Further travels of accordiongirl

AGWC part three, in which the winner is revealed, and comments on his success

2009-08-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

8/21/09
After I take a too-early bike tour with foreign journalists, another press conference starts off the official part of the day, and now all the national champs are here. There’s Mei, a tiny, stylish Japanese woman. She tells me she was into salsa, never listened to this music before starting in air guitar. She did it because she works for Tomy toy company who has a new toy out that is like a guitar neck on which you can press buttons for various power chords as you play air guitar. They said they didn’t have the money to make a big marketing campaign, so she had to become a champ.

There is Tremolo Thoen of the Netherlands who seems to fancy himself a real rockstar. He is wearing leggings printed with colorful comics, I think. The Martian Canadian turns out to be a martial arts instructor from Whistler. Lord Airness from Switzerland shows up in full HazMat attire, apparently fueled by swine flu fears. Representing Taiwan is another Canadian who is a little befuddled by the whole media circus, and the fact that he is representing Taiwan, but having a good time nonetheless. I interview him, briefly, and Kate regarding her win last night. She talks about coming up with her jock-strap costume as a reaction to the usual “sausage show” of air guitar.

Now the champs must go off to market square to jump on a giant trampoline and have their portraits taken mid-air (get it?). So I go back to the hotel to get a few things done and then to interview Santeri Ojala, the creator of shreds, the YouTube comedy hit! He is pressed for time so we keep it short, but I learn that he welcomes and is amused by the negative comments, so, hey folks: keep them coming.

No time to rest. I grab a cheap lunch (or is it dinner?) at the grocery store and head back to Rauhala for the Air Guitar World Peace Parade. Champs are supposed to carry their country’s flag, but unfortunately there is no Brazil or South Africa. We are not told where the flags came from, but they look used.

Parade Grand Master is Bjorn Turoque dressed in a white tail coat with (f)airy wings attached, followed by a throng of younger, blonder, and more feminine Finnish fairies. Bringing up the rear are three zombies advertising a Zombie Walk in September. Apparently this is much like the Air Guitar World Peace Parade, only for zombies, and without the peace part. We are not sure if they play air guitars – at least, we don’t see any.

In between are air guitarists, air groupies, and air ethnomusicologists. OK, I was the only one of those, and the one in the least interesting attire. US champ William Ocean was decked out in his mom’s sweater vest, French winner Gunther Love was naturally in gold lame, Dutch rep Tremolo Theun in psychedelic op-art pants, later to be enhanced by his painting his facial hair green. Walking through the cobblestone downtown Oulu streets, many marchers broke out into classic rock songs like “We Will Rock You” in order to serenade the throngs of Oulu folk eating at sidewalk cafes on this beautiful, warm day in the near Arctic.

The market square was already filled with thousands of people, and we arrived just in time to hear some official making heartfelt announcements in perfectly enunciated but unfortunately unintelligible Finnish. Later switching to English and reading off her giant pick (or plectrum, as they say here) cue card, she repeated the air guitar manifesto, noting that the people of Oulu believe that anyone acting against the goal of world peace should be made to play air guitar. Then we are led backstage where, for the next hour, 20 men and one woman are kept busy putting on tight pants, eyeliner, war paint, blond curly wigs, electrical tape, and other items of rock attire. Once that stage is completed, the iPods come out and arms start swinging about as routines are practices in front of mirrors or in isolated corners of the tent and its environs. Beer is consumed, as is water, surprisingly. Every so often Hilkka, the stage mistress, comes around to tell us 25 minutes are left, 15 minutes are left, and finally only 3 minutes are left so I make my way to the front in the small space between the stage, speakers, and crowd barriers. There, I share a small metal perch with a Reuters cameraman and start filming. The show began with a group air guitar jam by Bjorn Turoque and his Airies, then a choreographed dance routine minus Bjorn, and then, finally, it was time to rock.

On this night there were three different invited judges: Ari Gold, air drummer; Santeri Ojala, shredmaster, and Juha Torvinen, Finnish guitar legend. They are joined with two national organizers drawn by lottery, this time from the US and Estonia. For the first few performers, scores were all over the place. Although later on the judges seemed to come together a bit more, it was unfortunate for early performers like France’s Chateau Brutal, who really deserved a better score for his routine, which included a Twilight Zone moment in which he realizes he’s not actually playing any guitar. Other performances were underwhelming on the creative side, but made up for by the excitement of the performers – hard not to be excited in front of 5000 screaming Finns.

The New Zealanders brought their own air: a fuzzy black box, like an amp, fitted with a lock and marked “Randy Reaper.” They explained to me that inside was about 2 cubic feet of the fresh air of New Zealand. The Romanian, Buvnitz, brought only his hair, which was whipped around in dangerous fashion to a speed metal song – he was his country’s first-ever AG champion, having beaten three other contenders, and the youngest in this competition at 21. The Canadian Martian, Johnny Utah, made a daring move by playing not air guitar but air keytar, with a white 80s-style fringed t-shirt, “Got Keytar?” printed on the back. Although he explained that the Finns should love it, as Finns love tar (they do – they even have tar-flavored lemonade), and in spite of his fancy round kicks, he scored low.

Heart Buckboard, dressed in suit, white tie, and scary silver teeth pulled off some nice Jacksonesque moves. William Ocean ended in a painful-sounding thud on his knees, but was apparently unharmed. Gunther Love’s painfully geeky faces and backflip won the crowd over, and Hot Lixx Hulahan’s scary joker-like persona also impressed, ending with the sound effect of an air beer being opened. They all made it into the second round: the compulsories.

At this point, all competitors join together on stage for a hearing of the compulsory song, selected by the judges. This year it was "Animal" by Sweatmaster, a Finnish band, a song which - strangely enough - I already knew, since it was also used as the compulsory in Berlin. This would seem to give an unfair advantage to the German competitor, but in the end it didn't matter. Gunther Love's explosive style and elastic face won the day and, in the end, it was he who received the Flying Finn, a transparent electric guitar seemingly made of air, but in fact handcrafted by a local instrument-maker. (The guitar maker actually showed up himself, and said something that was apparently in English but nonetheless unintelligible.)

The joy of the 5000+ crowd was palpable as "Rockin' in the Free World," the traditional end to an air guitar competition, began to play and all air guitarists, organizers, and even photographers joined on stage for some communal rocking. I couldn't hold myself back and jumped up there myself for some air bass and solo guitar playing, further bruising my knees. One must suffer for one's art, of course, even if that art is air guitar.

The traditional conclusion to the air guitar weekend is an all-night drinking fest in the basement of the Hotel Cumulus, but alas, after a single drink in the VIP area down at the marketplace, and a deep discussion of air guitar philosophies on the walk back, I decided I better hit the hay. My flight was, after all, at 6:50 the next morning.

And so four and a half hours later I was back on the road, this time in a shared van with the members of Airnadette and the new world champion, Gunther Love. Only two of the air band's members had had any sleep at all, and the rest were running on only beer and pizza. I asked Gunther about his feelings on his win and his remark was: "Yeah…. wow."

Indeed.

Airnadette

2009-08-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

The great French air band Airnadette, with new world champion Gunther Love in gold.

Post-rock, pre-roll

2009-08-26T04:54:00.002-07:00

These air guitarists did not win, but they are happy anyway. They may have had a few too many.

AGWC part two, in which I am alternately amused and afraid, not to mention confused

2009-08-26T04:54:00.001-07:00

8/20/09

The day starts off at noon with an interview. Five members or associates of the French air band Airnadette are here, one for judging and the others for performing, and we meet over coffee in the hotel restaurant. The interview is a bit confusing, but as band member Scotch Brit - who channels Britney Spears - notes, air guitar is a bit like a "return to surrealism."

Next is an info meeting and press conference at Rauhala, the "House of Peace" and air guitar HQ, only no press were present. Slots are drawn for the dark horse qualifying round by picking playing cards. Flamboyant costumes are already to be found: the Japanese organizer is decked out in white sunglasses, a hat, and platinum blonde hair, the Russian contestant is gothed out with chains hanging from pants, long wavy flowing hair, and eyeliner, his girlfriend in a silver bolero jacket with matching purse. The cameras are on as soon as entrants come through door and the media circus continues for the rest of the time I'm in Oulu. I learn that one of the camera teams, the one that in fact filmed me the day before during the training camp, is from the Australian 60 Minutes.

After the conference, I interview "Heavier Dannair," the Brazilian champion, who is there with a kind of manager. He shows me pictures of his recent trip through Germany – “I love the German people,” he reports – Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Hildesheim. There, he stopped to practice his heavy metal routine at a scenic overlook with a gray-haired lady looking on. Afterwards he said she called her whole cycling group over, and he got a picture of everyone playing air guitar with him. Next the Brazilians went on a tour to Lappland, where Fausto got Santa Claus and Santa’s elves to play air guitar too. And on a train in Finland a little blond girl also played air guitar for his camera. His manager is now a convert to the power and joy of air guitar. They prove it with pictures – people smile when posing for the camera but smile like idiots when striking air guitar poses. This guy is an air guitar guru. The two of them suggest air guitar as a new Olympic sport when I mention how sore I am today from the training camp activities. Well, if ice dancing is an Olympic sport, why not air guitar too?

Nap time, then over to the city hall annex, since city hall itself is under renovation. A reception for all air guitarists is held here yearly. Four city officials welcome us and shake hands with all air guitarists. They take these things seriously here. An enormous Finnish giant in something like a monk’s robe and a little round cap with a feather in it is getting food from the buffet table. The media circus continues: there are cameras everywhere. In fact, I keep bumping into them as I try to take my own pictures. All air guitarists are asked to line up and state their country for the video cameras. A Canadian is last in line and says “Mars” - is an Air Guitar Interplanetary Championship next?

While at the reception three German freelance journalists interview me, and then I interview Nat Hayes of US Air Guitar while this guy from Munich films us in a distractingly non-ethnographic fashion. Back to hotel to write up notes, a little shopping, and dinner at an Iraqi falafel joint where the pita was as big as a pizza, then it is time to get to 45 Special for the famed dark horse qualifying round of the championships.

The worst performance of the evening was, hands down, that by the Crazy Swede. His entire routine consisted of a minimalistic strut back and forth across the stage, strumming the same high notes on his air guitar. We kept thinking he was just warming up and was going to break out into some face-melting solos at any moment, but it didn't happen. The Crayz Swede wasn't crazy enough.

In one way, the most frightening performance was probably that of DefCon John, an American living in Tampere, Finland. I later found out he was making a tour of all the wacky Finnish summer competitions and had already participated in the wife-carrying contest and the international sauna competition. For this evening, he had decided to portray the worst American stereotypes. He had painted red, white, and blue starts on his chest and USA on his back, then sprayed his entire torso with gold. He wore a cowboy hat and silvered glasses. For clothing, he had only some skimpy shorts made out of an American flag and held up with a wide leather belt. When the Finnish emcee introduced him and asked a question, he responded, "I don't understand you. Don't you speak Merkan?" Nonetheless, afterwards he reported that he wasn't sure if the judges got the joke, because of his low scores, and joked that he had been "politically railroaded." I myself was just relieved that his shorts had stayed on the entire time.

Depending on your definition of frightening, a second contender for that title might have been the performance of one of the South Africans, who opened his number by stubbing a lit cigarette out on his neck. He didn't make it through but four did: the other South African, Skeletair; Snake Russkin of the UK and Sausalito; France's Chateau Brutal, of the well-known air band Airnadette; and the critically-acclaimed Zero Prospects, the only female contender that night. As Bjorn Turoque's recently-acquired wife, she had had extensive training in facial expressions, but the costume concept was entirely her own. Under her tight-fitting, rip-off yellow track pants she wore men's underwear with "Make Air Not War" written on the B side, so to speak, and a jock strap. She explained that this was her feminist statement about the "sausage fest" usually found in air guitar competitions.

Afterwards while chatting with Airnadette members and admiring their lamé costumes, a crazed Finnish fan steals Scotch Brit’s red plastic glasses, and starts to drink Gunther Love’s beer, although he is able to recover it before too much damage is done.

The evening winds up with a round of Aireoke, which if you haven't experienced it, is basically like karaoke only you play air guitar badly instead of singing badly. The nice thing is that it brought the locals and the pros together for once, but the bad part was watching lackluster amateur performances. As I said, it is much like karaoke: it requires alcohol to be entertaining.

Oulu welcomes air guitarists

2009-08-26T04:51:00.000-07:00

Oulu is serious about air guitar. City coucil members welcomed us with a reception involving free food and drink, and this is what they got in return.

Air Guitar World Championships, part one: in which I abase myself in jolly fashion

2009-08-26T04:49:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, I think I mentioned earlier my intentions of conducting research on air guitar by traveling to the birthplace of competitive air guitar performance, Oulu, Finland. Read up to see how I lived the dream.

8/19/09
Oulu, Finland

I wake up at a reasonable hour on my first day in Oulu in order to take advantage of the hotel breakfast. They should really extend the breakfast hours past 10 for the weekend, since air guitarists need to sleep in, and the training camp doesn't even start until 12. That gives me plenty of time to get some work done, and since I noticed Bjorn Turoque and Hot Lixx Hulahan eating together in the breakfast room I know they are up and decide to start off with an interview with Mr. Turoque. We discuss Freud, Nietsche, and air guitar ideology until it is time for me to go.

Arriving at the High Altitude Training Camp, I find that my co-guitarists are two 2 Swiss, Airnado and Lord Airness (who turns 35 this week - we both feel a little over-the-hill for airing, but I soon find out that many others are old enough to be our.. well, brothers, anyway) and 1 South African, Skeletair. That's it but Bjorn Turoque and Hot Lixx also decide to join with us, as do a couple of the Finnish hosts (the only other females). Bjorn’s Scottish wife is there briefly but leaves. She will play in dark horse round tomorrow as Zero Prospects, in order not to get anyone’s hopes up..

During the introduction, the principal organizer of the event attributes the rise of air guitar to Finland’s economic downturn in the 1990s and the cutes in health and mental health care that accompanied it. Intriguing: air guitar as low-cost, DIY therapy?

Our training day begins with an improv course. According to the promotional materials, “Improv is a jolly form of self-abasement.” Accordingly, we make complete fools of ourselves and laugh hysterically for much of the rest of the day. We play the “bunny” game, a kind of hot potato game in which we have to make floppy bunny ears with our hands; we lead a “blind” partner around the house; we have to rapidly assume the roles of police, victim, sheriff, or thumb-sucking child; we collaborate to complete stories on the topic of “Biting the dust” (ours involved murderous giant midgets); we chant musically in a circle with appropriate sound effects and gestures; we sing songs on topics and in styles provided by the others in “Whose line is it anyway” fashion (mine was “delicious golden raisins” in country style, but others included Christian pop, techno, blues, and Miami sound machine). Finally, we create air bands in the suggested styles, so that I find myself at one moment playing bass in an emo rap band, then air trumpet in an 8-man Jamaican group singing the lament, “There is no snow in Jamaica.” All throughout, we are being filmed both by the Australian 60 minutes crew and by a Parisian/English couple residing in Germany and working on an air guitar film. If this footage ever gets out, I may never live it down…

At break, I avoid a journalist wanting to interview me, preferring to conduct my own interview instead, this time with Tappo Launonen, one of the original founders of the festival. The journalist eventually gives up, and I rapidly consume a sandwich mid-interview in order to be prepared for the next event, a lecture by 2008 World Champion Hot Lixx Hulahan. He isn’t very well prepared, but he is enthusiastic in demonstrating some moves for us. Also, he’s brought along the bottle of spirits traditionally provided by the defending champ for the drunken amusement of the aspiring air guitarists. Unfortunately, due to airline restrictions, he has only brought about 25 mL.

Thus, we are forced to attend the next workshop, the Choreography workshop, completely sober. First we play funky music while focusing on using different body parts, like the shoulders, or different levels from standing to kneeling. Then we join up in a group, watching others and copying their moves (I, unfortunately, as yet have none worth mimicking). Bjorn and Hot Lixx get a little nutty, tossing the air guitar around the circle from across the room, Bjorn finally eating his guitar. Then we join into pairs to play a Rage Against the Machine song twice, experimenting with 2-person air guitaring and the well-known back-to-back solo pose. Afterwards my neck hurts. Also, I find out that I am the only one who has never played Guitar Hero, making me a kind of social outcast. They should give me a red A (for Air) to wear on my shirt.

Continuing in the theme of self-abasement, we are given funny air guitar head wraps to wear for our bike ride to a wooded island. With our hair thus protected, we feel no need to protect our brains as well, and forgo helmets. On the way we stop to see some local sights: a salmon run constructed of concrete steps and located in a park below water level; some fountains and ducks in a river where a Ric Ocasek look-alike gives us hate-filled glares before he rides away; a library building right on the water, near the stage now being constructed for the big event on Friday. After coasting across some bridges from which we can see the paper factory, we pull up at an 1892 house/cabin now used as a Waldorf School – and for air guitar training, naturally. It’s kind of rustic what with the giant woodburning stove in the living/dining room and the composting outhouses, and also a bit cold, so after a salmon-based dinner inside, we gather around a fire going in the back. There a couple of Sami shamen play drums for us to scare away the evil air spirits. They seem a little befuddled by the whole thing and leave as soon as they can.

Next Bjorn/Dan and Tappo give their motivational talks on air guitar and Hot Lixx/Craig passes around the ceremonial bottle. Luckily, he also got a larger one from duty free, so that we can play the new drinking game Dan’s invented. It was a sort of Air Charade – Chairade? – deal, where he made up a special iPod playlist, passed around a written copy, and then everyone has to play a song and have others guess it based on nothing more than their movements. My skills are still pretty low-end so I pick the easiest one I see on the list: “Girl you really got me” as performed by Van Halen. The woman here as representative of the City of Oulu also must do it, and she plays Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit.” That one was slightly harder, lasting about a minute longer than by 10-second performance. The Australian film crew is back again. We learn they’re here in between providing vital news coverage of dramatic events in Israel and Africa. Maybe air guitar will make world peace.

Afterwards, I stand by the fire a while longer, chatting with the Finns and learning
swear words they assure me are highly useful. Then I join the others in a huge old wood-burning sauna, where impromptu rock sing-alongs are already underway. The Finns have thoughtfully provided us with beer and with birch branches to whack each other with, an oddly refreshing activity, and an appropriate-enough end to a day of jolly self-abasement.

Air guitarists in training

2009-08-26T04:47:00.000-07:00

Swiss air guitarists listen attentively to Hot Lixx Hulahan's lecture at the High Altitude Training Camp.

A yodel interlude

2009-08-13T06:08:00.002-07:00

In the pictures below, you can take a look at my recent visit to a yodel festival in the Harz. This is a forested hilly area right in the middle of Germany - right on the former East/West border. Driving there with some music colleagues from Halle, we noted where no-man's-land used to be - we would have been shot taking that trip 20 years ago!

Anyway, besides former borders, the Harz is also known for (a) scenery (b) witches and (c) yodeling. A winning combination.

As for (a), just outside the parklands we visited the town of Wernigerode. It was really ridiculously charming, full of cobblestone streets, half-timbered houses from the 16th century, and a giant, multi-spired city hall of about the same vintage. Also lots of Dutch tourists. You can see us in the town square in the photos.

Inside the national park area, it is a wilderness of Christmas trees. Really: giant fir trees with a perfect triangular shape, ready for twinkly lights and glass balls to be hung about. I never saw a forest that looked so well groomed. No wonder witches like it here.

As for (b), the folk tales tell of witches in the Harz, and that's still what Germans think of when they hear the name. I think these are our classic idea of witches, broomsticks, hats, and all. I'm also pretty sure this is where Hansel and Gretel must have gotten lost and found the gingerbread house - it looks like the spot for that. The only witches we saw were onstage at the yodel festival - apparently, the Harzers, or whatever they're called, are as proud of their supernatural heritage as they are of their history as miners and lumberjacks (see their logo in the photo).

(C) was naturally our real reason for visiting. Screw the pretty trees! Seriously, on August 2 there was a yodel competition going on right in the center of the forest, at the town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. They had already started when we got there, and we could hear them as soon as we got out of our car. The Harz yodellers have a very particular and unique yodel technique: they alternate beteween head and chest voice extremely rapidly while also alternating vowels, for example; another characteristic is them singing the lower note twice and the upper once so as to make a kind of triplet feeling in countertime to the duple meter of the accompaniment. They also accompany themselves on accordion and/or guitar, and both women and men play both instruments.

We were pretty impressed with them overall, although the Jodellieder (yodel songs with text verses and yodel refrains) were pretty cheesy, all about how great their Heimat was. Also one group apparently wanted to compete in the quintet division simply because there were only two other groups in the category, thus guaranteeing them a trophy. They seemed to have thrown two men in at the last minute, as neither was dressed in the group costume, and the men also didn't know the song but just made sort of vague low-pitched tones in an indeterminate tonality. It was a little startling.

The "free yodel" item was pretty exciting, though. In this the solo competitors (in four categories, divided by sex and also according to whether they'd ever won before - if they had, they were placed in a separate group of "Meisterjodler") had to improvise a yodel for about a minute. Some of these were quite impressive, employing many contrasts in vocal register and tempo.

Yours truly also took part in a way. One of the organizers came over to talk to us, and Helen had already let him know that I too was a yodeller. Thus I was asked to yodel something between some of the competitive parts of the program. After first ascertaining I wouldn't be thrown out if I yodeled in the Swiss style - I don't know any German yodels - I proceeded to do so, to great acclaim. They were a pretty happy audience. Also all five judges spontaneously awarded me with 6.0 points each (out of 6.0). If only I'd been competing!

Alas, we were not so pleased with the outcome of the competition. The young woman who won was indeed good, but so clearly overshadowed by the absolute confidence and strength of an older woman that we were shocked to hear that that woman only took second. We were told that this was due to a technicality: in her free yodel she had apparently quoted a passage from a Jodellied the judges new, so points were deducted.

Another side note to vegetarians: you won't find much to eat at a German yodel competition. The only non-meat items were French fries, ketchup and mustard. Or cake. Helen tried to convince me I could eat a Schmaltzbrot, but I reminded her that Schmalz is lard, which is made of meat. Or is fat not considered meat? Either way, it's nasty. Oh yeah, you can also have beer.

Thus nourished, I proceeded on to Berlin on the extremely slow train. Even slower than usual - some problems on the tracks - and I had to wait for an hour in a boring station where everything except Subway was closed, and then I had to sit for 2 hours in the worst train I've ever been in - including Cuba! While in possession of more electricity, greater speed, and possibly even less smelly restrooms than a Cuban train, it was overcrowded (due to the fact that all passengers from three scheduled trains, of which two never made it, were all squished together), there was no air conditioning, and you couldn't open the windows. It was absolutely suffocating and I actually thought I would pass out from lack of air - you could feel the carbon dioxide level rising, and notice it as people got quieter and quieter. By the time we reached Berlin, it was so hot the windows had actually fogged over. Also, I couldn't even manage to make it to the restroom the whole time because the passage was so crowded, which is why I can't provide you with an accurate smell assessment.

Some German witch had clearly not appreciated my Swiss yodeling!

2009-08-13T06:08:00.001-07:00

2009-08-13T06:07:00.000-07:00

2009-08-13T06:06:00.000-07:00

The Serene City, part 1

2009-08-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

Just returned last week from an impromptu vacation. My friend childhood friend Tianna was recently and unexpectedly passing through Berlin following several months constructing ships made of trash on the coast of Slovenia, sailing them across the Adriatic to Venice, and crashing the Venice Biennale pirate-style, with grappling hooks, then dismantling the ships again in the Lagoon of Death. All true: see it at
http://todseelie.com/serenissima/
http://www.swimmingcities.org/

Anyway, she asked me if I wanted to go along with her as she drove her Citroen van from Venice back to Slovenia to give to a fisherman who had helped the trash-boat crew out with a boat and given them fish, which they had forgotten about, and had then caused the craft to be re-christened Stinky. He also didn't mind when they attached one of the van's seats to the top of the boat and fixed up a rope allowing them to drive the thing from the cooler and more ventilated roof area. Clearly, he deserved this van, which can double as sleeping quarters in a pinch.

So I said, what the heck? And I flew to Italy.

I arrived in Venice late, well past dark, and sorted out the vaporettos only with confusion.But it was a beautiful time to ride down the Grand Canal, which I hardly remember from my last time in Venice nearly 20 years ago (principal memory: being lost). The architecture is really something, as you can see the time when Venice was a world trading center and one of the spots where East habitually met West - if principally, and sadly, through the Venetians' sacking of Constantinople. Still, it was also astonishing how often grandeur was met with decay: a number of those grand old mansions opening onto the city's central waterway are apparently uninhabited, even uninhabitable, and while work appeared to be going on in some, others were simply boarded up. I'd certianly like to take one, but doubt I could afford the upkeep, especially with the rising water levels...

Anyway, some boat confusion led to me getting off at a different stop than planned, but no worries. Tianna and her friend Christoph soon turned up in a boat and, quite illegally, pulled up at the vaporetto stop long enough for me to drop my luggage and myself onboard. With Tianna serving as figurehead, holding a big battery-powered lamp as our headlight, we made our way across the lagoon with the lights of Lido in the distance, pulling into a side canal at Zattere and ducking under the low-hanging bridges. The parking situation in Venice is no better than in other crowded cities, only sloshier: wherever there are poles sticking out of the water, there are private parking spots you can't use, so you with your tiny skiff are stuck searching for any spot with something to tie up to. Christoph thus let us out near his door, since it was here we were to spend the night, and left again.

Air conditioning here means leaving your window to the street open, which unfortunately also lets mosquitos and noise in. Unaccustomed to the sounds of drunken tourists laughing and seagulls pecking at trash, I didn't sleep well my first night, but I was nonetheless excited to reacquaint myself with the city. The first thing to be done was clearly to drink coffee and, if possible, have gelato, and these tasks were quickly accomplished. After that, we headed for Certosa, a small undeveloped island where vaporettos often only stop when requested. It was here that Tianna had spent much of her time, as had the boats made of trash, during their unauthorized visit to the Biennale. The city owns the island but it is run by a group of former Olympic sailors, all born and raised on nearby Lido. Its main feature is a complex consisting of a boat-building workshop, offices, a hotel and cafe, and a bunch of large modern sculptures scattered about. You reach all this just as soon as you come off the long pier. Just behind this is a compound where art school is sometimes held, along with a very handy bathroom, shower, and laundry building. Off to one side is a marina, where numerous fancy sailboats are moored, with all the comforts of home for (as far as I could tell) a bunch of Germans.

We had lunch with one of these: a well-off German with a sailboat who had kindly loaned it to Tianna's gang for much-needed sleeping and cooking quarters, providing them with a rather cozy home away from home. He also proposed to one of the project's carpenters, and she had provisionally accepted, and they were due to sail off into the sunset - quite literally - the next day, on their way across the Adriatic to the Dalmation islands.

We also stopped by the boat-building workshops, where hand-made gondolas are being produced for the city of Venice, also by Germans, including our host. These things are quite impressive and gorgeous, but those guys looked busy so we went on our way.

Our way next took us to the uninhabited part of the island, technically off-limits as it is more or less under construction. What's there at the moment is mostly the ruins of a lot of bunkers from WWII, now generally roofless and under the control of creeping greenery. There was also a larger building, apparently a monastery from long before, with a big tree growing right in the middle. A little further on was an enormous woodpile consisting of the trees that have been done away with during construction, and these logs were covered with goats. Live goats. Wild goats. Someone had apparently brought a few over a couple of generations ago, and those few have now grown into a gang of perhaps 50. Apparently, they now live permanently next to this woodpile, on a mound covering an old foundation and now home to some shady tress, and in two old bunkers, one of which was full of stale rolls. Maybe the restaurant dumps its leftovers here? Goats are supposed to eat anything, but these ones wouldn't touch the bread. Perhaps they, like Tianna, have a gluten allergy. At any rate, Tianna was able to get close enough to pick up the smallest baby in the group, and few things are cuter than a tiny baby goat.

Returning to the German sailboat, now populated by a couple of German fashion designers who were dressed the part, we decided for some reason all to pile into Christoph's little skiff to hitch a ride back into the city proper. With the fashion designers, the boat builders, someone's girlfriend who couldn't swim, Christoph's friend from Hamburg, and us two Americans, we totalled 12. The boat was riding low in the water and really we should have known we were asking for trouble, since Christoph had revealed to us that his boat motor had earlier stopped working and then mysteriously started again. (It was a free boat, anyhow.) So we were not really too surprised when, in fact, the boat did break down in the middle of the lagoon, when we were about equally far from any possible land. We had come prepared with oars, but before we had any chance to use them, Mateo, one of the Olympians, sped by and we flagged him down, then tossed him a rope for a tow back to Certosa. It was a little bit hilarious to have all these people packed into a tiny boat, towed back to civilization... a little bit rub-a-dub-dub, 12 folks in a tub...

At any rate, the rest of the evening was pleasant enough if longer-lasting than expected. Back on Certosa there was a little going-away get-together going on, consisting of an international assortment of people sitting around a picnic table eating chips and drinking beer. We joined in, and couldn't stop joining in, because Christoph had forgotten we needed to go back to his apartment to pick up my stuff. It was after midnight before we made it to that night's lodging on Lido, and where once again sleep was in short supply. "I'm so tired, I'm going right to bed," said Tianna's colleague, with whom we'd be sharing a living room. reat! I thought - no staying up all night talking, and I can get some sleep too. Unfortunately, I hadn't known he was a snorer. Even with earplugs AND my iPod playing relaxing music I couldn't block out the sound, and I was in dire need of coffee in the morning, as it was going to be a long drive to Slovenia.

Air guitar

2009-07-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

I know I have been very remiss in my blogging, and I hope to remedy that soon. In the meantime, I would like to share with you the joy of air guitar.

In order to clear my post-dissertation mind, I decided that the next topic calling out for research was competitive air instrument playing. If you have seen the moving Air Guitar Nation, you will probably know why. Actually, it fits very much with my interest in dance, gender, and the body because it is a (usually) masculine-identified kind of bodily performance, which is kind of a rarity in Anglo-American culture, at least.

I attended the German national air guitar championships last week to see what was what, and we observed some stimulating performances. Look at some pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/salsasydney/BerlinAirGuitar?authkey=Gv1sRgCIvHyI-6xsDGpAE&feat=directlink

Nearly half the competitors this year were women, which is a huge departure from past years when 0-1 women was the average number. Also, a huge number of them were from Hildesheim, which is not exactly a metropolis. It turned out that both of these unusual circumstances were due to the fact that a professor at the university there had been giving a course called "Aesthetics of air guitar" in which students had to come up with their own air guitar moves and try them out on each other weekly.

These students were pretty impressive. THey had clearly thought a lot about air guitar performance! So many in the audience felt the contestants were robbed when it was announced that this year's winner was once again Heart Buckboard, already a four-time winner. His performance was good, but in the round where everyone must improvise along with a song chosen by the jury, one of the Hildesheim women was clearly better. Also, another Hildesheimer, who performed a geek character who receives his guitar from heaven and is overtaken by it, forcing his body into strange and bizarre movements like the duck walk, was more creative. He came in third, a Berlin woman called Mel from Hell second (also an impressive performance, involving an introduction borrowed from Schlager, or schmaltzy German pop ballads). Buckboards will again be representing Germany at the International championships in Finland, which I'll be attending in August.

I am working on putting together my air character - airacter? - for next year.

Another web page

2009-07-04T13:29:00.001-07:00

Hi people, and sorry to those who are receiving this twice.

Just wanted to let you know I also have another web page. It is kind of under construction still, but I also have a blog there (on issues basically unrelated to Dominican accordion music).
Visit me at: http://sydneyhutchinson.com/

Leipzig pictures

2009-03-16T10:13:00.001-07:00

in case you like pictures to go with your stories, take a look here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/salsasydney/Leipzig#

Travels in Leipzing, and tales of a hijacking

2009-03-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, I wrote up these notes last October and I don't know why I didn't post them. I guess because I didn't finish writing up the exciting tales of Leipzig. But now I will post them here anyway for your reading pleasure. I hope to visit with you again soon about my adventures in Germany.

10/15/08

Recently we were in Leipzig for a conference, but for me the trip was at least as educational when it came to non-conferential matters. I don’t often take the opportunity to sight-see in Berlin but since it was a kind of mini-vacation for us, Maurice and I actually managed to look around a fair bit in Leipzig. Also, sitting at a desk writing is not usually a good way to experience German culture, in spite of the view of fall leaves backed by the DDR’s Alexanderplatz TV tower that I am looking at this very moment. In Leipzig I had a bit more opportunity for interaction.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived, after exiting the rather grand train station, was a couple of young men in out-of-the-ordinary attire. They had on black pants with very wide legs and a short coat with a widely spaced double row of buttons, sort of reminiscent of a sailor suit, together with a round-topped hat with a wide, flat brim, also in black.

Maurice informed me that this is the traditional outfit for apprentices here in Germany, particularly in the building trades. After learning their trade in school, they have the option of getting more practical experience by taking to the road for a few years in a sort of rite of passage. They travel from town to town, stopping in at the local shops to see if they can get any work. This tradition dates back to medieval times. They don’t have to wear the outfits, but the outfits announce their position and may help them to find work, food, or lodging, and they are a mark of pride. Also, apparently they get a lot of sex. A fringe benefit. We’re not sure if it also works for the women increasingly entering such trades.

Later on, we found more of these guys. We heard the sounds of a brass band while roaming the downtown area, and following our ears, came to a construction site. A new multi-story building was going up, and apparently the framework was just finished so a ceremony was being held. A kind of green tinseled cone that looked like some kind of Christmas decoration was being raised on the crane, and a bunch of those guys in the outfits were playing music in a circle. One had a bass drum; the others had the strangest kind of wind instruments I’d ever seen, with maybe eight or nine trumpet-shaped metal horns of different sizes pointing upwards. Later we saw some in the musical instrument museum but I can’t for the life of me remember what they’re called.

Some of the other sights we saw were of a more typical tourist nature. For instance, the church where Bach worked for a couple of decades. We even heard an organ concert there. Bach’s bones are also there, having been moved around a number of times, poor guy. Naturally, we also paid a visit to the musical instrument museum, which had an interesting collection of mechanical instruments and, of course, accordions. There has been a lot of classical music going on in this city for centuries. Mendelssohn also lived here, but we didn’t have time to visit his house.

Leipzig was the next-largest city in the DDR after Berlin, so it was home to some infamous installations of the Stasi. Of course, it was also the place where the peaceful uprisings that led to the end of the DDR and the Wall got started. This is another focus of Leipzig museums and something I particularly wanted to learn about. One museum was called the Forum for Contemporary History and had a sign in the front window reading “Warning: Contains history, which may cause reflection and lead to understanding,” or something to that effect. It was a free museum mostly dedicated to DDR history. It was really fascinating and well-presented, especially the collections relating to daily life. But we’d spent too long in the special exhibit, which had to do with ten scandals that changed the political outlook in post-war Germany, so we ran out of time and were only able to see a part of the permanent installations.

Another particularly interesting museum is the Stasi Museum housed in the Runde Ecke or “round corner,” the Stasi’s former headquarters. This place was impressive not so much for its displays, which consisted of lengthy typewritten notes attached to cardboard placards, but for its history. The building was occupied by concerned citizens of Leipzig just as the DDR was breathing its last. Apparently, as they went in they were asked by guards for their passcards, which they showed, and then proceeded to sit in and not leave for days, weeks, months, in order to prevent the Stasi from destroying any more of its records. This same citizens’ group created and runs the museum today. In the same building is an office in charge of keeping the remaining records of the Stasi open for public perusal.

The exhibits include various types of machines used to open envelopes and reseal them, record telephone conversations (onto recycled cassettes of popular music like Elvis, no less), take secret photos, record on the sly from one’s handbag. They include information on courses the Stasi gave in disguise, as well as suitcases with everything one needed to transform oneself into an inconspicuous “Arab” or “Construction Worker.” There was a perfectly-preserved 60s-70s style (the DDR didn’t seem to keep up with the latest trends in office furniture) Stasi man’s office. And at the end, an industrial-strength paper shredder complete with congealed bricks of pulp that used to be the records of someone’s life – or its end. The extent of their surveillance, the number of people they killed or whose lives they ruined in other, more devious, and less detectable ways was frightening. So the point was well-taken when a display on “Ostalgia” – nostalgia for East Germany – pointed out that the merchandise celebrating the DDR and the Stasi, now available in many tourist stores, is no joke, any more than it would be to sell Nazi memorabilia.

At the conference, I learned other kinds of things, many of a more immediately useful nature. For example, it turns out that at the end of an academic presentation in Germany, one is supposed to knock on the table rather than clap. The first time that happened, I thought we were voting on something. Not the case, I found out the next time I heard a paper and was the only one clapping.

I also began to understand the full extent of rivalries in German ethnomusicology. There are the old-school folks still doing some kind of comparative musicology (for those not in the know, this is the kind of thing that was new about 80-90 years ago), and there are those doing stuff related to cultural studies, popular music studies, etc – more the kind of thing we do in the US or UK today. Sadly, these two camps cannot seem to simply agree to disagree but have to actively agitate to prevent the others from ever getting any work done. The thing that really took the cake this time was when another ethnomusicologist actually hijacked Maurice’s chair! One of the people on his panel, the first to go one morning, hadn’t shown so the panel was to start a half-hour later than originally planned, in order to keep the papers to the times printed on the official program. But when we showed up in the morning, this other guy had already had the panelists start their papers! This was unfortunate for everyone, as about a dozen people showed up at the correct time to view the paper that had just finished - and then when Maurice tried to say something very politely, this guy totally cut him off! Well, this really pissed me off, but when I fumed about it later to another grad student attendee, she said, “These things just happen sometimes.” They do?? What kind of conferences does she normally go to, I wonder???

Pictures from Stockholm

2008-06-03T06:50:00.003-07:00

Last week we were in Stockholm for a conference. Check out the photos.
http://picasaweb.google.com/salsasydney/MayInStockholm

Only in Germany...

2008-06-03T06:48:00.000-07:00

Long time no post! Busy with my dissertation, sorry about that, but at long last here is a little list I made for you all. To be added to in the future as necessary.

Only in Germany:

1. American food in grocery store’s exotic foods section. Karstadt, a high-priced German grocery and department store has several shelves marked “American food” located in their exotic foods section, right between Mexico and Thailand. Some of the items found on this shelf include: Arm & Hammer baking soda, jalapeño pepper jelly, pancake mix, artificial maple syrup, and Marshmallow Fluff – in both regular and strawberry flavors. This is certainly exotic enough for the label, as I don’t think I have seen this frightening pink product even in the US!

2. The party streetcar. East Berlin is known for its bright yellow electric trams, which travel down the middle of many of the busiest avenues, a fourth means of public transportation. The other day we had just stepped off one, and were waiting to cross Prenzlauer Allee to go to my friendly second-hand English bookstore, when I heard a noise. This noise sounded strangely like a party, but appeared to be traveling towards us from the left. I looked up and discovered… the Party Tram! Full of drunken young Germans loudly singing in chorus, decorated with disco balls and flashing lights, and not yellow but with a festive purple and blue outer wrapping. Apparently, you can rent this thing out and have it drive you and your friends around the streets of Berlin all night as you get completely wasted.

3. “Bistro Firstaid” – this is the actual name of a fast-food restaurant on Schoenhauser Allee. Would YOU want to eat there?

4. Speakeasies. You thought these disappeared after Prohibition, but they’re still operational here in Berlin. Nameless, temporary, unlicensed pubs, they are open on an irregular basis until discovered by the authorities and shut down, but in between they usually have a few months of good business. To get in you need to know the address and the secret passwood. A Spanish friend told me of one called Mittwoch (Wednesday), possibly because it’s only open on that day. Can’t wait to learn the secret word…

5. Bureaucracy. This, and forms needing to be filled out, are a German specialty. Many of the world’s forests are currently being cut down merely to serve German bureaucratic needs. The size of the bureaucratic system is inversely proportional to the amount of work they produce and number of hours they work. Two examples will suffice.

First, I tried to get a library card to use the collections of the Ibero-American Institute. It is the largest library in Europe on Latin America, so it would of course be nice if I could use it. It is part of the same system as the national library, for which I already have a card, so it didn’t seem that it would be such a big deal. I even bothered to go to my local bureaucracy supplier to get a form showing where in Berlin I live and since when, so I’d be totally legit. Armed with this and my passport, I went and filled out a couple of forms for good measure… only to be told that with no visa I couldn’t get a card. Pointing out that I already had a card from the national library didn’t help – they just told me that “the national library has a big legal department, and we don’t.” Apparently they are afraid that I am a literary terrorist who might kidnap their books and take them out of the country. Result: I can look at any book in Germany that I want to, except for those that have to do with my area of expertise.

Well, I needed to get a German visa anyway, so then I proceeded to look into how this might be accomplished. I am just now recovering from the process. It took approximately one month from my communication with a German bureaucrat to when I was able to actually get together all of the paperwork she requested of me. At that point, it was just three working days before I was to leave for a meeting in Sweden, and I couldn’t leave the country without a visa ensuring I’d be able to return. One of these days was wasted in a health insurance office trying unsuccessfully to get a paper stating, in German, that I was insured. This, however, could not be accomplished because (a) my letter stating I was insured worldwide was in English, and (b) they didn’t have the time to have their legal department review Aetna’s entire policy brochure. So the next day we decided to just take our chances and visit the foreigners’ office with the stack of papers I already had. We were in line at 8 AM, but by the time we got to the front of it, we were told they were already closed for student applicants. They had opened at 7 AM, so apparently they were open for one hour only that day. The woman told us, “Come back tomorrow. But we might be on strike.”

As it turned out, they didn’t strike, we were in line at 6:50, and several waiting rooms later, at 8:30 I had a visa. Our plane left at 9:25. We got to the airport at 9:10. But in the end, we made it to Sweden, and I am no longer an illegal alien! (Put it down as a few months of participant observation.)

Latest photos

2008-02-17T11:34:00.000-08:00

some photos here for you to see: my dad's visit to Berlin, our visit to Hannover, and some other stuff around here.

Latest Berlin pics!

This week in German class…

2008-01-23T02:18:00.001-08:00

We have some new students in class: a Spanish graphic designer and electronic musician, a Bosnian and a Thai woman (professions unknown). The Bosnian sat next to the Serbian and they seemed to get along fine. Another student asked them about their languages and if they could understand each other and they said yes, that in most of the former Yugoslavian countries they spoke the same language, although sometimes they are differentiated for political reasons. The exceptions were Macedonia and Slovenia.

The last vestiges of the former Yugoslavia finally disappeared only last year, when Serbia and Montenegro broke into two different countries. Probably, Kosovo will break off from Serbia as well. This will make a total of seven countries out of the former Yugoslavia. If things keep going like this, we’ll probably eventually have another four new countries: Ser, Bia, Monte, and Negro. Not to mention the little-known Republics of Ko, So, and Vo.

All kidding aside, I wish I could converse with my classmates, as I find this area of the world very interesting, having had so little contact with it (other than a 3-day visit in 1990). I wonder what they think about all the war and political changes they have lived through, and all the ethnic tensions that led to the wars, especially when we now have representatives of several of the different warring groups all studying together in this class. For example, I would like to ask Elvira, a Serb, why she always introduces herself to new classmates as “from Yugoslavia,” or more rarely, “from the former Yugoslavia,” only admitting she’s from Serbia when pressed for more information.

I think the books we use in class are really quite good. The authors came up with many clever ways of getting around the problem of having to make a language book for students with no other language in common. However, there are some cultural barriers we have come up against which I think may never have occurred to the authors. Yesterday, we had to explain Mozart to the Thai student, who had never encountered the cultural icon mentioned in a story in our book. Then, I was partnered with the Iraqi to work on an exercise in using prepositions and the dative case. The dative was no problem for this Arabic-speaker, it was the drawing that got him.

The activity went like this. Mohammed was given a stick-figure drawing of a room with a few things in it, and I got a drawing of an empty room, consisted of a box in the center representing the back wall and four lines coming out of its corners, creating ceiling, floor, and two more walls. He was supposed to describe the contents of the room to me in relation to one another (e.g., the table is next to the wall, the glass is on the table, etc.) so that I could draw it. This started out fine, but then he started looking over at my drawing and saying in great consternation, “but the table goes in the middle of the room! On the floor!” “It is in the middle of the floor,” I would explain. And then “I said the key is under the table and behind the chair!” “It is under and behind,” I would point out, getting a little annoyed. But then the problem revealed itself: “That’s the floor, there,” he tried to explain to me, pointing at what was quite clearly the back wall of the drawing of the room. “That’s the middle wall,” I corrected him. “Aaaaaaaahhhh,” he said, in a moment of possible enlightenment. So then we switched roles. All of his objects were drawn two-dimensionally in a pile on what he now knew was the floor, so that it looked like some terrible accent involving a stampeding giant dinosaur might have occurred, but everything was in the right order, at least.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

My new friends

2008-01-17T03:02:00.000-08:00

2 Turks (1 male, 1 female)
1 Moroccan (female)
1 Algerian (female)
1 Frenchman
1 Bulgarian (male)
1 Pole (male)
1 Brazilian (female)
1 Paraguayan (male)
1 Sudanese (female)
2 Serbs (both female, 1 Rom)
1 Iraqi (male)
1 Lebanese (male)
1 Malaysian (male)
1 Macedonian Albanian-speaker (female)

1 American (me)

This is how my German course breaks down.

I started a daily German class at the Volkshochschule on Monday. These schools are half Parks & Rec and half INS: they offer classes in arts, dance, theater, cooking, exercise, etc for the general public, as well as the language courses required of immigrants and supported by state funds. Most of my classmates, then, are immigrants who must learn German; since I’m not, I have to pay 20 Euro more, but it’s still quite a deal.

We are not allowed to speak anything other than German for the 3 hours and 15 minutes a day we are in class, but sometimes we do. I can speak Spanish with the Paraguayan and the Brazilian; French with the Moroccan and the Algerian; or English with the Bulgarian and the Lebanese; I can speak all three with the Frenchman. Other than that, we only have German in common, which is great for practice but limits what we can discuss. Some of our usual topics are: who was late to class and why; our homework and who did it the fastest; and whose language has the most difficult grammar (probably Arabic).

In spite of the language barrier, we have a great time together and spend much of our time laughing hysterically about any old thing and annoying our teachers. To me it is kind of an idealized little EU world in room 308 (303 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays).

We are already known to each other by various personality traits:
Hanifi is always laughing and always in possession of chocolate bars
Ikram is always talking in languages not allowed in class
Krzystof is always late
I am always hungry

But we are all equal... at least when it comes to our German grammar. Schlecht!

West

2008-01-07T03:39:00.000-08:00

part II: Recklinghausen
The train ride over, about 4 ½ hours with two changes, was quite beautiful as everything was covered with a shimmering layer of frost. Maurice predicted it would have melted off by the time we got to Recklinghausen, but instead we were greeted with a fresh layer of snow. Maurice’s mother Susanne picked us up at the station and told us it hadn’t snowed at any other towns in the area, so it was clearly meant just to welcome us. I appreciated it, as it made the town look quite charming.

The area around the train station was composed mainly of new buildings, as everything old had been bombed out in WWII. In fact, the town has been settled since the middle ages, but the oldest thing still standing in this area was a concrete bunker, now converted into a gallery space called the “art bunker,” where Susanne told us a friend of hers had been born as bombs fell. From there it was just a five-minute drive home through a neighborhood of neat houses originally built for mine workers and middle-management. (Recklinghausen was a coal-mining town until recently.)

The house Maurice grew up in was one of these, built in 1956 but since renovated several times and consisting of two main living floors, an attic room and bathroom where we stayed, and a basement where laundry supplies, baskets of potatoes and apples, and Maurice’s teenage leftovers (guitars, books, and wood paneling he installed himself) might be found. The yard, however, was a fairyland of snow and ice – and a newly installed gate leading to the garage. Strangely, this had no wall around it, meaning it had no use other than a symbolic one. Apparently, Susanne and her boyfriend Helmut had disagreed over how it should be installed. He did it his way, which she found annoying, so she decided to protest by leaving it suspended in air.

I wanted to see the sights of Recklinghausen, but Maurice claimed not to know what they were. So we went to a bookstore and looked at a book about the sights of Recklinghausen. Thus prepared, Maurice showed me around town. There is a segment of the old medieval wall with one whole tower and half of another one, sliced vertically straight down the middle and therefore fitted with a wooden back. Next to it is an 18th-century manor house belonging to the now departed local nobility. There is a 17th-century stone church with an iron cannonball embedded in one wall, still visible 25 feet about the ground. There is a museum of religious iconography, mind-numbingly boring to locals but well-known among scholars. And there is a nice downtown area in classic German village style, its narrow streets closed to all vehicular traffic and lined with shops.

The center of this downtown area, just a 15-minute walk from the Mengel home, held another Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) where at last we found the latkes we’d been searching for, although here they are called kartoffelpuffer or reibeplatzchen. The rest was a typical assortment of gift items, sausages, and Gluhwein, the mulled wine so welcome on a cold winter’s day. A two-storey Christmas tree marked one corner, and to add even more atmosphere, the trashcans were actually Santas holding sacks for you to drop your trash in (apparently their gifts had already all been delivered, so these Santas were on garbage duty).

We also found a little stage with a strange sort of performance in progress. Several apparently South American men wearing enormous North American Plains Indian headdresses were playing a variety of panpipes and cane flutes along with a recording of drippy, synthesizer-heavy music, all while singing in the classic meaningless vocables of “hey-yo.” You could buy their CDs for 15 euro. I found this show quite mystifying, as I had never seen the likes of it. But Maurice tells me it is the new fashion in world music at European street fairs. About ten years ago, all the guys who used to play pan-Andean music while wearing ponchos switched over to this new, flashier schlock. The Germans seemed to like it fine – especially after several glasses of Gluhwein and Eierlikor (egg nog).

After this, most of our time in Recklinghausen seemed to be spent eating and playing with computers. It was a relief to have internet at home again – Maurice felt we had finally reentered civilization, rather ironically for he who thinks of this small town as only barely civilized. In order to get in the Christmas spirit, though, we made Christmas cookies in the shapes of angels, stars, ducks, pigs, and the classic Christmas mushroom. Then I played Christmas carols on the piano (the only ones I recognized were Silent Night and O Tannenbaum, but I played the rest anyhow). After I stopped, the notoriously grumpy neighbor came over to complain about the noise. The grumpy neighbor’s grumpier father once called the police on the Mengels for daring to hire a piano tuner. I guess the son had enough of the Christmas spirit to refrain from getting the police involved, but felt compelled to keep up tradition in some form.

Here all things Christmas take place on the 24th. The day prior, we’d gone to a Christmas tree farm, still beautiful with its sprinkling of snow, where Maurice sawed down our tree of choice himself. On Christmas Eve we decorated it, opened our presents, and had a dinner made of fish caught by a less grumpy neighbor. Susanne was slated to sing in the church choir that night but had come down with the cold the rest of us had already had, so had to stay in bed instead. I wanted to hear the music anyway and see what this small-town German Christmas thing might be like, so Maurice and I bravely set out into the freezing streets for the 11:00 service.

The bells of the cannonball-embedded church, our destination, were audible from quite some distance away, and no wonder! As we approached within a few blocks of the place we had to stop talking, as we could no longer understand each other. The huge bells’ minor thirds made a big and eerie in the night. We arrived just in time – only a few minutes after we took our seats with our candles in the back o f the church, they ceased ringing.

The church décor was pretty Spartan, in a Protestant way, but it was a nice, airy, white space inside, filled up in one end by a thirty-foot tree hung in white lights. I didn’t understand all that German sermonizing, but didn’t really need to, as it was the same stuff they always read in Protestant Christmas services in the US, too. I sung along with the German carols as if I knew them, with the help of the lyrics printed in our programs. The choir sounded good and we particularly enjoyed music played on the organ accompanied by flute. Still, I was glad it only lasted an hour. The quietly uplifting music was a nice end to the evening, but my German quotient had been reached for the day.

After a week in Recklinghausen, I was actually surprised at how much German I was able to understand, although I could still only respond in simple yes or no fashion most of the time. Still, with Maurice’s mom’s newly acquired English words – she’s taking a class in a nearby university – we did pretty well at communication. Maurice took charge of the more complicated translations, of course, such as instructions on how to use the washing machine.

We did make some small effort at getting out, looking around, and having a bit of exercises. On Christmas Day, all our presents opened and cookies already baked, we went to Die Haard, the comically named nearby forest. There was a dirt road lined with trees labeled in scientific and German names on one side, piles of cut logs on the others, along which we strolled for a couple of kilometers, until the sun was nearly down. At the crossroads where we eventually turned around stood a tall wooden cross in a stone base, near a statue of St Johannes Nepomuk (whoever that is) – these marked the point where the Germanic tribes held their court in medieval times.

On another day, we met with Maurice’s father. I had been very curious to see what would happen at this meeting – he recently married a Thai woman the same age as Maurice, who on their last get-together, read Thai beauty magazines throughout the whole dinner. We wondered if I could find anything to talk to her about, but we needn’t have worried – she declined to join us either for the afternoon tea and cakes we had at their home or at dinner afterwards. Actually, we had a nice time in spite of – or because of – this. And I was able to assuage Maurice’s fears that he was like his father. If anything, I think he’s the opposite of this polite yet extremely quiet and distant man.

On the way out to the village of Borken near the Netherlands border, we stopped to buy the cakes in town, directed by the well-mannered village punks with their spiked hair hanging out in front of the village bar. One bakery on the classic village square by the church was all that was open on these “dead days” between Christmas and New Year’s, and it was packed. We quietly consumed our purchases with Maurice’s father afterwards, and then took a quick “field trip” across the border to the Netherlands to buy gas. There’s no border control now that everything’s EU, and the Dutch charge less for gas taxes. Unfortunately it was already dark, so I couldn’t see and scenic views of Holland, but we did see an awful lot of Dutch on bikes.

Later, since I mentioned I’d hardly seen any German culture since arriving, and that we had a hard time finding German food in Berlin, Maurice’s father took us to a German restaurant. When we entered, salsa music was playing over the speaker system, and we were served by a Thai waitress. The menu did feature goose, duck, and wild boar, but it also had a number of vegetarian options. I guess it wasn’t quite what I expected from a German restaurant in a little village, although there was indeed plenty of beer on hand.

The next day’s field trip was to a more unusual monument in Recklinghausen. Hohe Mark is a tall hill just outside town, made entirely of rubble removed from the mine. It’s quite big and must have taken a century to pile up to its current height. The city got the idea of turning it into a kind of park, and construction is still in progress. Currently, some paths lead around the hill at various levels and aluminum staircases lead straight up through a couple of viewing platforms. The top offered a strange view, and looked a bit like a lunar landscape. The flat, triangular area was scattered with construction equipment. At one end was a large and perfectly round hole, while in the middle stood a temporary viewing tower. From the top you can see factory smoke stacks all around, which were lit up rather eerily at twilight.

We decided Berlin would offer more options for New Year’s revelry than little Recklinghausen, so made our train travel plans accordingly. On our last day in town we still had some more visits to pay. While at Maurice’s father’s dining room table a few days before, Maurice received a phone call with unhappy news: his dissertation advisor, who had been sick for some time, had passed away. All former advisees were naturally now feeling distressed. One of them, Patrick, was in the country only briefly before returning to his fieldwork in India, and he rode in to Recklinghausen to talk things over at lunch. After that, we went to see a high school friend, Lars, who had also played together with Maurice in the immortal Recklinghausen blues band, Mojo Turner.

First Dispatch from Berlin

2008-01-03T08:40:00.000-08:00

12/30/07

Here we are at the end of another year. I’ve been in Germany for three weeks already and most of you have not yet heard from me. I am sure you are wondering what exciting and amazing things I’ve been doing here. The answer: not so much – yet.

I arrived in Berlin on Dec 10 after a very stressful trip. I had four flights on three different airlines, and three of the four were very, very late. My bags had been checked in via some antique system with very sketchy-looking handwritten tags, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever see them again. Then there was the notorious Chicago connection: yes, it was snowing; yes, it was icy; yes, the flights were four hours late. In three airports I found myself running through several terminals dragging my heavy carry-ons behind, sweating in my down coat. Somehow, I made all the connections and got to Berlin on time (but only because I had a long layover in Dublin to begin with). My bags did not.

Maurice was not concerned – we were happy just to see each other – and it turned out he was right anyway; my luggage showed up intact two days later. In the meantime, I bought a few things to wear at H&M and settled into the new apartment. Maurice just moved a few days before my arrival to a larger place. It is conveniently located next to two subway (U-bahn) lines and one S-bahn (above-ground train), as well as a big shopping center. We have a balcony and a wall full of windows in our living room. From there we can see a small park, the trains pass by behind it, and beyond those, the huge TV tower in the center of former East Berlin.

The weather was very Decemberish – cold, dim, a creepy kind of mist at night, sun down at 4 PM. In such conditions I found it impossible to recover from jet lag and spent the first few days sleeping away most of the scanty daylight hours. I did pull myself away from the pillow on the evening of my first full day to join Maurice and his mother Susanne in a jaunt to the movie theater at Potsdamer Platz to see The Golden Compass. On the way we passed the Brandenburg Gate, imposing under its bright lights; the tree-lined boulevard Unter den Linden; a Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) complete with a svelte-looking St. Nicholas and ice skating; and an ornate and gilded old café where we had some dinner. Then there was Potsdamer Platz, an area that had been empty and deserted during the time of the wall, as it passed right througt, but which has since been subject to some urban revitalization planning. The big new Sony Center fills up the space with a movie theater and restaurants around a dome-topped courtyard, bringing life back to what is once again the center of the city.

We still don’t have internet at the new apartment so we spent the next day – well, afternoon really – searching out internet cafes and brunch along the Kastanien Allee, an area full of hip youngsters. I made my first acquaintance of Ampelmann, the hat-wearing green crosswalk signal guy who is a symbol of old East Berlin. No one knows why in the East he was dressed so conservatively, but there is a movement to bring back the Ampelmann. He is certainly more stylish than the hatless, international-style green man of West Berlin. Along this street we saw Ampelmann painted on the side of a building in such a way that he appeared to be walking along the fire escape. After brunch, it was practically time for dinner already and to meet my friend Juniper, who is in town studying German as a post-doc. We ate at a Mexican restaurant with a German waitress who had clearly studied English in Ireland. The salsa was surprisingly good but because it is hard to get pinto beans over here they had used kidneys instead, thereby creating a new dish that might be termed Chili Tacos.

Once Maurice went back to work, I was left to explore our neighborhood on my own. I mostly just had to figure out how to go grocery shopping and use the internet shop. This was challenging in German. Most of the neighborhood here is Turkish, but since I don’t speak Turkish either this is not very helpful to me. Grocery shopping took about twice as long as usual because I didn’t understand the words on the packages and had to poke and shake them instead to guess their contents when the picture alone didn’t help. Then apparently I did not deal correctly with the produce. At least I managed to find some beans at the health food store, and to explore Prenslauer Berg a bit – the next neighborhood over from ours, where Maurice used to live, and a happening kind of an area for young Berliners.

One day I went in to work with Maurice to check out the Ethnographic Museum where the Berlin Phonogram Archive (his place of employment) is located. It’s a big place and I’ll have to go again to see all of it, but in the first visit I managed to take in the Mesoamerican collection as well as a new temporary exhibit on Peruvian mummies.

Then I got sick. This was expected, but still sucked. My sightseeing activities were at a temporary end, and I spent a few more days in bed. I emerged in time to attend part of an ethnomusicology conference on music notation, hearing the sole paper in English and one in German, in which I only understood the Hindi words used. In the evening, an Italian woman gave a lecture-demonstration on north Indian dhrupad singing. I found her ungrammatical German – apparently a combination of German vocabulary and Italian syntax – to be strangely intelligible and quite enjoyed it, except for my copiously running nose. Afterwards Juniper joined us again for dinner, this time some really excellent Thai. I saw many of the same people again the next day back at the museum for the Archive’s Christmas party. Aside from my nose, again, it was enjoyable, featuring German bread and cookies, champagne, and a funny movie about African anthropologists studying the strange Austrian customs of drinking beer, polka dancing, beer drinking, yodeling, and beer.

Time for the holidays at last! I, Maurice, and a heap of Kleenex hopped on a train heading west on the 21st, going to his hometown of Recklinghausen. Located in far western Germany, approaching the Netherlands border, it is in an industrial area formerly known for coal mining, although the mines closed down a few years ago.

Photos from Christmas in Recklinghausen

2007-12-31T05:35:00.001-08:00

Here is a link to my web album of photos from this Christmas. Finally this blog is in the present!!

Recklinghausen

Next installment of blog transfer

2007-12-31T05:21:00.000-08:00

the following are pictures and words from the summer of 2006, when I returned from the Dominican Republic to do some fieldwork in New York and library research at the American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C.

Ordovers

2007-12-31T05:20:00.003-08:00

Ordovers
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

dinner with my sister's family, back in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. My first night back in the US since November!

Me and nephew Aaron

2007-12-31T05:20:00.001-08:00

Me and Aaron
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

more of the return-to-New York dinner.

Political intrigue and funky music in our nation's capital

2007-12-31T05:19:00.001-08:00

Regarding the events of July 23 - 27.

I’d heard both positive reviews and horror stories about the Chinatown buses I’d arranged to take from New York to Washington, so I was curious to see what would happen. What did happen was that I very nearly missed it, the damn E train was so slow in coming, and had to take a cab the last ten blocks. But then I was pleasantly surprised to find a fairly comfortable vehicle, only half full. I could take the window seat and spread out over the aisle one as well. However, the window seat did not turn out to be advantageous. A screen was pulled down to shade us from the sun, and the bar at the bottom kept hitting me in the head. This wasn’t restful at all, and after ten minutes of wrestling with the damn thing together with my neighbor two rows behind, on the other end of the bar, we determined the blind’s retractor was broken and the clip that seemed meant to hold it in place was the wrong size. On second thought, that aisle seat looked pretty comfortable.

At any rate, our journey from Chinatown to Chinatown was otherwise uneventful. Soon I found myself under the giant, elaborately carved gateway on DC’s Gallery Place, where I decended into the metro system, so much cleaner and more efficient than New York’s 100-year-old underground labyrinth, and found myself on the doorstep of Carolina, who I’d never met before but who worked for my dad some years ago. Her Argentine accent, which I could barely understand from disuse at first, brought back memories She accompanied me to the grocery store, showed me to my futon, and then got me watching Alias, her favorite show. She and her roommate Susmita promised I would get hooked, and indeed, at the end of the first episode I was anxious to see what happened on the next.

My first morning in DC did not start off quite so promisingly as the night before. I looked pretty cute in a new skirt and fancy shoes, but I soon found out I’d chosen the wrong day to break those suckers in. On the map, it looked like a simple and not-too-long walk from the Union Station metro stop to the library, so I decided I might as well get off there rather than change trains for the closer Capitol South station. A little walk in the morning could only be good.

Ha ! The “little walk” turned into half an hour of wandering around the perimeter of the Capitol building. I didn’t realize the street situation was so confusing around there. I knew I needed to walk south on First Street, and when I emerged from the station I found First right away. But when I crossed the street, I wasn’t on First anymore, and it was nowhere in sight. If I passed through the little park, surely on the other side things would become clearer, I naively thought, but when I emerged from the trees I found myself on yet another, equally incorrect street. I asked someone for directions to First Street and they confidently pointed me off to the right. I did find First over there, but it led me around the wrong side of the capitol, and so I discovered there were actually two Firsts here separated by a couple of very long blocks. After contemplating the Capitol from all angles, I eventually came around to the correct First (though now it could more appropriately be termed Last), but by this time the new, stiff leather of my shoes had produced sizeable blisters on my toes, knuckles, and heels. I tried to think of other things to keep going, but by the time I found the library, passed through security, checked in at the reading room, and went to the bathroom to clean up, my feet were a bloody mess (as were the insides of the new shoes).

I hobbled back to the American Folklife Center reading room where I met my hosts and kicked off my shoes to listen to old tapes on a reel-to-reel for what was left of the morning. By lunch I couldn’t take it anymore and limped down to the nearest CVS pharmacy where I bought two boxes of bandaids and a pair of$2 flip-flops - maybe the best two bucks I ever spent. My feet thanked me and I smiled as I headed back down capitol hill in my smart black pencil skirt and neon pink striped footwear. After a quick lunch at the Library of Congress workers’ coffee shop, hidden away in the basement of the boxy, newish Madison building at the end of a long, twisty underground passageway from the historic Jefferson building, I let the antibacterial bandages work their magic as I listened to my 1940s field recordings from the Dominican Republic.

My usual work schedule is approximately 12 - 9 PM, so I was only just hitting my stride when the reading room closed at 5. It’s a good thing I arranged to spend two weeks here, because I realized it was going to take me some time to get through all the tapes and do the transcriptions as well. At any rate, Carolina had arranged an after-work welcome party at a sushi restaurant at Dupont Circle, rumored to have some good happy hour deals. I flip-flopped over there and ordered a celebratory glass of wine. Soon the WRI (World Resources Institute) crowd showed up and we ordered big platters of sushi rolls. The favorite, by consensus, seemed to be “spicy crunchy tuna.” No one seemed to know what the crunchy part was made of (it was brown and grainy) but the $3 drinks had dimmed our faculties enough that we didn’t worry about it too much. Also, though I’d been afraid of going out with a work crowd that would then get into long boring conversations over people I didn’t know, budgets, or some other work-related matter, they were actually very well-behaved. Kudos to the WRIers for having lives outside of work !

Having consumed an appropriate amount of raw fish, wasabi, and alcohol, we prepared to descend into the metro once again. At the top of the escalators was a man, perhaps West African from his accent, with a keyboard and a microphone. As we passed by, he asked rhetorically, “Do you like funky music? Who likes that funky music?” Well, I like funky music, I thought but did not say. Perhaps I should have said, because he then launched into the least funky keyboard playing, slow and pop-ballad-ish, that I’d ever heard. His non-funky lyrics included, “When I was a kid / my mama would hit me on the chin.” I did not like that funky music.

The next day, I did much the same thing at work, only in comfy sandals. Afterwards, Carolina had planned another interesting evening for us. In commemoration of Fidel’s July 26 Movement that carried out the successful 1959 revolution, the Cuban Interests Section was throwing a party. (Since Cuba and the US do not have diplomatic relations, Cuba does not have an embassy in DC but instead an Interests Section within the Swiss Embassy. The same is true of the US in Havana.) We wangled tangential invitations out of Lucy, a health services translator for DC Latinos and a friend of Carolina’s close friend Kendra, and met up with her at a bus stop in Columbia Heights to head over to the party. On the way over, we were warned not to talk about any trips one may or may not have taken to Cuba, as informers are often present at events in the Interests Section.

And so we found ourselves entering the marble-floored lobby of the embassy, where we signed in (I wonder where the guest list will be sent next) and ascended the grand staircase, greeting the embassy officials at the entrance to a wood-floored, crystal-chandeliered ballroom. Although it was in better conditions than most buildings I’d seen in Cuba, in other ways it reminded me very much of that country. There was no A/C, so the six-foot window shutters were open to let in the hot, humid air. It cooled down only slightly as night fell and we all angled for a spot near the windows, sitting on the wrought-iron grates to try to catch an infrequent breeze. An official made a long speech, made double in length by the accompanying English translation, about how the people of Cuba and the US were united, but our president’s policies were stupid and spiteful. Although we agreed we couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm in the heat. Some of the better-prepared Cuban ladies had come prepared with Spanish fans, and I emulated them with my folded-up bus ticket, less stylish but somewhat functional. When the speech was over, we made a beeline to the free mojitos and Cuban food: congrí, pernil, salad, and yuca, with syrupy pickled guavas and hunks of creamy white cheese for dessert.

As we enjoyed our refreshments we mingled and conversed with whoever came our way: a Spanish professor, some Cuban officials, and finally a Czech called Alex. He was an old man with a long, yellowed ponytail, and he apologized for his odd method of drinking, as he’d recently had cancer removed from his lip. His long and fascinating life slowly unfolded before us. He’d worked in Chile for some time before coming to the US. His wife was German, a beautiful and strong woman, but she had died two years ago from Parkinson’s brought on by a stressful experience. He couldn’t work anymore, but his son made a lot of money as a computer executive and was able to support him. He’d gone to Chile after Pinochet ousted the pro-communism Allende “because the Russians had lost all their contacts there, and they needed someone to establish new ones.” Wait a minute, I thought. “Who were you working for, then?” “For the KGB.”

Then the whole story came out. He had begun working in some generic office job for the Russians in Czechoslovakia as a young man. Eventually he got drafted into the secret service. He worked in various areas before being sent to Chile. Although he spoke no Spanish at the time, his young son learned it quickly and translated for him. His wife was in the same line of work. He showed us her picture: with short blond hair and a sleeveless khaki shirt, she was looking off into the distance over a garden wall, seeming both courageous and prepared for anything. After their mission in Chile was accomplished they were sent to the US. Here, just a few years ago, someone betrayed them and the whole family was imprisoned. Alex made a deal and his wife and son were freed, but not before his wife had been subjected to a lengthy and hard interrogation, which led to her developing Parkinson’s far too early in life. She died two years later.

Meanwhile, Alex’s social security number was deleted and assets seized, making sure he would never work in this country again. In his career, he’d been known by seven names besides his own, and even showed us an ID card that read “Rudolf Herrman” on the back and his real name, which at lest he can finally use, on the front. “Did you ever get confused?” I wondered. He didn’t. Now, he leads a quiet life. “Everyone I used to know is gone now.” He misses his wife very much and is proud of his son. He likes to tell his stories to whoever wants to listen, but I bet there are many he won’t tell, too. After this conversation, I danced to some timba music with various Cuban officials in the ballroom, but Alex was a hard act to follow.

A Query: Does anyone out there speak Czech? If so, I’d love a translation or summary of this article I found online that appears to be about the capture of Alex and some other KGB agents: http://zpravy.idnes.cz/vedatech.asp?r=vedatech&c=A020617_120804_vedatech_jan&r2=vedatech

Alex was still on my mind the next morning as I rode the train to Capitol South (I learned my lesson about Union Station). On the train with me was a typical DC mix: suited politicians, foreign tourists with children, and a Future Farmers of America delegation, its members all heavy-set and all iin identical blue corduroy jackets with their states embroidered on the back: West Virginia, Wisconsin, Minnesota. What a country this is. I got to see even more of its diversity at lunchtime, when the AFC had scheduled a performance by a Laotian music and dance troupe from Iowa, of all places, resettled there on an Iowa State refugee program. They were fantastic and so enthusiastic about presenting their culture to North Americans, it could only be described as heart-warming. I confess that, for me, a beautiful performance always produces a very visceral reaction. When I hear an amazing pianist, I literally get chills up and down my spine, and if they’re very good, the sensation can be sustained for the whole piece. When I see an amazing dancer I get choked up and teary-eyed. I don’t know why. But for whatever reason, I had this reaction to the Laotians. I think it was their beautiful costumes, painstakingly sewn from gold-embroidered silks by an Iowa seamstress, the stately music learned from a long line of teachers who must be acknowledged with an offering before every performance, their graceful movements and expressive hands, the smiles that passed between the performers and then out to the audience. All this made me think about how much work it must have been for them to learn this art, which they had done at a state conservatory back in Laos, and how it must be an even harder job to keep it going in the US Midwest. That kind of job can only be done out of intense love. I guess that’s why I get choked up the way others do at weddings: I think of all the love and beauty that can be found in people everywhere, all the time, and this optimistic part of me tells the pessimist that, someday, this might be enough.

The euphoria seemed to continue through the night and into the next day, when I found myself bounding down the stairs to the red line metro, thinking, “Life is good ” Indeed it was. The hours of listening to the ancient field recordings paid off in the form of an interesting discovery. I found that the lyrics to a popular merengue still commonly played today actually come from an old mediatuna, a type of improvised folk poetry from a Cibao, rather than being composed in the 1970s as generally supposed. I just about fell out of my chair when I heard the familiar words coming off a 1940s field recording. I can’t wait to tell Rafaelito about it, as this is the kind of discovery that interests practicing musicians as much or more as it interests us academics.

Somehow I managed to tear myself away for long enough to go hear a noon lecture on Alan Lomax’s recordings of non-English-speaking communities in the US. These recordings aren’t as well known as those he did of African-Americans in the South, but just as interesting. Examples were presented of Finnish, Mexican, Cajun, Polish, and Amish musics, but the audience was most taken with a track recorded by a Serbian auto worker in Detroit in the 1930s. He had made himself a duduk double flute out of “metal rods discarded on the factory floor” on which to play the melodies of Serbian shepherds in the Motor City. One audience member pointed out that pipes would be more convenient for flute-building than rods, and we had to conclude that Lomax had been a bit sloppy in his notes that day. It was amusing to look at some of his other notes. A telegram to his boss back in Washington requested, “Send advance or money or something. I’m not eating.” An expense report listed “mule team” as one of the items - he’d had to hire one to pull his car out of a ditch in a town with no cars.

Viva la Revolucion!

2007-12-31T05:18:00.002-08:00

regarding the events of 7/28-8/1

Friday was my mom’s birthday, but since I couldn’t be with her, I celebrated with a meeting at Folkways Records, instead. Director Dan Sheehy met me and showed me their new Latino musics series, which of late has featured styles like Colombian gaita, Mexican arpa grande from Michoacan, and Argentine nueva cancion. This is good, but clearly merengue tipico is needed to make the collection complete. Luckily, Dan agrees, and we worked out a plan to make a Folkways tipico release a reality - assuming their grant money comes through in the fall. Stay tuned

While there, I got the deluxe tour of the Folkways offices. Among the stops on the tour were the recording/mixing lab, where workers were busy duplicating making a CD copy of an ex-LP of testimony given by Bertolt Brecht at some hearing or another; the archives, where I admired a Mo-bile made of photocopied pictures of Mo Asch hanging by strings from artfully assembled toothpicks; the wall of fame, where copies of Folkways recordings line the walls; and finally the secret storage closet, from whence Dan extracted an attractive “Listen Up” t-shirt for me.

The fun continued after work, as the WRI crowd was convening for a margarita cocktail hour at the house of one of their rank, also celebrating her birthday. So we stopped to pick up margarita fixings, chips and salsa, crackers and cheese, which only took about an hour after all the deliberations required. At that point I was starving and looking forward to eating the spoils right away, but it was not to be. Little did I know how far things can actually be from subway stations in DC. From our liquor store stopoff, it was about another hour of walking before we actually arrived at our destination.. I may be exaggerating, or then, I may not be. But once we arrived we wolfed and/or slurped down the snacks and/or alcoholic beverages pretty quick. We were aided in this by a drinking game, which someone had though a good idea and therefore looked up some inordinately complicated rules on the internet to help us along. This game worked on the premise of combining aspects of every other game known to man into one unwieldy whole, and involved drawing cards and then asking questions, doing a truth or dare, inventing rules, or coming up with names for genitals. After we reached the “Washington Monument” moment, we figured things just couldn’t go any further than that, and decided to call it a ten-way tie. After that, some were hoping for more substantial food, but that also was not to be. The rest of the night was spent at corny college bars along 18th street in Adams Morgan, the most drunken few blocks I’d seen in a long time. Suffice it to say that at the first bar we went, the decor consisted of neon beer signs on the walls, farm implements hung from the ceiling, and plaques of clever sayings hung behind the bar, while the fun consisted of watching for a skeleton-shaped robot wearing a tuxedo to swivel his hips, at which point one could receive a jello shot for only $1. The price still wasn’t low enough to convince me to drink one. Suffice it also to say that the next stop on our tour was called “The Tom Tom Room” and our neighbors there were a group of five blond girls in matching black dresses and high heels, one extremely pregnant, posing for pictures while draped across chairs and small step ladders. Maybe we should have stuck with those jello shots after all.

There was only one way to recover from that evening on Saturday. I was in Our Nation’s Capital: I had to see Our Nation’s Baby Panda Bear. I’d been following the young guy’s life via webcam since last year (haven’t you?). It was a nasty, hot, sweaty day, and all the animals, being much smarter than us humans, were sleeping indoors. After waiting and sweating 20 minutes in line, that’s where I found him, yawning and stretching. He was as adorable as you would think. After that, I couldn’t find the giant anteater so I visited the elephants and giraffes instead, then the invertibrates, the primates, and last but not least the new Amazonia exhibit. I recommend it: you start out underwater so you can check out the piranhas and other weird jungle fish, then go up into the forest part which is in a big greenhouse with free-ranging monkeys and parrots. Outside, there were more free -ranging monkeys, and as I wandered around in my usual oblivious state I just about ran into five golden lion tamarins right next to the path.

I knew I wouldn’t have much time for sightseeing this trip, but the panda was the only sight I really just HAD to see, so I felt glad I’d accomplished my mission. That evening, my second wish came true as Carolina and her friend Kendra accompanied me to eat tasty Ethiopian food back in Adams Morgan again (much safer and less drunken during the daylight hours). Washington DC has an astounding 2-300,000 Ethiopians living there, which has led to the establishment of numerous excellent Ethiopian restaurants. The oldest ones date back to the 1970s and are in Adams Morgan around 18th and Columbia; there is a new enclave around 9th and U that I haven’t checked out yet. We decided on an old favorite, Meskerem, and were not disappointed with the spicy sambussa, foamy injera, and flavorful vegetable stews.

When we finished, it was still too early for any nightlife, which technically should begin after dark, so we grabbed a table in front of the Latin music spot across the way, Bossa. We were there a looooong time with our Negra Modelos before anything started happening, but eventually people started arriving and we decided we’d better claim an inside table before it was too late. Bossa has two floors with two different bands. Both were good, but the upstairs was way too crowded. I went up briefly to hear some rock en espanol but quickly returned downstairs where the real dancing was going on. Well, I say “real,” but most people didn’t seem to have much clue of what was going on; they were probably only out there as a result of the beverages they’d been consuming in previous hours. I did have one good partner, a Peruvian who threw me around so effectively in the stifflingly hot dance floor that at one point my nice new glasses slid right off my sweaty nose, throwing me into a momentary panic as I blindly groped the floor amidst the dangerous assortment of footwear whirling around me. Luckily, the peruano found them. Now I remembered: not only had I not really danced since the second knee surgery, I hadn’t really danced since a nasty eye infection forced me to switch from contacts to glasses. Oops.

Still, we had fun. The band playing at the downstairs dance floor was composed of only four men, on keyboards, bass, timbales, and congas, who played mostly classic Cuban tunes. One was Cuban, one Salvadoran, and the other two looked like they might be Mexican or other Central Americans. Later another Cuban joined them as vocalist, and we chatted with both him and the Salvadoran jazz pianist. The Cuban singer had been in the US only a short time, having come to Washington to work and live with family nearby in Adams Morgan. Carolina was whipped into a revolutionary fervor through some combination of her recent trip to the island, our repeated Cuban encounters throughout the week, and the five or six Negra Modelos she’d consumed, so when our friend returned to the stage, she ran over to ask him to shout “Viva la revolucion!” Just so that we could all shout “Viva!” in return, as if at a Castro-led rally. He was in the middle of “La Guantanamera” at the time, and he went into an extended soneo, or section of improvised lyrics. He turned his back to the audience, as if to gather his thoughts, and we heard him say, “Si, que viva...” and just as Carolina got all excited he followed up with “...que viva la Guantanamera!” We collapsed into laughter.

At about 2:30 the show was finally over and I was more than ready to head to bed, but Carolina was not. Apparently, she was waiting for (a) her opportunity to talk more with a cute Colombian waiter and (b) her friend’s opportunity to talk to the attractive bar owner. There was nothing in this deal for me, so I just got sleepier and sleepier after a record 7 hours in the joint, but when at last I convinced them of the folly of their plotting we found there were no cabs to be had in the madhouse that the street had become as all the bars ejected their drunken patrons. After my years in New York and the DR, neither of which have “closing time” in their vocabulary, such an eventuality had never crossed my mind. We took a long walk, argued a cab driver into making two stops he didn’t want to make, and eventually made it home an hour later. Phew. That’ll teach us to stay in Adams Morgan past 3.

Needless to say, Sunday was not a day of action. Monday was not eventful either, although I did make another interesting discovery in the archive: a song familiar to all tipico enthusiasts today, recorded in 1944 with different lyrics. My teacher, Rafaelito, had in fact told me that prior to Tatico the song had different words, and had recited a verse to me in almost exactly the form I found it on this old tape. But this one had a second verse, too. Can’t wait to tell him.

The next day I ventured over to the Recorded Sound Collection: I’d made an appointment to hear some old Victor 78s of Dominican music. I thought over in Performing Arts the librarians might be more amusing. Not so. They were the unsmilingest group ever and didn’t respond at all to my habitual joking. Thus, I had no one to share my mirth with when I got back my book request slip stamped with the date “July 32 2006.” Apparently we were in some new kind of leap year. (Hey, I could use the extra day.) That’s OK, though, because later I did find people to laugh with me. After finishing up the afternoon in the Folklife Center, one of the far more amusing Folklife librarians invited me to join a couple of them for dinner: they were taking a visiting archivist, in town for the Society of American Archivists conference, out for the evening. “He has a really great web page about field recording equipment. You should check it out,” Jennifer told me. “Cool. Where’s the page?” “On the Vermont Folklife Center site.” “Oh, OK. Wait a minute... what’s this person’s name?” Sure enough, it could only be the one, the only Andy Kolovos, a former IU classmate of mine.

So we four folklore types, plus one friend, headed out to Silver Spring, Maryland to try a new Colombian restaurant. Actually, it turned out to be a Colombian/Dominican/Mexican restaurant that had just move into what was formerly a Japanese restaurant and even more formerly a Korean one. It was next to a Colombian bakery advertising Fruit Cakes in its window. We hoped Colombian fruit cakes were different from the American variety. Anyway, in the restaurant that still featured some of its Japanese-style woodwork we discussed Andy’s tenure as archivist at a paranormal research institute and ordered a variety of dishes: tasty arepas full of cheese, mangu or mashed plantains, fish, pigeon peas, and the infamous chicharron harmonica (later rechristened the Hamonica). This foot-long slab of salted pork curled around and split into tooth-shaped sections that reminded us of the working end of a harmonica. We couldn’t seem to get much sound out of it, though. Afterwards we were too full and too salted to deal with the fruitcakes, so we skipped them in favor of the two-bit tour of Silver Spring. Actually, we only saw one sight, but it was a big one. Silver Spring is mainly known as the home of the Discovery Channel, and since they were in the midst of their Shark Week, they had decorated with an impressive ten-story-tall shark that appeared to be embedded in their building: a tail coming out the back, fins from the sides, and an enormous toothy head facing the subway station, all about twenty stories above the ground. I wondered if it might be one of those spongy toy figures that grow in water, gone drastically awry, but apparently it was actually inflatable. The only other sight worth noting was an Indian restaurant with a tragic name: “Bombay Gaylord.” (Andy thought Bangkok Gaylord might be even better, but I don’t think Thai restaurants have gone that far yet.)

Library of Congress

2007-12-31T05:18:00.001-08:00

Library of Congress
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

What I Saw At The Zoo, pt. 1: Our Nation's Baby Panda Bear

2007-12-31T05:17:00.005-08:00

What I Saw At The Zoo, pt. 1: Our Nation's Baby Panda Bear
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

asleep with mom

What I Saw At The Zoo, pt. 2

2007-12-31T05:17:00.003-08:00

What I Saw At The Zoo, pt. 2
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

What I Saw At The Zoo, pt. 3

2007-12-31T05:17:00.001-08:00

What I Saw At The Zoo, pt. 3
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

Bar nite in DC: normal view

2007-12-31T05:16:00.006-08:00

Bar nite in DC: normal view
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

(Carolina at left; jello shots on table - eww)

Bar Nite in DC: view from above

2007-12-31T05:16:00.005-08:00

Bar Nite in DC: view from above
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

(me in the middle)

Salsa Nite in DC, pt.3

2007-12-31T05:16:00.003-08:00

Salsa Nite, pt.3
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

me and Kendra

Salsa Nite, pt.2

2007-12-31T05:16:00.001-08:00

Salsa Nite, pt.2
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

apparently, Carolina snapped this picture of half of me while I was dancing with this Peruvian fellow.

Salsa Nite in DC, pt.1

2007-12-31T05:15:00.001-08:00

Salsa Nite, pt.1
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

the band at Bossa

Smokljana (It's a Serbo-Croatian thing)

2007-12-31T05:14:00.002-08:00

8/2-8/11

The Washington fun continued on Wednesday, though no salted pork or fruitcakes were involved. Instead, I met Steve, a friend of my sister’s, and a gaggle of female friends for a nighttime voyage on the Chesapeake in his 39-foot sailboat. Once we’d purchased the beer and snacks essential to our cruising plans, we made our way to Annapolis, where our seagoing vessel awaited us at a dock reachable only through a gated community. (A gated community of pirates, I was hoping, but it was far too tidy.) We set sail in plenty of time to enjoy sunset over Maryland from the water, to the accompaniment of BB King and Sam Adams. But soon we decided in favor of silent running, the better to enjoy the night sky. The crew (them) and the onlooking loafers (me) discussed internet dating (theirs, not mine - two of them had independently dated the same sailboat owner from the same site) and the difficulties of finding potential partners who love sailing. This surprised me: who wouldn’t like sailing, I wondered - they’d have to be nuts! Of course, I hadn’t taken seasickness into consideration. Luckily none on board suffered from this so we were able to enjoy ourselves on the water until 11:30 at night - past our weekday bedtimes, but well worth the sacrifice of sleep.

The most memorable moments were passing by freighters and container ships that came upon us unexpectedly and quickly, suddenly looming over us and blocking out all the stars with their huge, black forms. A pilot boat, tiny in comparison, buzzed around the base of one Fearless Captain Steve got on the radio and made contact with their captains (one of them a woman) in order to check their courses and keep out of their way. We did indeed make it back to port safely, even with me at the wheel. Following captain’s orders I took the helm, my only directions being “stay between the red and the green lights.” When the lights were far away on the coastline and we still at sea this was easy, but they came upon us as rapidly as had the ships and soon I saw they were rather large posts with lights and, in some cases, birdnests affixed to the tops ten feet above the water. It would definitely not be good to run into these. “Don’t run into those,” was the crew’s helpful instruction at this point. Luckily, as the strait narrowed and we found ourselves surrounded with boats packed in like sardines, but all sensibly tied up for the night long before, someone more knowledgeable took the wheel and saved us all from certain disaster, and me from certain embarassment.

The rest of the week continued as it had started, me transcribing tapes during the day and attending the occasional lecture (the next one on fieldwork in Jamaica and Afghanistan). I couldn’t believe how quickly the time had passed when all of a sudden I found myself in Friday, my last day in Washington. I celebrated with a lunch with Carolina and her boss at WRI, a friend of my dad’s. “Dan’s cool, you should meet him,” my dad had said. “Dan is so cool,” Carolina’s coworkers had confirmed at happy hour last week. With that many coolness reviews, I certainly had to meet Dan. They were right: he was cool.

After that, I realized I’d spent two weeks in the Library of Congress and still hadn’t seen the main reading room, which also had many major coolness reviews. So I went up to see. Again, they hadn’t lied. It was definitely worth seeing the towering marble columns topped with bronze statues with viewing galleries in between that looked like the choir loft for a Gothic cathedral, and the soaring dome filled with stained glass several stories above. Down on the floor, dark wooden desks and chairs were arranged in a circle around the reference desk in the center, and around the perimeter were arrayed the open stacks of reference books n two tiers. Never one to resist narrow, twisty staircases, I went up and circled the room a half-storey up instead. This certainly must be one of the top ten most attractive places to do library research (the NYPL main reading room is up there too). Now why, I wondered, do they always have to hide the performing arts books around in some flourescently-lit, windowless room with no personality? Did I pick the wrong field?? No, I didn’t, I was reminded once again by some folklore colleagues at the happy hour we attended at an Irish bar after work. Who else, after all, is likely to discuss their personal experience in combining breakdance and clogging over a hearty ale?

For the grand finale to my Washington week I wanted to take Carolina out to dinner, but she was sick. It turned out to be tonsilitis, of all things. I told my dad and he said, “Tonsilitis?? But you’re supposed to get that in the winter!” “Well, I guess she screwed up,” I responded. The result of this was that we stayed in, ordered out and watched a movie. So my trip went out less with a bang than with a pad thai.

Since I’ve been back in New York, it’s been pretty much what you’d expect, only transfered to my relatives’ Upper West Side apartment rather than my former Greenpoint flophouse digs. Have I been able to interview those elusive musicians? No. Have I gotten other things done? Yes, but mostly boring errands and shopping not worth writing about here. I have had just one fieldwork success. This was in meeting with a major tipico fan at the bodega he owns, just on the border of Bed-Stuy with Bushwick. Fermin is the kind of guy who commissions homenajes, songs of homage: you might remember I met him at a tipico gig about a month ago, recognizing his name from a song Maria Diaz recorded in his honor. When I arrived, I found him behind the counter of his corner store, surrounded by an array of candies, cigarettes, and calling cards. Customers came and went with their purchases: chips, soda, toothpaste, deoderant. He told me to come behind the counter, so I ducked under the plexiglass. Fermin offered me a chair in the corner next to the shampoo and the trash can and sent his assistant, a man who’d grown up down the street from him in San Jose de las Matas and arrived in New York just a month earlier, to get me a cold Presidente. He opened it on the counter’s edge, then decided it wasn’t cold enough and put it in the freezer again.

It was a challenge to do the interview there as Fermin worked and chatted with customers, and I only got a few of the questions done that I’d planned on asking him. However, in all other ways, the four hours I spent in this Bed-Stuy bodega were quite educational and entertaining. I listened as Fermin’s accountant went over a report from a health inspector, explaining the fines he’d have to pay: one for keeping items of a chemical nature on a shelf adjacent to items of a food nature; one for having a cat in the shop. “But if I didn’t have the cat, the place would be full of mice!” he objected. The accountant further explained that if he had an employee, he’d be obligated to pay him $12 an hour and give him two weeks’ vacation as well as health insurance. At this, both Fermin and his helper laughed: they knew no Dominican bodega employee anywhere in the city was earning this lofty sum, and none ever expected to, either. The bodega owners could never afford it, and the employees (whose English is generally nonexistent, and their education at a similar level) could never find a better job. “If you’re going to keep that cat here working for you, you’ll have to give her vacation time too. She might want to go to Florida for a couple of weeks,” I suggested.

A bit later, I exited the counter area in order to search for snacks to eat, and one of the guys in the store, those types that hang about hoping for a job to do, asked if I could help another guy in the store make a phone call. “I don’t speak enough English to know what he’s saying,” he explained. The other guy handed me his cell phone. “I need to talk to this guy Francisco, but I don’t speak any Spanish,” he told me. “No problem,” I said. “What do you want me to say?” “Well, his wife will answer, then ask for him. Tell him to be at Gates Avenue tomorrow morning.” “What time?” I wondered. “Oh, he’ll know.” “Who should I say is calling?” “Oh, he’ll know. But you can say Kevin if you want.” This all sounded fishy, but whatever. The wife answered, I told her I was calling on behalf of Kevin as a translator and relayed the message. “Where? At his house?” she asked, and I asked Kevin. “No, he knows where. Gates and Nostrand.” I translated this. “Oh yes, I know what this is about,” she confirmed. “Thanks, I’ll tell Francisco.” I hung up wondering just what kind of transaction I’d just set up. Was I a good Samaritan? Or a BAD Samaritan?

Back behind the counter, I realized that the radio station playing was actually a Santiago station, La Super Regional, and that we were listening to it thanks to a computer with Internet Fermin had set up behind the counter expressly for this purpose. I commented on this, and told him I’d been interviewed twice on just that station. “Really? That’s great! Let’s call them up and say hi!” So we did. The DJ on duty was one I hadn’t met before, but he knew who I was, and asked where I was and what I was up to. “I’m hanging out with Fermin in the most tipico bodega in all of Brooklyn!” I informed him, and he agreed the definition was correct. “But I’ll be back in Santiago in January. I hope you’ll be waiting for me,” I said. He said they would be “planning something big” to celebrate my return.

With all this excitement, needless to say, the interview didn’t go far. But I did get a couple of nice pictures of Fermin at work, and Fermin’s ring, which I liked. Other excitement of the week consisted of a Burmese food and Irish music night with friends from the Washington Square Harp & Shamrock Orchestra (“The Finest Irish Band Withing A 5-Block Radius of Washington Square”), which I played with in pre-DR times. When Ben and Amelia arrived, they were accompanied by a woman unknown to us, who Amelia introduced as “Someone I found in my building.” I thought she was kidding, but when I asked the person in question (actually named Anna) she confirmed that they’d met in an elevator this morning. She turned out to be from Serbia, but had lived in California for a year, where she worked as an au pair. She also confessed to having been annoyed when she first arrived in this country and discovered that Americans didn’t actually know where her country is. So boy was she surprised when we pulled out the two words we collectively knew in Serbo-Croatian (now artificially divided into Serbian and Croatian for political rather than linguistic reasons). For some reason, Scott knew how to say “appendix.” I knew how to say “nerd.” Best not to ask why.

What I saw at the Natural History Museum

2007-12-31T05:14:00.001-08:00

What I Saw At the Natural History Museum
Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

A giant armadillo with a beret? More or less.

Red hook

2007-12-31T05:10:00.000-08:00

the following are links to my photos of Red Hook, Brooklyn, from August 2006. It is an interesting waterfront industrial landscape with warehouses dating to the 19th century.

My trip to Red Hook

2007-12-31T05:08:00.001-08:00

Red Hook 2 Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

Red hooks in Red Hook

2007-12-31T05:07:00.003-08:00

Red Hook 3 Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000. Red Hook hooks hanging on historic 1860s warehouses.

Red Hook, Brooklyn

2007-12-31T05:07:00.001-08:00

Red Hook 4 Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000. Historic warehouse space on the waterfront, built by an Irish immigrant in the 1860s.

more Red Hook

2007-12-31T05:06:00.000-08:00

Red Hook 1 Originally uploaded by salsasydney2000.

Rice, Waikiki, and dead people - notes from last fall

2007-11-16T21:32:00.002-08:00

The following are some photos of my trip to California to research family past and to Hawaii for the SEM meeting last year.

Here are some other notes about last fall, originally published on the other blog last November.

I’m posting a couple of pictures I took on my California journey, when my mom and I decided to go searching for the long-gone town of Rice, California. Located in the middle of the eastern Mohave Desert, this is where my grandfather worked for a few life-changing months in the middle of the Great Depression. He assisted at a gas station out there, selling tires to those who were out there working on building the aqueduct or providing other kinds of services to the construction workers. Among the services provided were an illegal gambling den and a brothel, which made for quite an education, according to my grandpa’s stories. All that’s there now is a bunch of junk and the ruins of a couple of buildings, including the gas station in its second incarnation (the current ruins date to the seventies, we think.) The only inhabitant, when we arrived, was a bum asleep on a mattress under the old carport. We woke him up so he took off, taking off down the long, hot highway with his little wagon. He pulled it along by means of a giant wooden cross which he hitched over one shoulder.

I had another picturesque and totally Tucson moment on Sunday at the All Soul’s Parade. I don’t know why I’d never been to this event before, which is held to celebrate the Day of the Dead. Thousands of people took to the streets, many in wonderfully creative costumes and masks. There were five-foot-high skeleton heads, strange creatures on stilts, a vulture with the face of Bush, a skeleton dog on wheels, a coffin-wagon with children riding inside, an enormous brain-hat, dead bagpipers and capoeira dancers. Many political statements on the number of civilians dead in the Iraq war and the number of illegal immigrants dead in the Arizona desert were also to be found. At the end of the route, the parade-goers gathered in a parking lot next to the train tracks, where three stages and a crane were set up for a performance by Flam Chen, a group of acrobats and fire dancers. Their show, consisting of people flying up on giant white helium balloons or being lifted, writhing in a cage, on the crane; devils on stilts around an iron mountain; and angels with wings on pillars was eerie. To the accompaniment of a carnivalesque brass band, an enormous urn filled with all the mementoes of the dead observers had cared to throw in was raised up on the crane and set ablaze, providing the perfect conclusion and memorial.

Gas station

2007-11-16T21:32:00.001-08:00

This is what's left of the second incarnation of the gas station in Rice, California where my grandfather worked during the Depression.

Rice, California

2007-11-16T21:29:00.001-08:00

Another view of scenic Rice.

Valley of the Temples, Hawaii

2007-11-16T21:26:00.002-08:00

a beautiful Japanese temple in northeastern Oahu

Waikiki

2007-11-16T21:26:00.001-08:00

Blog in transition

2007-11-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

Because I decided my Accordiongirl blog (http://accordiongirl.blogspot.com) should really be devoted solely to merengue tipico and the Dominican Republic, I'm moving everything about my other travels here. Please subscribe if you want to keep up with where I am, and hear about my adventures in Germany in December!

Where have I been, you might ask? I used to post once a week, nearly without fail, and now it's been four months since I've posted at all. Life is a crazy thing. I met the man of my dreams in Europe this summer so I've been a bit occupied with that (hence the forthcoming trip to Germany). Also, I got hired to teach a lecture course on Mexican music here at the University of Arizona about 2 weeks before the semester started in August. Since then I have been madly writing lecture notes, preparing power points, searching for musical examples and videos, and grading papers, so I have not had much time for anything else (except drinking - now a necessity). Just kidding - sort of. Anyway, stay tuned for further developments and travels.

What follows is the still-incomplete account of my travels in France and Austria this summer.
I'll be transferring previous trips over here as time permits. Thanks for your patience!

The Better Late Than Never Post

2007-11-13T10:12:00.003-08:00

7/4/07
Today is July 4, but it’s not exactly picnic and barbeque weather where I am. Today Vienna is cold, rainy, and strangely quiet for such a big city. Thus it is a perfect day to write about what I’ve been up to for the last week or so.

Last Thursday, after climbing up the St Nazaire cathedral steps at Beziers and enjoying the dizzying view (later to be paid for with sore thighs), my friend Cathy picked me up and whisked me away to the countryside north of the city in the Herault department. This area combined with the rest of the Languedoc region is the biggest wine-producing region in France, a fact which became very obvious as we drove through rocky hills covered with vineyards. Every few minutes we passed another vigneron offering tastings of their wines and other local products like olives, tapenades, flavor-infused olive oils and vinegars. The area was very green, but more of an olive or sage green – one completely unlike the near iridescent emerald greens of the tropics, and one that reminded me of some of the hilly parts of Arizona.

It didn’t take long for us to reach our destination, Herepian – a village of about 500 located at a crossroads. Its two main streets, one leading to the larger town of Bedarieux and the other to the more picturesque medieval hamlet of Villemagne les Argentiers, meet at a little roundabout by the “new” town square. The spot is marked by a crooked “H” about five feet tall, which is lit up with white fairy lights at night. In Tucson we have “A” Mountain, in Herepian they have the H traffic circle.

Herepian is known mostly – or wants to be known mostly – for its bell foundry, said to produce bells of the clearest tones. There is a museum about it and one can see the foundry in action. At least, that’s what they say – we never did figure out when it was open. Besides that, it is also home to one of the best restaurants in the area, bringing in residents and tourists from all surrounding villages. Its old town square is quite charming, surrounded by four-story homes with rows of window boxes and a small church of an age that is indeterminate but certainly far older than anything one can see in the US. There is a small fountain on the square and another on the main road near the other restaurant, Sergio’s Pizzeria. There are two bakeries, a tobacco shop, a tiny grocery, and a bar called Le Chantier that seems far too large for the five drunks usually in residence. That about covers its amenities.

For about four years now Cathy has been the occasionally proud owner of an 18th century house in the middle of this village, down a side street barely wide enough for one car just a block from the old town square. Because she is only in residence for a short while each year, however, during the rest of the year the spiders take control, and our first task upon our arrival was to de-cobweb and sweep. Surprised, they scurried off to hide in the yet-to-be-renovated basement and attic. Then we aired things out and discovered a leak in the terracotta-tiled roof, which meant we’d have to get in touch with the handyman named Pierre.

It was by then late in the afternoon, and after doing our grocery shopping at Lidl, the Euro Trader Joe’s, it was time for wine and cheese (there was still wine in the cellar, and we bought manchego, some kind of blue, and some kind of Corsican white at the store). For dinner, we went into “town,” Bedarieux, which has an impressive selection of restaurants to choose from: Chinese, pizza, kebab, crepe, pizza, or McDonald’s. We chose a pizza place that was full of French people, which seemed like a good sign, although it also meant that it was full of smoke. It was also full of carved wooden cat models apparently collected by the owner, an aged crazy cat lady with hair dyed too dark a black, which ranged all the way around the place on several shelves. Behind the counter were photos of cats she had known (and one dog). The pizza was good, though, and the chef was from Martinique. He brought us a special homemade chili oil to spice things up.

On day 2 we had to figure out something to do with all that wine and cheese, so we decided to take it on a picnic. Following the Orb river through the hills we made our way to Roquebrun, a village built up the side of one hill. Rafting and canoe trips start here, and we watched some adventure travelers getting suited up from our picnic spot on the pebbly river beach. It was a hot day but pleasant in the shade, though some pinkish looking Brits were instead spending their time baking in the sun. From there we continued our driving tour towards St-Chinian, a region with a wide assortment of nice red wines. A store on the town square functions as a clearing house for all of them, so we stopped in for a tasting. Some are still made by monks! There were even a couple of good whites although the area isn’t known for them. I bought a bottle and would have bought a lot more if I’d had any room in my suitcase.

Back on the road, as we passed through the town of Fontcaude we noticed a sign for a medieval abbey and thought we might as well take a look since we were there. IT ended up being more of a detour than one might have thought, becoming rather comical as we made turn after turn following one sign after another and never seeming to get any closer. Eventually, however, we pulled into a parking lot on a meadow, walked into another tiny village with a tiny square where the town gossips sat around with a little dog who ran up and yapped at us. The abbey itself had been mostly destroyed at the time of the Revolution, but archeologists had turned up a few bits of ancient sculpture, an old bell foundry, coins of various types dating back to Roman times, and an oil mill, and had rebuilt a few walls – not spectacular, but an interesting bit of local history. Apparently there is also a menhir standing in a field out there which one can walk to, but it was hot and we didn’t. We did, however, pull over at the town of Olargues, which, signs told us, was one of the most beautiful in France. It was pretty darn scenic, built from garden plots along the River Jaur upwards to the bell tower that once was part of an 11th-century fortress.

Then it was time to hurry back, for we had reservations at the town restaurant and needed to change for the occasion. It was not cheap but incredibly good and lasted 3 hours or so, in good French style, with an appetizer, main dish (salmon), cheese course, and desert, all accompanied by local wine. And though we were a little overloaded afterwards we were still up for a night on the town. Normally a night on the town would consist of drinking with the drunkards at Le Chantier, but there were bigger things afoot that Friday.

All through the summer, each village puts on a party in its main square for one weekend. Bands are hired, carnival-type games put out, and a bar set up. Teenagers and young families for miles around come in to take advantage of the rare opportunity to have a nightlife – as do your stray tourists, although we seemed to be the only representatives of that group on that night.

The road into the village itself was closed off for the evening, so we left our car near the bridge over the river and walked from there. An ungodly racket was emanating from the water, which turned out to be hundreds of frogs in chorus. And as we passed through the arched and crumbling brick gate or Barbacane, past a urinating man, and into the village proper, a different kind of racket was going on. A racket that sounded strangely like… The Pointer Sisters.

As it turns out, today’s French villager’s favorite type of music is US Top 40 hits of the ‘80s. Later they also did Madonna and Michael Jackson, which was the funniest because the beefy male singer had only moments before been singing in a Barry White deep voice, making the falsetto quite the surprise. On the bright side, they were very good at what they did – the guitarist, bassist, drummer, and synth player all had chops, the singers knew their stuff, and they replicated the recordings nearly exactly. On the minus side, they replicated the recordings nearly exactly. The focus was mostly on fashion, it seemed, as the two female singers and two dancers changed clothes nearly every number from one skimpy 80s outfit to another. Tres amusant.

[I wrote this much a month ago and have had time neither to finish the entry nor to post it. Life has taken some interesting turns. Will try to finish one day soon…]

Carcasonne IV

2007-11-13T10:12:00.001-08:00

Carcasonne III

2007-11-13T10:11:00.003-08:00

Carcasonne II

2007-11-13T10:11:00.001-08:00

Carcasonne - in Basilique St Nazaire

2007-11-13T10:09:00.002-08:00

Beziers II

2007-11-13T10:09:00.001-08:00

Beziers

2007-11-13T10:08:00.001-08:00

Beziers, Cathedral St Nazaire

2007-11-13T10:04:00.004-08:00

Dinner in Paris II

2007-11-13T10:04:00.003-08:00

Dinner in Paris

2007-11-13T10:04:00.001-08:00

Medical advice in St Germain

2007-11-13T10:03:00.001-08:00

New Art at Louvre II

2007-11-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

Arizona in Paris

2007-11-13T10:01:00.002-08:00

with a touch of ancient Greece

New art at Louvre

2007-11-13T10:01:00.001-08:00

Accordion jazz

2007-11-13T09:59:00.000-08:00

during the jazz festival at the Marche aux Puces, Paris.

J'aime le fromage!

2007-11-13T09:48:00.000-08:00

6/25/07
And now for something completely different!

It’s not the usual topic of my blog, but now I’m in France, so I guess I might as well write about it.

Here are some things I have learned.
(1) “Quark” is a type of cheese, besides being a subatomic particle.
(2) Spinach makes one say “beurk.”
(3) Paris subway doors are specially designed to foil foreigners’ attempts at getting on or off. (I figured them out, but I’d bet that in a couple of years they’ll have come up with an even more diabolical design.)
(4) You must kiss everyone on both cheeks – one bisou is just not enough.
(5) Parisians are actually friendly if you try to speak French to them and play by their rules.
(6) The Paris subway shuts down at 1 AM, and after that, good luck getting a cab, you schmuck!
(7) Southern French accents are specially designed to foil foreigners’ attempts at understanding the French language.
(8) The French disapprove of all English vocabulary except for the following: “week-end,” “OK,” and “cybercafé.” Oh, and also “techno” and “gay.”
(9) French cows say “meuh.”

Paris is crazy, but who doesn’t love it? My French is pretty crappy but everyone has been so nice and so supportive of my linguistic attempts that I can now both accomplish my daily business and pick up on French men without fear. And thank goodness, because on the day I arrived I have no idea what I did or said to anyone. I had taken a variety of sleep-inducing drugs on the plane but still not managed to actually sleep more than a couple of hours, so when I got to Charles de Gaulle I was in a stoned stupor. I have only the vaguest memories of getting my passport stamped and finding my bag, so vague that later I wondered whether I actually had done those things. Yet somehow I got on the right train, lugged my bags up the stairs in the elevatorless station with the help of a kind Frenchwoman, hailed a taxi, and made it to the apartment of the Weisz family, with whom I’d be staying.

On the way, in spite of my state, I managed to have my first 100% French conversation with the taxi driver. In an interesting coincidence, he turned out to be Haitian, so we discussed Haiti, the DR, and various dance styles, and I also quizzed him on places to go dancing in Paris. He liked merengue típico, too.

By the time I got to the apartment I had sobered up a bit, fortunately. I conversed in mediocre fashion with Claude and then decided that the best remedy for jet lag was to keep moving, so made for the Champs-Elysees where I snapped some photos with my official Arizona mascot (see exhibit A), then passed through the famous Tuileries gardens on my way to the Louvre. There, attempting to see something new, I visited Pre-Classic Greece, Islam, and Medieval France but was sorry to see Mesopotamia and Etrusca were closed. It doesn’t seem kind to shut down entire civilizations, but that’s how they are. One highlight was a temporary exhibit called “Conversations” or some such thing where modern artists had been invited to create works to be displayed alongside the medieval ones. Their interesting responses included a crowd of white plaster statues wearing clocks over their faces, dozens of scythes hanging above an ancient and spooky tomb, and a recumbent engraved marble column that looked as if it had been accidentally toppled from a pedestal and broken in two, eliciting startled responses from many innocent museum-goers.

I was relieved when finally I could crawl into bed and sleep 12 hours, preparing me for a hard day of shopping on Wednesday. The Weiszes sent me to Printemps, promising me a fruitful shopping experience. Although I was skeptical, since it was a department store and I detest shopping at department stores in the US, where I’m never able to tolerate more than about 20 minutes, I decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised: in this version of a department store, the departments were not simply “men’s,” “women’s,” and “juniors,” but small individual shops organized by designer in an open layout. Because they only had a few of each item out to look at, I wasn’t overwhelmed and didn’t have to run away, and I actually made several purchases! Shopping in Paris is good. Also, on the sidewalk outside I saw a street organist winding his pint-sized pipe organ. Not an accordion, but close.

I still wanted to check out the Marais and its boutiques, however. This historic Jewish area has streets that are pleasant for walking and is also famous for its falafel, so of course I made a stop at Falafel King. I was all shopped out, both mentally and monetarily, however, so I had to content myself with just looking through shop windows. I also didn’t have too much time as I had to return home, change, and get to the conference opening reception at 7. But then I made a move that for me appears to be becoming something of a tradition on arriving in a new country – I accidentally slashed my finger open and had to lie around on my bed with my finger in the air applying pressure until the bleeding stopped. I couldn’t help having a feeling of déjà vu as I remembered the night I arrived in Santiago back in January.

Needless to say I arrived late at the Centre National de la Danse. It was a longish and crowded train ride, but better late than never. The CND is actually in a suburb, Pantin, which is sort of an odd area to hang out in – a mix of old and new buildings with mostly empty streets and few restaurants, populated largely by North African immigrants. At any rate, the reason the trains were crowded, it turned out, was that for that day and that day only it was the city-wide Fete de la Musique. The Music Fest comes but once a year, and when it does, bars and restaurants all over the city have live music and everyone can ride on the subways and trains for one low price, no limits. I had forgotten this fact when I went to dinner with friends at a nearby Algerian restaurant, where we had tasty couscous and my first Algerian wine ever. But as we exited, a parade of drum-playing Brazilians all dressed in white passed by. In the lead were three men cracking whips loudly, making me feel for yet another moment as if I were in Santiago again.

Thinking I’d take the RER (the regional train line) back instead of the city Metro since its stop was closer, I got a bit lost looking for the station and ran into the Brazilians one more time. Then I asked a happy-looking French speaker on the sidewalk in front of a bar for directions, and he and his four friends all decided to accompany me to the station since they were planning on heading to another bar anyway. Unfortunately, the trains were running differently so the route didn’t work the way I thought it would, but fortunately, I had 5 new French-speaking friends to chat with on the way. We talked about music and then compared the relative levels of evilness of Bush and Sarkozy. (I suggested that the scale wasn’t comparable, as Sarkozy hasn’t started any wars, but my companions darkly suggested that it was only because he hadn’t yet had the opportunity.) Everyone was in high spirits that night, in spite of the recent changes in power, and some African teenagers got together an impromptu jam session on the subway, chanting in favor of the Fete. I made it home eventually – again, better late than never.

On Friday I gave the Metro to Pantin another shot, having had my fill of RER the night before, only to find all the trains out to be sardine-can crowded. I had to let two go by before I could even sort of squeeze my way in, and when I did, it got harder and harder to breathe as at each station one more person thought he or she could surely get in. Someone joked that it was worse than the Fete de la Musique. Naturally, I missed most of the first paper session, but I was luckily in plenty of time for my own.

Of course as I hurried to get set up I sprung a leak, and before I’d realized it I’d bled on my book and my new rain coat. Quite the fashion statement. Then, when I finally got started reading my paper for an audience of about 60, the simultaneous French translator exited her booth, to tell me, “Um, it’s kind of hard for us to translate if we don’t have a copy of your paper,” in a rather surly fashion. It was also kind of hard for us to know that they needed extra copies if no one told us, but whatever. We simply switched the order of papers and some kind soul ran off to make a copy. But all told, once I stopped bleeding, it went pretty well and many people told me they liked my paper (this one on not típico but gender roles in salsa dancing. Variety is the spice of life, you know).

I felt I’d earned my keep at that point and after lunch and a couple more papers I took off for sight-seeing. I don’t know how anyone expects people to stay in meetings all day when they’re in Paris of all places. I can’t be held responsible. I saw most of the classic sights when I was here 3 years ago so I moved on to the second tier and visited the Conciergerie, a sort of medieval clergy underground office area next to the Sainte Chapelle where prisoners like Marie Antoinette were held before being executed during the French Revolution. I’m always a fan of the spooky stuff. Then on to the other island in the Seine, Ile Saint-Louis, a scenic spot full of historic buildings where famous folks like Baudelaire have lived over the centuries. The main street down the center of the island is lined with antiques and gourmet food shops, including some of the most amazing window displays of cheese I’m likely to ever see, and I partook of the island’s famous ice cream (ginger bread flavor). Then dinner at home, filled with my scintillating brand of French conversation.

I set my alarm the next morning, intending to go to a very interesting lecture demonstration, but my newly acquired travel clock failed to wake me. In what was quickly becoming a theme for the conference, I arrived late once again. But I did accomplish my original purpose in going to that lecture: I had found my old bharata natyam teacher from Indiana on the program and was curious to see her after 8 years. She looked the same but has been divorced, remarried, started a dance company in New York, and moved to India part time to work since last I saw her, making me feel like positively a slouch in comparison. Anyway, at least I didn’t miss my lunch appointment with a fellow salsiologist, a Venezuelan who had lived in Paris 26 years. We ate Turkish, as it seemed like the thing to do in that neighborhood. Afterwards, naughty me ditched meetings once again, this time to visit the Marché aux Puces (flea market), which in reality is a whole complex of different markets covering many dozens of blocks north of the city. Each is a warren of narrow alleys with a different name and a theme – one devoted to prints and books, one to art deco objets d’art, others to general antiques.

It turned out to be a good day to go, as it was the first day of a two-day flea market jazz festival and bands were playing everywhere. It was like hitting an accordion jackpot! On one corner a big Parisian jazz orchestra was performing, with something like 8 guitars, three saxophones, a couple of clarinets, a flute, a standing bass, and a piano accordion. In a little café, a duo played that consisted of guitar and one of those huge five-row chromatic button deals. I love how accordion is a standard jazz instrument in France. What’s the problem with people in the US, anyway, that this is not the case?!

Still, it wasn’t very good weather and I wasn’t in the right mindset for major shopping. I only managed to buy a few small color prints, amusing old French advertising cards, and then I saw it was time to go. I had to head back to the CND for the awards presentation. Since I was actually getting an award, it didn’t seem good form to miss it. Afterwards drinks were served, including a sparkling red, something I’d never even thought of before but that was actually quite pleasant. This time, I headed with the UCR gang back into town for dinner. We went to the area around the Canal St-Martin in the 10th arrondisement, where I’d stayed in last time I was in Paris, when friends were living there. It’s an interesting area with kind of an up-and-coming arts scene, something like Williamsburg was a few years back only much more scenic.

Choosing a restaurant right by the canal because it was listed in someone’s guidebook, we proceeded to make a lot of work for our poor waiter, who spoke some English, luckily for everyone involved. The walls were lined with interesting-looking and inexpensive bottles of wine, but he wouldn’t let us choose our own, so we described what we wanted and he brought us things, first a white and then a red, accompanied by a variety of small plates – a cheese assortment, asparagus points, raw tuna with cherries. It was all delicious, if a little more than we had planned on spending what with the 7 euro corking fee. Still, we left happy, although not completely satisfied, since our restaurant did not serve dessert.

No creperies were to be found as we walking along the canal, first one side, and then, crossing the picturesque arched bridge that one of our group insisted was “so French,” the other. Standing around on a corner, we debated our options for an annoyingly long time until my companions suggested that I, as the only one who spoke any French at all, should ask a passerby to point us towards crepes. We all agreed a man was more likely to be patient and help five American women in need, so I stopped the next nice-looking lone man I saw and asked. Striking up a conversation, he not only answered the question but asked where we were from and what we were doing in Paris, and then switched to English. Turns out he had studied at Westpoint!

Raphael, our new French friend, ended up accompanying us on our dessert mission to a corner restaurant just up the canal and near the Republique metro stop where he “knew the owners” and we had tasty chocolate crepes and crème brulee. He was a fireman, which apparently in France also entails being a paramedic, as well as the son of an Algerian Jew and a mother “from the Carpathians.” He kept us entertained but made me miss the last train home. Thus I learned an important lesson: never try to get a cab at 2 AM in Paris. Even with Raphael in tow, it was a nightmare.

Needless to say, I was quite sleepy throughout the next day, my last in Paris. Luckily, the morning panel I attended was an entertaining one: they spoke on dance in reality television and did the whole thing in reality TV format, including confessional interviews with all the presenters. Then I convinced a friend to go to the Rive Gauche with me. Although I’d forgotten that it was Sunday and many things were closed, we did get a look at the St-Germain church as well as the rather bizarre décor of the School of Medicine building. The chiseled medallions that circled it all featured different aspects of ancient medicine, most of them things that one definitely shouldn’t be doing in the modern world, like un-anesthetized operating and demon exorcising. We also found an open book store where we found highly amusing childrens books, including one, “The Book of Noises,” which amused all our friends the rest of the day with its explanations of what various things say in French. Christmas trees say “Jingel [sic] Bells.” Electrical sockets say “NON!” Snails don’t say anything but they wiggle their antennae prettily.

My last stops were made at the flower market, where I bought violets for my hosts, and Notre Dame, where we snapped pictures. I then attended one last panel like a good girl, and went home to pack and have a final dinner with the Weiszes. My 5 days in Paris at an end, I and my rather heavy suitcase jumped on a train at 11:45 and headed south for the sun.

Because the second floor of my first-class carriage was occupied only by myself, a group of three women, and two lone men, I was able to spread out over two seats and actually get a fairly decent night’s sleep on the 9-hour ride (helped by some prescription medication, of course). I awoke with a sore hip but reasonably refreshed, finding myself in the middle of a grassy countryside studded with cypress trees and quaint-looking stone houses. I hadn’t been able to find a guide book with any decent information on the part of the country I was heading to, so hadn’t bought one, and had no idea where I might be when we passed through an area with large bodies of water visible to both sides and they started announcing the names of our stops, places like Sete and Agde.

Before long we arrived in the station at Beziers, the town of about 71,000 where I’d be spending the next few days in the Languedoc region. I was just glad I hadn’t slept through it – a friend had joked about me waking up to find myself in some unknown town, and had gotten me a bit worried about the possibility. I’d made a reservation at the hotel closest to the station, so luckily I didn’t have to lug my baggage too far. Although the place is nothing to write home about (although I guess technically I AM writing home about it) my room’s floor-to-ceiling French doors look right out over the scenic park called the Place des Poetes – not too shabby. After a shower, I picked up all available tourist information and set forth to explore.

Beziers turns out to be a very interesting town. If it were anywhere else in the world, it would be a tourist mecca, but in a country where everything is scenic and a zillion years old, it doesn’t get much press. Nonetheless, there is quite a lot to see here and a lot of history to learn. The old part of town on the eastern banks of the Orb river has been inhabited continuously since the 6th century BC, when Celtic tribes built fortified towns here and traded with the neighboring Gauls. Then the Romans moved in, and two thousand years and many wars and changes of power later, you have the modern city of Beziers in modern France in the modern department of Herault.

It took only a few minutes for me to be able to start peeling away the layers of history. Just a couple of blocks west of my hotel, I found myself wandering down twisty, narrow, cobblestone streets that adhered to no compass point. They were lined with tall multifamily homes, many with flowers at their windows, some with laundry hanging out, and a few with long hallways ending in central courtyards visible from the street. Some were freshly painted, some dilapidated and on their last legs. Some were of brick and plaster looking a scant 200 years old and others of roughly hewn stone that looked ancient. From one window came the sounds of a cheesy pop song, while from others Arabic dance music was blasting. Around every corner was a surprise – a hidden stairway, a tiny triangular plaza where workmen stood smoking. At first I was in streets wide enough for a car to pass through, and some did; then in alleyways only suitable for pedestrians or bikes, and then there were zigzagging pathways where only a single person could walk. Street names were posted on the corners of buildings in both French and Catalan, and ranged from the historical, like Rue de la Ancienne Comedie, to the humorous, like Rue Malapague (the same as malapaga in Spanish – one who borrows money but never pays it back). The clouds kept shifting: when it was hot and sunny I almost felt I was in Morocco, while when the sun was hidden and a chill came through it felt like medieval Europe indeed.

After an almond croissant and a café au lait consumed in the peace of the steep and shady park, occupied by more swans than poets, I decided to start at the beginning – or at least as far back as was still visible – and made for where the Roman ruins were marked on my map. I made two complete circuits of the block before I noticed a small alleyway to one side and followed it to where it ended at a large pit full of flowering bushes and, sure enough, some columns and other bits of masonry that showed where an ancient amphitheater once stood, all hidden away in the center of a block of those ancient houses. Following another intriguing-looking passage I ended up on top of a hill with a perfect view of all the red-tiled rooves of the old city leading down to the river and the Canal du Midi, an engineering marvel constructed in the 17th century and later fitted with a bridge allowing the canal and boats to pass over the river in the 19th. I could also see the city’s 12th century cathedral of St Nazaire, where I next headed.

Down another alleyway, past some interesting graffiti, and I emerged into a small plaza next to a very large church, very Gothic and imposing, alongside of which I was stopped by an American asking directions. A couple of interesting-looking restaurants formed one side of the plaza, but it was Monday and they were closed, so I decided to take a look at the cloister instead. Perhaps this one served as the inspiration for the Met’s Cloisters museum in upper Manhattan, because they certainly looked similar to me. The difference was clearly in the antiquity, visible here in numerous indecipherable inscriptions carved into the walls of the courtyard along with crumbling gargoyles and angels. In the back was the “Bishop’s Garden,” designed in the French style with hedges carved into curly symmetrical patterns, though the hedges here were only inches tall. This garden’s best feature was its spectacular view, as it is located right at the edge of a hill facing west to the river. There was also a French groundskeeper there, apparently for entertainment, since he picked up on me (though I didn’t take him up on his invitation to coffee, wanting to continue my explorations).

Inside the cathedral, the requisite humongous Gothic stained glass windows take advantage of the building’s east-west orientation, the rose window above the lovely pipe organ (of course a later installment, of the 17th century) catching the sunset and the vertical windows on the altar end facing the sunrise. All the stonework arches inside were quite impressive. As it turns out, the whole place was erected over a pagan temple, the original church was burned in 1209 during the Crusades, rebuilt in 1215, and enlarged in 14-something, with things like sculptures, pulpit, and organ added at various points over the years. Built to last!

At this point I was ready for a nap, so I wound my way back through the medieval city past the town’s archeological museum (closed for Monday) and to the hotel for a quick nap before my afternoon activities of changing money (unsuccessful – guess they really want you to use ATMs here), checking email (successful), eating lunch (eventually successful, although I didn’t know what I wanted and also they really want you to stick to their schedule, which I don’t), and purchasing a train ticket for the next day’s excursion (also eventually successful, once I figured out that my low-tech, chipless American credit cards do not work in high-tech French machines). And of course, washing clothes and blogging 4U. Once that got old, I took to the ancient streets once again, winding back to the cathedral, beautiful in the golden sunlight but also cold with a strong west wind (the cathedral’s brochure had explained its front doors were seldom used for just that reason). I discovered another mysterious alleyway, this one lined with restaurants (including one representing the island of Reunion, of all places – intriguing but I wasn’t hungry) but pressed on, managing to fit another few of the historic sights marked on my map into my first day.

Second day: to Carcasonne! The most famous bastide, or medieval walled city, of the region, I only knew of it from the game of the same name but as I read about it I became interested. It was less than an hour away by train, and the train station is just across the street from me, so I decided to go.

I certainly have gotten a lot of walking in during these past few days. Electing to forgo the expense of a taxi ride, I walked from the Carcasonne station through a shopping district to the river, which I crossed on the Pont Vieux, wide enough only for carts and now closed to all vehicles. The river rushed through underneath, split around a small island, and iron arches holding lamps overhead. From there I got my first full view of the Cité, looking as historical and romantic as one would expect, more Middle Earth than Mediterranean. Across the bridge I found myself on a street one lane wide lined with the kind of medieval village-looking houses I’d also seen on the narrower lanes of Beziers, though a little more picturesque with details like fish-mouthed drainpipes. I followed the path winding around to the other side of the hill, past a lot full of tour buses, then the old cemetery, and finally came to the city entrance (there was just one of any size, the better to protect against invaders), a stone bridge topped with arches that passed over what a grassy dip that might have been a moat.

In my family, originally from Southern California, it is a long-standing joke to say real-world things “look like Disneyland.” But it really did. The narrow street leading away from the city gate lined with shops, their wooden signs hung in front from iron rings, the red and yellow banners stretching across the way, and of course the crowds of tourists, all of it looked eerily like the entrance to Fantasyland. No wonder EuroDisney was so unpopular – what could they possibly need it for when they have the real thing?

Although all the little shops and restaurants overwhelmed me a bit commercially speaking, once I got over my Disney moment the sense of history was amazing. I declined to go into any tourist trap museums, electing instead to simply stroll the streets and discover back alleys leading to less populated parts. It is not a large place, consisting mainly of three main east-west corridors and perhaps a dozen twisty paths through the middle, but it took a while to cover that ground. One can also exit the city proper at one point and make a circuit of the area between the inner and the outer defensive walls, examining the view of the lower city (where the peasants, farmers, and merchants must have lived) and the battlements as crenellated as any child’s drawing of a castle. The old church, dedicated to St Nazaire the same as the one in Beziers, was a full of spooky Goth details as one could hope, and the large central well was very Beauty and the Beast.

You wouldn’t think you could get lost on so few streets, but that’s just what I did. Exiting a restaurant after a pleasantly long lunch, a three-course “menu” with some local wine, I spotted a pair of shoes and a book I was interested in but I wasn’t yet ready to make purchases, as there were still a couple more streets to explore. After getting my fill of historical scenery I looked for them again. I found the book again, though it took some doing, but the shoe store never did turn up before it was time to go catch my train. Always a graveyard fan, I did take a few minutes to make a stop there on my way out, and thus was able to view a petanque game in progress on the dirt area in front of the cemetery gates.

Finding I still had time to get some sightseeing in back in Beziers, I visited the upper part of the city I hadn’t yet seen, which included the Madeleine church, scene of a massacre in 1209, and a chapel dedicated to St Aphrodise, which dates to the 10th century and is thus the city’s oldest church, but it was closed. Finding myself again near the cathedral I thought I might try to climb the stairs up to its roof, which I hadn’t been in time to do the day before, but again I was too late. I did, however, get to enjoy the scene of the late afternoon sun coming through the rose window and splashing brilliant prismatic colors over the floor and one wall. It must have been an awe-inspiring display during the drab times in which it was built – it still wasn’t too shabby a sight. And since the sun was out, I decided to take advantage and sit on a bench in the square on the promontory in front, but eventually the wind got the better of me and I went on a search for cheap food. I found it at an Arab-run Chip Shop.

More tired than I knew from the many miles covered on foot the day before, I slept in late on Wednesday and again got breakfast from the boulangerie next door, eating it on a bench in the Parque des Poetes. I then tried to see the city museum, but the woman at the desk convinced me I didn’t have enough time to see everything before they closed for lunch. (So inconvenient to close for lunch! And so leisurely! So un-American!) So I gave up and instead made for the beach.

Beziers is really only about 10 km from the Mediterranean sea, and a cheap and quick bus ride gets you to the little beach town of Valras-Plage. It has a gorgeous long sandy beach stretching away from the river’s mouth to the east as far as you can see, but it was still far too cold for me to even think about getting in the freezing water. Nonetheless, I enjoyed a few hours of strolling and sitting on the sand, taking in the drifting clouds that changed the temperature dramatically every few minutes and the gentle lap of waves. The feel of the seaside here is definitely different from any other I’ve experienced – the Pacific, in California; the Atlantic, in New York; the Caribbean. I tried to put my finger on it but couldn’t exactly – something about the quiet, the sea so calm and the beach so relatively empty, the angle of the sun and the lesser intensity of the light at this northern latitude, the chill in the air that disappears immediately whenever the sun comes out, which is never often enough. Or maybe it comes from knowing about all the ancient civilizations that surrounded it on all sides, and still do, and can somehow be sensed.

It would have been easy to doze off in a reverie but for the sand that came my way every time the breeze kicked up. Instead, I lunched on a pan bagnat chased with coffee and ice cream, then, finding nothing left to do, I headed back north. This time I had more luck in my timing and made it to the church in time to climb the stairs in honor of my last night in Beziers. It was dizzying going around and around the narrow spiral staircase whose deeply worn stone stairs made me afraid of slipping and falling, and a little frightening to stand several stories above the nave, looking down over a too-short wall, even more so to emerge on top and peer at the church square and the rooftops far below. The viewing platforms were missing the guardrails and mesh cages they would surely have in the US, where it would be considered a lawsuit waiting to happen. But the view was worth it.

Stay tuned for updates from village life in Southern France, Barcelona, and Vienna!