneyesque, too perfect to be genuine. I certainly applaud preservation efforts and authentic restorations, but I am so appreciative of the imperfect nature of Venice and its buildings. I think that perhaps living in Stockholm, a perfect and unblemished city if there ever was one, has made me even more appreciative of imperfect Venice.
I know I’m not being original, but I just can’t get enough of Venice’s canals. I am totally captivated by them, and by their variety. There are narrow canals and there are wide canals,
We were also fascinated by how daily life is conducted with boats. Not only are there water buses, but trash is collected by boats, hotel linens are delivered by boats, fires are fought by boats, kegs and wine jugs are delivered to bars by boat, and the pedestrian embankments are so narrow that fruit stands are even on boats. These service boats vie for the canals amidst fleets of tourist gondolas, private boats, and taxi boats.
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| Fire station and fruit stand |
One of the “annoyances” of visiting Venice during the winter is the acqua alta, or high water. We did not really experience this phenomenon of exceptionally high tides, but there were a few high tides that flooded church crypts and slightly broke the canal banks. Properly prepared with rubber boots, it would be intriguing to see the city during acqua alta, and I can imagine that there are some gorgeous photographs to be had of mirrored, shimmering views.
Toward the end of our stay in Venice, we discovered that our new camera takes amazing night shots. We photographed just about every canal for a second time, this time at night. Some shots even turned out surprisingly well from a vaparetto speeding through choppy waters!
Other than wandering, our other major activity was gazing at art in various art museums. We gazed at modern art, we gazed at Renaissance art. We gazed at Gothic art, we gazed at Baroque art. All in all, we visited nine art museums and eighteen churches, which are really more like small art museums than churches as they are all dripping in Titians, Bellinis, Tintorettos, Carpaccios, Veroneses, Longhenas, Massaris, Pellegrinis, Riccis, and Tiepolos. (Yes, I am proud of myself for knowing and recognizing the work of all of these famous artists after our art studies in Venice!)
While we were quite the studious art history students, we didn’t fall in love with most of the art we saw. We both appreciated the boldness of the paintings, the colors, the moodiness, the masterly techniques, and the raw emotion, but most of the art didn’t captivate us. There were two exceptions:
The first was Canaletto’s oeuvre. Sadly, there are only two or three Canaletto paintings left in Venice. I am not the only one to love his exacting and detailed portrayals of everyday Venice and his paintings sold as the wealthy man’s postcard throughout the 1700’s, travelling home with hundreds of young men after their grand tour. Canalettos are now in display in museums around the world, but generally not in Venice. The two paintings we did see, however, totally captivated me, I think because Venice hasn’t really changed all that much since Canaletto used his primitive pin-hole camera technique to capture the canal scenes.
Our other exceptional Venetian art experience was Veronese’s cycle of paintings from the mid 1500’s on the ceiling of Chiesa di San Sebastiano.
Another gem of a church with little exterior indication of its interior awesomeness was Chiesa i Gesuiti. While the exterior is a bit showy with a good bit of ostentatious statuary, the interior is breathtaking in detail. The columns and walls look like they are tapestried with green velvet brocade, but they are actually intricately inlaid with green and white marble.
We rented an apartment in a fairly un-touristy part of the Dorsoduro neighborhood. The apartment was about a 10 minute walk from the train and bus stations, but it was also within a 15 minute walk of the Accademia Bridge and about 20 minutes from the Rialto, meaning that the entire city was within our walking range. We chose the apartment in part because of its convenient location (it did end up being a convenient bathroom stop on several occasions!), but mostly because of its canal view. From our breakfast table, we gazed upon the intersection of two canals. Over the course of eight breakfasts, we learned the habits of the local taxi-boat driver as we watched him climb in his boat and back up down the canal at the exact same time every morning. We watched tourists consult their maps and turn around and retrace their steps back over the bridge. We watched taxi boats lumber around the bend with loads of tourists taking photos through the sunroof. We watched locals walking their poodles along the quay. When we returned home early enough, we enjoyed sunset colors streaking overhead and reflecting in the canal.
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| Our apartment was in the building at the end of this canal. Our view. |
We rented an apartment mainly so that we could cook most evenings and not have to eat out in restaurants every night. We have found that apartments in Europe are often comparable in price or even cheaper than hotels, so you can save a good bit of money by eating in. Also, after so much wandering and museuming, we are often uber-exhausted at the end of the day and would rather lounge in our pajamas than go out to a restaurant. However, we did make a point of going out to eat a least a couple of times during our stay in Venice. We tried some new favorite wines from the Venetto region (Soave and Amarone) as well as the local spritz and Bellini cocktails (despite the fact that it was decidedly not peach season!). Our dinners out consisted of cicheti, the Venetian version of tapas which are generally found in tiny bars, eaten standing up, and accompanied by half-glasses of wine. Many of the cicheti are made from local ingredients purchased that morning at the Rialto Market.
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| The Rialto Market puts fresh into a "fresh" perspective--many of the fish were still flopping and gasping for breath! |
Although our apartment was excellently located and within walking distance of many areas of the city, we did buy a week pass for the vaparetto (water bus).
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| Left: From a vaparetto, looking at a vaparetto. Right: The vaparetto stops aren't so pretty so I generally avoided taking photos of them. But this reflection in the waiting area's windows caught Carl's eye. |
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| Our camera is so impressive with night shots that Carl was able to take these photos from a speeding boat! |
Early-evening vaparetto rides were really the only “crowd” experience we had in Venice. Everyone has been asking me about how crowded Venice is, and I have decided that there are two answers to that question. Piazza San Marco certainly has its share of tourists, but there were markedly fewer tourists in Venice than in Rome and Venetian sites don’t require reservations weeks in advance like they do in Rome. There are several “main” paths through the city that connect major landmarks like San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. Those paths are fairly packed with tourists and lined with tourist eateries and tacky gift shops. But you only have to get a block or two off the main path to lose the tourists and to find local businesses. There are a lot of tourists in Venice, but we still saw a large percentage of local folks about their daily business.
Even though they’ve gotten way more expensive, the vaparettos are the poor man’s gondola since a gondola ride is extremely expensive and water taxis are nearly as costly. One day, I would love to hire a gondolier to row us through Venice’s maze of narrow canals, but wintertime was a little too chilly to sit still for an hour or two.
We did decide, however, to pay a little extra and take the airport shuttle boat instead of the cheaper bus. Where else in the world can you travel to the airport by boat? After leaving the city, the airport boat crosses open water, but when it enters the canal next to the airport, you are right next to airplanes on the runway just above you. The shuttle boat practically glides under their wings!
The flight from Venice to Frankfurt was beautiful with unusually clear views. First, we circled over the lagoon and saw areas that must be representative of what Venice was like before millions of tree trunks were driven into the marsh as a foundation for the floating city. Then, we crossed over the Dolomites and the snowy Alps, practically retracing our steps from Venice to Val Gardena to Munich and beyond.
It was sad to leave Venice, but I do believe that a fifth visit to Venice is on my horizon sooner than later. Even though we exhausted ourselves visiting churches and art museums, there are quite a few must-see sights that we didn’t get to, including other lagoon islands like Murano and Burano. Not to mention the Architecture Biennale as well as all of Palladio’s villas on the mainland and the town of Vicenza...
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