Egyptians have been very friendly. Some are just the trying to sell something, but others seemed genuine. We are staying at the Marriott, where I stay whenever I can all around the world. The Cairo Marriot is more opulent than most. It sits in a beautiful garden area on an island in the Nile in a palace built by the Egyptian Khedive to host Euro-Royalty during the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Among the guests were Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Eugene, wife of Napoleon III. I suppose they had really nice rooms. Today the rooms are typical Marriott. I like that. I feel at home.
Outside the Egyptian Museum
Alex & I walked to the Egyptian Museum, which is just across the river not far from the hotel. It is full of artifacts, perhaps over full. The place has a little bit the feel of a warehouse, with artifacts stacked in rows. After you have seen one mummy, you have pretty much seen them all, kinda dry and depressing. But I enjoyed seeing all those things I have seen pictured in history books. We saw the King Tut stuff, for example.
The desert preserves things that would have long ago turned into dust or compost in any other environment. I especially like the little wooden figures showing ordinary life and people working in brewing, baking and textiles. I prefer these kinds of things to the death obsessed culture of the tombs. How they lived in more interesting than how they died. The gold and art from the tombs is spectacular, but it was a waste of for the people of the time to literally slave away their lives to fill monuments to the dead. I don’t much like the jackal-headed gods either.
Old & new
We tend to think of Egypt only in relation to those who built the pyramids but there is a lot more. Roman and Greek history was always my specialty and I am more interested in Egypt under the Greek Ptolemy and the Romans. This period lasted more than 1000 years, but we often telescope history and move from the pharaohs to the caliphs, with only a brief glace at Anthony & Cleopatra, usually even forgetting that Cleo was a nice Greek girl descendents from one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Cairo was built on a Roman city called Babylon. It is a little ironic that I had to travel FROM the country of the original Babylon to see one. The Christian Copts, descended from the original inhabitants, still live on the site.
This is one of the narrowest buildings I have seen.
Parts of Cairo are pleasant, but it is never peaceful and walking around is not much fun. Drivers pay no attention to crosswalks or signals. You have to run for you life to cross busy streets and there are lots of busy streets. As Alex and I waited to run across one busy street, some guys on the other side actually mocked us for being timid. The funniest thing I saw was a bus turn a corner too sharply and three guys literally fell out. They landed on their feet and just chased the bus to get back on. Cacophony is the word to describe roads. Everybody feels it necessary to beep his horn just like a bored dog has to bark at everybody who passes. We did a lot of walking nevertheless. It seems like everybody wants to talk and invite you back to their shop for free tea. Of course, it is not really free. If you stop more than a few seconds, taxis pull up and ask if you need a ride I have to admire their energy, but I would prefer to have a little more peace.
I am traveling in Egypt. I have my camera and I plan to take lots of pictures, but I forgot to bring the cable to load them onto the computer, so I will not immediately be able to post them. I will still post texts and will amend them with pictures when I get back to Al Asad.
I also have some old pictures I can use AND the Internet is so fast here compared with Al Asad that I might take advantage to post some old odd things.
I went to Brussels and the Hague to consult with the people at the posts there. I have been to Brussels many times. It is a pleasant city in many ways, but not really beautiful. It does have its beautiful parts, however. There are different layers. The center is a late Middle Ages guild city. Up the hill a little is the late 19th early 20th century art deco city. Nice neighborhoods from about 100 years ago (above).The art deco part of the city starts with this arch (below). I think it was once in a better location. Actually same location, but the rest of the city changed around it. The city has grown a lot when it became EU capital. Most of the growth was not good.
Polish-EU Consulate
Check out the little statues.
I liked the vines on the pavilions.
Some of the monumental park architecture. They liked such things in the 19th Century.
More parks.
I stayed in the Courtyard Marriott. It was located in the middle of a park and running was good. I enjoyed my time in Holland. It was not exciting, but very pleasant, a nice place to relax.
Chrissy & I went to Barcelona. Compared to Poland in December, it was warm and pleasant. We needed only light coats. The big downside was that I got pick pocketed. The guy who did it was a real pro. He told me there was dirt on my coat and then he and a friend “helped” me. I suspected they were crooks, but when they left I still had my wallet. Unfortunately, when I tried to use my credit cards, both were gone. Even with that, the trip was worth it. Barcelona was fully of gaudy architecture.
This is an arch in the park.
Streets were lined with sycamore trees. They made the whole place much more pleasant.
The thing I liked about Barcelona and the thing I like re Europe in general is that the streets are alive with people walking and living. Chrissy and I had a really good time in Barcelona. It was not what I expected. The medieval part was like France and the people looked as I would expect Germans or French, not Spanish. I guess Spain is a big and diverse country.
Chrissy and I drove to Keene, NH today. Keene reminded Chrissy and me of Bedford Falls, the place where the old Jimmy Stewart movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” was set. Like so many places around here, it is really cute. The area around is features ski trails and white water rafting. It seems like a fun place to live, although probably not exciting for those uninterested in either outdoor activities or looking at historical buildings or antiques.
The yellow building in the picture is a museum for furniture and antiques from the houses of the local elite from the nineteenth century. Keene was a mill town. Factories were set up to make textiles. They took advantage of the waterpower of the Connecticut River. Chrissy was looking forward to going to the museum, but it was closed for some kind of meeting. It shows the mindset of these little towns. They close things when they feel like it. This is like another movie, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” He comes from a little town called Mandrake Falls, NH and brings these small town values to New York. This was a good movie with Gary Cooper as Mr. Deeds. Recently the movie was remade with Adam Sandler playing Mr. Deeds. Naturally, Sandler brought all his nasty, dumb humor to the role and ruined all the subtlety and charm. I hate Adam Sandler movies.
On the way back we passed Franklin Pierce’s. He is the president that I usually forget when I am trying to think of the list of presidents. He didn’t do much memorable, but he is remembered locally because he is the only president born in the state of New Hampshire. New Hampshire is tiny state and the Piece’s hometown is a tiny place called Hillsboro. They don’t have many famous people around here. The house is better than most of the houses I have seen from the period. The rooms are large and they look comfortable. Franklin’s father built the house in 1804. He built it originally as a tavern. That is probably why the house was so nice. They needed the rooms for dinning rooms and guest apartments. The house was closed, but as we walked around outside a woman pulled up who was a curator. She let us in and gave us the tour. I guess if you live in Hillsboro, you don’t want potential visitors to miss your town’s attraction.
The drive is beautiful. New Hampshire is generally very beautiful. We are becoming accustomed to pretty scenes and don’t notice them too often. This part of New Hampshire is called Currier and Ives Country after the scenes that appeared on the 19th Century prints.
We drove through mostly pine forest. I am continually surprised how much forest covers this state and most of New England. Portsmouth, NH was about a half hour drive down Hwy 101. It is a pleasant little city. The highlight is a place called Strawberry Banke. This is the original downtown. At one time an arm of the ocean reached up here and it was a seaport. Over the years it silted in until the city filled in what remained. It became a working class neighborhood and after that a non-working class neighborhood. I think the politically correct term for a neighborhood of welfare recipients in this case is leisure class neighborhood. In addition, in this land of forest and streams, I think we can call the homeless “outdoorsmen”.
No matter the terms, by the 1960s, the neighborhood was blighted and the Federal Government wanted to tear it down and build low-income housing. Local residents didn’t want this to happen, so they got together to buy and restore the buildings. They did a good job and now the area around looks solidly prosperous and well painted. We did talk to one outdoorsman. He told me that some sort of food stamp coupons were worth $100,000.00. He once offered to trade one of these coupons for a Canadian $2.00 bill, but the fool wouldn’t take the trade. He seemed more prosperous than outdoorsmen in Washington, since he had his possessions strapped to the back of a bike, instead of in an old shopping cart. Still, I don’t know whether to believe this guy. When we met him, he was fishing change out of a fountain. I figure he should get a job at Strawberry Banke playing a street person from the blighted neighborhood of the 1960s.
Strawberry Banke is not like Williamsburg, where all the history centers on one era. The buildings here are restored to various times in the life of the neighborhood. One house, for example, half is from the late 17th Century, while the other half is a working class house from the 1950s. They have a Jewish immigrant house from 1919, complete with a Jewish housewife (Mrs. Shapiro) who tells the story of her family and how they came to America from Ukraine. Living history also included the wife of a governor at the governor’s house and a woman at the grocery store. They all did a very good job of assuming the roles.
We visited the home turf of Thoreau and Emerson in Concord, MA. Actually, we spent a lot more time with Louisa May Alcott, who wrote “Little Women”. They all lived near each other and interacted on a regular basis.
“Little Women” was Chrissy’s favorite book when she was a girl. I suppose there are men who have read it voluntarily, but we were not the target audience. I did enjoy touring the house, however. Louisa’s father was named Bronson. He was an interesting guy who came from extreme poverty. His father was probably illiterate, but Bronson taught himself. I never knew anything about him, but evidently he influenced many people besides his famous daughter. Emerson’s essay on the American scholar is supposed to have been based on him. In his house was educated a local artist who went on to sculpt the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln memorial. Thoreau was a frequent guest. All that said, the man was obviously weird and probably hard to live with. He didn’t support his family well, and they were always poor until Louisa May made big money from “Little Women” and her subsequent writings.
Louisa May never married. According to the guide, her mother and father had different personalities. I think that is docent code for family conflict. That, and her father’s remarkable inability to earn a decent living for his family, may have soured her on the opposite sex. If a movie were made about Louisa May Alcott as an adult, Glen Close would certainly play her. I am not fond of Glen Close, but you have to give Louisa May Alcott credit. She supported her whole family, on to the third generation, with the money she earned and never seems to have complained about anything. She traced and paid all her father’s debts, which were many, sent her high-strung little sister to art school in Europe and paid for the family house, which we visited.
The Alcott house was built first in the 1600s and later extended and improved. It is a pleasant place, but the ceilings are very low and the floors badly warped. In fact, the place is crumbling. Powder beetles, which have a diet a lot like termites, have eaten most of the supporting pillars. Besides that, Bronson put some of the house on the dirt – no foundation. Direct contact with wet earth is not good for wooden structures. I guess the house lasted long enough for his purposes. The place is being restored by some society created specifically to do that, probably consisting mostly of earnest old ladies with a lot of money. I have no doubt they will succeed.
I enjoy such houses because of the personal insight you get into the people’s lives. In the Alcott case, I was impressed on how contemporary the family seemed. Sure, they did a lot of things we no longer do, but they had similar problems, hopes and dreams. As I wrote, Bronson was weird. He imposed tasks on his family and made them all vegetarians. From all indications, however, they didn’t really listen to him. It sounds a lot like a modern sitcom, maybe Frazier with five kids. Bronson also dreamed big. He built “The Concord School of Philosophy” next to his house. It is sort of a fancy barn with a big lecture hall. It is unheated, so classes were held only in summer. His faculty consisted of himself, but he printed up programs and managed to get most of the famous people who passed through Boston to come out and give lectures. A freelance university – you just couldn’t do anything like that today, but it is easier to start a dot com.
The picture below is one of the fine New England stone walls behind the Alcott place.
Walden After the Alcott place, we visited Walden Pond, where HD Thoreau wrote the famous journal about his life in the wilderness. It is not wilderness now, and it was even less wilderness then, when the area was heavily farmed. You can walk from Concord to Walden in about a half hour and there were always people around even in Thoreau’s time. Thoreau was kind of going out to live in the local park. I am sure he was a local curiosity – strange old Henry living next to the lake. It is as if I found a guy along one of my running trails who thought he was living in the wilderness because there were a few big trees and a couple of fierce chipmunks prowling nearby. If Thoreau was really looking for wilderness, he could have easily found it in 19th century America. The truth is that Thoreau didn’t like wilderness, at least how we would use the term today. The one recorded time he came in contact with the real thing was during a visit to the State of Maine, when he complained that it was too lonely up there. His quest for the simple life was obviously a hobby. But like Bronson Alcott, he dreamed big and left a lasting mark.
Walden pond is bigger than I thought it would be, even if not so big. I bet I could swim across it. Chrissy doubts my bold claim. In fact, some people were swimming, although they were wearing wet suits. Didn’t look that hard. Where we saw the lake, there was a beach with sand brought in from somewhere else. These little mud-bottomed lakes don’t naturally have sandy beaches. It reminded me a lot of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. Bunches of teenagers were loitering around. I bet the place gets even more popular with them when the sun goes down.
Thoreau’s Wilderness I listened to a lecture by a forester from the University of Massachusetts called “Thoreau’s Country”. He pointed out the Massachusetts looked much less like wilderness in Thoreau’s time than it does today. In those days, farming was inefficient (although organic) and a lot more acreage had to be under the plow or in pasture. It leads to an interesting dilemma for preservationists. What do we preserve? If we leave the land alone, it will quickly be covered with forest, but heavy forest is not the landscape that Thoreau, Emerson or Alcott would recognize. Of course, farming with the old methods is not economical and the upscale local communities would object to the pungent presence of pigs, horses and cows needed to keep the fields from becoming forests. (Maybe horses would be okay. Upscale people like horses. Grazing horses are picturesque; running horses are graceful, but cows are a stretch, especially on the graceful running, and pigs have none of these redeeming characteristics.) He guy also said that modern people don’t really understand where their resources come from. In Thoreau’s day, people knew some of the local trees were for fuel or furniture and today’s pig was tomorrow’s pork. When food and fuel comes from far away, people can delude themselves about nature being a big park full of benign creatures that are to be seen but not touched.
Thoreau’s Tool Shed Back to our trip. We saw a reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin. The real thing has long since become compost. That is Chrissy with Thoreau’s ghost in the picture in front of his cabin. He really craved Coca-Cola, but water was all we had. Thoreau’s place was much like a shed for the lawnmower.
Even though I will be working just a few miles outside Boston, I don’t think I will spend much time in the city itself. That is a shame, because it is a beautiful city. I think it would be nice to get to know it a little at a time, exploring it on foot, seeing it in its various moods and seasons. When you work in the central city, you get that opportunity. That is how I got to know Washington and Krakow and that is why I still like those cities so much. Unfortunately, I will remain a tourist in Boston. Well, we made our first visit.
We did not have time to do too much, and the kids were unenthusiastic about lingering at historical monuments. We mostly followed the “Freedom Trail” where so much of America’s history took place. Below are some photos.
The boys always like fountains. This is on top of a parking garage. According to the display inside, this was once an ugly above ground parking garage, until the locals got together to make put it underground and landscape the top. It is an excellent example of how things should be done.
The monument to the starving Irish. Much of Boston’s population came from Ireland during the great potato famine in the 1840s. Plagues around the statues tell the story. On the right are the starving Irish on the old sod. In back of CJ are the upstanding citizens they became after coming to America.
Amazing street acrobats. They play rap music and jump up and down. They are great athletes – like Jackie Chan, but they have to make it on the first take or hit the pavement.
I caught this guy in mid flight. He flipped over five people without a net. Before the big stunt, they came around for money. I gave a couple of dollars. It was worth it.
Daniel Webster, the great orator. I read “The Devil & Daniel Webster in HS. It was the shortest book on the reading list. Webster is actually a New Hampshire man. I bought my commuter car at a dealership on the highway is Nashua, NH is named for
Massachusetts state house. It stands in front of Boston Common, which is a very lively and pleasant park.
The cemetery in the center contains the graves of famous people such as Paul Revere and John Hancock. It is a small graveyard, but full of the dear departed and tourists.
We got back “home” to northern Virginia yesterday. We are staying at the Courtyard Inn at Manassas battlefield. In the South they call the battles first and second Manassas. In the North they are better known as the battles of Bull Run. The Rebels tended to name the battles after nearby cities. The Yankees favored geographical features. Bull Run is a creek that runs through the battlefield. Since it is located in Virginia, the National Park Service uses the local name – Manassas. The big battle that took place in September 1862 in Maryland is called Antitem. Southerners call is Sharpsburg after the town. In Maryland, the National Park carries the Yankee name.
Alex and I went to the battlefield. First Manassas, the first big battle of the Civil War took place right about this time in 1861, so we were feeling similar weather and seeing similar sights. I thought about Wilbur McLean. He lived on what became the battlefield before the war. The Rebs commandeered his house as an HQ and it suffered severe damage. After the battle, Wilbur decided he didn’t want to be in such an action filled area, so he moved south to a peaceful little place called Appomattox. When Generals Grant and Lee came to terms in April 1865, they commandeered his parlor to sign the armistice. Trouble just follows some people..
Peaceful farmland of N. Virginia, site of the first battle of the Civil War. It was hazy. On clear days you can see the Blue Ridge. This part of Virginia is one of my favorite regions in the world. It is not breathtaking, but it is green and pleasant. During the Civil War there were not so many trees, as you can see from old pictures. Horses needed pasture.
“There stands Jackson like a stonewall. Rally behind the Virginians!” This is the place where Thomas Jackson, later always called stonewall, stopped a Union victory at first Manassas. I don’t suppose he was as muscular as the statue implies. The terrain is rolling and large numbers of troops can be concealed in the undulations. The Yankees were surprised when they ran into the Rebs behind the hill. Jackson was an instructor at VMI in Lexington. He studied the campaigns of Napoleon and believed in the bayonet. He had trained his men well in its use. The Civil War was a time of technological change, as the rifle was replacing the smooth bore musket. Bayonets and even pikes were still effective weapons at the start of the war and both sides were fond of the charge. Unfortunately, the longer range of the rifle was making this a deadly – if heroic – anachronism. The next year, at Fredericksburg, not far from here, the Union spent many thousands of lives charging entrenched Southern positions. The Union paid them back in kind at Gettysburg in 1863. Southerners boasted of Pickett’s charge for the next fifty years, but it was a mistake.
It is a pleasant place. Nashville looks more Midwestern than southern, although there are the magnolias. We went to see the Parthenon. Nashville has the only full sized replica of that building. It is nicer than the original, which was famously destroyed by the Venetians during a skirmish with the Turks, who used the building as a power storage facility. Although this one is more complete, it is made of concrete instead of marble. It was built in 1892 for the Centennial of city of Nashville. Surrounding the Parthenon is Centennial Park. Across the street is Vanderbilt University, the “Harvard of the South”.
We are staying at Marriott Courtyard. It is a suite hotel, but with smaller facilities than Residence Inn. We had planned to stay at KOA, but the hot weather in Arizona convinced us that we did not want to spend another night in a hot cabin. Ironically, it is cool today. I was a little chilly sitting out near the pool supervising the boys. The boys played football with some other guests. It was not a fair game. Alex was much stronger than anyone else in the pool. He could just muscle through the lines.
