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Through Three Lenses - Notes from April Travels

Through Three Lenses - Notes from April Travels

Old May 11th, 2004, 05:43 PM
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Through Three Lenses - Notes from April Travels

Last month my good wife and I had the opportunity to take three weeks and travel to Israel and various places in Western Europe. We saw a lot of beautiful sights, historic buildings; we ate good food and slept in nice hotels. But rather than do a "trip report" per se, I've decided to record some observations and perceptions based on some of the things we heard from people we encountered, rather than praising places that others have described far better than I could. The Duomo is imposing; the Victoria and Albert still gets my vote for best museum in Britain. You've heard it before.

* * *

Our three weeks took us to a few places new to us, but mainly to places we'd been before. That made it possible for us to ditch the guidebooks to some degree, and to observe more closely what people were saying, how they were living (or how it seemed) and to weigh these perceptions against our own presumptions or, in cases where we'd been before, against our memories. I've picked out three parts of the trip that struck me as worthy of comment, representing to me some little glimpses into the world revealed by travel. How do these places stack up to our expectations? What do we know of others' worlds and how do we learn more? So herewith three little stories.

But first a disclaimer: it's presumptuous and not particularly honest to take snippets of experience or perception and then build generalities and whole fabrics of stories around them. It's a journalistic trick, making factoids balloon into theories, then whole realities. Bogus science, inductive rather than deductive reasoning. Travel writing is fertile territory for these sins - an encounter with a snotty waiter in Paris grows in the telling into a blanket indictment of all French waiters, then all Parisians, then the French, then "old Europe." I am not immune to this temptation; you have been warned. So please forgive any hyperbole that follows. Oh, and pomposity, another icky habit.

***

I. Our Israeli Cousins

Israelis love bumper stickers. You see very few bumper stickers in Europe, but in Israel they're everywhere. The last time we visited Israel was in quieter days shortly after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. The lull between storms, it turned out. At that time, some high percentage of cars on the road sported, in addition to the ubiquitous stickers saying the Hebrew equivalent of "keep your distance" (as if), other stickers saying "Shalom, haver," the sad, ambiguous line Bill Clinton spoke at Rabin's funeral. Literally, it meant, "Goodbye, friend," but it also means "Hello, friend," or simply, "Peace, friend."

They were fine words in a time when peace still seemed possible, when good will hadn't yet been obscured by the smoke of bombs and rocket trails. Maybe naïve, but it was uplifting to see people using the word "friend" on their cars - hello or goodbye, or just saying the word, peace. There were other stickers then, saying the word peace, or with outlines of doves or peace symbols.

Now there are none. In traveling around the country we didn't see a single piece of visual evidence of the once-widespread peace movement. Instead, we saw thousands and thousands of flags - on roadside poles, on building facades, and especially on cars, mounted in car-window holders like one sees in the US. The density of national flags was much higher even than what we saw in the US after September 11. The message was clear. Don't tread on me.

Nor did we see any of the distinctive green-and-white car number plates issued by the Palestinian Authority, nor any Jordanian plates like we had seen the last time we visited - at beachside cafés in Tel Aviv, on the roads to the open border crossings between the two neighbors.

My wife's cousins were glad to see us and we them. We visited their home, made appropriate noises over newly arrived grandchildren, went out for meals, took a drive around the Sea of Galilee, where their historic kibbutz is located, schmoozed, visited galleries, ate some more. April in the Galilee makes one appreciate that line about milk and honey: wildflowers, Bougainvillea, dates and bananas on the trees, the stone of the ancient buildings glowing in the spring light.

But when the talk turned to the world, there was a change from the last time. There was a harder edge - not just the comfortable, humorous Israeli cynicism, which was still very much in evidence, but in addition a pessimistic, almost fatalistic, undertone.

On our last visit five years ago, it seemed that the old siege mentality that had sustained the country for fifty years had been hung in the closet like old clothes that had fallen, for now at least, out of fashion, or like trousers that are too big after a diet. Don't throw them out - you may need them again. But it seemed there was optimism in the way people spoke, a lifting of aims and expectations. My wife, who hadn't been on the west bank for over 20 years, said you could see it among the Palestinians most noticeably - commerce flourishing, kids playing, buildings being fixed up, markets packed.

Now it feels like those old clothes are back in fashion, and likely to remain that way for years to come. The new threat of siege is not Iraqi Scuds or Syrian tanks, but kids wearing backpacks at bus stops, young girls walking into Pizza Huts on busy Thursday nights.

One of our cousins (not the kibbutzniks but from an urban branch of the family) spoke of their son's friends - six young soldiers, all school pals - doing their mandatory military service, all dying within days of each other in Gaza. Another cousin, a beautiful and brilliant graduate student, has been unable to secure the financial aid needed to obtain her Ph.D. in Italy, while Arab students in the same program get free rides from the E.U. And a professional colleague we met spoke of Israel's growing problem with illegal immigration, as first young Israelis leave entry-level jobs, replaced by Palestinians who then can't cross the border or the new "fence" to get to work, who in turn are replaced by Thais, who get temporary work permits but then fail to leave the country when their permits expire. These stories were conveyed with a "what are you going to do" tone that sounded fatigued, edgy, resigned, and not just a little bitter.

The sense was, it's not getting better any more: fences and barriers and walls and Israelis blaming other Israelis for lack of vision or resolve or toughness or clarity. Less smiling evident, honestly. I can't call it a malaise as such, and beware my admonition about reading too much into too little. But the sense was that the status quo is lousy and people aren't seeing any lights in tunnels.

But O, the land is beautiful, the walls of Jerusalem the same gold, the sand on the Tel Aviv beaches white, the water blue, the joggers and 20-somethings in the cafes still the handsomest, most vital people we've ever seen. And the street corner falafel, served up by Russians or Yemenis to truck drivers, students, shoppers and dog walkers, with Jordanian radio blaring and CNN in the corner, muted, is still ambrosia.

Peace, friends.
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Old May 11th, 2004, 06:01 PM
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II. Prague for Tea - EasyJetters on the High Street

Our itinerary took us first to London, then to Israel, then back to London so we could switch airports overnight and head out to Rome, where we were to board a cruise ship for a 10-day sail along the Mediterranean coast to Barcelona. Our transatlantic flights were via Heathrow, the hop to Rome on EasyJet from Stansted airport northeast of London. The cost savings on EasyJet over Alitalia (RIP?) or British Air from Heathrow more than justified the hassle of changing airports - £30 each v. £200+ each from LHR.

First a word on Heathrow. Ugh. Next a couple of words on the "Hoppa Bus" serving the airport-area hotels (which we used because of two overnights followed by early morning flights out.) Ugh, ugh.

We had a lot of bags so the idea of using the various ground connections between Heathrow and Stansted (bus/train/tube/train/taxi or bus/train/taxi/train/taxi or bus/bus/taxi or some variant) was nasty. Instead we negotiated with a car service to takes us from one airport hotel to another, price £85 for the 90-minute ride around the lovely M25. I thought that was a hell of a lot, then when I observed the traffic the driver would have to face returning empty, it made much more sense.

So we found ourselves at a "motor inn" (translated, motel) near Stansted around noon, with our flight not till the following dawn. So we got a taxi and went into Bishop's Stortford, the local market town, which was, conveniently, having its market day. We had a good lunch, a better beer, and then went shopping along the street stalls and in the shops on the High Street. Aside from food, the prices in the shops were really high by US standards, but then herself saw a discreet "Sale" note in the window of the Laura Ashley shop and all was lost.

The shops were quite busy, the Laura Ashley shop especially filling rapidly with young mums pushing prams, then around 3 PM being augmented greatly by more mums towing uniform-clad children just out of school. A couple of husbands too were among the towed, one of which joined me in the unofficial waiting area of the shop (a nice leather sofa, price £1100). We chatted; he noted my accent and immediately asked where we were heading to from Stansted (five miles away.) I said Rome, and he nodded. "Yeah, we were there last year." We chatted some more and it became clear that the advent of nearby ultra-cheap flights (Stansted is a main airport for the likes of EasyJet, Ryanair, etc.) was changing his attitudes about travel to Europe, away from what I've always taken to be a slight reluctance on the part of many English to venture too far beyond the white cliffs. Rome, no big deal.

His wife reappeared and we bid farewells, then mine turned up Laura-less (oh too bad) and we moved on to the next opportunity for retail therapy, in this case an optician's. (One thing we've found to be a universal bargain in Europe is designer specs - buy the frames, have your own lenses installed back home.)

Here my chatting was done with one of the shop assistants - a very nice middle-aged lady who looked slightly like Hyacinth Bucket ("Bouquet") but without the toothache voice or pretense.

Soon the same conversation ensued, only this time she started reeling off the places she and her family/pals had visited recently thanks to cheap airfares from the local airport. Paris for the weekend. Majorca. Barcelona. Venice. On a spur she and some friends had decided one morning to see what they could arrange in Prague by dinnertime.

Talk about a revolution in travel behavior. No pre-booking, no passport stamps in most cases, strong pound/euro, plenty of accommodation. If the Israelis were feeling fenced in, these people were feeling the polar opposite. Virtually instant access to anywhere in Europe, at costs less than a family outing to the theatre in London or attending a football match. Beam me to Provence, Scotty.

The predominant accent I heard in Bishop's Stortford was vaguely London east-end (to my ear) and I couldn't help flashing onto Eric Idle's famous riff on Monty Python about English tourists on the Costa Brava - "bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel" - you remember the skit. Well the accent may be the same but the level of sophistication and access is certainly different. Now instead of staying in Britain for bank holiday or even ordinary weekends, these folks are going to Spain or Greece or Sicily - for lunch, it seems. And it's reciprocal - squadrons of Italians weekending in London, Spaniards at the Duomo, gobsmacked Germans goggling at Gaudi. In April, for Pete's sake - unprecedented. With travel this cheap and easy, and with generous European vacation allowances, the situation will only become more dramatic.

If you're seeking evidence of how the 21st Century is redefining the world, here's some. The US once thought of itself as a melting pot (always seemed more like a fruit salad to me, anyway) but take a look at Europe: visas, work permits, currency ripoffs, gone. Multi-lingual ability is assumed, it's a given. Your cell phone works everywhere. There are millions of travelers who feel comfortable in others' countries, who know about the political issues and the social trends, the music, the food, the architecture. Provincialism is vanishing before our eyes. But so might be some pretty important things - cultural distinctiveness, national and ethnic minorities, linguistic variety. Last week when the E.U. was expanded by 40%, there was lots of talk about how would the Latvians manage to communicate with the Maltese, the Slovenes with the Portuguese. The answer is that English, for the most part, or French, will be used by the EU's translators as a "conduit" language - Lithuanian will be translated into English, then English into Italian, or whatever. How long will that system work before the Lithuanian ambassador simply starts speaking in English all the time? Not long, I'll wager.

This, of course, was always the fear about European integration. Well, I can tell you, the emergency card in the EasyJet seat pocket had nothing on it in Estonian. Not a word.
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Old May 11th, 2004, 06:10 PM
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III. Set the Wayback Machine, Sherman - Americans at Sea

We've now been on three cruises, one in the Caribbean, another traveling from Hawaii to Mexico, and now this one from Rome to Barcelona. (We've also been on a fourth, but it was a freighter across the Pacific, with us the only passengers. No climbing walls or art auctions on that one, that's for sure.)

The line we traveled on this time calls itself a "premium" cruise company, meaning, generally, that it's slightly more expensive than the "mass market" lines but not up there with the lines where your champagne wishes and caviar dreams come true all at once. The ship was beautiful, the food excellent, the cabin luxurious, the staff attentive. The passengers were virtually all American, virtually all 50-plus, affluent. There were, among those we spoke to, relatively few who hadn't been to Europe before.

The appeal of cruising to us is threefold - you can see several places in a short time frame that would be hard to get to, or too expensive, on a land-based holiday; second, it's comfortable, convenient, and actually cost-effective compared to comparable accommodations and food on land; and third, because there's just nothing like standing on a balcony looking out at the moonlit sea hissing by. On these scores the cruise was marvelous - relaxing, time to read and look at the horizon, islands and sights unavailable on land, really luxurious. We'd do it again, but not in the immediate future.

The downside to cruising, in our opinion, is that any addiction you might possess is too easy to indulge - food, booze, gambling, narcissism, shopping, sloth. And, most of all, you're insulated from the world - one can easily be lulled into the worst kind of passive tourist behavior, easily see the world through "excursions" off the ship that turn great cities into television shows seen through the bus windows.

This ability to use the ship as a means to distance oneself from the places visited seemed - disturbingly - not a drawback to many of our fellow cruisers, but an advantage. Again, at risk of over-generalizing, we got a strong impression that many of the passengers were using the ship as a platform for making sure their preconceptions or distant memories about a simpler, more picturesque Europe were maintained or confirmed. Never mind the reality, never mind the fact that many of the people ashore were living demonstrably as affluently, as hassled, as cell-phone and e-mail stressed lives as theirs. One of the women on a bus we took from the port into Florence complained loudly (in her standard "authority" tone) that things weren't quaint enough for her. Geez, sorry, lady. Send a note to the European Parliament.

Another asked the Italian guide on the same bus where the Arno river was, despite the fact that she'd been told it was outside the window at least three times. She appeared disappointed when she learned that we weren't going to see the River Po on this excursion. And where's the Tiber? I felt like saying no, the Po isn't on this tour, but we'll get to the Volga in a few minutes.

The Europe offered through the ship's port selection and excursions was tantamount to a Disneyesque world of picture-book villages, happy beret-wearing farmers, yachts bobbing at Portofino, Fendi shops next to Armani, and the Monte Carlo casino. The fact that we docked for a day in Marseille left many of our cruise mates slightly bewildered - what do you do in France's somewhat gritty, second-largest city, when there are no convenient leatherwear outlets?

Now okay, maybe that's all a tad unfair. (No, it's grossly unfair. Sue me.) I don't want to make the majority of passengers out like a bunch of morons (although when the table talk turned to world affairs and politics the ignorance was often thicker than the steaks.) We met a whole lot of very sharp, experienced, seasoned travelers - retired airline pilots, international lawyers - like that. One thing I noted was a very high incidence of alpha females (always the case at our table), which was good to see.

But it was troubling to live in an environment where the only real Europeans that a number of the passengers had any interaction with, aside from tour bus guides and attendants in Florentine shoe shops, were the Polish or Romanian waiters in the ship's dining rooms. It seemed like the cruiseline sort of wanted it that way, so as to maintain the fiction of the almost-Europe being marketed.

The shipboard environment was like a time machine. Afternoon tea with a string quartet. Bingo. Lounge and showroom acts where the most recent song was from Evita and most would have been oldies to Tony Bennett. In the showroom, we heard (coming through the floor of our cabin) what seemed like (but wasn't I hope) nightly renditions of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" accompanied by the ship's orchestra - the ship's Polish orchestra. On the TV in the cabins CNN and the BBC, both piped in off satellite feeds, were going on (and on and on) about the emerging prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, along with in-depth (to exhaustion) coverage of the expansion of the E.U. The ship might as well have switched it off, from what I could gather: people were not interested in reality rearing its ugly head.

It was as if many of the passengers were mimicking the 1950s - "doing" Europe because it was the thing to do. Looking at old buildings and shop windows, uninterested to a scary degree in seeing the real Europe, warts and all, then able to retreat back to a little bit of floating America, complete with soundtrack.

On a walk back to the ship from the town center in Olbia in Sardinia (where the ship had to divert due to high seas preventing anchorage along the much more tourist-friendly, i.e., sanitized, Costa Smeralda) we saw some graffiti on the side of what I think was the town hall. The graffiti comprised a Star of David with the word "Raus" next to it, then, below, "6 milioni pochi." Six million, too few. The paint was old enough to tell me there had been time for its removal, and the size of the message was plenty big to notice.

I asked when we got back to the ship if others had seen it (it was on one of only two streets that led back to the shuttle pickup point, so it had to have been passed by some high percentage of the passengers.) Nope. I thought later about our Israeli cousin, the one who couldn't get financial aid in Italy. I thought about the tightest security we experienced on the whole trip, when we visited the great Synagogue in Florence. Representative of the new Europe? Surely not, but certainly part of the new Europe. It's amazing what you can look at and not see. I did mention it to some fellow passengers who we knew were also Jewish, and their words were predictably concise.

But then it was time for dinner, followed by a sing-along in the lounge. Tibor the magician had missed his connection from Budapest, so the ship's entertainment team had to make do. The casino was doing bang-up business and the shops had a sale on gold by the inch.

Eventually we got to Barcelona and re-entered the Europe of the EasyJetters and traffic jams, and it was splendid.

***
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Old May 11th, 2004, 06:15 PM
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Fascinating, Gardyloo-- Thanks for posting!
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Old May 12th, 2004, 12:44 AM
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Thanks for taking the time to post this thoughtful and interesting reflection on your trip.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 04:00 AM
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Well done, gardyloo.

Thanks for sharing.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 04:25 AM
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Excellent and thoughtful observations, Gardyloo. Thanks!
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Old May 12th, 2004, 04:33 AM
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Gardyloo - love your trip report style with all your impressions and thoughts. Wonderful.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 04:34 AM
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Excellent. Thoughtful. Publishable I think. And thanks for sharing your reflections with us.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 04:50 AM
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Sometimes a vacation is just a vacation. People do need down time now and again.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 05:44 AM
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Now this, THIS is a trip report. Quiet observation and effective translation to the written word is a skill not many posess, and you've done it beautifully. Bravo. I learned more from this than any article in the Times. Thank you.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 06:01 AM
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Wonderful report! Thank you for all the insights - really makes one think about the world situation in 2004. Also, reinforced my thinking about cruises - rather be on land seeing the real Europe - or wherever else I might want to travel.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 06:48 AM
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I agree, it is a splendid report.
THe world is so small anymore, going so fast...
Your insights make me "think" out of my realm (the box). Makes me somewhat melancholy.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 06:58 AM
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Fasicating!!!
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Old May 12th, 2004, 08:47 AM
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ttt - because more people need to read this.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 09:50 AM
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Gardyloo, thanks for the excellent report.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 10:15 AM
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Bravo!!!!!!!!
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Old May 12th, 2004, 10:55 AM
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Gardyloo,
Thanks for one of the more interesting post I've read in quite a while. Congrats! Now.....have you thought about re-posting it in the Cruises forum???
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Old May 12th, 2004, 11:02 AM
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sorry, my typo of the word
fascinating, allows me to top this unusual
post by Gardyloo.
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Old May 12th, 2004, 11:18 AM
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Gardyloo,

Thank you so much for taking the time to post such insightful observations.

There are two topics that when brought up cause my DW to immediately leave the room - " Buying a Big Screen Television" and "Going on a Cruise."

I don't understand the aversion to Big Screen TV, but I am beginning to comprehend her reaction to Going on a Cruise.

JoeG
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