People aren't the only ones who remember

Went back to my old yarn store yesterday.


Half of it has become a real estate agency, but there's still a yarn part of it. When he saw me the owner came rushing out (of the real estate part) to greet me. I found a heap of yarn for 19 YTL (about $Can 16) that would cost me closer to $80 at home.




On the way back I met my old favourite street cat, MomKat. I chirped at her and she meowed back. She followed me home and waited while I went upstairs and got the catfood Elisabetta had on hand. Today I bought some more catfood. I didn't mean to start feeding the cats again, but when one actually acknowledges your presence it's an unusual honour and must be celebrated. I didn't know cats' memories were 9 months long.

Home in Izmir

Well, we made it. We're back in our comfy apartment in Izmir - have been for three days, actually. It really does feel like home. We'd gotten things quite nicely set up before we left, and "the girls" - our former roommate Shadi, and her new roommate Elisabetta - made some improvements after we left. So the only things we miss here that we had back in Canmore are a microwave and English-language television - and our family, of course, but I wouldn't call them things!

I'm surprised, too, at how much Turkish we remember. We'll never be able to read the complete works of Orhan Pamuk, the great Nobel Prize-winning author, but we've still got the basics. It's nice to know our old memory cells work sometimes.

Izmir is looking much the same, or maybe a little better. Some of the half-finished cement hulks have been completed and look rather spiffy. The Konak overpass is done and seems effective. There are a couple of flashy new buildings downtown. Some of the steps outside our apartment building have been fixed, and there's a new coat of whitewash on the lower walls. Generally things look a little cleaner, a bit more prosperous. That fits with what we saw in Portugal and Spain, too - clean streets, and construction everywhere.

We dropped in to our local pide salonu Saturday night and were recognized immediately. Handshakes all round, and the woman who brought us our food called me ablacım - dear older sister. That felt good. Our neighbours and the local merchants have been welcoming, too. Veggie seller: "We haven't seen you for a long time. Where have you been?" Pharmacist, leaving his customers and coming out of his shop to shake our hands: "When did you get back?" Neighbour across the street, leaning over his balcony: "Welcome! It's good to see you again!" And big hugs from Emine hanım and her daughter Güller downstairs. It feels good to belong.

We went to church on Sunday and were pleased to see most of the old familiar friends and some new ones. There's a magnificent new organist, and a young American soprano who's studyıng opera at the local conservatory (the best in Europe, she says). The place seems full of life, and Father Ron looks contented.

We're rediscovering the things we missed: fresh real yogurt, salça (sun-dried tomato paste), drying laundry in the hot sun and having the whites look white again, taking an inexpensive cruise on the harbour ferries, the beautiful faces of the other subway passengers showing traces of the scattered origins of their ancestors, the young men greeting each other with kisses.

It's good to be home.

Out of Portugal

I loved Portugal. I hate to have to leave it. But we've been in Spain for four days now and it's time to get up to date.

We zipped back to Lisbon by train and flew to Madrid for some ridiculously low fare. Of course the fact that there was no boarding lounge for the flight and it turned up 20 minutes or so late (some comments being made about siesta by jaded English-speakers among the waiting throng) had nothing to do with the low price. It arrived safely and more or less on time - and we didn't care anyway.

Ron had found a hotel for us right in the center of everything, nicely placed between two metro stations. Our first night we had supper at a very nice tapas bar (Canmore's Tapas has nothing to be ashamed of, though). Then we tried to sleep through the nightlife of the Madrileños carried on right outside our hotel window. They're extraverted night people, these Spaniards.

The next day, Sunday, we did the Prado museum - Spanish art from the beginning to the 19th century. On Sunday's it's free, and the lineups were impressive. So were the buskers - really competent musicians who made the waiting tolerable. The art varied from the mildly amusing (Elijah being fed in the wilderness by the birds - when I suggested that it was special delivery from Tim Horton's a couple of young Americans near us lost it completely) to really mind-blowing (El Greco for me, and Velazquez' portrait of the young princess with her courtiers). I'm glad we saw it. One more tick mark for our life list.

Then we caught the hop-on-hop-off bus to Plaza Colón, the monument to Christopher Columbus' voyage. I haven't been able to join in with the glorification of Columbus, partly because since reading 1421 I realize that the Chinese and the Portuguese did it first, and partly because I remember how it turned out for the native North Americans. Nevertheless, I liked the monument listing the members of Columbus' crew. They were the ones who really did it, after all.

Then we went to a bull fight. Ron expected, and so did I, that I'd be disgusted by the blood and suffering. If you look at it in the moment without the context of human history and mythology, it is disgusting. But I kept remembering the place we'd seen where bulls were sacrificed as part of the rites of Serapis, and realizing that Madrid's patron goddess is Kybele, the ancient earth goddess, whose worship included the sacrifice of bulls, and I looked at the men as they got ready for their encounter with the untamed wild (Ron had found us some superb seats right in the first row behind where the toreadors got ready). And I realized that there was an ancient and deeply symbolic ritual being enacted there, and somehow that made it all right. I don't know yet what it meant, and if I could put it in words I wouldn't be doing it justice. There's something older than civilization happening in the bull fight. It says something about death, which we all face - and the bulls are given a chance to face it heroically - and masculinity, which I can't understand. It's a profound experience and carried out with the respect it deserves. I've seen Christian masses carried out less respectfully and profoundly (I've celebrated my share of them). I don't know what the rest of the spectators got out of it, but I found it a deeply significant experience.

And then we went back to our hotel and had dinner at the little restaurant beside it. A neighborhood bar sort of place that felt very comfortable and homey. Our waiter was a cheerful Costa Rican; his colleagues were from all over the Spanish-speaking world, and so was everyone who came in. The food was good, too.

Monday we did the laundry - always an experience when you're a tourist. We were helped to figure out the machines by a young Spanish man, and we taught a German-Spanish couple what we'd learned. Then we went to the Queen Sophia museum of modern art to see Picasso's Guernica (moved me to tears) and some other stuff. Finally we went to the railway station to get our tickets for Granada, and discovered the wonderful gardens in the remodelled 19th-century structure. We had lunch there and I had a moment of truth when I decided I wouldn't settle for the crappy glass of wine I'd been given. Called the waitress over: "No es vinho (Portuguese - oops!)." I said, "es agua" (This isn't wine, it's water!) I said. And she went away and brought me a glass that was maybe half wine - big improvement. Don't eat in the Madrid railway station.

Finally we finished the hop-on-hop-off tour. It was becoming really cold and windy, and by the end we were huddling downstairs in the covered area. I guess it's only March still.

Tuesday we went by train to Granada. We left early and we both slept a lot, but we travelled 1st class and were blown away by the service - breakfast served in our seats, etc. We got settled in at our hotel (Posada Pilar del Toro, a very nice place), walked around a bit, and caught the hop-on-hop-off bus for a tour around the larger town. This being off-season, our tickets are good for two days, not just the 24 hours they promise.

Today we got another tick mark on our life list by visiting the Alhambra. What a beautiful place! Those words are totally inadequate. I think the Moorish kings tried to make it a vision of heaven on earth, and they came awefully close. It is one of the most beautiful human creations I have ever seen. If you go to Spain you must go there, and you must buy the tickets well in advance if you're coming in tourist season. As we saw at the Prado, the Spanish are very sensible about allowing a reasonable number of people in at a time. You can't enjoy humanity's most profound creations in a crowd, especially a Spanish crowd. So book ahead. And go. This is one place that you must see.

Tonight we had dinner at a little restaurant - Café au Lait - just behind the cathedral, not far from here. We went because they advertised a flamenco show in our hop-on-hop-off bus map. We lucked out again. Our hotel wanted us to go on an expensive tour to a cave somewhere where we would see a jaded tourist-oriented show. We weren't feeling up to that, so we walked the 10 minutes to the café and enjoyed a good-enough meal with some excellent dancing by a young woman who reminded us of both Evan's Anna and our Rachel. I told her she danced with her head and her heart and and body, and she cried. She wasn't some jaded old woman who'd been doing it for a lifetime. She was a student of the art and knew it inside out. Worth doing.

So tomorrow we leave for Malaga, then Gatwick, then Izmir - the cheapest way by far, tourist agent Ron says. Stay tuned.

Finishing Portugal, on to Spain

We're in Madrid, with a reliable Internet connection. Tomorrow we move on to Granada. But I have a lot of rumination about Portugal to complete.

The southwest was a highlight for me. Here was where the Portuguese prepared themselves to explore the world, using Chinese data gathered by a Genoese. In Prince Henry's fortress at Sagres explorers planned their journeys to the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. They Portuguese were settled in the western hemisphere before Columbus set out to "discover" it, and they got around the Cape of Good Hope before the rest of the world even realized it was a good idea. When Columbus asked the Portuguese to support his expedition to China by sailing west they laughed at him because they knew it was closer by the eastern route. And all their knowledge was gained here, in this think tank.

But we could spend only a day here, and then we headed north. We drove to Lisbon using the excellent superhighway built using European Union money. It was a great road, and we really appreciated the excellent signs that made our navigation easier.

We tried to drop our car off at the railway station we'd picked it up at - but it was 1:30! You don't try to do business in Portugal between noon and 2 p.m. They take their siesta seriously. So Ron found a safe place to park the car, we had a nice lunch at a pleasant buffet in the station, and when 2 p.m. came he got the car returned. Meanwhile I discovered what my mobile phone number is (I bought the European SIM card in Italy last fall but never knew the number). If you need to call us while we're in Europe you can reach us at 00393466711056 (I found that out by going to a phone shop and calling their number).


So finally we caught the 3 p.m. train to Porto, Portugal's second-biggest city. We got there after dark on one of the amazing super-fast trains - for much of the time we were going over 200 km/h and not feeling like it was more than 80. It was a shame we arrived so late, because our first impression of the city was dark and dirty. We never really warmed up to it, probably because it's so much older than Lisbon, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755. A very competent Prime Minister, the Marquis de Pombal, planned the new Lisbon on an open and modern grid system with some lovely parks and monuments. Porto is built on solid granite and wasn't rattled by the earthquake, unfortunately. It has lots of narrow, dark, dirty streets - even some old Roman pavements left behind. I found myself liking it a little more after a tour that showed us some of the newer parts and the Atlantic Ocean beaches. The tour ended with a port wine tasting, which put us in a much more accepting frame of mind.

The best part of our stay in Porto was a train trip along the Douro river inland into the wine country. The grapes that produce port wine grow in a geologically unique area (very similar to the East Kootenays, actually) where the bedrock is schist. The soil is terribly rocky - no problem for grapes - but these rocks absorb moisture and measure it back out to the soil and plants gradually during the dry summer. The cool mountain weather suits these grapes, and the results are spectacular.

So was the train trip. We took a normal train to a large riverside town, then got into a single narrow-gauge car to go up to the mountainside town of Vila Real. We thought it would be a small village, but it was really a substantial and quite new city - mostly built after a new superhighway arrived, I think. We explored the remaining old city on foot, then caught a taxi to Casa Mateus, the building that adorns the label of the wine we drank too much in our youth. The grounds were closed for siesta (of course), so we consumed some more Mateus while eating lunch at a snack bar across the road.

As we were eating, we browsed the local map we'd found in a bookstore in town. It talked about a Roman sanctuary of Serapis at Panoias, a little way down the road. So after we'd walked around the lovely gardens we had the ticket-taker call a taxi for us and convinced the surprised driver to take us to Panoias. He had the time of his life. Why should he spend the time waiting in his taxi for us do to the tour? He came along, and saw something he'd never seen before. Apparently a Roman official who came from southern Anatolia brought his worship of the Egyptian god Serapis to Portugal when he was appointed governer there. That's what the inscriptions say, but I find it puzzling. The sanctuary was set up for the sacrifice of animals to purify adherents of the rite, culminating in the ritual burial and resurrection of the devotee and a sacrifice of a bull. One odd thing is that I can't find any references to Serapis being a god of death and resurrection. Mithras was, and the sacrifice of a bull was important in Mithraism as the Romans practised it. Another odd thing is that this sanctuary was oriented towards the setting sun on the winter solstice - the day the Mithraists celebrated as the rebirth day of their god. And it looked a lot older than Roman. I think more research is needed.

Anyway, we clambered around the rocks, and so did our taxi driver, and then he showed us around a couple of lovely churches in town (which led to an entry in my other blog). And then we headed back down the mountainside in the little train car. This time we were on the downhill side of the car and could appreciate how steep the drop was from the edge of the tracks. Great scenery!

Some menu items should not be translated

The other day in Lisbon a restaurant's English menu offered us
Vegetables cooked in spit.....3.50

I don't think so.

The next day a charming lunch place in Evora offered
It wakes up eggs with shellfish.....5.00

I wonder if they meant scrambled?

Update from Porto

If this is Thursday it must be Porto. Since we were last heard from we've gone to the farthest southwest corner of Portugal to the largest city in its north. We're still having fun, too.

We made it to the fado restaurant, or at least one our Lisbon hotel recommended that specialized in a folklorico show. There were some fine singers, and a trio: two men who played a bass drum and an accordion (is that the Portuguese national combination of instruments?) and a woman who played tambourine and sang. Occasionally she and the drummer danced as well. It was altogether a most enjoyable show.

The next day we picked up a car and Ron drove us to Evora, an attractive old town east of Lisbon with a Roman temple of Diana right beside the 12th-century cathedral and the former offices of the Inquisition. (We keep encountering disquieting reminders of Christianity's darkest days). That afternoon we explored some megalithic remains: a solitary standing stone, and a field full of dolmens that seemed oriented towards sunrise at the equinox.

We spent the night in Beija at a posada - a government-run high quality inn - in a former convent. It was a huge building, quite attractively made into a hotel and with a fine restaurant. But it had a strange, haunted, sad, cold feeling. I slept well but woke feeling like something had drained my batteries overnight. I wouldn't go there again even though it seems like a good enough hotel.

The next day, Tuesday, we drove to Sagres at the southwest corner of the country, stopping first at Vila Nova de Milfonte on the coast - a very pretty fishing village and summer resort (for the Portuguese, not Europeans). I could have spent days there; we didn't even get to explore the castle. Definitely a place to see.

Sagres is the place Prince Henry the Navigator established a navigation school for his fleet of explorers. The fortress there has a large wind rose laid out on the ground that I think the captains used to help plot their anticipated courses. They may have had Chinese sailing directions for at least the seas around India and Africa and have been translating them into charts they could use in their voyages. Sir Francis Drake raided the place once, I think for the maps - they were worth more than gold at that time.

A little further along the coast is Cape St. Vincent, where the body of St. Vincent the martyr was said to have washed up as it made its escape from his hometown of Zaragossa in Spain. It's the furthest southwest point in Portugal, and the Romans said the sun sank hissing into the sea just beyond it. We watched the sunset later from our balcony in the very comfortable posada in Sagres, but we didn't hear any hissing.

Gotta go now. The wireless connection is becoming intolerably slow and unreliable. To be continued later.

On the Road Again

So much for a peaceful life in Canmore. We're off and travelling again.

At the moment I'm curled up on my bed in the cozy and friendly Hotel Principe, Lisbon, recovering from our third day of seeing the city and environs. I've taken a real liking to Lisbon. I'm prejudiced in favour of the Portuguese, anyway, after getting to know some fine specimens when we lived in Toronto. There are more of the same here.

I suppose I should catch up with what's been happening for the past week first. We left Canmore with our friend Mallory (who will be house-sitting for us when her term at Malaspina University College ends in May) a week ago, taking a day and a bit to get to Nanaimo. There we left our car, picked up some of Begum's stuff to take to Turkey, and (on Monday) tried to catch a plane to Vancouver. No luck. Nanaimo had too much fog for it to land. So off we went to the Duke Pt. ferry and then Vancouver airport, where we caught a later plane to Toronto. Tuesday afternoon we finally got to the home of Elena, Vladimir and Alexei, our son Evan's future in-laws. I think we all wanted to check each other out and see if our children had chosen a good new family. We definitely approve of Evan's choice; Anna's family will look after him extremely well indeed.

Wednesday evening we caught the plane for London. It was a pleasant enough flight, although too short for us to get enough sleep to face the hellhole that's Heathrow Airport with equanimity. We'll pass over those hours of waiting in various lineups and try to pretend they didn't exist.

Finally we were flying into Lisbon. The city makes a good impression from the air - green and clean, old and scenic with lots of new bits too. That first impression seems to have been accurate. The city is a lot like Izmir in many ways, but it's cleaner and looks much more prosperous. The EU has been good to Portugal, I suspect, although wages are still low (€700 a month, we're told). Prices seem low, too, at least for Europe. And the weather has been perfect: 22 at most, and clear with a brilliant blue sky. It helps having the Atlantic Ocean to the west acting as a giant air scrubber.

The first full day - Friday - we took our usual hop on-hop off tour. We find these a helpful way of getting acquainted with a city. We take most of the tour the first time around and get off at the furthest place we think might be interesting. After we've seen that we hop back on and go around again to the next neat sight. We do that as long as the light holds and stagger back home to recover.
So first we stopped off at the huge S. Jeronimo monastery, which now houses an archaeological museum, national library and a whole bunch of other stuff. It still has a functioning church attached, complete with the tomb of Vasco da Gama, the first European to sail around the world (using maps compiled by the Chinese earlier in the 15th century, according to this site.) Across the road was the Discoverers' Monument, celebrating the incredible achievements of the Portuguese in the Age of Exploration. Portuguese is still the 5th most spoken language in the world, and when you look around on the streets of Lisbon you can see why. There are people from all over the world in this city - many from Africa, some from Brazil or parts of Asia, all speaking Portuguese. And they seem to fit in and work together well.

Anyway... where was I? Oh yes, we caught the bus and went back into the centre of town to find the #28 tram, which our book said we mustn't miss. It goes up a steep hill towards the castle through the most ancient part of town (not destroyed by the 1755 earthquake, which wiped out most of the fashionable parts and powerful people of Lisbon and put an end to the glorious age of empire). The tram was crowded and Ron lost his wallet to a pickpocket - but some kind angel had hinted to him that he should take everything out of it except a bit of money, and carry just one credit card separately. So that was not a disaster.

We got out of the tram at the highest part of its trip to take some pictures from a viewpoint, then caught it again, found our way back to the subway, learned how it works, and found our way back to the hotel. When we were somewhat rested we went out in search of a restaurant the desk clerk recommended. Couldn't find that one but ended up in a place that claimed to be "the king of bacalhau (dried codfish)". And that's what we had. Not bad, really - way better than what I've had in Canada, which is salty and tough. This was just really chewy but flavourful.

Yesterday - Saturday - we caught the train out to Sintra, the summer home of Portugal's royalty since at least the 12th century. We poked around the town, explored the palace, and were serenaded twice: once by a drum band, and a second time by a men's singing group. They were both excellent examples of their art form.

Today we headed out quite early, trying to get downtown to catch a walking tour. But I misled us and we missed the subway entrance, so we ended up walking the whole way and getting there an hour late. It was a pleasant walk, though. We ended up catching an old tram car tour that covered much of the same territory we'd seen on Friday but more interestingly. Then we caught a minibus up to the castle, which had been staring down at us the previous couple of days, tempting us to get up there and have a look. It's a very nice castle, probably more than 1000 years old in its oldest bits. You get a fantastic view of Lisbon from its ramparts, and it's nicely restored and maintained - an example of what Izmir could do with its Kale if it had the money. Lisbon's castle is an EU restoration project.

Tonight we're planning on going downtown again to a restaurant in the old part of the city where we can hear fado, a traditional style of Portuguese singing. We'll see. We're both pretty wiped from our day on our feet in the sun. Maybe we'll try the snack bar down the street.