The Family Grows Again

Since the last post we've been putting down roots in Canmore, getting re-established in our condo, joining two choirs, becoming involved in the church (Ron) and Rotary (Ron), landing two jobs (me - at the Canmore museum and at Knit and Caboodle, our local yarn store. We've been wonderfully lazy, just exactly what we wanted to do when we came home. It's great.

Among the delights of the past 5 months were Evan and Anna's wedding in September, his cousin Aimee and Tyler's wedding a couple of weeks later, and their joint second reception in Canmore on Thanksgiving weekend - a chance for the older relatives who couldn't make it to the weddings to celebrate with the newlyweds. We love the new additions to our nuclear and our extended families. I couldn't have chosen the new daughter or nephew any better if I'd done it myself.

Christmas was a delight with all our kids around. We had the second annual mass family turducken dinner on Boxing Day with 25 or so of our closest relatives enjoying a specialty of Canmore cuisine. And now we're setting into the rhythm of a life of hibernation through the rest of the winter.

Somehow the family hasn't seemed complete to me, though. We've had no animals around to complicate our lives for a very long time. So Saturday I went to the Bow Valley SPCA and adopted two elderly cats: Zazu, who's 13 and deaf, and Tazman, 15 and lazy. Taz and Zaz have been together for 10 years or so, and it seemed only right to let them spend their last days together. They're big and fat and loving and domesticated. I had no idea how much easier it was to start off with old cats who know the rules of life in a household. The only complaint I have with them is that Zaz, because he's deaf, sometimes doesn't know how loud he's meowing, and if he suddenly discovers that he's alone he'll start yowling for his buddy Taz. It's a bit startling in the middle of the night.

Future blogs might have more to do with knitting because I seem to be discovering things I never knew I had to learn about this craft I've been enjoying for more than 50 years. I want to write about things like Turkish knitting and how to knit a sock on one circular needle and my newly-invented pattern for a felted jug. Stay tuned.

Home at last

I'm writing this curled up in my comfy chair in Canmore, home at last. A lot has happened since the last post - sorry! I'll summarize our travels quickly now, and probably over the next few weeks tell random stories as i remember them.

I left off as we were sailing out of Stockholm harbour. From there we went to Warnemünde, Germany, the port for Rostock. Several hundred of the passengers went on a day-long tour to Berlin, but we stayed behind and enjoyed exploring this beautiful resort town. It has a long, lovely sandy beach, a scenic lighthouse, and a private museum unlike any I've ever seen before - a collection of souvenirs picked up by an adventurer who has been around the world 42 times. Eclectic and eccentric are two words that occurred to us.

Then off to Århus, Denmark, another lovely smaller place. We took a bus trip to a recreated Viking village, then walked around the city - another place worth spending more than a few hours visiting.

Across the Kattegatt to Oslo, Norway. We could have used a week or two there, but managed to get to the Kon Tiki museum and do a bit of exploring downtown. We cruised back out to the open sea through spectacular Howe Sound (BC)-like scenery, then spent a day crossing the North Sea to Harwich, England. It was odd seeing the occasional oil rig loom out of the mist and rain seeimingly in the middle of nowhere.

We got to Heathrow in plenty of time to catch our plane to Toronto, and didn't even hate the experience of going through security there too much. The evening trip wasn't too bad, and we landed before midnight. I think that's the best timing to minimize jet lag - we got up the next morning at a reasonable hour and were even able to function more or less normally.

A few days spent wandering around southern Ontario visiting dear friends, and then it was time to meet Begüm on her way back to school. We explored Niagara Falls and Toronto with her - it was great having an excuse to be tourists there.

Took the train to Ottawa (sharing a car with the lovely and friendly Luba Goy) and settled into our B&B in preparation for Evan and Anna's wedding. Rachel, Evan and his best man Steve stayed there, too - felt just like home.

The day of the wedding dawned bright and cool, and everything got done in time (except for unlocking the church doors, which was not our problem). And the most lovely wedding in the world happened without a hitch but with lots of joyous tears. Great reception, too. So the kids are truly and properly married, and are now touring South Africa.

The next day we flew to Nanaimo with Begüm and spent a couple of days helping her and Mallory get settled in their apartment. Two days driving across BC, and we were finally home.

We don't have any great plans or aspirations for further travels just now. We need a few months or more to get settled and a figure out where home is. So far the best things about Canmore have been the temperatures below 30C and the mountains - the best ones we've seen so far. Oh joy! What a place to call home!

A moment of high drama

The MS Amsterdam is at the moment on the way from Stockholm to Warnemunde, Germany, so many of its passengers can take an all-day tour to Berlin. But for a while last night it didn't look like we would be leaving.

We'd spent a pleasant day in Stockholm on various tours or shopping - great city; Ron and I had an hour at the Vasa museum built around a 17th-century ship retrieved from the bottom of the harbour.

The Rotterdam had to leave by 4:30 because it takes a long time to get through the network of islands off Stockholm and it has to be done in daylight. So all the tour buses got back in time, everyone was shepherded into the ship and the gangplank went up. And then we heard the announcement: "Would Emily Smith from cabin 1833 please contact the office?" Waited a few minutes; the announcement came again: "Would Emily Smith or anyone in her party please contact the office!" And still we waited. Quarter to five and the captain's pacing in the wheelhouse (I could see him from my perch on the top deck). And then in the distance we see a little taxi racing down the road to the dock. It nearly drags the security guard at the gate along with it. It screeches up to the ship and out jumps a woman with a Swedish accent: "Someone please help us! Please let Mrs. Smith on board! Please help!" Meanwhile the missing Mrs Smith emerges from the taxi and looks rather dazedly about her.

I have no idea what really happened, but from what I was able to piece together I think the Swedish lady found this somewhat elderly and scattered foreigner wandering around lost. Being a good and kind person, as most Swedes I've met are, she found out that the lady was looking for her bus back to the ship and had to be back by 4:30. At this point it was something like 3:45 and the last bus had left. No problem - call a taxi and everything would be all right. But the taxi took 20 minutes to come and there were traffic jams all over Stockholm (built on 16 islands with 53 bridges, some of them closed for repairs). So the dear helper was in a proper panic seeing the gangplank up and the ship nearly untied.

A small gangplank came down and the lost passenger was helped on board, to the cheers of the passengers. And some of us even remembered to shout "Thank you" to the helpful Swedish lady, who was left standing on the dock waving as we sailed away.

We got to Stockholm via Copenhagen, where we caught the ship last Friday, and Tallinn, St. Petersburg and Helsinki. I have never been this far north before, and the short nights and cool air are really wonderful. We enjoyed Tallinn, a life-filled town with a good balance of old and new, history and creativity. St. Petersburg appealed somewhat less - it still feels closed and unfriendly. The eighteenth-century buildings are marvelous, though, and we enjoyed a great Russian song-and-dance show. We spent most of a day at the Hermitage and I was quite disappointed. Our guide just showed us Western European art, and we saw nothing that was up to the standards of what we'd seen at the Louvre or Prado or Vatican. What I'd have liked to see was Russian stuff - artifacts from prehistory or uniquely Russian works. But we saw the Hermitage - one more tick-mark.

Helsinki was as pleasant as Tallinn. We didn't do a ship-organized tour but took a city tram around the town centre. Our best discovery was a Lutheran church built into the rock. What a wonderful feeling it had! A real church. And at Stockmann's department store I finally found the right dress (bright red - I hope that doesn't violate wedding etiquette) for Evan and Anna's wedding - I like Helsinki.

A week from today we'll be back in Canada. Seems hard to believe, but our gypsy life is coming to an end. We're already trying to decide what we'll do next year, but it will be kind of nice to settle down in one place for the winter.

North to south and north again

So here I am lounging in a comfy chair on board the MS Amsterdam - one of the Holland America line's lovely boats - somewhere between St. Petersburg and Helsinki, while Ron uses another hotspot somewhere on the boat. What on earth are we doing here?

We left Izmir for good (or not - who knows?) towards the middle of July. First stop was Warsaw, to catch the last two shows in the Warsaw Chamber Opera's annual Mozart festival: Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni. As far as I'm concerned there's no such thing as too many Magic Flutes, and this one was another completely different and wonderful experience. We sat in the second row of the 150-seat hall and felt like we were right in the middle of it all. DG the next night was less wonderful but still very good.

Then on to Kiev to catch the MS Dniepr Princess for a cruise down the Dniepr to the Black Sea and on to Romania. We'd booked this through the UBC alumni association and found it most pleasant to be among a bunch of alumni from various universities getting a somewhat deeper view of the life and history of the people we were sailing past. The boat was built in East Germany in the communist era and had some eccentricities (whole-bathroom shower, for example) but was seaworthy. The staff was definitely not Holland-America trained; you had to pysically grab a restaurant server to get some coffee in the morning, and the notion that one might want a second cup was not one that had occurred to any of them, but those were not significant problems. It was most interesting seeing Kiev and the site of its Orange Revolution, where the people hoped to have won their democracy back from the oligarchs - whether they have or not remains to be seen. The Ukraine makes Turkey look affluent, but they're trying as hard as they can to get on their feet again. Still, there's been a lot of psychic damage done by war and communism, and it may take another generation or two before people learn again how to really work and create. I wandered through a department store where everything was protected behind glass counters and the clerks didn't seem interested in getting things out for you to buy. (Tried on a sun hat that was too small. Told the clerk it was too small and she said, "Yes, it's too small." End of transaction. Why would she want to find a bigger one for me?) So it's a very different place from Turkey, and it's got a lot further to go to join the developed world I fear.

We cruised down the Dniepr through vast reservoirs behind huge dams, great wetlands for flocks and flocks of waterfowl. Once Kiev's wastes had been diluted the algae blooms disappeared and the water seemed clean and full of fish for most of the distance, except around Dniepropetrovsk. We passed that area in the late evening, sailing through clouds of coal smoke lit by the glow of steel mills and other factories - "dark satanic mills". The next day we visited a Stalin-era industrial town that also celebrated the Cossack heritage with a museum and a show of riding and dancing. The contrast nearly made my brain crack with the shock. The Dniepr delta was another peaceful green place where we visited dachas for traditional meals and admired handicrafts - another contrast with the dirty port city our ship was moored in.

Then across the Black Sea to Sevastopol, a place full of history where the guns of the Crimean war are still warm. We saw the valley of Balaclava ("into the valley of death rode the 500") on our way to the palace of the khan of the Crimean Tatars, where we felt for a moment that we were back home in Turkey. As we were leaving we heard someone saying "Hoş geldiniz" - "Welcome" in Turkish. We instinctively replied "Hoş bulduk" and ended up buying some local baklava in Turkish - the Tatar language is so close to Turkish we had no problem communicating with the lovely old woman selling the stuff. She was quite tickled to be dealing with a couple of Canadians in her own language.

From Sevastopol we also toured Yalta and the summer palace of the Romanovs, where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met towards the end of WW II. The building reeked with history - you could almost believe Nicholas and Alexandra and their kids had just left the upstairs room, and the rooms downstairs still seemed to smell of Churchill's cigars. Beautiful views of the sea, too, both from that place and from the road all along the coast.

Back across the black sea after that to the mouth of the Danube in Romania. If the Ukraine made Turkey look modern and developed, Romania makes it look as rich as Las Vegas. Another country with a long, long way to go - I can't believe the EU could accept Romania ahead of Turkey. There's still a feeling about the place that makes me want to check for bugs and spies and watch what I say in public. I guess there are still a few ghosts around. We had a boat trip through part of the Danube delta, another bird-filled place if you didn't mind the piles of garbage. And then off to Bucharest, which still feels a little like Paris east even after Ceauşescu demolished a large area of elegant old buildings for his horrendously huge People's Palace (the second-biggest building in the world after the Pentagon). We had a look at the place and left feeling the Romanians would go bankrupt trying to heat the place, let alone maintaining it.

Anyway, it was a worthwhile trip and I'm glad we took it. We'll probably try another alumni tour sometime.

Ooops - out of battery. More tommorow, with any luck

Alive and well in Sebastopol

We have 10 minutes at the post office internet facility in Sebastopol - just long enough to say we still exist and we're having a great time on a cruise down the Dniepr River from Kiev to the Black Sea. Last night was a little bumpy - we were crossing a chunk of the Black Sea just as a major weather front seemed to be going through with lots of flashing and banging. Only complaint with the cruise so far: no contact with the outside world. I have no idea what's going on out there or even if there is a world outside. I assume since the internet still seems to be functioning there is someone alive in North America. I'm going to use the remaining few minutes to try to catch up on the news. More later.

It's not the humidity, it's the heat

I missed a wonderful photo-op yesterday. Both of us went to bed with socks on - wet socks, with a fan blowing over them. The idea, from an Australian, was that the socks would cool our feet and thus the rest of us as the water evaporated, and the evaporating water would also cool the air blowing over us.

It seemed to work for Ron. He slept much longer than usual, even after his socks dried. But I couldn't help feeling that my feet were soaking in clammy socks and I'd get dishpan toes.

Extreme measures have become necessary. In the last few days - and for the next week at least - forecast high temperatures have been at least 40C. According to my portable indoor-outdoor max/min thermometer/humidity gauge 39.9 has been the maximum, but that's hot enough. And during the night it's stayed around 30.

But the humidity has been less than we experience in midwinter in Canmore, where everything dries out including my skin. The readings on my little instrument here range from 25% to "LO" - below 20%. That's dry. It's also very nice when there's a bit of wind; sweating works. But when there's no wind it's just plain hot here.

The weather in Turkey has been just as crazy this year as it has been everywhere else in the world. Last winter, the rainy season, there was almost no rain, causing a lot of worries about the water supply. There's been a very little rain since we arrived - again surprising the locals, who assume there will be none after the end of March - but not enough to do any good. The trees and garden plants look very droopy indeed, and there's a watering ban. Even so, the water goes off in our apartment from time to time, quite unpredictably. We're back to keeping full bottles of water around so we can flush the toilet if necessary.

It's interesting living in Turkey, that's for sure. And I for one am a firm believer in climate change.

Another day, another language

That's the way it felt as our Central European jaunt wound up. We moved on from Poland to the High Tatras mountains in Slovakia the day after my last post - by bus and taxi! We arrived at the town on the Polish side of the Tatras just 15 minutes after the last bus to the Slovakian side. There was no train, so we had two choices: walk or taxi. It was only 20 km, the taxi fare was quite reasonable, so that's what we did.

Interesting trip, really. I don't know if the driver deliberately chose back roads or if there really are no main roads from Poland into Slovakia. But it felt like he was giving us a tour of some truly scenic countryside. He spoke no English and our Polish was limited to hello, yes, no, and thank you, but when I asked him if he spoke Russian (in Russian) he gave us to understand that thanks to Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II he didn't have to speak that @#%#@$% language any more and he wasn't going to, so there. And then he carried on a cheerful and friendly-sounding description of what we were seeing - in Polish.

When we got to our Slovakian town he asked for directions to our hotel in what I'm sure was Polish. But later when we tried out our extensive Polish vocabulary on the locals they either laughed or tried to teach us the proper Slovakian words. What a difference 20 km can make.

A couple of days later when we took the train from Slovakia to Eger in Hungary (home of Egri Bikaver and other fine wines) we had the same sort of experience. Cross the border and suddenly all the other people on the train are speaking Hungarian. And yet around the border they must be able to make themselves understood to their neighbours.

In Slovakia we didn't meet many people who spoke useful amounts of English. My smattering of German was quite essential at times - most tourists seem to come from Germany. We thought the scenery was lovely, but the area really wasn't ready for large-scale tourism yet.

Hungary is quite a different story. Even in Eger, which is quite a small town, many people spoke good English. The restaurants were excellent - and cheap: $Can 30 for a fine dinner for the two of us complete with wine. Clothing and shoes seemed to cost about half Canadian prices, two-thirds Turkish prices. Great scenery, lots of history - I think Hungary is my favourite place on this trip.

Budapest was more expensive but no less interesting and worth visiting. It's quite exciting watching the restoration work going on in the historic centre of the city. The country, like the rest of the former Communist-bloc countries, is still recovering from the dark years between 1945 and 1989. Hungary seems to have more to recover from; the memory of the 1956 revolution is still fresh in people's minds, just like the bullet holes in the walls across the street from the parliament buildings. In the areas that are being restored it feels like decades of pain and corruption are being washed from the walls along with the grime. And the result: Budapest is probably the most beautiful city we've seen in Europe so far. Well worth a visit.

And now we're home in Izmir. We arrived just as they started tearing up the street again to run natural gas lines into the buildings (just over a month ago they laid the pipes in the street). On of the good things about our area is that the bedrock is right below the surface so the buildings aren't bothered much by earthquakes. But that means that any excavation work involves jackhammers. And with the weather so hot just now (high 30's) they like to start as early as possible. A jackhammer under your bedroom window sure beats an alarm clock when it comes to getting your attention. And now the beautifully rebuilt steps into our courtyard from the street that seemed to get done last winter while we were away have turned into pieces of rubble again.

I guess life in Izmir has been like this for at least the last 4000 years. I wonder what sort of public works got done in Homer's time?

Ten days or so until we have to get packed and out of here. Some things I won't miss.