Travel funnies 2012 (3)
Torrey Orton
July 25, 2012
"Trous en formation" said the sign on a Jura highway to Gex
In Melbourne we're accustomed to a sign which says "rough surface" in the most unlikely places, and just as often failing to be present in some pretty rocky ones in the city. This French one serves a purpose somewhat like the "Limbs may fall" of country byways in Victoria, or its mountain cousin "Rocks may fall". And it was exact. There were holes emerging into the road surface, as happens especially in deep frost regions like the Jura. It's really not such a special sign after all, but being French makes it sound so. I enjoy the obvious presented with a patina of culture.
July 16 - fire hydrants in fields sometimes full of snow
Wengen is a place not short of water, or ice or snow, as necessary. Nor is it short of wood. In fact, pretty much everything that provides cover for warmbloods is also of wood in The Alps. This is not surprising. There's quite a bit about still (thanks to energetic conservation amplified by the need to maintain a certain alpine visual aesthetic). So in the undeveloped and/or still cow supporting grounds of many local establishments, there were fire hydrants of varying vintages free standing among the grass and flowers. They must be a wonder in the cold months.
This reflection recalls me to the burning of a neighbouring barn one night around 1953 in our well hydranted New England town. Even if the local firies had gotten to it early (which they didn't because, we later heard, they lost the hydrant wrench in the drive 400 metres from the fire station to the blaze) a hundred-fifty year old cow barn is a fire's delight. Burns brighter and brighter. It would have taken a city's worth of red trucks to make a dent and Lunenburg wasn't a city. Imagine a town full of untreated pine hotels and houses shoulder to shoulder with each other. Not a great fire of London or Chicago but enough for a blaze. By the way, Copenhagen cooked itself twice in the 18th century with the town stripped of wooden buildings by the end of the second round in 1795 (the medieval part in particular).
July 24, 2012 – Copenhagen and cultural differences
So I've been in Copenhagen for almost a day today and I can recommend it, but how highly is the subject of my thoughts, which are stuck in comparative cleanliness across three Germanic cultures (German Switzerland, Berlin and here) with a counterpoint of French for six days (Besancon, Dijon and Beaune and a stopover in Geneva, all traversed by self-drive rather than public transports).
Being a very low grade garden maintainer, I have to acknowledge that what follows may be tainted with projected self-punishment for my pathetic interest in maintenance, backed by an equal indifference in practice. However, I like externals which look kempt. Switzerland is great for kempt. They even have kempt snow on the peaks. The only snow dune I have ever seen (well, since I grew up in Massachusetts that is where the hills lack a bit by comparison, but then I'd never seen a comparison higher than 4000 feet til now) is a perfectly crafted one on the right flank of the Jungfrau, looking from north to south. Once again, my ignorance amplifies my interest.
It was amazing to both of us how scruffy the grounds-keeping was throughout the limited Berlin we saw in three days. Stray weeds poked out of hedges within sight of the Reichstag, road dividers were often uncut or if cut, the fringes were untrimmed. Streets ran to the detritus polluted. Contrast this with the efforts put in by one porter in our Wengen hotel to keep stray geranium petals (of which there were many cuz every window had a geranium jungle hanging off it on every habitation in town it seemed) off the bowling green fineness (imagine a #1 haircut all around) of the little bits of lawn that could be perched on the flats rent into the hillside to support the hotel driveway. He did it twice a day minimum (that's what I saw happen; maybe more times?) with a straw broom. I assume the brooming was doubling as chaser of petals and caresser of grasses. There was backup from a rake once some mass of petals had been achieved. These masses could barely be gathered they were so refined. Only their colour betrayed them.
I can assure you I never saw its equivalent, or even a remote suspicion of such an effort, in the Reichstag front yard. Contrast number two: Copenhagen this morning walking back from the train station at 8:20 AM and seeing a guy easily my age, or worn for his age, holding a 20 litre yellow canister in his left hand and a long hose with the fiery schnozzle of a small dragon in repose in his right.
He blasted with the characteristic blowtorch hissing whoosh any postage stamp sized grassy upstarts he could find between the endless cobblestones of the sidewalk out front of the massive opera building. Probably cleaner in the long run than doing them with Roundup. And quicker too. Roundup decimated greenery fades slowly. Not the thing for civic scrubbing. After another look around town a day later, I guess there's very large hectares of cobbled ways in this town and at the rate he was going re-growth could have started in the scorched earths well before he got to the end. Winter helps, of course.
An appropriately similar effort went into cleaning the nearest canal (also take off point for endless tourist canal trips) of the expectable detritus of so many tourists and cafes this morning. However, the water obstacle surrounding a 16th century earthen-works fort beyond the Royal Palace had not benefitted from weed cleaning of any sort. Maybe because tourists mostly wouldn't walk that far for a gander, though the attraction of the famous Little Mermaid on a rock was 100 meters over the earthworks.
One of the commitments of the French – street cleaning –was on display in Copenhagen today, too, with an equally varied array of functionaries, in addition to blowtorch man, to those in Dijon and Besancon: guys with arm's length grabbers for dropping recoveries, street sweeping machine operators, industrial strength garbage collectors….but still a sense of mild scruffiness, amplified by the fact the every tenth street is under major repairs here.
So back to Berlin. Two thoughts: one, the Berliners have been recovering from 45 years of neglect and it shows in the old east which casts its architectural pall from close onto the Reichstag, and, two, the Germans have a resistance to their own discipline which shows in little disregards for public space of which indifferent grounds-keeping may be one. Another was an at the time startling discovery of ours while swimming in a 19th century pool in Munich 20 years ago. The locals swam everywhere except within the lines, as if they weren't there at all, which they were. We were startled, unprepared and culturally committed to staying on the left, or right, depending on which of us was doing the staying! It made laps a bit chancy.
July 25 – Loos, again
Also not all of my concerns are roses; loos are in the picture again. For example, I paused not at the sharply named "pissoire" on the banks of a local inlet for a leak yesterday. I had already done so an hour before in a public facility at the airport on the way into Copenhagen. While one of two urinals was closed for repairs, the other provided this experience: my contribution was eaten by a blue gloop which rose up out of the urinal drain and consumed it (so it seemed).
The gloop looked oily but enclosed the urine rather than riding on the surface, as oil usually does on water. Hopefully a knowledgeable sewage specialist will point out what was going on there – both the chemistry and the mechanics (how'd the stuff rise up out of the drain to seize the urine, and then retreat back down the drain once all had been seized, so to speak.?). Given that everything within miles here is about 10 feet above the high tide line, the management of sewage must be a delight.
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