Lithuania

Vilnius and Warsaw are not connected by a European equivalent of I-10. They’re connected by a winding 2 lane country road such as one might find in the mountainous hinterlands of New Zealand. No wonder it takes over night. The bus was very nice but the rutted carriage path we were driving made sleeping near to impossible and crippling when one did manage to doze off for a few minutes. We arrived hobbled, but excited to explore a new place. Our first discovery was that it is not warm in Lithuania though it is summer. It is easy to forget that this part of northern Europe is on roughly the same latitude with southern Alaska. So we put on our fleeces, checked the luggage, used the pay toilet, and set off into the city.

Vilnius Cathedral

We arrived around 6:30am and by the time we finished our exotic McDonald’s breakfast it was 7:30 so everything was still closed. Like the cities in Poland the old parts of Vilnius are quite beautiful. We made it to the square around the cathedral and let me tell you, that’s the best time to be out there. You have the place to yourself because everyone else is inside. We went inside also and caught the tail end of a cardinal giving the homily and leading the congregation in the Creed. (I think that’s what was going on anyway. It was all in Lithuanian so I could be wrong. We found the miracle square which is where a human chain from Tallin, Estonia to Vilnius protesting Soviet occupation ended. You’re supposed to do a clockwise 360 and make a wish. We are bound by sacred oaths not to tell you where to find it so you will need to use the picture as your guide and find it yourself.



make a wish



Leaving the square, we followed a cobbled path to the summit of a hill crowned with a tower flying the Lithuanian flag. It has a name I can’t pronounce that probably means “windswept and cold” in the native tongue. In any case, the views were amazing, particularly over the old town. All the walking and sightseeing were wearing so we… that’s right, stopped for coffee and a sweet, delicious treat. Today it was a crepe with strawberry jam and vanilla ice cream. Moving on we wound our way along the maze of backstreets looking at the quaint. One street had a whole wall with individually designed tiles set in it. The best I think was the metal cross stitched rooster. Around every bend in the road was another spectacular view of a church spire or flower bedecked stone balcony. I spent a lot of time standing in the street with the camera pointing into the air over my head.

For lunch we had pizza and some potato pancakes which were not quite up to yesterday’s but still tasty. We did some shopping and then wandered back to the bus station to catch our bus on to Riga. This daytime ride is affording us a look at the countryside which is beautiful. There are large patches of birch forest and broad fields of cereals and something with a yellow flower I suspect is mustard. We have also seen several storks. These sights can’t fully detract from the horror of watching the bus barrel down this goat trail. European rules on passing and right of way seem to have a heavy Peruvian influence.

POLSKA!



So what does this shop sell?



Greetings from Poland! We arrived via LOT Polish Airways on a 767 that had ashtrays in the armrests. Not that smoking was allowed, but the plane clearly dates back to a time when you could. Nonetheless, we landed safely though sleep deprived. I can’t remember the last time I was on a plane with so many children, so many awful, noisy children. Seriously, most of the parents just let their kids get up and run around the plane. One kid was hanging over the seat playing some absurd punching game and screaming with his older brother while their mother slept! Then there was the toddler running up and down the aisles with no parent in sight. I guess he was an unaccompanied minor.


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The defender of Warsaw



Anyway… we managed to acquire bus tickets and made our way to our hotel, which happened to be on the bus line from the airport. The Hotel Jan III Sobieski was painted in the most wonderful shades of gelato pastel. Though we were desperately early for check in time, they gave us our room anyway. We deposited our very heavy bags and went over to the train station to get tickets to Krakow for the next day. I will admit that we did not even attempt to learn any Polish before coming. That’s because after attempting to learn some Russian we determined that we have no capacity for Slavic languages. The language barrier this created made buying tickets quite the challenge. There was much passing back and forth scraps of paper with numbers written on them. Eventually arrangements were made and we moved on to the subway station where we hopped a train to the old town.



Pooh would let Zada be in this picture because he was afraid his friends would think he's a baby



In Warsaw’s case, “old town” is a bit of a misnomer since just about all of it dates from the end of WWII. Between the Nazi bombings during the invasion and crushing the Warsaw Uprisings the whole city was in ruins by the end of the war. However, the center of town, the part inside the old walls, was rebuilt to look as it did before the war. It is all very charming and clearly, the restorers did an excellent job. After seeing Krakow (which is genuinely old) the buildings in Warsaw’s old town have the feel of replicas, something new made to look old. The day we were there happened to be a national holiday in Poland, so many of the shops were closed though all of the restaurants were open. Our LOT Airlines breakfast of fruit and a roll (which Zada treated like a Polish assassination attempt)was starting to fail us so we to lunch at Pizzeria UFO (continuing her unbroken streak of eating pizza in every country she has ever visited)which was wonderfully restorative and got us moving again.

We meandered through the streets admiring the precious and following a self guided walking tour ending up at the bell tower (LP failed to mention that it costs 5 zlotys to climb it) which offered stunning views of the old town with its beautiful array of decorative church spires. About this time the sleep deprivation caught up to us so we headed for a café in the old market square and ate decadent desserts (Sacher torte and Polish cheesecake) with excellent coffee. The centerpiece of the square is a sculpture/ fountain of a two-tailed mermaid with a sword and a shield. She is the protector of the city. Zada recounts the myth of how this came to be on her blog, so check that out.

After desert, which ended up also being dinner, we went back to the hotel and quite literally passed out after making arrangements for a wakeup call and a taxi to the train station.

Poland day 2- Krakow



Almost all of it is made of salt



As we rode the train to Krakow we began to think that it might not be possible to visit Auschwitz in the time we had available. We had been waffling back and forth on this being appropriate for Zada yet. Boy In the Striped Pajamas – yes, traumatizing, but it should be no matter what age you are, and she can #1 handle it, # 2 understand it. Then, Night – are you crazy? Of course 10 is too young. Indeed, after checking the train schedules upon our arrival, our soul searching was needless as we would have to skip everything else to get out there and back. So, Plan B, we dropped our things at the hostel and headed off to the salt mine just outside of town. It seemed somewhat crowded for a week day and indeed, it turned out it was a free day for Poles, so there were more than the usual number of locals there. The tour begins with the descent of 380 steps, “a few steps” as our guide put it. The crowds caused a bit of a traffic jam but never for more than a minute. First we learned that all the “security works” (which is how they referred to any safety related things, such as structures that prevent cave-ins) are made of wood in the mine. Wood does not corrode and the salt it absorbs actually preserves it. So, all the many tons of salt overhead are held up with tree trunks. This mine actually stopped production in the 60s but even before that it drew tourists. Copernicus and Goethe both came here back in the day. For many years horses were used in the mine. They were lowered in crates and housed in subterranean stables. There is an army of life size statues carved from salt. Carvings of salt miners, Polish kings, gnomes, saints, and other national heroes like Pope John Paul II and Copernicus abound. At the end of the tour we were spared the climb out by a ride in a claustrophobic mining elevator.

We bused back into town and made our way to the market square. This square is larger by far than the one in Warsaw. The cathedral and a large clock tower dominate the scene along with the “cloth building”. All the salt mining had worn us down, and we refreshed ourselves apple pie and coffee. Back on our feet again we took a carriage ride around the old town and gave ourselves whiplash trying to take in the historic and beautiful. Krakow seems to be in the process of renaming everything after Pope John Paul II. There are signs on every place he lived or even visited in town and his face is on many buildings. Even at the salt mine they were very excited to tell us that John Paul had been there three times in his life, though sadly not when he was Pope.

After more wandering though the twisting and fascinating old town streets we headed for yet another restorative dessert (black forest cake) and coffee combination is a beautiful little café in a boutique hotel on the square. We finished our day with a recital of Chopin pieces in a small salon at a hotel on the market square. The kid at the piano was probably in his 20s but he looked 15. Whatever his age he was very good and we enjoyed it immensely.

We crawled back to the hostel to rest our ankles for tomorrow’s round of cobblestone jeopardy.

Krakow Day 2

Up and out to the Old Town early for a walking tour and careful canvass of all the thousands of amber shops and tchotchke shops. We walked through the lovely Planty Park that surrounds the Old Town to the walls encircling the palace. It was an absolute mob scene on a Saturday – enormous tour groups moving across the plazas like a vast herd of caribou migrating. We (playing out the Animal Planet motif) were like salmon desperately battling our way against the current.

We shopped/café(ed) our way circuitously back to the main square, where I was determined after the previous day’s pizza showdown that certain people were going to try some Polish food or else. Lunch was not a complete success, but no one actually died. The potato pancakes were a big hit, but the pierogis – delicious buttery pan-fried bites of tasty wonderfulness drew the type of histrionics normally seen only in the last act of an Italian opera. The only thing wrong with the lunch was that it was so substantial, that with the best will in the world, dessert could not be eaten.

We had to jog to make our train; thankfully, we had started the day by dumping all the bags in a luggage locker at the station. We grabbed the bags and discovered that we had cracked a wheel casing! Our precious indestructible Eagle Creek switchback 20! Our beloved Christmas present from Mom Q the first year of our marriage! It has been with us for every trip we have taken together, so the wheel thing felt like a betrayal. Initially, only a small chunk came off, which made rolling no longer one of the bag’s functions. Enough train tracks and cobblestones later and the whole outer shell came off, so it rolls again – just unevenly.

Train to the bus station and then onto the overnight bus to Vilnius. We are very excited about that, as it is supposed to be absolutely gorgeous. We’ll let you know in the next post!

San Francisco – The Ring

Well, we’ve enjoyed our first Ring Cycle tremendously – quite a testament to the production as there is the immense bitterness of the fact that this was supposed to be HGO’s Ring. Yes, David Gockley and Francesca Z. wanted to mount this monster in Houston – the board’s refusal to sanction the project is probably why he left. Not that we don’t think Anthony Freud is great, but seriously, “Song of Houston

” and all that Britten vs. a Ring Cycle? What is wrong with those people? And now that everyone is getting new Wagner, HGO is jumping on the bandwagon anyway and will have new Ring operas dribbling out over the next however many seasons.

Anyhow, all that aside, it has been very enjoyable visiting SF – we don’t have redwoods or humpbacks, or Alcatraz in Houston (or the need to wear 5 layers of clothing in June). Their opera house is really beautiful – nicer than ours; the acoustics are better at the Wortham however – a big deal for those of us who attend operas on folding chairs on the roof. Our opera shop is better, but their food service wins – for the Ring they’ve added a biergarten on the mezzanine level terrace. I wonder if they have themed cafes for all their productions. If not, they really should. So should we – espresso, tiramisu, gelato, cannoli for Donezetti, Puccini, Verdi, et al.; madeleines, crème brulee, napoleons for Berlioz, Bizet and Poulenc and so on.

Opera is not just about what there is to eat, so on to the actual productions!
Das Rheingold

We’re waffling on the art direction – the giant projections on the scrims are sometimes really effective and other times, not so much. This production tells the drama as an American allegory of the destruction of the natural environment due to the lust for power and money. From the beautiful opening scene of the glittering Rhein the world becomes progressively darker, dirtier, and more industrialized in each production.

The rheinmaidens were wonderful – and the water effects were pretty good. I always wonder how all that fog/steam whatever doesn’t affect the voices. Alberich was excellent – creepy, angry and all around dangerously repulsive. He had a very strong voice and this was what made us question the acoustics of the house initially – there were moments when you could tell he was really belting it out, but the voice was completely lost. Later we decided to blame the conductor, but we didn’t really toss the blame on him until Siegfried. The whole first scene was very well done.

Das Rheingold has no intermissions (building your stamina step by step to prep you for the 5+ hours of Gotterdamerung) and the set changes must have been stressful – they certainly sounded as if the new pieces were being dropped onto the stage from helicopters. Strangely the set changes were silent for the rest of the cycle. The Valhalla construction site was kind of lame and the rainbow bridge looked like a cruise ship gangplank. Wotan and his crew of immortals in their 20s/30s fashions carrying champagne flutes looked to be boarding the fun ship Valhalla rather than a lordly and majestic entry into their new fortress. The set for Nibelheim, where Wotan and Loge go to kidnap Alberich, was brilliantly creepy and grim, filled with filthy, writhing child slaves cowering beneath the lash and worshipping the ring. Good stuff. The tenor playing Loge was magnificent.

Also wonderful were the giants’ (San Francisco Giants) costumes. They were lowered onto stage from an i-beam wearing padded construction clothing, huge platform/ stilt boots, and mechanical hands a la Edward Scissorhands. The bass/ baritone playing Fasolt had a rich, powerfully expressive voice. We were sad that he was killed off so soon. Fortunately, he was back playing the more substantial role of Hagen in Gotterdamerung.

Die Valkyrie

This whole production rocked! The superb Nina Stemme (supposedly coming to Houston as Isolde soon) was an unbelievably dynamic presence on stage and her magnificent voice soared above the 100+ instruments in the orchestra- an accomplishment that few others managed to pull off the whole time. Seriously, the Wagnerian orchestration is ridiculous, 51 strings! The pit looked like a can of sardines.

Every other character’s best scenes were the ones they shared with her. We really liked the parachuting Valkyries in their Amelia Earhart aviatrix getups. The heroes they collected were represented by enlarged portraits of actual American soldiers killed in action in conflicts from the Civil War through the current Afgan War.

The projections were less successful in this one we felt – the wild racing through forest shots were a little too Blair Witch opera. The best projections were the ominous, billowing clouds. However, the wall of flames was really good. Siegmund’s death scene (under a grim and filthy underpass) was enlivened with a couple of beautiful German Shepherds.
Siegfried

The sublime wall of sound envisioned by Wagner was tonight a giant tsunami of music completely washing away all voices on stage – okay that is a bit of an exaggeration, but seriously maestro! Intensity doesn’t equal volume! Even if Siegfried just has a weak voice, that voice is the most important instrument and it needs to be supported. Whatever the limitations of the performer it is his job to make the whole thing work and it really didn’t. This role is a killer and though his voice wasn’t bad (when we could hear it) it simply had little expressive power – his physical acting was quite good, but there was no attempt (that we could hear) at vocal acting. Forging his father’s sword, talking to birds, killing dragons or his stepfather, and swept away by passion were all one and the same. Maybe he was just pacing himself to survive the marathon and that is how it has to be done.

The settings become more and more grim – opening at a broken down trailer in the woods ringed with bits and pieces of machinery and furnished with plastic yard chairs, moving to an abandoned warehouse (the dragon’s lair) where we discover Alberich keeping watch and become a denizen of the mean streets complete with a shopping cart he is filling with Molotov cocktails. Everything has a real Terminator post-apocalyptic look to it and the skies are becoming more and more oppressively dark since the initial theft of the river gold.

The dragon was fantastic! It emerged from the warehouse in a cloud of green smoke and sent up sparks wherever the sword struck. The deathblow cracked the beast open allowing Fafner (the giant from Das Rheingold) to fall in a bleeding heap at Siegfried’s feet and sing for another 10-15 minutes.

Again, Brunnhilde shone like the sun – her glorious voice completely blowing Siegfried off the stage. She had her work cut out for her though, as about ½ the audience was clearly out on a day pass from the home for terminal consumptives.
Gotterdamerung

The scene opens on the Norns – the weavers of fate. In this production their world is a morass of cables. It wasn’t a spiders web so much as a rat’s nest of lines; we think they are supposed to represent the internet. Their gleaming green costumes with goggles and caps made them look like a cross between workers in the Emerald City and Oompah Loompahs. Their voices were wonderful – this production finally got the perfect balance between voices and instruments.

Despite the 5 ½ hour running time, Gotterdamerung is so action packed that you hardly feel it. Freia was back as Gutrune looking great and sounding good, Froh was back as Gunther – a little uneven and Fasolt was back and incredible as Hagen! He was sinister, slithery and deliciously bad. Alberich appeared all too briefly in a wonderfully done scene with his son Hagen. Hagen’s voice was so powerful that even laying in the bed face down it penetrated perfectly to our aerie. As if the way the music were written and the fact that they must sing for hours on end weren’t enough, Wagner so often has his singers rolling around and thrashing about on the floor like wounded seals while belting out their most impassioned scenes. Did he secretly hate singers and want to kill them or what?

Insert raves about Brunnhilde here – we are running out of superlatives, but rest assured she was superlative!

The rheinmaidens were back for one more shot at saving the world by getting their ring back – another fantastic performance and set in their completely destroyed river awash in plastic bottles, tires and even a pick-up truck cap. They staggered out, filthy and bedraggled, looking like coal miner beauty queens, their lyric paean to their river now a lament. Their highlight was when they rushed Hagen and suffocated him with one of the recycling bags they’d earlier used in a fruitless attempt to clean up their home.

Tonight’s Siegfried completely lost his voice halfway through the second act and David Gockley (formerly of HGO) came out before the 3rd act we thought to announce his replacement, but instead to tell the audience that he had a vocal issue and had been treated by their specialist and was going to go on. He was restored a bit and carried through bravely, but he looked completely destroyed by the end. He was clearly devastated.

We did have issues with some of the costuming – Gutrune looked magnificent in clingy, flowing silky things, but Brunnhilde was a frumpy drudge – I get it she’s sad, a betrayed and enslaved bride, but she should still be magnificent.

The director is all about this being a story of redemption and to make sure we get the point, as soon a Brunnhilde has set the world aflame and descended in to the funeral pyre (very well done – tee hee –with massive banks of fire and the rheinmaidens wielding gas canisters), the waters rush forth and a small girl in a white dress emerges from the shattered remains bearing a small ash tree that she plants center stage as the curtain falls.

The San Francisco audience is overall really fantastic – they actually stay to applaud the performers! They were wildly enthusiastic – especially that last night! That is one of my pet peeves about home, for so many Houstonians the performance is clearly just a prelude to the REAL event – seeing who get out of the parking lot first. You see people getting up and heading for exit just as Butterfly is lifting the dagger, Tosca is still telling Cavaradossi to play dead and Clara hasn’t even made it back from the Kingdom of Sweets - really irritating.

People were all about the bear of course. We were starting to wonder if there were any children in SF at all she attracted so much attention. She was annoyed by it; she complained, “Aren’t they stereotyping me? Why wouldn’t I like opera?” We had to gently break it to her that even some adults don’t like opera and wouldn’t be thrilled to sit through almost 18 hours of it – even some adults she personally knows. Don’t worry; we didn’t give her your names. It is odd that people are concerned by kids in the theater; they couldn’t possibly make more noise than the candy wrapper brigade or several of the either drunken trollops or extremely elderly neophytes we’ve been seated near; asking their companions quite audibly, “What’s happening?” “Who is that man?” “Can I get a drink?” More than enough ranting, I am sure – though seriously, has anyone ever tested the decibel level of a cough drop wrapper? It has to be like a jet engine.

So, that was our first Ring Cycle. It was truly a wonderful experience and now we hope to see Seattle’s Ring in 2013.

Everything Else



COME TO BEAUTIFUL ALCATRAZ!



We had a great time even when we weren’t at the opera. Our first outing was Alcatraz – which was unexpectedly quite the garden spot. The tour was very interesting and the island itself really lovely. It is currently undergoing extensive restoration and it was interesting to see how carefully they work. We saw a group huddled around a box full of concrete samples trying to match the exact shade and texture. That is meticulous.

After that we wandered the various tourist traps off Embarcadero – Pier 39, where Zada was attacked by a sea gull for her sandwich. We had only been flogging her to hurry up and finish it for about an hour at that point. We ended up at Ghirardelli Square and had giant piles of deliciousness. Then it was off to the opera.

Next day we were out at 5:30ish to provision for the trek out to Monterey. The boat staff was pushing Dramamine and said people hadn’t been doing too well over the last few days. That would be the 10 to 8 foot swells pitching the boat all over the place I guess. We have never had a problem before and Zada is the best sailor among us – until this day. It was not only really rough, but also freezing cold and after we got soaked, we suggested going into the cabin to get out of the wind – BIG MISTAKE. After just a minute or two she was running for the rail. Good, brave bear…unlike those people who sat around in misery puking all over themselves, the seats, the floor, their neighbors. It was like a bad adolescent male comedy. Seriously 2/3rds of the people were hanging over the rails, laying huddled on the seats and in complete misery. How is it physically possible to throw up for 4 hours straight? You have to be bringing up your toenails at that point. We felt bad for them and, to be honest, completely repelled.

Zada rebounded amazingly and was able to get back to “whaling” within three minutes! We saw lots of humpbacks, including several moms and calves. The pictures don’t do it justice; the camera was set to rapid action which takes dozens of pictures in seconds, but those enormous swells generated dozens of pictures of sea, sky, sea, sky. We also saw several otters, Risso dolphins, Pacific white-sided dolphins, and tons of sea lions and seals.

IT"S PURPLE!

We then drove down the Big Sur coast – all that yap about the view, is completely true. It was gloriously beautiful. Pfeiffer Beach was our goal – the famous purple sand beach. Indeed, the sand is streaked with lovely, glittering purple sands. It was otherwise a typical Northern California beach – rocky outcrops, pounding surf and psychos dressed and cavorting about in the water as if it wasn’t 12 degrees.

We were exhausted by a long day of not succumbing to hypothermia and looking for uncooperative blue whales, so we headed back to the hotel for an early night (performances were getting out 11:30 or later and the combination of early rising and late nights is something we’re getting too old for).

Next morning we headed out for the Presidio area. We wandered around much of the Golden Gate NRA, visiting Crissy Field, Fort Point and Fort Mason. They have done a lot of really great work restoring the dunes and tidal marsh area here. The sky lupines and these enormous bushy yellow lupines were really lovely. The views of the Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point lived up to the hype. It was insanely windy down there – Zada was nearly blown off the ramparts. San Francisco has tons of quaint and beautiful homes and we enjoyed our meanderings around various neighborhoods – the picture windows on the houses facing the marina were really something special though. Where on earth do you but glass like that? That evening we saw Siegfried – very late night at 4 hours and 50 minutes.

Saturday we headed off to Point Reyes – the road had some real New Zealand flavor to it and we don’t mean there were sheep! It was good to see the road crews were busy at work shoring up the parts that were crumbling away the most rapidly. We thought we’d spend ½ the day here and the afternoon at Muir Woods, but there was a lot more to the national seashore than we realized. We ended up spending the whole day exploring the very different sections of the park. We started in Bear Valley and then went out to the lighthouse – 302 steps down to the light.

After the light we went to Chimney Rock to see the elephant seal colony – they were basking on the pebbly beach making the most unearthly noises – a weird growling sort of snuffling bark. There we a few young males wrestling in the surf away from the main pod. None of us have ever seen elephant seals before and were happy to finally do so.

Zada had to do a beach clean-up for her Junior Ranger, so we headed over to Drake’s Beach for that. There was a wonderful café on the beach where we enjoyed lunch – okay, Kimberly enjoyed lunch, Brad had a giant basket of fries and Zada alternated between giving agonized and piteous looks at us and gazing down at her grilled cheese like an early Christian martyr facing the lions.

Next day was our last full day in SF, we got up and went to the Krispy Kreme for breakfast and drove into town and found FREE PARKING at city hall – this was incredible because for a lot of the week we had struggling to even find insanely expensive parking – seriously, we spent more than $150.00 on parking this week. That may mean nothing to you, but to Houstonians that is an abomination. We celebrated our successful trip with dinner at Ghirardelli’s (again) and then packed up to head out at the crack of dawn Monday.

We won’t post from our NYC layover – Zada will though. We will write next from Poland.