Travel funnies 2014 – Athens

Torrey Orton

June 29, 2014

I wasn’t really looking forward to Athens, just as I hadn’t been to Istanbul two years ago and Budapest one. Istanbul was a great experience and Budapest instructive, so how could anything fail?! Athens certainly didn’t, and for the same reasons as the other two. I had a lot of history with it and a lot I didn’t know that the visit amplified powerfully.

The city of hills, to my surprise…

The first striking thing about Athens is that it sits in a valley surround on four sides by mountains of 1000 metres or so, with a vaguely Australian look to them – sparsely clothed in greenery of fading intensities. This similarity of flora has been recently intensified by bush fire damage. The streets of Athens carry a fair load of imported Australian trees, including some pollarded and responding with dense pompoms of new growth up and down the trunks.

The second is that Athens looks mostly to have been built in the last 100 years or so, to the European standard of six stories height with an appropriate allowance of balconies for a Mediterranean setting. I sort of knew what the building style was coming from guidebooks and such, but the promotional photos of down town archaeological wonders missed the large scale surroundings as photos mostly due, unless they are doing surroundings in which case the focus on highlights declines…you can’t see the birds for the trees and so on. But eyes can see both, just not at the same moment.

Over it, at a nearer height looms four hills (I’m told by a reliable Greek source that for the Greek army anything under 1000 metres is a hill and over that is a mountain) of great and minor renown: the Filopappos, Areopagos (site of Acropolis), Lykivittos (site of one small Orthodox church) and Strefi hills. The first three came imposingly into view as the light of midsummer faded into a pinkish afterglow on the back dropping mountains and the lights were turned on each of them. All this looking was conducted from a setting too Istanbul to not remark: the top floor drinks and dining establishment with open terraces to three quarters of the view provided by the eponymously named “New Hotel”, recent progeny of the New Athens Hotel collaboration with a focus on making new out of old without offending either. Not a bad effort in my view. A similar set of stage offerings is available on the edge of the plaza holding the Hagia Sophia and The Blue Mosque at a distance from each other in Istanbul.

Sprinkled among the recognisably modern Athens is a guidebook’s load of historical interests, but often invisible without the book, unlike Rome, or Paris, or London, or choose your preferred great city. There the history is almost always present, dominating that present. In this sense Athens is neither great nor grand, though it sustains the physical remnants of one of the great grandeurs of humanity – classical Greek civilization. New York in this sense is more like Athens than it is anything European. It has mostly been built in the last 100-150 years, with the last 125 (?) pre-dominant. And it expresses the great though the disputably grand essence of the American contribution to civilisation, whose physical derivatives now lurk in all sorts of newer places: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chicago, Singapore, Dubai, KL…

The Agora and now…resilience for lunch and dinner

We ‘did’ the Agora briefly a day ago…long enough to have it clearly established that the place has spent more time in the hands of marauders and mongrels than Greek ones, and that it often in its hay days 2000 years ago and especially the 500 before that was beset by destructive assaults including from within Greek ranks themselves as the Spartans and Athenians tested their respective mettles from near distances. And the Macedonians loomed in the near horizon (remember Philip, father of Alexander). Only standing in the middle of the repeatedly destroyed, rebuilt and re-destroyed foundations of classical Greek civilisation did I notice how uncertain the unintended project of democratisation (founded in theatre and philosophy, strangely to us now) actually was at the time. It would have been prime ground for the fear and trembling driven by conflict, but instead it was ground for starting again out of cultural foundations much stronger than trembling could set back. The cultural fundament was proven perhaps by the fires which threatened it.

It might be useful to figure this relationship out – the one between deeply conflicted, fear inducing socio-political environments and successful psycho-social building. We are in the grip of such times now it seems with a number of shared characteristics, notably the conflicted cultural/political models on offer. The Classical Greek period was characterised by two highly opposed models: the Athenian and the Spartan. The contest between them was eventually ironed out in Athens favour for a while, and then the Romans arrived changing the game for everyone as we now say. That couldn’t have been predicted, any more than the arrival of the BRICs on the world stage could have been predicted 20 years ago??

While the socio-political outcomes of the Classical Greek era were fragmented, the underpinning effects of the Greek dominance is still with us. This is the definition of resilience, not some act of individual struggle to move on or over or something usually involving a high level of denial of what’s actually happening. The fact that Athens did not exist as a substantial human habitation as recently as 150 years ago, at least, gives me some idea of how far off being Greek was from its famous history. The fact that the Greeks have been multiply invaded and subsumed in other’s dominion over the subsequent 1800 years means that they have spent most of their ethnic existence as a non-state.

In fact, two guides in our experience of Athens independently made the point that ‘Greek’ is not a Greek name; it’s Roman, with an insulting implication. Preferred by locals of certain prideful sorts is Hellas for the ethnicity and Hellenic Republic for the political entity. Strangely, the Chinese have for long called Greece by a name very close to the preferred one!!

Finally, on these ethnic integrity matters, one consistent feature of the Athenian offering to humanity was education. Schools of philosophy, governance and so on were available up into the pre-Christian era, and people came from all around to be schooled, as they latter hung out in the palaces of Islam when the light of Greco-Roman civilisation had faded and the renaissance was not  yet a word.

Churches nowhere to be seen…

Having just come from three weeks in France it should have been hard to miss that the skyline of Athens is almost totally absent any religious architecture. No village in France fails to be announced from afar by its church tower, even the most modest Romanesque relics. In Athens the Byzantine relics and their more modern replicas are here but very quietly so, their reddish domes just peeking out here and there, and never above the average 6 story roofline mentioned earlier. Another contributor, by their absence, to the strange timeless modernity of the visual landscape of the city. I did not notice this startling fact until a couple of days on the ground here.

A sea of housing, or is it a carpet?

One effect of this visual uniformity when viewing the city from even the small 7^th floor height of our hotel roof, is the sense of the city rolling smoothly up the surrounding hills, the distinctive whitish builtness of the view slowly transforming into an undifferentiated carpet of white, or surge of shore-side foam as the distance of the view increases. The only place I can recall a similar but not remotely equal sensation is some parts of San Francisco where thousands of standard issue two story wood frame houses (the ones in the Pete Seeger song?) have been built on hillsides…can’t remember the district, but can see the impression. Uniformity folds the individuation of the components (each house a family) into something else shaped by the site.

There has to be a loo story here or it won’t be funnies

And there is: the New Hotel has the biggest loos I’ve ever seen or sat on, giving concrete sense to Montaigne’s claim that the highest throne most of us will ever occupy is when we are sitting on our asses (or was it: we all sit on the throne of our asses, no matter our elevation in the world?).

And while I’m at it, the shower here is a face-to-face double act: two large overhead bronzed roses fired by the same feed we initially struggled with in Mont Dore three weeks ago. Now mastered!! The shower act is separated from the loo by opaque glass doors and the whole is separated from the hand basin by another opaque divider leaving that part of the bathroom actually in the bed room with a sort of peek a boo access to each other and shared lighting. Weird.

Finally, I had a phone call on the loo experience after all these years (going back to the Friendship Hotel in Guangzhou at the end of our first China visit in 1979 where I first encountered a loo with a phone extension in it!). The wakeup call we had asked for arrived as I was on the throne.

Another MacaBucks’ invasion…saccharining the world

Everywhere in our trip – that is France and Greece – we’ve been mildly but persistently surrounded by unbroken covers of American pop classics from the last 50 years, performed mostly by unknown artists with arrangements that take the energy and punch out of the originals, and all in English. What’s happening here? My second thought was that it’s another version of the American commercial practice of persistently feed them shit and make it taste like sugar and salt and they’ll soon only recognise that as food – as people do in the US thanks to decades of precisely that marketing strategy. My first thought was that somebody’s done a sales job of packaged background (remember Muzak?) noise which captured a key distributor and the rest is history, like Big Mac and Starbucks and other coals to Newcastle stories that constitute business success en large, leading right back to my second thought above.

A place in trouble…the empty shops test

On Bridge Road, Richmond, I count with indifferent precision the number of shops empty of retail adventure. These seem quite numerous and the fact fits the underlying sense of unease in our market. In Piraeus, the port of Athens since its martial peak, long since declined, the empty shops on the main drag between the ferry port and the appurtenances of the rich at Marina Zea, seemed more numerous than the active ones. This fact was amplified by the general sense of disrepair in the streets…broken curbs, failing surfaces…normal infrastructure maintenance failings. Much of this impression was within 2 minutes and eyesight distance of the mega-rich yacht parking lots of Marina Zea and its larger neighbour Pasalimani, and just a hundred metres up the hill from them shops of standard issue luxury goods occupy well-tended street scapes briefly, running down in less than a block into shopfronts whose decorative style can safely be called distressed.

A cab driver who took us on a short sightseeing trip ending in lunch back in Piraeus, but at a truly seaside, and truly Greek, spot noted that he is now working 15 hours a day for what he made in 9 before the economy imploded 7 years ago, and that his three tertiary educated children cannot find jobs in their respective specialisations (or anything else for that matter).

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2014 – Dordogne and Bordeaux, France

Torrey Orton

June 21, 2014

 

What’s a brand, really?

 

Arriving on the outskirts of the greatest by price/volume wine region in the world - Bordeaux, and specifically St Emilion - I realised that this is what ‘brand’ means. Anything which can have the brand attached legitimately to it has value, no matter what the scale. The scale can mean a few hundred square meters here and there along the road between houses, or, in towns, spaces which elsewhere would be an undeveloped vacant lot or a sign of local decline, here have vines of manicured looks. They are there because they are Bordeaux vines, and some Grand Cru to boot.

 

Think acquiring the brand of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by taking an address in Cambridge (Mass. that is!) for your start-up private tertiary education establishment. There’s an MIT simulacra in Melbourne, branded MIT. This does work for foreigners needing only a brand label to attach to job apps for positions in countries and companies where Cambridge is as common as Villeneuve or Maisonneuf are in France – namely, every town has one of each of these nearby. But everyone knows they are a place name and not a quality drop, whereas the title ‘MIT’ has recognition value way beyond its place in the daily experience of people in, say, Sri Lanka. You won’t get the branded MIT experience or learning in the simulacra, either.

 

Road works, again…

 

I’ve long been a fan of those “Rough Surface” signs all around Melbourne, often signalling to no obvious effect. That is, attending to the expected distortion of our travel experience yields a nil result. The ‘rough’ fails to put in a perceptible appearance. So, too, in France there’s a nanny state competition already mentioned re: limbs and rocks that may fall. In addition there’s the competing duo of “Chaussees deformees” and “Trous en formation”, which roughly mean there’s a bump ahead whose origin may either be lack of attention to weather effects (the said “trous” arising from freezing subsurface water in winter which creates surface bubbles that break down into holes as things warm up) or be a direct effect of intentional deformation of the road surface to improve it. I particularly like the implication that the trous are the result of some naturally productive (en formation) process, while the rough surface of the “Chaussees deformees” are the real effect of efforts to improve things? Nice one.

 

Then there was Freud again…

 

We were being lined up by a waiter for ordering from a flash menu, when he questioned our respective holdings of allergies, since many local, wholly bio and only slightly distressed by preparation treatments (cooking) components were included in the offerings and …suddenly, he was hit with an attack of the sneezes in a setting (overlooking St Emilion township from a roof top terrace) he’s been working for the last weeks with no clear sources for sneezes in the environment…I fell about laughing which he joined easily, but somewhat less fully than my giving over to the moment…BTW, none of us could come up with an allergy to warn the chef about.

 

Jardins for a moment…

 

…we’ve seen a few in the last few days. About four close up in varying degrees of intensity ranging from the very slight Jardins de Sardy in the back blocks 15 ks. east of St Emilion to the extremely rigorous, classical French style a few days before. The others had tended towards the classical with variations for scale, age, and rehabilitation from original plantings and so on. All had an age of a couple of hundred years as a starting place.

 

What struck me viewing the Jardins de Sardy – a somewhat cobbled together anglo-italian melange, with water features of substance and ingenuity, but altogether only about ten hectares of coverage before folding naturally into pasturage - was how embracing the presentation was, containing many specimens of flowering and towering and climbing and crawling vegetation, any one of which might reach out to attract my attention (noticed because this is what was happening at the time). A low demand and high opportunity experience.

 

What we had faced at Eyrignac Manor Garden at Salignac- Eyvigues, Perigord (Dordogne valley) was the reverse: high visual demand and little choice opportunity except to turn away from the demand. The unrelieved designed views required visual submission through their very consistency, formality and persistence in the visual space of the present moment. Most powerfully this effect was achieved by their justifiably acclaimed hornbeam based planting, rigorously sculpted over a hectare or so, with maintenance requirements of monthly hand clippings of 42,000 square meters of shaped facades as the display placards announced with equally imposing formality and precision.

 

What it’s all about is the unnatural, of course, I just realised in a noddingly reflective moment. Plants don’t grow in regular, clipped forms except under duress. So my amazed shock at the achievements of classical topiary is expressing a perceived impossible forced into its boundaries but unremitting human attention…that which only can be supplied by wealth.

 

There is something off-putting in this visual demand which is perhaps somewhat the experience I was having in Paris a few weeks ago. Where everything is designed, everything is predictable and so, intrinsically boring, or reassuring if you have that feeling arise from certainty. I obviously tend to the former, increased by my inclination to see things slightly from a skewed perspective in order to bring peripheral vision to bear on my world… the vision which is highly geared to threats, disturbances, in brief to pre-empting the unexpected.

 

And here comes Freud again, again…

 

Often, if someone is lecturing me about something (which I accept by remaining present to the lecture, or may have requested it in the first place), I will attend to it by not appearing to listen, by letting it flow by, especially if the information novelty is high. With the gardens of more natural pretence, I look at them as I do a forest or a mountain range – a surveying, sweeping look at the whole, seeking the whole? I don’t know, but the perceptual effort seems on the edge of the unconscious and cannot be forced. It can only be allowed, which requires not trying to see, in a way. This is of a kind with insight, intuition, problem-solving…which just comes and cannot be forced.

 

And so, it is not surprising that I only noticed the gazpacho on the menu board of the fourth restaurant we checked out last night, having been disappointed two nights before by its allure on another establishment’s hoarding which we were then denied, once having chosen to eat there on the basis of that allure, by the sad message that it was off, not on at all. I didn’t even know I was looking for it this time and there it was and it was on and it was good, though not a gazpacho we had ever had before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2014 – Le Mont-Dore, Massif Central, Auvergne, France

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2014

The cuckoo and the cow bell called to us…

Travel funnies* – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Le Mont-Dore in the Massif Central of the Auvergne, where rises the Dordogne River in the Puy de Sancy. We were here for the first time in 1993, so the return is long awaited, though not consciously so over the intervening years before our deciding this revisit.

 

The cuckoo and the cowbell called to us as we were climbing through the forest which clothes the steep slope of the Capuchin at the end of the funicular ride from Mont-Dore to its foot around 1200 metres up…a slightest semblance of the cuckoo which I thought at first was my wishing it to be there as it had been 20 years ago when I heard the first cuckoo in my life in this place. As is often so, I did not then recognise that what it was, was it: a cuckoo. By the time we had emerged from the forested rise at the tree line, the cuckoo was undeniably itself, not my aural phantasm.

The cow bell on the other hand was a decidedly unproven reality and remained agreed so between us until we started our return an hour later. At which point some 100 metres back down the path, I heard the plangent ping of the Reine de la Troupeau, at first a solo note and then the burst of them which means the Reine is moving and munching at the same time. She can sound like a herd when in high move and munch mode. Apart from the joy of a tone recovered, there was the reassurance that not all location has been subsumed by GPS plugins to every being with a bloodstream**.

And the violas and strawberries flowered at us

Being early summer, many of the trees were still just coming into leaf and the earliest ground flowers were about in abandon. I had forgotten strawberries, the wild ones which give the cultivated types we’re accustomed to their deserved repute mostly experienced in its absence in the Coles or Casino pretenders. Jane pointed them out in the midst of other small-flowered upland delicates. Way too early for consumption…and I’m wondering that I forgot them as an opportunity of this trip, which of course they cannot be because the season is too late or dry or something.

I noticed today on another hillside that I have much too good an eye for the small virtues of nature – the obscure bloom or unexpected one in a certain microclimate – to have never cared for bucolic poetry or music, though as I thought it I remembered that there’s a particular poem about the humble bumblebee whose provenance I cannot recall yet it is with me in some vaguely accessible memory recess…strange ways, the mind. A 19^th century English poet? But then, I didn’t know what poetry was verbal music) until I read Gerard Manley Hopkins aged around 20 as an undergraduate. No teacher bothered to mention it. Since when was iambic pentameter music??? Any more than the number one was a convenient fiction of mathematics?

 And a field of daffodils…

…filled the plain of the grassed slopes the cows were yet to munch…striking little natural daffs more delicate than the garden prepared varieties I’m used to at home, yet still briefly, leading me to wonder aloud where the peasants went who had set them out so numerously and successfully as city workers had been doing in soaring numbers in the grounds of Versailles a week ago…leaving trails of little forcing boxes around the place. Nature beats a worker most times in the beauty game.

But the hotel room engineering has a weird hanging space…

At last a traditional funny! The Hotel du Parc in Mont Dore has been recently renovated to good effect, leading the space to bed ratio and bath room swinging a wet towel ratio to desirable levels, but as seen elsewhere in French renovations there’s a glitch. There’s a built-in robe with a foot’s worth of long hanging space – enough for three shirts, a jacket or so and a couple of trousers.

 Now someone created a short-drop hanging space good for hanging pressed shirts and similar, but not trousers or long skirts; neck to belly hanging space. However, whoever did the measures on this had early adolescent sizing in mind, if anything, and so a serious shortage of adult hanging space. I suspect it wasn’t even measured other than to divide the space equally into four levels for some reason of construction simplicity rather than customer need fulfilment. Well, it obviously met the needs of the hotel chain purchasing division’s need for the renovation at best price or whatever, but the end-user?

And the shower starts in reverse…

Discovering new ways to mix cold and warm water in taps is probably one of the most useless endeavours of the plumbing engineer fraternity and here we had another variant which stumped us for 15 minutes. Intuitive it wasn’t. We couldn’t get anything from it for a while, not merely just cold or hot. Once in hand, it was obvious as the newly disclosed often is, but also purposeless. What’s the added value, as the econometricians like to wonder?

 Expectations and experience revisited…

As in Paris, Mont-Dore started out a slight disappointment for me, it never having a hope of measuring up to Alps or Pyrenees, its top most reach being the mere 1889 metres of the Puy de Sancy. But as the days have rolled by and we’ve patrolled the region with persistence the pleasures of very long views over totally green landscapes, rolling up and down many hundreds of metres never failed the danger of repetition …rather gained from it as the same sights were viewed from many perspectives and in many lights, occasionally seasoned by the soft shadows of emerging thunderheads (which threatened but never performed up to their promise, fortunately.)

And we drank about four different local wines we’d never heard of (wines of Auvergne, huh?). Between our traditional port-a-bottle approach to walking lunches for years in Europe and numerous dinners, we never had a bad one and always had viable ones for about 15 Euro or less across the selections, backed by true local delicacies in the sausage and cheese domains supported by bread of reliable consistency.

 The black shower and wash basin material

Not at all funny – amazing! It wasn’t until my third shower that I realised the slightly soft, ambient temperature-neutral material under me was also totally slip proof … as good as slip proof boat shoes of which I have a couple pair. At my age a slip is as good as a broken something which may take months to recover from. Thanks water proof room engineers. I may refloor a bathroom for safety’s sake.

*I am realising that the purpose of Funnies is to describe various arising realities in my life in concrete ways that render them truly for me and maybe so for others. Enjoy, as our culture challenges us to do.

 

**It just occurs to me that probably I can be tracked by my pacemaker if I’m in the right company. I know I can feel its speed up response to an electromagnetic source too near to its hiding place in my shoulder.

Travel funnies 2014 - Paris

Torrey Orton

June 8, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Paris which I am visiting for the first time in 5 years or so and with the advance knowledge of recovering 100 pgs. of stuff I wrote in 1972 during the last four months of our 16 month tenure here.

However this expectation was skewered by a repeat of the Charles De Gaulle airport record holding performance in the race for slowest luggage delivery in most incompetently designed baggage carousel. They didn’t get as high as the previous 1 hour wait 15 years ago, but it was 45 minutes including trying to get through the crowd squeezed in by two carousels opposing each other across a 50 metre space handling 450 folks off the full A380 we had arrived on from Dubai.

This had been preceded by a definitely record breaking taxi of 29 minutes from touch down to arrival gate, none of which was spent waiting for others to get out of the way as happens at JFK in New York with regularity. We had the Grand Tour of the airport as far as I could tell…all over the place to get to the arrival from what appeared to be behind it!

Dog drenching disgrace

One of these historical knowledges was the great Parisian dog drenching disgrace. To quote a 41 year old perception:

“Where else in the world can a dog piss on so much history with so little effort? Paris - a city of great stone losing its nature under the impact of innumerable streams of piss. Paris – the animals’ pissing post. Paris – city of sidewalks paved in dog shit….Impression of a city with an unending wealth of little yellow springs …”

So I walked up (from the Seine) to our old stamping grounds in 117, Rue du Cherche Midi this morning (June 2) and found the sidewalks paved in old dog turds with a sprinkling of recent contributions and drying rivulets of piss running off the 17^th to 19^th century 6 story apartment buildings, much as 40 years ago. Pleasantly enough I tried a local croissant just from the oven and found it typical of the genre in the best sense of both words. And our old café – Le Chien Qui Fume – was still there on the corner of the Boulevard de Montparnasse and Cherche Midi but the neighbouring once best patisserie (“artisanale” variety) has declined into banality. On the other hand, much of the length of the Cherche Midi has been transformed into high end boutiques, in no obvious way impeded by the dog doings, and nor contributing to their cleaning up. The same is the case at Versailles and the more pretentious reaches of the Boulevard St. Germain, of which more later.

Aux Deux Garcons

Last night we revisited a favoured eatery known until recently as Aux Fins Gourmets. This was our favourite not-famous Parisian eatery from back in the days when a Fr750/month salary was totally consumed by rent (6^th floor walk-up at Cherche Midi glorified by having both a loo and shower within).  Much later that year (’72) we discovered that 750Fr was the legislated salary for all foreign contract teachers at the time, which just happened to be the salary of the lowest paid workers on the Renault production line with the marvellously spun name of ouvriers specialise.

 The other Fr 750, provided by whoever was not paying the rent, was eats, cigs, papers and the occasional trip to Chez Hamadi for grilled chops and polenta at about 6.5Fr a head. Aux Fins Gourmets brought us into stratospheric reaches of 25+Euro dishes and similar priced wine (for balance’s sake, the wine we regularly drank was max. 2.5 Fr at which rate you just got a miniscule vdqs notification, and a glass bottle (or was that VOC – vin d’origine controlee? It’s been a while.). Doing this review reminds me that one of the skills in those days for drinkers of local plonk was to check for the notification of Algerian wine being used to get more mileage out of French labels (focussed on the 1Fr a litre wine market which was sustained by workers’ 1 litre a day, mostly at lunch, wine consumption in plastic bottles, so claimed an article in Le Nouvel Observateur at the time).

The Garcons of the name did a good job, but didn’t have cassoulet on - wrong season! Nor the remarkable collection of 50plus year old Armagnacs, each hand bottled, etc. Nor the overall uppermid priceyness of the precursors…which allowed an investment in a very credible Graves of recent vintage.

 Homeless Paris

Café Flore and Les Deux Magots, two of the flashiest coffee spots on the Boulevard Saint Germain were home to a homeless family (mum, dad and at least two kids, looking pre-school ) sleeping up against the Flore street awnings still at 6:45am when I walked by looking for a quiet side street to conduct some phone business with home. A small variety of clochards were wandering around my walk path the next day, leavened by a guy my age making way on a child’s mini-scooter. Not something I’ve seen in Melbourne.

 Paris unknown, and yet not

We both noticed in the first three days here that it looks and feels different from ever before and that this was an effect of the great French uniformity, the Napoleonic achievement of integrating the late medieval with the 19th century and a set of regulations which have kept the proportions that way (6 stories, etc.) and the facades indistinguishable, mostly. This ruler over every structure is then amplified by the sandy colour of the local stone and concrete look-a-likes. We have a fourth floor view up the Rue Des Saints Peres which displays the look-a-likeness of this area and contrasts it with one of the glaring modernist events of the last hundred years in old Paris – the Tour Montparnasse in its grey, near blackness of 50+ stories on the horizon, overwhelming in its confirmation that the anything at a right price part of capitalism doesn’t always win. Montparnasse is a show off. This uniformity occurs in every town of any historical substance which is part of the greatness of the country. Go anywhere and see Paris in miniature.

 I’ll take the historical over the modernist most days, but for once I am appreciating that the historical was often a bit colourless. Unless, you were among the great Louisian kings who produced the wondrous Versailles over a few hundred years and went bananas for colour on the interiors, at least the regal ones. Reminded me more of a baroque cathedral but for the bed rooms. Not a presentation I’ve ever liked but the expense is commanding.

 

How’s your day been…

There we were at door opening time (10am sharp) of Sephora on the Champs Elysees accompanied by 5 minutes of clapping and twerking or something to a noisy piece of pop by all the staff (around 25 I’d guess). After 5 minutes to find a particular brand of perfume we ambled up to the cashier, presented the item and as the cashier was turning on all systems I heard “How’s your day been…” in French, which I roughly understood, though not quickly enough not to be taken for foreign. As I seldom am, I was struck dumb that for all their linguistic preciousness (not an unworthy pre-occupation), cash and brand had deprived the staff of their standard French manners and replaced them with the faux intimacy of the Anglo world. I want to say “pathetic” but I so often encounter occasions when that seems appropriate I’m no longer sure of expressing anything by it other than my own irritated wonder.

 

Limbs may fall and such

Another piece of formulaic public language is that of warnings against this or that danger – usually the stuff of which a lawsuit can be made, or has been often enough to warrant the printing required to pre-empt suits of not warning, etc. I was ambling along Boulevard St Germain this morning before the Sephora incident and came by a miniscule public park planted next to the church St. Germain des Pres with a historical notification of its relatively recent origin in the work of an architect you won’t have known. A few metres along from the placard came another warning as follows: “In case of storm this garden will be closed” roughly translated, do not stay in this park if there is a storm but we aren’t exactly saying that. Immediately I was connected with two of my Australian favourites of the genre – “Limbs may fall” and “Overhanging limbs”– to be found on country roads carrying the unaware to notable destinations like Wilson’s Prom. At St Severin a version of the ‘overhanging limbs’ one popped up and it was hard to see the danger, as is usually the case in Oz, too.

 

Travel funnies 2014 - Dubai

Torrey Orton

June 1, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange,…this time, weapons out of kitchen utensils

Just a day and a bit pausing here in the midst of so much on the edge of nothing sustained by its paleo-historic treasure of convertible carbons…a place remarkable for its greyness leavened by occasional pastels in typically European 6 story accommodations radiating around two high-rise centres – nominally east and west Dubai, the home of the kilometric Burg Khalifa.

Around the Hyatt where we’ve stopped a second time, the evidence of the encroaching of the Gulf by piles of sand behind various bunkering techniques continues in the creating canals and lagoons for vacation housing. Here, for the unaccountably numerous time, my trekking back pack carried as luggage not carryon, with its contents of various life assisting (first-aid kits, bug defender, eating tools, wet weather stuff) goodies passed through all screening devices without even a squeak of concern in dozens of countries include this one was found to be holding a questionable item by a last gasp check after clearing customs and about to grab a gab. There was something in it (it being inside a large roll around suitcase). After opening the case and finding nothing but an electric razor in a case that might have held a snub-nosed 38 in a  cartoon and pressing on into the backpack to find a camping knife (Swiss Army multi-function type, but no projectile sending capacities of note), I pointed out there was another such scabbarded knife, too, in the mess that is the contents of the pack.

The customs lady opened it and found a beautiful scrimshaw knife of razor sharpness and about 6cm (3 inches?) length with a safety lock once opened to protect unskilled fingers from self-execution in the conduct of serious camping endeavours (which for us amount to cutting quality sausage on the highest ridge we can reach on our daily climbing in France). I had a moments’ sharp despair that this would be confiscated as a half dozen forgotten pen knives have been on passing screenings in Australia. This one, however, is a 25 year old gift from a long-term Chinese friend for some consideration long forgotten but for the gift. My despair was dismissed by a 1 second judgement of the head screener that my weapon was no such thing.

All this took three minutes… and I walked away as full-handed as when I arrived, armed for this season’s sausage, bread and wine after an adventure unexpected for a result unforeseeable as it all was in the eyes of the beholder looking at an x-ray screen with new perspectives unshared even by her co-workers. Imagine what does get through, as the Australian Senator for farming matters and moral righteousness, Bill Heffernan, recently dramatized at Parliament with his pipe bomb infiltration of the high house’s security, perhaps forewarning of future intent of his own since he sees it so much in the minds of others around him!!