Cat Howell's blog

Play on snow and no snow

2012-02-17T00:42:00.001-05:00

Last weekend we went sledding at Snoqualmie Pass, and stayed long enough to catch a ranger-guided snowshoe hike. Maeve did very well, finishing the whole hike. The picture is at about the 3/4 mark.

To help Maeve and Silas get into the fun of skiing, we let them wear their brand-new cross-country skis around the living room. This will not be a regular occurrence, and of course we don't let them wear shoes inside the house! Now they are eager to hit the trails.

Linen closet

2012-02-17T00:32:00.000-05:00

Here is the closet where we store our towels, sheets, and pillowcases. Naturally, we call it our Lenin Closet (or our Lennon Closet).

Seattle Snow

2012-01-20T00:07:00.004-05:00

January 19, 2012

The first photo is of the UW's Suzallo library. Mike walked into work today and took this shot on his way home. You can make out one guy on cross country skis just to the right of the main entrance.

We had a number of skiiers as well as tons of walkers though our neighborhood. Our street, although a neighborhood arterial, has not been plowed and is snow-covered, with minimal traffic. The kids will end up being out of school for 3.5 days. Frustrating, when our lives are local and we can all walk to work or school, but much of Seattle is very hilly and treacherous. We worked on digging out our drive and sidewalk for the 3rd time today, but Silas wasn't very patient so we ended up going around the block on our sled a couple times. A very good workout for Mom! Silas also took a brief turn pulling Maeve.

Mt. Rainier sunrise

2012-01-14T15:30:00.002-05:00

On my bicycle commute to work, I get views of the Cascade Mountains, the Olympic Mountains, Mt. Rainier, and the Seattle downtown skyline. The last two weeks have been unusually beautiful, with colorful sunrises and sunsets rewarding my ride. Here is a cell phone photo taken from the 45th Street bridge over Interstate 5, which doesn't come close to doing justice to the view.

Maeve Howell, theater critic

2011-12-03T12:40:00.001-05:00

Maeve was quoted today on the UW Computer Science & Engineering News Blog. There is also a picture of Mike in the article.

Thanksgiving running

2011-11-24T16:47:00.002-05:00

November 24, 2011
Thanksgiving 2011.

2010 Turkey Trot

Last year, we helped with registration at the Turkey Trot, a 5K benefiting the Ballard Food Bank. Maeve had a great time stamping registrants' hands after they paid. That year, Seattle had an uncharacteristic Thanksgiving snowfall.

This year, for Thanksgiving we decided to run it! We parked at Golden Gardens Park on Puget Sound and climbed up the cliff. All that elevation to lose during the run! Maeve ran/walked the whole thing, with Silas in the jogging stroller/Mike's arms most of the way, and we finished in 55 minutes. We played a bit at the park and, despite a foreboding forecast, it started to rain only as we got in the car - perfect timing. It was a really lovely morning, and then we went home and had tortellini and cauliflower for Thanksgiving dinner (per Maeve's request, and also very popular with Silas). I forgot my camera so the photo is in our side yard (great view of the artichoke and winter cover crop coming up in our garden) once we got home.

In early October, just 6 weeks after she first rode a 2-wheel bicycle unassisted, Maeve biked 12 miles as part of the Shine On Seattle fundraiser for green energy. Most of it was very flat on the Burke-Gilman Trail. Silas rode on the back of Mike's bike, as usual.

It's snowing up in the mountains so the plan is to go up for some snow play tomorrow.

Reading foreign-language books on the Kindle

2011-10-29T22:21:00.001-04:00

I like my Kindle e-book reader. It's handy for checking out library books, though it's a shame that I can't return the library books early, as soon as I finish them. If I could, that would reduce wait times for everyone. The Kindle is good for inexpensive, out-of-copyright, classics, even though sometimes the OCR is of poor quality. I don't read so much that the Kindle reduces the weight of my luggage significantly (more's the pity). The Kindle makes it very easy to buy more books than I would otherwise, which was surely a design consideration.

But, the "killer app" for an e-book reader, for me, is foreign-language books. More often than I like, I need to consult a dictionary to translate a word I do not know. When reading on the Kindle, this becomes extremely easy: just move the cursor onto a word, and the dictionary definition pops up at the top or bottom of the page. No longer do I need to interrupt my reading to page through a dictionary, then find my place again. This has transformed my reading by making it easier and more enjoyable to read books that are slightly beyond my reading level. You need to buy a translating dictionary; installing it is an easy process that is available from the Home menu under "Menu > Settings > Change Primary Dictionary".

Many dictionaries have some problems with word forms, such as the frequent case when a pronoun or article is appended to the end of a Spanish verb. If navigating to the word doesn't bring it up, you can always type the word into the dictionary search, but at that point I usually just keep reading. If I do choose to type the word, another problem is that you cannot type accented characters on the Kindle keyboard. Instead, I type the word without accents, then go to the list of all nearby words and select the accented form from the list.

The main downside of the Kindle is its slow display refresh. This is completely tolerable for turning pages, but is irritating in navigating menus and other activities. I do notice it when navigating the cursor to the word I don't understand: the definitions of other words along the cursor's path flash at the top or bottom of the screen. Slow refresh also makes it hard to judge when I should let up on the "5-way" joystick controller. The forthcoming Kindle Touch may solve this problem by letting you touch the screen directly rather than using the somewhat clunky "5-way" joystick.

I notice that battery life is a bit lower when using a translating dictionary, probably because of all the display changes that occur as I navigate to the word. But, battery life is still great: the Kindle battery lasts weeks.

Review of the FollowMe Tandem Coupling

2011-09-28T23:11:00.000-04:00

The FollowMe Tandem Coupling attaches a parent's bike to a child's, creating a tandem bicycle in which three wheels are on the ground. The child can't steer nor turn the front wheel, but can pedal to help power the bicycles -- or can just rest and enjoy the ride. The child's bike attaches or detaches in one minute, so the child can ride attached or separately and switch between these modalities.

Mike, Silas, and Maeve ready to bike to daycare

I have been using the FollowMe Tandem Coupling daily for a year. I carry two children: my 5-year-old daughter on her own bike attached to the FollowMe Tandem Coupling, and my 2-year-old son on a bike seat attached to my rear rack.

My experiences are generally positive, but differ from other available reviews, many of which seem to be based on a day or a week of using the coupling. This review is divided into four parts: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the bottom line.

The Good

Children are upright. I transport two children every day on my bicycle. I wanted a setup that seats both kids upright, where they can see and participate in the bicycle ride. For this reason, I didn't want a trailer; a trailer would also be harder to store and would be a step down for my daughter. I didn't want a front-mounted child seat (such as the Bobike Mini and the Co-Rider), which are deathtraps that unbalance your bicycle -- even the few that fit on drop handlebars and don't interfere with your steering or your knees. I didn't want to buy a new bike, which feels wasteful of resources and which I would have no room to store. I had good luck transporting a single child on a tag-along (a single-wheel "bike" whose front attaches to the parent's bike), but most tag-alongs attach to the seat post, preventing use of a child seat on the rear rack. The Roland add+bike looks great: it is a tag-along that is compatible with a rear-rack child seat, but it does not seem to be imported into the US. The FollowMe Tandem Coupling attaches to the rear axle of the adult's bike, so there is no problem putting a child seat on the rear rack.

Solid connection. The FollowMe Tandem Coupling attaches my daughter's bike very firmly to mine. She loved this immediately, compared to the small amount of wiggle she experienced when using a tag-along bike. I am very safety-conscious, but I am comfortable going 28MPH every day with two kids on the bike. There is a bit of road noise -- the metal components rattle a bit as you ride. This has no effect on safety, nor does it cause any looseness in the connection, but it took me a little while to get used to it. Really, it just means that the designers didn't take road noise into account. The coupling I use also has a small build problem: a weld connects two parts slightly crooked, so that two holes don't quite line up. With a bit of a shove I can still get a pin to go through them as required. As you'll see below, I didn't want to deal with the distributor (Clever Cycles) to get a replacement.

Easy attachment and detachment; coupling folds up. It is easy to attach or detach the child's bike -- I do this every day, and it takes perhaps 60 seconds. When attaching the child's bike, I do need to lean my bicycle against a wall rather than having it freestanding. You will probably want to do this too, unless you are more physically gifted than I am and you have at least three hands and an armspan of 8 feet. Attaching and detaching the coupling was a bit tricky for me at first, and in the first month I tipped my bicycle twice while attaching, but with practice it is now effortless. The coupling folds up onto the adult's bicycle, so I can detach my daughter's bike when I want to run an errand or store the bikes. You can also remove the coupling entirely; since it is extremely heavy, this is smart if you plan not to tow the child's bike for a while.

Attention magnet. I get a lot of comments about the coupling. People pull up beside me in their cars and roll down their windows to tell me how great my setup is. People on the curb stop talking on their cell phones when I ride by. People ask me whether I built the coupling myself, or ask me where to get one. (The coupling says "www.followme-tandem.com" in big letters...)

The Bad

Expensive. The coupling retails for $399, and I paid almost $500 when you count shipping and the extra parts I needed. On the other hand, other solutions can be pricy too.

Heavy. The coupling weighs 10 pounds, just for the parts that detach from the bikes, and the parts that stay on my bike are at least another 5 pounds, though I didn't weigh them before installation (and the last time I removed them, it look a hammer because of all the rust; see below). Furthermore, all of this weight is on or behind the rear axle, which can affect the balance of the bike. I balance this by putting my panniers on my Old Man Mountain Sherpa front rack, which accommodates my disc brakes. With two kids, the coupling, a bike, a bike seat, and the kids' gear, I'm carrying over 100 pounds of extra weight, in addition to my own (steel) bicycle and my gear.

Fit problems. The coupling consists of 3 parts: axle extensions for the adult bike's rear axle, a small bracket that gets strapped to the child bike's down tube, and then the big heavy coupling itself that connects to the othre two parts. I've attached the coupling to two adult and two child bikes (in all 4 combinations), and have had minor fit problems with three of the bikes.

The first problem was with the disc brakes on my bicycle. I asked the reseller (Clever Cycles) three times whether my disc brakes would be a problem, and each time they assured me without question that the FollowMe Tandem Coupling was fully compatible with disc brakes and I would have no problem. My rear disc brake is mounted on the trailing side of the seat stay (that is, behind the seat stay) rather than on the leading side of the seat stay (that is, between the seat stay and the chain stay). This location is not compatible with the upward arc of the coupling where it attaches to the parent bike's axle; I don't know why that upward arc is even necessary. So, I bought an extension that adds a fake axle several inches behind the real one. Clever Cycles swore to me that this extension would not interfere with the mounting of either a child seat or my panniers on the rear rack. They were half right: my child seat fits fine, but my panniers do not, at least not without bending them. So, I usually put the pannier on the front rack even when I don't have my son in his rear-rack seat.

On my wife's bike, the retaining clip that safeguards the coupling from falling off the adult rear axle doesn't fit -- it's simply so big that it needs to be in the same space as the derailleur. The coupling itself fits, as does the retaining clip on the other side of the bike.

Finally, the coupling barely fits on my daughter's 20" bicycle -- her tire is too low to the ground and drags in 4 places on our 1-mile ride to daycare. The coupling fits fine on my daughter's 16" bicycle. I don't know whether a 20" bicycle with different geometry would fit better or worse than the one we have, but this is a concern for older kids.

Rust. Essentially every piece of hardware on the FollowMe Tandem Coupling started to rust within a month. This affects looks and ease of installation/removal, but I am not concerned about safety. Really, this indicates unnecessary cost-cutting by the manufacturer. Did they not imagine that people might use their product in the outdoors, where rain is possible?

When I received the coupling, the plastic bags holding the parts were torn open (I blame not the manufacturer but the distributor, Clever Cycles, for this: apparently, the coupling had been demoed or used before), and I couldn't find one of the bolts. I bought a stainless steel replacement at my local hardware store, at a cost of less than a dollar but quite a bit of inconvenience. That bolt is the only piece of hardware on the bike that isn't rusted. Why didn't the manufacturer spend a few extra cents on stainless steel hardware?

Defective small parts. A small pin that keeps the coupling from folding up while being used (and that rattles around while you ride) has a small metal wire tether. This broke within two months of purchase. The distributor says that its warranty doesn't cover small parts, so I bought a replacement pin and spring-type cotter pin at my local hardware store. This works great. It isn't tethered to the bike, but I haven't lost it yet.

Another defect is in the strap that holds the coupling folded away when you are not towing a child's bike. It looks a bit like this. Every time you hit a bump, the weak spring lets out a little bit of the strap until the whole thing goes crashing to the ground. (This happened to me when I was carrying my son in his bike seat to the emergency room for a head wound!) So, I bought a one-foot nylon cord and a plastic clip from REI, and these have given me a year of faithful service.

The Ugly

I had a terrible experience with the distributor/reseller, Clever Cycles. I have to give them credit for being the only importer of the FollowMe Tandem Coupling into the US (if you know of another one, please let everyone know!), but that doesn't make up for all the other negatives.

They told me they had the coupling in stock, then that they didn't, then that they did, then that they didn't, and I finally got one months later.
They told me that the coupling is compatible with disc brakes, but some disc brakes require extra hardware.
They told me the extra hardware was compatible with panniers, which it is not.
They shipped me a product with missing hardware.
They didn't stand behind defects in small parts, but did try to sell me replacements for the broken parts.
Once they had my money, they were extremely hard to contact. I generally had to contact them at least 3 times before I got a reply: 2 emails and 1 phone call, or 1 email and 2 phone calls. The other employees, when I gave the name of the one who was supposedly helping me, clucked in sympathy but didn't offer to give me any assistance themselves.
Worst of all, the customer service was offensive and patronizing. It's bad business to belittle your customer when the customer is wrong. In my case, I was right, yet the Clever Cycles employee was still derogatory and impolite.

The Bottom Line

The FollowMe Tandem Coupling is an ideal fit for my needs: I want to carry two children on a standard bicycle, safely, in a way that involves them in the ride. If you have only one child to carry, then there are other devices with similar benefits, such as a tag-along or the Trail-Gator bicycle tow bar.

I would buy the FollowMe Tandem Coupling again. But, I would wish that there is someplace to buy it from besides Clever Cycles, whose terrible customer service was a huge hassle, costing me time, money, and headache.

2011-08-27T00:36:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, I went hiking without the family for the first time since the kids were born. I likewise haven't been on any long bicycle rides, though pulling 100 pounds of kids and their gear to daycare and back every day can be strenuous in a completely different way.

The hike was instigated by John Leo, who was my TA in a theory class when I was a student at MIT around 1986 or 1987. An avid mountaineer, he moved to Seattle and has done a lot of hiking and climbing. He ran across my name when looking up changes to the Java programming language, and he still remembered me. He saw from my webpages that I lived in Seattle and that 20 years ago I had done a lot of mountain climbing, so he invited me to go out with him. We chose to hike/scramble up Kaleetan Peak, which is relatively close to Seattle and non-technical (class 2). I enjoy hiking with my family, but sometimes a bit more challenge and speed is fun. We had a great time walking and talking, and the day wasn't even diminished when my car's radiator cracked on the way back to Seattle.

I still haven't downloaded the pictures from my camera, but John's pictures are most likely better anyway. The captions have a lot of information, too. He uploaded them that very evening.

2011-08-15T00:19:00.008-04:00

Summer Hiking 2011.

I haven't posted in forever, and have lots to update about summer travels (HI, NC), but here's an update about summer hiking.

We started with a weekend on Orcas Island with my mom, and did some hiking there in the state park. Just lovely. This first photo is of Maeve and Mom on Orcas.

For Father's Day, 6/19, we hiked up Rattlesnake Ledge. This is close to Seattle and only a 3.5 mile walk with 1000 ft vertical gain. Maeve walked all the way up without really taking a break. This let us know we were up to some longer hikes for the summer.

Next we went for a hike in Cougar Mtn State Park. It doesn't have as showy views, but is also close and relatively quiet. No photos.

For the 4th of July we went car camping near Mt. St. Helens. We went camping once last year with some friends at Dash Point State Park, only 30 minutes south of Seattle and Silas didn't sleep in the tent. This year was much better. Silas still had issues napping in the tent, but sleeping at night was fine. We went on several hikes - one that had great views of Mt. Adams, although we ended up just walking on the forest service road since it was blocked a couple miles from the trailhead by fallen trees. Another day we went up towards Mt. St. Helens and did a short walk with in the blast zone from the eruption. Everything's growing back and timber has been replanted, but it was clearly decimated. We couldn't go up to the visitor center because of snow.

On the way home, we drove the Mt. Ranier National Park. We walked a bit at the box canyon and then went up to Paradise to hike. Paradise was completely snowed in (this was July 4) so we did a snow hike to the Nisqually glacier overlook. The weather was nice and we didn't need jackets, just boots. Very lovely.

We stopped by Longmire on the way out out of the park and did a nature walk and looked at some trees that were in the process of being felled by beaver.

Our most recent hike was last weekend. We decided to do Little Si - about 4.5 miles long so a good hike for Maeve. We made it up with no problems and very little complaining about being tired. At the top is a great view of the I-90 corridor and Rattlesnake ledge across the valley.

2011-04-16T22:25:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Seattle

Just after we arrived in Seattle, I was returning the rental minivan that took us from the airport. The person in line behind me said, "You're from back east, aren't you?"

I allowed that I had lived there and asked how he knew.

"Your backpack is from L.L. Bean. We usually run people with those out of town."

"But didn't you see that I'm wearing an REI jacket?", I asked.

He quickly changed his tone. "Oh, I didn't notice. In that case, welcome to Seattle!"

2010-12-09T00:26:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving, 2010

On Thanksgiving day, we volunteered for the Seattle Turkey Trot, a 5K fundraiser for the Ballard Food Bank. We'd been out of school all week with snow, and I was worried we'd have 33 degrees with freezing rain. But no, it was low 30's with light snow - just perfect. Our gig was at the same-day registration table. Maeve had the best job - putting a turkey stamp on runners' hands so they could get their free T-shirt. Either Mike or I worked with Maeve taking fees and the other adult ran around with Silas. Silas was in hog heaven - the race was very dog-friendly and he got to pet lots of cool dogs.

Maybe we'll volunteer for this until the kids are actually big enough to run it!

2010-11-27T21:58:00.001-05:00

October 7, 2010
This is an older photo (a month ago) from when Silas started attending the same daycare as Maeve. They now both ride with Mike on the bike, Silas on the bike seat on the rear rack and Maeve on her own bike as a tagalong. Mike experimented a bit and found this contraption that allows him to hook Maeve's bike to his and still be able to fit Silas's seat on his rack. My bike is equipped to do the same, but I've yet to try it out. Apparently, it's quite a bit more work to carry both kids.

2010-11-24T23:17:00.001-05:00

November 22-23, 2010
Snow in Seattle

We had snow on Monday of this week, and ended up having the week off from school. Seattle pretty much closes down with all the hills and little snow moving equipment. We were able to get out and about in our neighborhood, and Mike walked to work one day, but some roads are still quite bad. Maeve loved the snow - especially eating it. Silas is less sure - he has trouble standing back up again in all the clothes and boots and face planted several times in the snow.

2010-10-04T00:10:00.004-04:00

Fairs, slides and Hiking

Two weekends ago we went to the Pullyup Fair, the WA state fair. Maeve has been very interested in riding roller-coasters for over a year, and we thought she'd enjoy some of the rides. Plus, it was a gorgeous fall day. We didn't do a roller-coaster, but Maeve did enjoy the swings, as long as I had my arm around her. Maybe once Silas is big enough to go on the roller-coasters, Maeve will want to go. In addition to the rides, the baby pigs were a big hit.

Yesterday (Oct 2) we went to the 5th Birthday party for Sienna in View Ridge Park. Maeve's highlight was the cake, but my highlight was watching my independent 14 month old son completely master the smaller play set. He crawled up the stairs, walked to the slide, and slid down feet-first on his tummy over and over. Unbelieveable.

Today we went for a walk up to PooPoo point, the local hanggliding take off spot in the Issaquah Alps. Unfortunately for us, it was also the weekend of the Issaquah Salmon Days, and we had to detour around a road race and lots of Salmon-related street closures and activities. We'll go back next year for that, it looked fun. This year was a hike, only 1.5 miles one way but 1500 feet and Maeve did a fair amount of complaining about being tired on the way up. We stopped at the lower launch site where the kids and I ate and took a break while Mike ran up to the higher site, which has a better view, though a bit fogged in. On the way back, Mike headed down in front, walking a bit quicker with a fussy Silas, and 20 minutes later walked back up with a sleeping toddler. Silas had on his Halloween costume, a bear? body suit, handmedown from cousin Hugh. It was too cute - I love the ears and the tail. At the bottom, we were parked at the landing site, and got to see a paraglider come in. Way cool.

2010-07-31T14:13:00.006-04:00

Howell Beach week 2010

We were on vacation in NC for two weeks. The first with my mom in Lake Lure, where we spent the week in the water. Maeve is now much more happy to play in the water and well on her way to being a swimmer. We then spent a week down in Wrightsville Beach, NC with all my Howell family kin. All of my first cousins were there, and all 11 of the 2nd cousins - all under age 8. This shot is of everybody, except Mike, who was flying in and was delayed in Atlanta, and my brother's family, which was only there the second half of the week.
This is Maeve, Winnie and I floating in the sound. Maeve was able to hang with the bigger cousins in the water - she just had to wear a life jacket.

Granny Hazel was down on Thursday and we all took pictures with her. She's in her 90's and every time we get to see her it's special. This same day, we drove up to Topsail to see David Patrick, John David, and families - Duke friends from college.

Maeve loved the jet ski. This was her first ride with Aunt Noell and Winnie. She later went a lot around the sound with her dad.

She wasn't sure at first about the waves, but as long as we were holding her hand, she decided it was fun!

2010-07-06T00:16:00.000-04:00

July 5, 2010

We finally got photos of Silas walking. We were playing the walking game, the one where the toddler launches himself from one person to another with the complete trust that he will get caught when he falls 5 steps later. Therefore the somewhat cautious look on Maeve's face, who had to work hard to catch Silas and not let his head clonk on the floor. Silas went from walking 1 step, which he's done for several weeks, to 3-4 steps this week, and now he's doing up to 5 feet and sometimes choosing to walk instead of dropping to crawl. He thinks it's great fun and has a line of bruises across his forehead to show his willingness to fall.

2010-06-27T00:25:00.002-04:00

Father's Day 2010: June 20, 2010

We decided to take a short hike on Father's Day, a drizzly but warmish day. We headed out towards Snoqualmie Pass to Twin Falls. It's and out and back hike, very short 3 miles, in the river valley with less than 300 ft elevation gain. But it was lovely and in very old forest with very old trees. There was also a put-in at the trail head and lots of kayaks in the parking lot.

We got a little drizzled on over the day, but had a nice hike. We missed seeing the second falls and kept walking on the trail until we talked to someone headed back and decided to turn around. The trail was semi-crowded with families for Father's Day, and would probably be packed on a nicer day.

Maeve liked balancing on the rocks on the trail, and our big motivator was adapting a rhyme about elephants balancing on a spider web to little girls balancing on rocks and then repeating verses with all the little girls in Maeve's day care, her teachers, her girl cousins, her grandmothers and any other "girls" we could think of. This kept us going for a good 30 minutes. Yay!

2010-05-23T23:22:00.003-04:00

Washington Park Arboretum, May 23, 2010

We went for a walk today on a trail in the Washington Park Arboretum that goes over a couple of islands and runs along the ship canal. We did this last year and saw an eagle's nest and juvenile blue heron. This year, once we got to the boardwalks crossing to the island, it was washed out. So we turned around and wandered back through the arboretum. Still, it was a pretty, though chilly day.

We had Dagan, a friend of Maeve's, with us and the kids had a great time playing, giggling, running and looking around. We spent a good bit of time watching the ducks, including this Mallard couple, in one of the lagoons off the ship canal.

There was a nice overlook into the ship canal where we could see buoys and kayakers as well as the UW stadium and Laurelhurst across the canal.

We stopped for a snack in a meadow beside the canal. Maeve and Dagan enjoyed crackers beside the water while Silas practiced walking with Daddy.

He smiled a lot when they finally got to where I was taking pictures.

Near the Arboretum visitors center, Maeve and Dagan played in the spooky trees.

They also enjoyed playing hide and seek around trees, counting to 12 (Maeve) or 5 (Dagan) and then yelling, "Boo!"

2010-05-20T17:06:00.001-04:00

May 20, 2010
Silas has been cruising for a couple of weeks, and is now comfortable holding on with just one hand and using the other one to play. He's falling more, but getting closer to walking.

This photoshoot was to try to get a view of his teeth. His top left incisor came in about a month ago, and is a big white tooth. The bottom two incisors cut about a week ago and are little, unphotogenic, teeth bumps. His top tooth features in the second photo.

2010-05-09T23:13:00.000-04:00

Mother's Day May 9, 2010

My mother's day present was a hike. We went up Rattlesnake Ledge, which is in the foothills of the Cascades. Maeve's longest hike yet, 4 miles round trip and about 1100 feet elevation gain. The way up was no problem, and although the last bit of coming down she was tired, she walked it all. We were out there last summer around Memorial Day with the cousins, and we didn't even get halfway up before descending to play in the lake. This is the limit of what Maeve can do - now I need to find more 3-4 mile hikes with 1000+ feet of elevation gain. Maybe by the end of the summer we'll do Little Si.

Rattlesnake Ledge is less than an hour from Seattle and was super-crowded. I'm still not used to the hoards that go hiking here. Likely hikes for us (short, not to steep, close to Seattle) are going to be super-crowded. By the time the kids are bigger, I'm sure we'll be ready to get a little farther from home to escape the crowds and dogs and hang out in quieter country.

Anyway, the day was beautiful, the kids were good, and the woods were variable so we had tons of stuff to look at and talk about with Maeve. She identifies snags, cut trees where you can count rings, mushrooms, ferns with and without fiddleheads, conifers, deciduous trees, pine cones, and anything else we can think of to keep her interested. This time we didn't even play hide and seek, which would have been a bit difficult since the trail was crowded and there were quite a few dogs illegally off-leash. Silas slept for an hour on the way down in the backpack. Yay!

The photo is part of the view from the ledge, which has 270 degree views of the Snoqualmie valley and Cascades. Lovely.

2010-05-08T16:45:00.003-04:00

Family bike ride to Gasworks Park
May 8, 2010

This was Silas's first bike ride. He wasn't too keen while we were parked, but didn't fuss to much while we were going. Maeve has been on the tagalong for a while and pedals nicely. Silas will have to get used to his seat, but we're quite excited to be able to again use the bikes as a family.

Gasworks park, in lower Wallingford and a straight shot down Meridian Ave from our house, is on Lake Union and has great views of downtown and the ship canal and a nice kite flying hill. We took Maeve's red octopus kite and had a good time flying. Behind Mike and Maeve, you can see the Hwy 99 bridge and lots of boats. Behind Silas is the Space Needle. What a beautiful day.

2010-04-18T11:30:00.001-04:00

April 10, 2010
Last weekend we took Maeve, Silas, and Chloe, one of Maeve's friends, up to Snoqualmie pass to play in the snow. The mountains had a late winter dumping, and we had fun. Maeve and Chloe particularly liked an igloo we found a Hyak, one of the state-run sno-parks near the pass. Silas pretty much just got carried around - didn't like too much crawling in the snow. Next year, cross-country skiing here we come.

2010-03-15T00:57:00.000-04:00

March 14, 2010

Silas loves to crawl and move around, and recently graduated to taking big kid baths. He sits on top of the frogs in the bath and loves moving his legs around to make the water splash.

2010-01-29T17:07:00.001-05:00

Silas is Up!
January 29, 2010

He's been combat crawling a yard or two for several weeks, but just this week he's up on all fours. Not yet cross-crawling, he mostly just falls over once he's up, but he's almost ready to take off. Luckily we've already got outlet covers and the hinges for the stair gate installed.

2010-01-04T12:06:00.009-05:00

Christmas 2009

We spent Christmas week in Grapevine, TX, next to DFW where Mike's parents have just moved into their new condo a few blocks from downtown Grapevine. We spent one afternoon making family portraits, and here's a photo of all of Mike's family. It includes Mike, me, Tracey (sister-in-law), David (Mike's brother), Grandad Paul, Grandmom Carolyn, Cousin Matt, Maeve and Silas.

One thing Maeve really enjoyed was making gingerbread cookies with Grandmom. They couldn't find all the cookie cutters in the new kitchen, so they ended up making gingerbread snowmen. They were a bit dry, but icing and lots of sprinkles helped.

One day we went to visit the Kaplan family. Maeve, Daniel and Jacob played cards and ran around the playground. It was great to check in with friends. We also went out for Mexican - yummy. Kathryn's parents came over so we got to visit with them, too. It's great to have friends where the in-laws live.

We also spent a day with Rachel, Steve and Naomi. We planned on going to the Dallas zoo, but we got there and they said no animals were out because of the cold. I started calling friends, and Seth Kaplan called me back and recommended the World Zoo Acquarium downtown. It was really cool - the trail started on the third floor of the rainforest biosphere and went down to a more typical acquarium in the basement. Maeve and Naomi liked the flamingos.

We also spent a morning with Chris Kribs, Adelfo and Sara, but didn't get any good photos.

Maeve also really enjoyed the trampolene. She could jump for ages. She also enjoyed playing China princess with Mardi Gras beads - first cousin Matt was the China prince, but throughout the week anyone she could get to wear beads was recruited.

Silas worked a lot on eating, taking mini-naps, and getting carried around by a lot of people. He's also now working on sitting and starting to get mobile in a rotate around the circumference of a circle with the center being his belly kind of way.

2009-12-31T16:58:00.001-05:00

Christmas 2009
We had family portraits made with the Ernsts in Dallas on Dec. 27, 2009. These are the best of ours.

2009-12-20T21:45:00.001-05:00

December 19, 2009

We went to Seward Park yesterday, where the Audobon Society was having a winter festival. There was a group of kids tagging birds, and we got to pet a chickadee that they tagged and released. We also took a hayride around the park.

2009-12-20T13:54:00.002-05:00

Silas started eating at 5 months when Grandma Shirley was visiting.

Silas now eats several kinds of cereal, fruits and veggies and likes it! Avocado isn't a favorite, but peas, squash, apple sauce, bananas. and zucchini rock.

2009-11-29T23:17:00.018-05:00

Thanksgiving 2009. We took our first trip as a family of 4 to Leavenworth, WA to do some winter hiking.

Leavenworth is a town on the East of the Cascades that has remade itself as a Bavarian village, complete with bad German. It also has lots of Christmas lights - overall very cheesy, but close to great hiking.

On the way there, we stopped at Stevens Pass on Rte 2 for Maeve to play on the snow. Here's some snow running. A good game.

One day we went hiking on an old rail-trail down by the Wentatchee River.

Another day we went hiking up Icicle gorge. There was more snow there, so Maeve got to hike on snow and eat ice.

On our way home, we stopped by Snoqualmie Pass for more fun in the snow.

2009-11-01T22:49:00.002-05:00

Halloween 2009

Silas has started to like to get help to sit and stand up. He's quite strong.

Maeve and Daddy enjoyed playing in the baby swings at the park. Maeve was running into Daddy and having a great time.

Silas with Daddy at Wallingford Park. He's all warm in his winter suit.

For Halloween, Maeve was a monster. She didn't wear her monster head very much, but here's where we're walking from our house down to the main business district in Wallingford, where they had trick or treating at the business starting at 3 PM. We were meeting Dagan, Kyna, and Scott at 4 PM. The view here is of Meridian Avenue, one door down from our house.

At Fainting Goat Gelato, instead of giving out candy, they gave the kids free icecream. Maeve got mint and Dagan got raspberry. Dagan was a cool dragon.

Maeve enjoyed walking with Kyna, so here's Kyna with both kids with Scott and Cat (pushing Silas) taking up the rear.

2009-10-21T21:32:00.000-04:00

October 19, 2001

Silas and Maeve with Cat.

2009-10-11T12:22:00.001-04:00

October 10, 2009.

One day shy of his 3rd month birthday, Silas decided to hold is own bottle, if only for a few seconds.

2009-09-22T23:26:00.000-04:00

September 22, 2009. Silas can do pushups galore, actually likes tummy time, and started turing over when he turned 2 months.

2009-09-15T18:07:00.001-04:00

September 12, 2009

Maeve and I were worms for the children's parade at the Seattle Tilth Harvest Fair. We also got to pet chickens and goats, and I bought winter cover crop seed for my garden. Maeve also had her face painted, got fruit and veggie samples, and honey in her hair after looking at the beehive and sampling honey.

Silas got his second bottle in preparation for Mommy going back to work in a couple of weeks. He likes the bottle fine once he figures out that it's full of milk.

2009-09-06T22:29:00.002-04:00

September 4, 2009

We had an enormous sunflower in our garden. It's less impressive bent over but will still hopefully provide lots of seeds. Maeve's enjoyed watching it grow and said the birds could have the seeds from one of the smaller plants, but this one is for people.

Here's Silas in his jedi-knight outfit with a nice smile at almost 8 weeks.

2009-08-10T22:47:00.000-04:00

August 10, 2009
Silas at almost 1 month being held by big sister Maeve.

2009-08-03T11:30:00.001-04:00

Silas and Maeve Aug 1, 2009

2009-07-14T14:58:00.003-04:00

Silas Atticus Ernst
July 11, 2009

4:22 AM
20 inches, 6 pounds 5 ounces

2009-06-21T23:38:00.019-04:00

Maeve's 3rd Birthday party, June 20, 2009

Meridian Park, Seattle

Maeve on the turtle in the park.

Chloe can do the monkey bars.

Dagan with Kyna.

Maeve and Sam on the swings.

Blowing out the cupcake candle.

Addie and Everest like their popcicles.

Maeve and Elena with popcicles.

Everest and his balloon.

Maeve and Elena hiding from wolves under the table.

Mike and Paul

2009-06-09T23:34:00.003-04:00

Visit from the cousins, May 26-31, 2009

My sister and family were in town the week after Memorial Day and got to hang out at our house and in Seattle. We were all at work/daycare all week, but it was still great to see them and have Maeve hang out with her 3 cousins. One night Mike and I even got to go out - we went out to Golden Gardens, a beach/park in Ballard to watch the sunset for our anniversary. It was chilly and beautiful and the park was packed. I think Noell and Gary got to go for a walk one night, too. Nice to have family around to be built-in babysitters and share the child-rearing time.

On Saturday, May 30 we all drove out to Rattlesnake Ledge, a hike about 45 minutes outside Seattle that is in a park that also has a lake - therefore very kid-friendly. On the way up, we played a bit of hide and seek, which involved the three mobile cousins running a ways up the trail and "hiding."Here's one of their hiding places beside the trail. We hiked part way up the trail to the ledge and it became clear that the older cousins (Elliott and Winnie) were most interested in going down to play in the lake and the younger cousin (Maeve) was the slowest and would eventually need carrying while the youngest cousin (Hugh) needed to nurse. So we went down in batches, with Hugh nursing a while trail-side and then played in the water. Maeve's still not so sure about getting her clothes wet and didn't much like walking around in wet underwear, but they all had a blast. Elliott could walk all the way across the lake.

We then had a picnic and went to a nearby water resource center that was having an open house and waterfall tours, which were already booked. At this point, Maeve was crashing so we went home. On the way out, the other car noticed that the trail had been shut and we wondered why. The next day, it was in the paper: someone had fallen and died in a freak accident.

Maeve learned tons from her cousins, we'll be figuring it all out for a while, but an obvious one was that last week she decided to quit wearing training pants and night and instead wear underwear. That she wore training pants had been discussed a couple times at night time with the cousins, but wasn't a big deal, but apparently Maeve really noticed. We've had a couple of accidents, and Maeve how has a cold and is back in training pants, but the end is near. Just in time for her 3rd birthday.

Maeve also loved touching and "playing" with Hugh, who is pretty game. She got to hold him a couple times - good practice for being a big sister in 6 weeks.

2009-05-18T11:01:00.003-04:00

May 18, 2009

We've moved! Here's a misty photo of our house from back in early spring. It's in Wallingford, a neighborhood of Seattle, and we're slowly getting settled in. This was helped a lot by my mother, who was with us for almost 2 weeks and pretty much organized the house, including putting in closets, toilet paper holders, organizing the kitchen, putting up curtains, cooking all the meals, and prepping the house for our first guests, Rachel, Steve and Naomi from Vancouver. Our house is now liveable and would be much less comfy without her help. Rachel and family were in town to visit some friends, and crashed with us so we got to see them in our limited free time. We went out to eat dinner at Cantinetta, a Wallingford Italian restaurant recommended by friends Dawn and Eric as both vegetarian- and kid-friendly. It was both. This photo is of Maeve and Naomi walking back to our house. My mom's pushing Naomi's stroller. Maeve is a big helper and wanted to help Naomi walk, and this did keep Naomi walking a bit longer.

Luckily, they stayed in the basement and identified a small wet spot on the basement carpet. This turned out to be the tell-tale sign of basement flooding, a perinial Pacific northwest issue where water is the enemy of your house. We've found a faulty downspout from our gutters and will be getting that fixed, which should mostly solve the problem. We now have slightly moldy carpet, a soaked carpet pad that's been put in the trash, and are running a fan in that room in the basement with the carpet pulled up. Sigh. Homeownership.

Last weekend, we took a little day trip to start enjoying the nice spring weather. I'd never been to the Cascades, so we went to Snoqualmie Falls, which is maybe a 45 minute drive in a pass in the mountains. The falls are beautiful, and there's a 1/2 mile hike down to see the river at the bottom. Maeve hiked all the way down, no problem. The way up, which is steep, was clearly going to be a problem, but we discovered hide and seek. Maeve would run ahead and "hide" often by standing by the side of the path and saying "here I am." By the end, she got the idea of going off-path a bit or hiding behind a tree. We did this for the whole half-mile - one of the first hikes she's walked the whole way.

She also enjoyed playing around this tree. She was wearing Mike's earbags and was being and elephant with great big grey ears.

2009-04-01T00:21:00.001-04:00

March 29, 2009

Maeve participated in her first Easter egg hunt with a friend Elliott. The dads hid eggs around the porch and back yard, and the egg buckets were soon filled.

2009-03-25T22:24:00.000-04:00

March 25, 2008

Maeve is learning how to make silly faces in the bath.

2009-02-10T22:46:00.004-05:00

Cat and Sarah on the porch of our house, overlooking Lake Washington and the East side.

February 10, 2009

We're getting settled in Seattle, and haven't been taking many pictures. Sarah Fish was in town over the weekend for a conference, so we got to hang out on Sunday. We inflicted a day at the playground on her.

We also had our first parent potluck at Maeve's daycare, the Child Learning and Care Center. I didn't get many pictures, but here's one of Maeve and Mike at dinner. Maeve's adjusted to day care more quickly, and after about a month of observation, without really joining in, she's now an active participant in her class.

2009-01-01T23:13:00.007-05:00

Christmas 2008

Mike and Maeve getting in the Christmas Spirit

We've now moved from Germany to Seattle, and after a couple weeks the beginning of December in Seattle, we headed out to SC and Tx to visit the grandparents for the holidays. We normally see one or the other, but since we were gone for the last year, we made the grand tour. The BEST part of the trip was getting to South Carolina. Seattle was having a blizzard. On December 18, it had just started snowing, but the taxi we'd scheduled to take us to the airport didn't show. We called Eric and Dawn, some friends, and asked for a ride to the airport. We got in our car to drive to their house to get a ride, and we couldn't get out of our neighborhood. Our car is a civic, not very heavy, and it currently doesn't have all-weather tires. We had maybe 2 inches of snow, but the house we are renting is in a very hilly neighborhood (Laurelhurst) in Seattle, and we were sliding all over the place. So we parked the car and I was walking with Maeve while Mike was pulling our two suitcases to get out of the neighborhood. We flagged a passing pickup truck, which took us to the local bus transfer at the University District. From there we took a bus downtown and transfered to the airport. Two hours later, at about an hour after our flight's scheduled departure, we arrived at the airport. We checked in, and were put on standby for the next flight out to Dallas, which we had to fly through to get to Greenville-Spartanburg. On our way to the gate, we saw our original flight leave, over an hour late. Two flights later, we got on a flight to Dallas and made it there by 10:30 PM, where we crashed with Mike's parents, who thankfully live 15 minutes from the airport. At 6 the next morning, we got on the flight to SC. When we got there, our luggage wasn't there, but we got it late that evening. We were all exhausted, but it turned out we were lucky to even get out of Seattle as the city was pretty much snowed in for a good week.

After that, Christmas was great. Maeve really enjoyed hanging out with her Grandmom Shirley and her two girl cousins, Winnie and Emma. Here, Winnie and Maeve are cracking up looking at themselves in the mirror while Emma's chilling with Granmom.

We also went to Emma's Christening. It was a very nice service with family only, at Jennifer's home church in Greenville. Emma was great the whole time, even when every member of the family was wetting her copious hair.

The weekend before Christmas we went to visit my Great Aunt Becky in Ellerbe, NC. The plan was to drive during nap or evening sleep time, which we did. Maeve did not really sleep in the car, but on the plus side, she didn't get sick either. We're just not in the car enough for her to be relaxed and sleepy there. The visit was great. Maeve walked to church with Daddy and Great-Uncle David, and walked back with me and Uncle David. It was beautiful out. We then had lunch with the extended family and ate lots of Beck's goodies.

After Christmas on Christmas Eve in SC, we flew out on Christmas day to TX to see Mike's family. In downtown Grapevine, there was a Christmas light show, and animatronics show, and some climb-onable animals. Maeve liked the polar bear.

We went to playgrounds a couple of times between visiting Kathryn Schoenbrun and family and Chris Kribs and family. On one playground, Mike found some mistletoe and Maeve learned to put it to good use.

By the time we left, Maeve was sad to leave and enjoyed holding her grandparents' hands in the airport and coordinating a group arm swing dance.

2008-11-22T08:15:00.004-05:00

November 22, 2008

Snow in Saarbruecken.

We got snow overnight and in the morning, and got out about 10 AM when it was just stopping snowing but hadn't started melting yet.

Maeve had a great time playing, walking and eating snow. She cleaned off the slide with her bottom.

2008-10-29T14:21:00.001-04:00

October 29, 2008

Maeve and I are posing with birthday cake candles and the pumpkin she carved, with a little help from Daddy. She did pick the pumpkin out all by herself at the farmer's market.

2008-10-18T13:53:00.015-04:00

View from Schauinsland
Freiburg and the Black Forest
October 8-13, 2008

We were in the Black Forest last weekend for our last trip in Germany. We’ve had off and on weather here in Saarbrücken this fall, and were hopeful that Freiburg, the sunny part of Germany, would be nice for hiking. And it was. The first day was super-foggy and we did a nice hike without being able to see more than a couple of trees in front of us. But it got better and we had a great time.
We stayed at an apartment on Augustusplatz, a busy square in the middle of downtown Freiburg. Downtown is pretty small, so both remaining medieval towers were less than 5 minutes walk, as was the Muenster. The train station was about 15 minutes. We’d rented this apartment for the location and because they advertised having internet and there were deadlines at work while we were gone and I knew I’d need to work (me needing internet for a change). We got to Freiburg about noon, after a 3-hour train ride. The room wasn’t ready so we at lunch at a café on Augustusplatz - pumpkin soup and sandwiches. Germany is big into seasonal foods so pumpkin is on pretty much every menu now.
Then we got into the apartment and put Maeve down for a nap, and I started looking for the Ethernet plug in. I had my cable with me, and assumed they’d probably have that or DSL. Nothing, just a phone line with extra jacks. So I went down and asked for help, and 30 minutes later someone came by with a print-out of instructions for Windows 98 computers. No cable, no DSL, no Ethernet, no wireless: analog dial-up. She claimed it was ISDN, and told me where I could find an electronics store to buy a cable. I took a picture of the jack and took my laptop with me to the store, where I bought an analog cable. After several more tries, making sure to plug the cable in correctly and dialing 0 before the number, I finally logged in and sent the work I’d done on the train. Needless to say, there was a lot of logging in and downloading, working off-line and uploading over the weekend. Adventure #1 in the Black Forest – I’m clearly used to high-speed connections.
We went by the Muenster that evening on the way to dinner. It’s a huge church but was not a cathedral; it was built completely with funds from Freiburg citizens. It’s under reconstruction, so the lattice-work tower that’s supposed to be spectacular was covered up. We were inside about 5 minutes when Maeve said she had to go to the bathroom. We’re in the midst of toilet-training, so like good parents, we took off for the local department-store (Kaufhof) bathroom like a shot. I was pretty sick with a cold, so I got to hang out quietly with Maeve in the handicapped bathroom while Mike went grocery shopping. By the end of buying groceries, still no toilet action. Back on with the pants and on to dinner. After this, we pretty much decided we needed to keep wearing training pants while we were out and about. After checking out a couple of supposedly veggie-friendly places that only had cheese spaetzle on the menu, we had dinner at a Turkish restaurant called Harem that wasn’t far from the apartment. They had tons of veggie options and the food was great. We even had leftovers packed in tin foil for the next day’s hike.
Our plan was to do 5 day hikes, one each day, and spend a couple of evenings after Maeve’s nap wandering around Freiburg. I’d checked out a number of hiking books from the library and looked around at different websites and come up with several interesting hikes that met multiple criteria – nice looking hike, not too far from Freiburg, easily accessible on public transit, and less than 10K long. There were surprisingly many hikes that met these criteria.

Day one was a hike out from Kirchzarten. This cute village is 13 minutes outside Freiburg on the train, and their tourism page had a dozen half-day hikes starting from town. When we got to town, the train going back into Freiburg was waiting on the other track, and we had to wait for the other train to go to be able to cross the tracks into town. The train line Kirchzarten is on runs down to Titisee through a big gorge and is called the Hollentalbahn. It’s one track most of the way, so the trains periodically have to stop to let each other by. We later took the train to Hinterzarten and got to see the Hollental. For the Kirchzarten hike, we picked an 8 K hike that went up to a Waldfahrtkappelle, which is a forest chapel, and had good views. The chapel was cute and had a biergarten attached, which was closed the day we went by. Rats! We kind of missed the views. We kept coming to open spaces where we could tell we should be able to see something, and looked at the fog. The hike was nice, though. Through town, over fields, up a wooded hill and through some forest, back downhill and through fields (including some horses), and back to town. Much of what we did was that way since we were hiking from in-town, we saw fields then woods then fields etc. Maybe with a car you could get away from the towns, but I think there would still periodically be farms and fields.

Hiking day two we got off the rail line and did a one-way hike between St. Margen and St. Peter. Both are connected via bus to Kirchzarten, and both are cloister towns with big church compounds. We wanted to do this on a weekday because the bus service tapers off on the weekend. We first took the bus to St. Margen from Kirchzarten – the whole trip from Freiburg was a bit less than 1 hour. The first part of the ride was through valley towns, then we started curving around uphill through St. Peter and then further uphill to St. Margen. There, we got off and found the tourist info to get a map, which turned out to be helpful getting out of town.

We then checked out the cloister – the walls were white and yellow and it had a fountain Maeve liked. We walked the Panorama trail – mostly on the ridgeline between the two towns.

Periodically the trail was in the forest, and periodically we saw farmsteads with lots of cows. Maeve liked the cows. About halfway through, the fog started burning off apace and we had views, and the trees and landscape were beautiful. The trees were about at peak, so there was a stark contrast between the deciduous and evergreen colors.

We saw another forest chapel. We got there at the same time as the hiking tour group we’d been behind at the bakery in St. Margen when we were all picking up pretzels to provision our walk. The tour group had pulled out their flasks and wine glasses.

Near St. Peter we saw some buffalo-looking cows as well as some Grimm-brothers type mushrooms with bright red caps with white polka dots. I’d always assumed the pictures of that kind of mushrooms in fairy tales were made up.

Another noticeable trait of the farmsteads in the Black Forest is the solar panels. Many farms and houses had the whole roof covered with panels. There were several super-picturesque farmsteads, two-story houses a with wrap-around wooden balconies draped in geraniums with a well in the front and solar panels on the roof. We had a few minutes in St. Peter before the bus came so we walked up to the cloister church – was much more ornate than the church in St. Margen. I suppose St. Peter had more money.

Hiking day three we went to Schauinsland. This is the large mountain very near Freiburg. It’s not the highest mountain the black forest, but it’s very heavily used as it’s near the city. You can take the tram then a bus to the bottom where there’s a cable car to the top. We planned on doing a 6K hike at the top. The ride up was impressive – it takes about 20 minutes in the gondola. The trees were gorgeous most of the way up – at the very top they were a bit past peak but all the leaves hadn’t fallen yet. At the top of the cable car there was the usual biergarten and a playground.

We walked to the peak, which is about 1200m and about half a K from the cable car. There’s a tower on top, which Maeve walked up, and you can see from Freiburg to Feldberg – the highest mountain there. On good days, you’re supposed to be able to see the Alps. It wasn’t foggy, but we didn’t have that good visibility. We didn’t have a very good map of the trails around so we weren’t sure exactly what to hike. We went to the Englanderdenkmal – a memorial for a group of British kids who got stuck in a snowstorm and several of them died.

We then walked to Hofsgrund, a village on the back of the mountain. The whole area up there is being used as pasturage – cows were everywhere which Maeve really liked. It was all rolling hills and deep valleys and wonderful fall colors. After lunch on a bench and giving Maeve a while to commune with the cows, we just kept walking figuring we’d eventually see signs to get to the cable car.

We walked past several pastures that had ski lifts going up them – the cows must all be in barns in the winter and I bet the skiing is nice. We eventually hit the main road that goes up to the cable car – there’s a path along side it, and walked up from there. We took a detour at the top of a ski-lift where there was a flat area and tried to get Maeve to nap. Mike and I relaxed in the sun, and Maeve played with grass. Nothing going on the sleeping. So we just walked out and went home for a late nap.

That evening we did dinner in BrennNessel, which is called a student bar, but had great food. There was a line outside when we showed up at 5:58 for the 6 pm opening. It’s a bit behind the main train station in a newer area of town, and we’d have never gone there if the restaurant hadn’t been recommended as veggie-friendly. We got pumpkin soup and cheese spaetzle and spaghetti with gorgonzola sauce and it was all yummy. I think we were hungry, but it was also good to get simple but tasty food.

Hiking day four was Hinterzarten. One of the reasons I wanted to hike from there was an excuse to take the Hollentalbahn through the gorge. It’s one of the many mountain trains that run through the Black Forest, in this case from Freiburg to Titisee. The gorge is between Himmelreich and Hinterzarten. The gorge was pretty – in places we could see the river at the bottom, other places were tunnels or just views of sheer sides. There’s also a road through it and a hike, but the hike is 15K, too long for us with Maeve. It was interesting to see when the train and the road were not on the same level – the train went through many tunnels, and the road switch backed at the bottom end to leave the gorge.

In Hinterzarten, we were doing the Ravennaschluct hike, a hike up the gorge of the Ravenna creek. Heading out of town, we walked on the Heimatpfad, which is a learning path about Black Forest history and culture. The first part went through the Loeffeltal, the spoon valley, paralleling the railroad tracks heading back to the Hollental. It was called the Loeffeltal because there were lots of spoon smiths there. Now there are several mills that have been reconstructed with pretty long open pipes carrying the water from the river to the top of the wheel. Most of the wheels seem to have been connected to saw mills – at the foot of the Ravenna valley trail there was an information board about how the sawmill technology changed in the 19th century. We saw three or four during the hike, often with multiple sluice gates starting 10s of meters from the mill. The walk down the spoon valley to the bottom of the Ravenna gorge was pretty with farmsteads, small waterfalls, the river, the mills, and the train tracks just visible uphill through the woods. We then walked through a more developed area around the highway where there is a hotel. On the street to the hotel, we passed these really weird electrical poles – it turns out we were still on the history learning path and there were a half-dozen poles as part of a recreation of an old telegraph line.
The Ravenna gorge hike was a bit more crowded –about half way up, Maeve decided she no longer wanted to be in the backpack so we kept getting passed by small groups and a couple of bigger hiking tour groups. We’d seen some tour groups earlier in the week on the St. Margen-St. Peter hike, and we saw several in the Ravenna gorge. The gorge was beautiful. The creek flowed pretty steeply downhill. At the bottom, we passed under the huge stone arches supporting the railroad tracks. Two minutes further in were the old stone walls that had been used to support the previous railroad line. Then the gorge got narrower, with the trail using a fair number of wooden bridges crossing from one side to the other and several places where we ascended on stairs. The trees and light were wonderful. Half way up we passed a mill that is sometimes used for historical enactments of grinding grain. There Maeve decided to get out of the pack and walk the rest of the way up. This slowed our pace considerably, but she could do it. At the top was a village called Breitnau, part of the town of Hinterzarten. From there, there was a well-travelled path which was part of a long-distance hiking trail to take back into Hinterzarten. We ate lunch at the top of a hill with a view over pastures and to our left the ski jumps – Hinterzarten is apparently the place to ski jump in Germany.

That evening, we managed to go back to the Muenster and check out the inside. They were preparing for a concert by the Jr. college of music which was happening at 5:30, including a Gregorian chant and other church music. We decided to miss it and get dinner instead. We walked to what was supposed to be a Persian restaurant which was outside the medieval core, but was now an Indian restaurant, again with good veggie options, but not open until 6pm. So we went to option #2, a potato restaurant called Kartoffelhaus. There’s also a potato restaurant in Saarbruecken which is veggie-friendly, so maybe this is a German trend. Anyway, we sat outside on their patio and the food was great. Yummy salads, good bread, and tasty potatoes – Mike got his with Raclette and I got mine with Spinach. We had some issues at the table, particularly with spillage of Maeve’s orange juice/mineral water mix (orangeshorle), but managed to stay mostly dry and not too sticky. The Kartoffelhaus and BrennNessel were the best veggie food we had in Freiburg. Baden-Württemberg is not known for its veggie cuisine, and for the size of city, Freiburg had very few veggie-friendly options.

Our last day in Freiburg we had to take the train at noon, so we’d planned to do a short hike up Schlossberg, the hill right outside the medieval core where the old castle had been. There’s now nothing left of the castle but a few ramparts here and there, and there is an observation tower on top. So we walked out of town, past the second remaining tower from the old city wall, and 2 minutes later were on the path up the hill. The path first went behind houses and past some construction and then was out of the city though not far from the noise.

We walked past a few vineyards, which Maeve really liked as she’s a fan of grapes. There were purple grapes still on the vines, although some grape leaves were already turning red. Schlossberg goes up about 400 meters above the city, and only the bottom part is good for grapes, but it really seems amazing that 5 minutes out of town you’re in a vineyard and 10 minutes past that in the woods uphill.

About half way up is a road that runs around the mountain that was built around the turn of the 20th century when the Schlossberg was rehabilitated as a relaxation spot near the city. At the front of the hill, facing downtown, there is a big gun battery that has great views of downtown – we could see the weekly farmers market in the square beside the Muenster. We snacked there.

From there, we headed uphill to the observation tower at the top. It was very cool, as the supports were massive tree trunks. The view was good; we could supposedly see Schauinsland but we weren’t sure which mountain it was. And you could feel the tower sway. Mike took Maeve to the crow’s nest up top while I hung out on the big platform. The trees again were just beautiful.

As usual, I was concerned about time so we headed straight down from the tower, past a second brick tower lower down that’s closed off, and straight to the city. We’d gone up a round-about route, but it took less than 30 minutes to descend and hit the city gate. From there, we headed to the apartment to pay, then the train station and the train ride home. Maeve did well and got down for a late nap in Saarbrücken.

2008-09-01T02:52:00.002-04:00

August 31, 2008

We were at a Children's Festival in the German-French Garden in Saarbruecken, and Maeve liked playing on the inflatable jumping stage, especially the slide.

2008-09-01T02:42:00.003-04:00

Photos of Maeve from Desiree Koh

These are from when we were in Seattle, and were walking around the Seattle Center/Space Needle area on July 22, 2008

The first series is of Maeve "jumping." At that time, jumping pretty much involved crouching and standing up, with little or no feet leaving the ground. Since then, she's learned to jump when holding something with her hand, like the back of the couch, which she does and yells "saltas" (you jump) in Spanish. She was very proud of herself for jumping.

The second series is of Maeve sitting on flying fish and pig sculptures.

2008-08-30T09:28:00.012-04:00

Gyor and Budapest, August 3-11, 2008

View of Budapest from Gellert Hill

On our way to Budapest, we stopped for a day in Gyor, a city in NW Hungary on the main train route from Vienna to Budapest. It’s a mostly industrial center, with a small but quaint old center city and a very big thermal bath complex. We stayed at a pension near the baths, which were on the other side of the river from downtown. We walked from the train station – it should have been about 1K, but we got a bit lost and had to ask for directions. There was not an overabundance of street signs. Lesson learned – take a taxi the first time in a new town and afterwards hoof it. We found the pension, but couldn’t get into our room until 1, and had no baby bed. No worries – Maeve had been climbing out of her travel bed all week in Vienna and falling asleep on the floor. So we stored our luggage and headed into town to wander for a couple of hours and get lunch.

We walked across the bridge into town and ran straight into a children’s festival. There were kids on motorized play tractors, and a put-put course laid out on the bridge. There were kids everywhere. We got a golf stick and Maeve played a hole or two. There was also a registration booth – I thought maybe you had to register, and we had no Hungarian money, so we wandered through more games in the square at the end of the bridge with more festival and an old yellow church and convent building, past booths selling stuff on the main street into the center city, and found an ATM. We then went back to the booth and tried to register – with no luck. No one spoke English, German, Spanish or French. At that point, we decided we’d tried and Maeve should just play. So she blew bubbles, hopped around on some cushions and played go fish. I later tried to register at another booth. Again the workers couldn’t help, but a mom in line explained that it was a free festival – you brought a photo of your kid smiling and they got an armband, but registration wasn’t necessary. There was also a fairy-tale area where the kids got colored cards and had to complete tasks like fishing, walking blindfolded, bean bag toss etc. All of this was very confusing to us, as nothing and nobody spoke English or German. We gave up trying other languages. After playing a bit, we went walking to the main square, where they had inflatable jumping stages set up, with long links of kids waiting to jump. There was a restaurant on the square with info in German and English, and after a bit more wandering around looking for eatables we could decipher, we ate there. At that point we were tired and sunburnt, and the food was very heavy. We quickly learned that Hungarian food is fried – we had some soup (Hungarian meals start with soup) and fried cheese. Not great. We called it a morning and went back to the hotel.

Maeve napped in the bathroom floor on a bedspread as the pension had only 1 travel bed and it was being used. Like many other places in Europe, we had a double bed but each of us had our own comforter. So Maeve got one of them for a mattress. We had access to communal bathrooms in the hall if we needed it, so it was better to have her in the bathroom and us be able to read and move around in the room. After nap, we lotioned up with sunscreen and headed out to explore a bit more. We walked along the river and past the cathedral. Coming back from lunch, the Children’s Festival was closing up, but when we got back out, it was going again. There was an island in the middle of the river which also had activities like making headbands etc, as well as a toddler playfield with inflatable pools of water and a big indoor-outdoor carpet covered with blocks, cars, and other toys. After dinner on a park bench, we settled down there to play. All in all, we walked around town but mostly just enjoyed the festival.

That night at the pension, we hadn’t gotten any towels or an extra bedspread, so I went down the hall and picked some extras up from a neighboring room that wasn’t rented out. That way Maeve had a mattress and I had a blanket. We were starting to realize why a pension isn’t a hotel. The next morning, we were up and ready to eat before breakfast was really out. The pension was billed as a health resort, and seemed to cater to people going to the mineral baths nearby. For example, all rooms were non-smoking, and there were so many smokers in Hungary, this was certainly a deliberate health-oriented decision. But the woman laying out breakfast was smoking like a chimney as she did it – so I paid and got breakfast for Maeve while Mike took her outside to avoid the smoke. Very strange. Later the employee moved her ashtray away from the breakfast area and into the office.

By this time, we’d noticed a couple of things about Hungary. First we didn’t speak the language. I was used to being able to communicate at least a little all over Europe. In Hungary, sometimes English worked, sometimes German (at the pension), and sometimes there was just total incomprehension. It’s one of the legacies of Hungary’s former isolation from Western Europe and felt very weird. We didn’t go to many museums, but the ones we went to were labeled in English, but off the beaten tourist track it was less sure to be able to communicate. Second, families don’t use strollers as much in Hungary as Germany. At the festival in Gyor, small kids were mostly in strollers – some in arms, and a few in slings, but many, many toddlers were walking. Some were on shoulders. They would all be in strollers in Germany. We had Maeve in and out of a stroller, but we’re ambivalent stroller users at best so really noticed the difference. Third, in Hungary, everybody smoked. We managed to avoid the worst of it, but had to make strategic decisions, particularly at restaurants, to not sit near smokers. Fourth, Hungarian food is heavy on the breaded and fried in grease variety of main courses. Hungarian cuisine was not our favorite. Luckily there were several veggie restaurants in Budapest and we ate a fair amount of Indian food and falafel. But it’s not a veggie-friendly country and veggie restaurants often had shorter hours (maybe only open for lunch), and some restaurants that guidebooks or web sites said had veggie options actually only had 1 thing without meat on the menu.

Fifth, Hungarians love kids. Especially in contrast to Germany, which isn’t kid-phobic but certainly isn’t kid-friendly. There are more kids in Hungary, and they seem to be more communally looked after. We ran into 2 children’s festivals (in Gyor and a small one in a park near our apartment in Budapest). Parents carry their kids around with them wherever they go. We ate dinner at a health-food store/veggie diner that had 1 veggie option and 3 tables on the street. A young woman was running the store and some kind of younger relation (son/brother) that was about 5 kept running into the store, on the sidewalk, and into the bar next door, which presumably was owned by the same family. Maeve enjoyed watching him play moving water bottles in the store. This is something you’d never see in Germany, or the States for that matter. There are also tons of neighborhood pocket parks, all with a water fountains, benches for sitting, and kid’s play equipment, including toddler and regular swings. The kids play with one another differently than in Germany. There’s still a fair amount of the bigger kids taking over equipment, but there’s also a lot of 6-year-olds who help their 3-year-old siblings play on equipment. There is also much closer parental/older sibling supervision of the littler kids, who are actively encouraged to explore the park instead of sitting in the sandbox while their parents sit on a nearby bench. And when a couple of little kids are on equipment, the big kids wait or play by helping the littler kids. For example, there was a very popular rope merry-go-round/climbing structure on the park near our apartment in Budapest and when Maeve and another toddler were on it, the big kids wanted it, but several joined in pushing the little kids gently until they were done and the big kids could get on and go fast. I’m not so sure how playgrounds work in the US, but I’d bet their law of the jungle is somewhere between Hungary and Germany.

On to Budapest. We spent a lot of time in Budapest just wandering around. Our apartment complex was centrally located, inside the ring road around downtown Pest (the flat side of the Danube), so public transit to everywhere was very convenient and there was a fair amount of things to see within walking distance. Our first morning we went to see the Parliament building on the banks of the Danube. It was partly under renovation. We later found out that less than 20% of the building is used by the parliament, and it was build of sandstone, which is a soft stone and continually erodes. Therefore, part of the building is always under construction. But it still looks like a cool drip-sandcastle on the banks of the Danube. We walked past the Agriculture ministry, checking out the giant metal marbles that mark where the building got hit by gunfire in the uprising in 1956. We then played a while on a bridge/sculpture of Nagy, who was president at the time and got deposed by the Russians when a more orthodox government was put in place. Afterwards, we found an Indian veggie restaurant in the basement of a nearby building and ate lunch. On our walk back to the subway, we went by St. Stephen’s church, the biggest church in Hungary. It was built in the early 20^th century, and supposedly houses a relic, the saint’s right hand. The relic chapel was closed so we didn’t see it. The interior was Byzantine-influenced, with pictures of saints and angles on gold backgrounds.

(detail of St. Stephen's Church)

We went back to our hotel and got into the room a bit early. We’d asked to get in before 2, the regular check-in time, so Maeve could nap. They got us in, but the room wasn’t cleaned, so we dumped our luggage and went out in the hall for another 30 minutes. We got Maeve down, and later realized that the room didn’t have wireless. So the next day, we were moved to another room that supposedly did have wireless. It was intermittent, and Mike ended up doing most of his work that week sitting in the hallway near the central staircase where the wireless was strong.

The next day we headed across the river to Buda and up castle hill, where the main fortifications were and the Hapsburgs ruled the country. Before them, the Hungarian monarchs ruled from there and the cathedral is there. We first walked a bit along the Buda side of the Danube to get to the cable car to go up the hill. The cable car was built to take workers up the hill – scribes and others who worked for the government ministries up there. It’s about a 2 minute ride – not that exciting and Maeve wasn’t old enough to think it was cool. It lets you out at one end of the hill, in front of the royal palace which is now museums and the national archives. There was a great view of Pest. From there, we walked over to the Cathedral, which we paid to duck into because it was raining. It had a very dark interior, not buying into the gothic esthetic of high and light at all. There were a number of informational signs around that included English, so we learned, for example, that all the ratty flags hanging up in the central apse were from noble families of Hungary. Maeve mostly just enjoyed running in and out of the columns supporting the pulpit. We didn’t think the interior of the cathedral was particularly pretty, but it was very different, and we were glad we saw it. Behind the cathedral, facing the river is the Fisherman’s bastion, not really much of a defensive work, that has great views of Pest. As a break from the drizzle, we went to a nearby coffee shop and got drinks and snacks. Maeve, as usual, wanted chocolate so we had a long discussion with the servers about what confections didn’t have nuts. Yummy. When we got out, we walked along the back side of castle hill to see the views of the Buda hills. It was mostly just city, both in the spaces between the hills and crawling up the hillsides. From there, we walked through the rest of the hill and down to Muskova Ter, the main transportation hub in Buda that’s at the foot of the hill.

From there, we went to lunch at a veggie fast-food buffet. It was right off the main pedestrian tourist drag, Vaci Utica, but Google maps hadn’t mapped it correctly, so we walked a bit to find it. From there, over to Deak Ter and home for nap. Deak Ter (Ter means square in Hungarian) is nothing special, but we kept walking through there as it’s where the 3 metro lines cross and is therefore a big transportation hub.

Mid-week we took a day trip out to Szentendre, a town about 20K outside of Budapest at the end of a commuter rail line. We’d wanted to go by boat to spend some more time on the Danube, but the boat times would have made napping impossible, so we took the commuter rail, which ran a lot and only took 45 minutes. The town has a long history of orthodox Christians and some nice churches as well as an open-air living historical village outside town. Our plan was to hit the village early and then the churches when they opened an hour later. This did not quite work out. When we got to Szentendre, it was about 9 o’clock and we knew the open-air museum opened then and what bus to take out there. But a nice gentleman also buying tickets for the bus was able to translate for the ticket seller – there was no bus for 2 hours and you couldn’t buy the tickets more than an hour before the bus so she couldn’t help us right then. So we had to decide whether to wander around town or take a taxi. Taxi it was, and very much worth it.

T he open-air museum had houses, stores, churches, barns and in some cases, completely reconstructed neighborhoods, from towns in different areas of Hungary. Our first stop past the entrance gate, where we did remember to ask what times the buses left, was a linen dying shop. It was a big barn where they had rooms to cook the linen in indigo, which they imported from elsewhere, and then had a huge barn with big rollers, as in large-barn –sized, where they ironed it mechanically. And they guide there spoke English so could explain the mechanisms. Next stop was the local bakery where we bought some pastries and stopped for Maeve to snack on yogert. Next to the windmill was a pottery making workshop and a class where people were learning to cane chairs. The windmill was across from a play area – Maeve hung out there while Mike and I took turns going to the windmill. The guide there was more typical – no English and a very little German. I managed to figure out that the big screw-machines were to change the coarseness of the grind – the guide didn’t really know the words for this in German, but we somehow communicated what made the flour bigger or smaller.

We walked through several other village areas, after deciding to miss the first bus back and just spend the whole morning at the museum. There was a tiny church and a house where they had weaving games for kids. Most of the houses were farm-houses with thatched roves, wells with counter-weighted levels to get up the water, barns, pigsties etc. A fair number of the houses had activities for kids, but Maeve was too little for most. We passed by another house where they were getting ready to make corn pancakes on a wooden stove. We communicated enough in German to figure out the demonstration was starting in 20 minutes, so we wandered a bit more, checked out some pigsties, apple trees, and beehives, and hit the bathrooms before coming back. Maeve got to make several pancakes, rolling them out and watching them puff up on the wooden stove. The fire was definitely the coolest part. They were served with very garlicy butter and sour cream. Yummy. When Maeve was about finished another little girl came in and rolled out pancakes, and then a whole troop of kids. Their guide was translating between Hungarian and English, and we found out that they had arranged the demonstration for their group. So we had just lucked out.

We ate our picnic lunch in the shade of the windmill – by this point I was getting very sun-phobic as we’d been out in the sun all morning. Then we went to hang out at the barnyard – saw the ducks, sheep, cows, horses, pigs, goats, and chickens. This was a big hit with Maeve.

After lunch we checked out another area of the museum after walking through the picnic area and big playground area. The whole museum was worth a day and a great place for kids, but it was definitely helpful to speak some German and if we’d known Hungarian we could have had a lot more interpretation and better understood what we were seeing. On the way out, we had some confusion about how to find the bus – you had to walk out to the main road – but the woman at the front ticket office was extremely helpful despite our communication difficulties. We’d also left our credit card there, and got it back from her. Yikes! Thank goodness there was one main entrance. From the park, we just took the bus into town and then the next train back to Budapest as it was already quite late and way past nap time. So we missed the churches, but had a good day.

I think that evening we started our relationship with the veggie hummus joint a couple of blocks from our apartment. We ended up getting falafel and hummus there a couple of times – cheap, quick, nearby, and yummy.

One morning we walked around on Andrassy Ut, the Hungarian response to Paris’s boulevards. We walked past the opera, and Maeve enjoyed climbing on the Spynxes. It’s art-deco, and I liked the small details, like the colored tiles on the ceiling of the porch in front of the main entrance. But the overall impression was big and bulky. Mike didn’t think the building was that beautiful. We then went to the House of Terror, a museum in a building that was used by both the Nazis and Communist governments for security. The museum was very impressionistic – with excellent video footage in several rooms (with English subtitles) and good English explanations on a paper you could pick up in each room. I ended up mostly going from room to room, glancing around to set the scene, and sitting to read the info on the sheet. There was some information about the Nazis and the Nazi-sympathetic government, but Mike and I had to keep talking to one another to figure out the general timeline. I could have used more overview, but basically I understood that the Nazis were never in power in Hungary, but they were a large voting block and the whole government was Nazi-sympathetic and allied with the Axis powers, a term coined by a Hungarian but that I didn’t know also included Hungary. For most of WWII, the Jews, although badly discriminated against, were not actually sent to concentration camps. Only in the last months of the war when Germany invaded Hungary to get more assistance for “the final push”, were the Jewish Hungarians rounded up, shipped off, and systematically killed. Which explains why Budapest still has a vibrant Jewish community – not everyone got killed off. Still not a pretty story.

Most of the museum was on the Communist Era – one of the critiques of the museum was that it focused more on Communism that the Nazi years, and that was true. There was information about how the secret services were built, informants, dealing with the uprising in 1956 etc. People lived in fear of the state police. Even the man that founded the secret police was later deposed and killed as he had Jewish heritage – this was under the Communists who were apparently also very anti-Semitic. In the basement was a reconstruction of cells from other security buildings.

One afternoon, we took a trip to the Ernst museum. This museum showcases modern art, and is in an art-deco palace off Kiraly Utica, walking distance from our apartment. The museum was named after the former owner of the house. We went because of the name, and got in for free because their computer was down. The house was interesting, with some stained glass windows and sculptural elements you could see as you walked up to the exhibition space on the 1^st floor. The rest of the building must be apartments. The exhibition was of modern Hungarian art – the best piece was a sculpture than ran behind the walls between two rooms – so all you could see was little pieces of wood that were leading into a dark room. It turns out that you could climb on the sculpture, most of which was in a room with no windows and one light from below, so you could see the precarious scaffolding that was holding up the wood you were standing on near the ceiling. Needless to say, Maeve loved walking on this, and Mike and I alternatively hung out with her in the dark room, coming out, and going back, while the other looked around.

We spent one morning in the Museum of Fine arts on Hosok Tere. This square is at the entrance to the biggest city park, at the end of a huge boulevard. We first wandered around the square and took lots of pictures of the monumental statues. This is where Hungarians have major rallies, kind of like the mall in Washington, when they want to protest or celebrate. No one was there at 8:30. We then walked around the park, which is huge. Maeve looked at ducks, played in a playground, and we walked through a castle that’s now a museum. We came out of the park to eat a snack before heading into the museum at 10 – and the square was transformed, teeming with tourists stepping in and out of charter buses. The museum of Fine Arts is an impressive building. We mostly just saw the Spanish paintings – left over from the Hapsburgs who ruled both Hungary and Spain. It’s an impressive collection.

That afternoon we did a bit of a walking tour from our apartment to look at some art deco buildings. One stop was the Orthodox Synagogue, which was build on a bend in the road. The building itself was rather austere. We walked past the trade school, again very austere with huge owls looking down from the second story. We walked past the Guttenburg apartment block, which was more lighthearted but in need of restoration. Our last stop was the Museum of Applied Arts, which was stunning. The tile work outside, the atrium inside, the stained glass – just a beautiful building. After our walk, we ate dinner at the whole foods store/restaurant where Maeve enjoyed watching the little boy play.

On Saturday, we had some kind of plan that probably involved walking or a museum. But we were up early and ready to get out hours before a museum was open and it was lightly drizzling, so we decided to go to the baths. Budapest is full of mineral baths and Turkish baths. There’s a big baths complex in the middle of the city park, called Szechenyi Furdo, and we’d decided to go there, in large part because it’s mixed, so we could all bathe together. After changing clothes and figuring out how to lock the locker with some non-verbal help from the Hungarian senior citizens who were changing back into street clothes after their morning medicinal, Maeve and I found Mike outside in the drizzle waiting for us next to 3 huge outdoor pools. They were at varying temperatures from 28 to 32 to 36-38 (which is body temperature) and were pretty well used, not over-full, but not empty of mostly middle-aged or older people lounging. One pool was for swimming. And there were a few families there. We hung out mostly in the warmest pool, with a little time in the middle temp one.

About swimming pools in Germany, and apparently in Hungary: they’re a big deal. Many of the pools in Germany are part of complexes that have indoor and outdoor areas, whirlpools, jets, big and little slides etc. They’re basically water parks. The outdoor pool in Saarbruecken has a small kiddie pool, a big lounge/play pool with several sides ramping down for small children, small and big slides, water jet/shower streams, a section with barca loungers submerged to 1 ft depth etc. As well as an Olympic sized pool farther back in the complex for actually swimming. The baths in Gyor were mineral ones - mineral baths seem a big draw in Hungary. But from what we could see from outside, in addition to whatever indoor facilities they had, they also had an outdoor water park. The city baths in Budapest were less of a water park – only 3 outdoor pools, with some Jacuzzi jets, a few shower massages, and one whirlpool area, in addition to the pool with lanes for swimming. And they were all heated with mineral water. The indoor areas had some rooms for aquatic therapy and then baths of varying temperatures with and without minerals for medicinal soaks.

Maeve is much better in the water this summer, as long as she isn’t cold. She still very much wants to be in arms as we’re moving around the pool, but when we’re at the side she likes to jump from the stair into our arms, or “swim” as we hand her off between us. After swimming a bit outdoors, we explored the indoor pools and hung out in one for a few minutes. It definitely smelled like minerals. 2 hours into the experience, we headed home exhausted to put on more clothes as the temperature hadn’t warmed up to shorts weather in the drizzle.

For lunch, we’d planned a quick excursion to a café in the Goethe Institute that supposedly had vegetarian food. There was one not very appealing noodle dish. So we decided not to eat there and went in search of the other nearby veggie restaurants. We went walking again down Vaci U, the main pedestrian street that’s full of tourists. We ran into some construction – Budapest is putting in a fourth subway line and every once in a while you run into construction. Then we went to the first place – under new management and no longer veggie. Second place – not open. Third place, a bio store with small buffet was open but no buffet on weekends. Fourth place – closed for Saturday. At this point, our easy morning had turned into an exhausting forced march around town to find food. We ended up going to a bakery near Deak Ter on the way home. There are not many veg options around.

That afternoon, we had tickets to do a sight-seeing cruise on the Danube. So we got Maeve up early and headed out. The cruise was great – they had headphone with explanations in many languages – Buda was a male voice and Pest a female so it was easy to know which side to look on. By that point, we’d seen most things already but learned more – for example that there was a monastery inside Gellert Hill, when the bridges were built linking the two sides, and that the Parliament building is continually under reconstruction. We had an hour break on Margaret Island – an island in the middle of the Danube that’s got a bath, a couple of hotels, and otherwise is park, no cars allowed. There was an optional guided tour, and we were the only ones that took it. We saw the oldest church on the island, and the remains of a Dominican convent which was where Princess Margaret (hence Margaret island) lived and was buried. There is also tons of park, some paths lined with sculptures of Hungarian artists, and a small Japanese garden. A popular form of transportation is multi-person bikes – the even have little ones for kids, or big ones for 4 people and seats for 2 kids on the front. When we went back to the boat, we were told that there was a bomb threat on Margaret bridge, and the boat couldn’t take us back to downtown. So we picnicked dinner on the island amid several bridal shoots, and walked off another bridge to the metro.

On our last day in Budapest, we had an easy morning and hiked up Gellert Hill, the second main hill in Buda that faces the river. In the afternoon, there was a festival going on on the Chain Bridge, and we walked there from Deak Ter. The festival was the usual arts and crafts with several music stages without anywhere to really sit and listen and lots of meaty food. Maeve liked listening to music, watching the boats on the river, and watching the guys selling devil’s sticks. On the way back to Deak Ter, we had to pass through a park which was heavily used by skateboarders and a latin dance practice group. We watched for a bit as Maeve watched a fountain. We were too late to re-visit a nearby veggie restaurant, which closed at 6pm, so we just went to an Indian place around the corner from our hotel. The food was super yummy but spicy!

Monday was heading home – flight from Budapest to Frankfurt Hahn and then a bus to Saarbruecken. We’d called to schedule an airport pickup, which didn’t come, so we took the subway. It took about an hour – subway to Deak Ter, change lines to end of line, then bus to airport, but was not a problem. The public transit in Budapest is really quite good. We’d never flown to Hahn before – it’s just for low-cost airlines and basically a hub for Ryanair, which we flew. Getting back wasn’t too bad – we had to wait about an hour for the bus, which turned out to be a mini-bus, at which point I was really hoping Maeve wouldn’t get car sick, and was dreaming that maybe she’d take a nap. We ate an early dinner before the bus, passed Maeve back and forth, working hard to keep her entertained and seated on the bus, and got home just in time for bed. Good to be home.

2008-08-18T14:56:00.013-04:00

Vienna blog (Maeve on the tram in Vienna)

We had 3 weeks of vacation this summer, as Maeve’s daycare had time off. We spent the first week (July 21-26) in Seattle. Mike had a conference, and I was looking at housing and daycares as we’re thinking of moving there. So that was work. But afterwards, we had 2 weeks of vacation and spent a week each in Vienna and Budapest.

From Seattle we flew to Frankfurt and then took a train to Vienna – a long travel day. Maeve did well on the flights, but it would be nice if she’d sleep more. The longer she’s up, the more she has to be walked around the plane and entertained, so Mike and I didn’t get much rest. She slept for about 3 hours on the floor of the train under our feet – it was great.

The Vienna weather was very nice – mid 80’s. We were often hot and tired from the heat, which just goes to show how quickly you can acclimate to cold and disacclimate to heat. We slathered on the sun-tan lotion and tried, somewhat successfully, not to get burnt.

One of the first days there, we did a walking tour of downtown offered through the tourist info center. It was great – took us by lots of historical plaques where Mozart or other luminaries used to live, and we went through several interior courtyards off the Blutgasse (blood alley). This is a medieval section of downtown near the cathedral with the complex for the Knights Templar’s (still in use with about a dozen monks living there) and other old buildings. We’d never have found that on our own. In the early 20^th century, there was a debate about whether or not to tear all these old buildings down and build new ones with better sanitation (i.e. running water and toilets) or renovate. The city council ended up establishing a fund to help landlords renovate, which is still in operation to day, and the buildings were kept.

Another morning we decided to go to the Albertina, a museum that’s part of the Hofburg, the Hapsburg’s imperial palace that takes up a huge part of downtown and backs onto the Ring – a boulevard encircling downtown that was built in the 1800’s when they tore down the medieval walls and fortifications. The day before we’d seen the installation of an outdoor sculpture exhibit on the plaza fronting the Albertina. We were up and out a bit before the museum was going to open, so we decided to take a trolley tour around the ring. A couple of trams follow the ring all the way around, so we hopped one and took it around. We started at Schottentor, which is where the tram from our apartment (in the outer part of Vienna at Hernals, a 20 minute tram ride into town) dropped us off. The first part of the ring with the University, Rathaus, Volkstheater, Parliament, Opera, and tons of parks is very monumental. All this was built on a grand scale when they created the ring. Later on were more palaces and parks. Near the river and the ride back to Schottentor was less impressive.

The Albertina had 2 exhibits going, one on Impressionism and one on Paul Klee, plus their permanent exhibit which is in the royal apartments. They have a massive collection, but only a small part of it is on display. We thought we’d missed the main museum, but the royal apartments are it – they just have very selected works on display. By the time we got there, we were pretty much wiped out, and I actually didn’t pay much attention to the art on the walls. I was more interested in checking out the apartments and running after Maeve, who loved the long hallways as all the rooms opened in a straight line and she could run a long way.

The 2 temporary exhibits, which was saw first, were great. They mixed works from the Albertina’s collection and things they borrowed. Maeve is now old enough that you can talk with her about the art, what colors there are, if there are people or boats or chairs or water or trees etc. She’ll point out the paintings she wants to look at and then we talk about them. It’s slow going, but interactive. So you get to look at things while entertaining her, a major improvement over just having her run around and climb on benches and whoever’s with her sees nothing. We still switch off, one going faster and one with her, but it works well. I think the impressionist work was very good for this – it’s very approachable and relatively realistic. The Paul Klee didn’t work quite as well, and she was tireder by then. In the apartments, she just wanted to run. After the Albertina, we walked through some of Hofburg to find the cantina, which had a veggie option, and was cheap at about 7 Euros each. On the way there, we passed the Butterfly house. Maeve was very psyched about this, and like good parents, we took her there after lunch. It was extremely hot and humid, but butterflies were flying all around, there were several terrariums with butterflies in various stages of pupation, and there were Maeve-level fishtanks. All in all a winner for the 2 year old set.

I would recommend the Albertina. It was small enough to do without getting exhausted, even for us, and had excellent art. We were interested in going to Belvedere also, another place/art museum, which has all the art deco work, but didn’t make it there. We also didn’t make it to any of the museums in the new Museum Quarter, right outside the ring. We have to be selective with Maeve, and the Albertina was a good choice.

One day we took a whole-day trip to Melk. You can get a package from the Austrian train to take a train to Melk, do a 2 hour Danube cruise downriver to Krems, and take a train back to Vienna. This was my favorite day in Austria. We got up early, took packed lunch and plenty of food - sandwiches, yogurt, fruit, crackers, dried fruit etc and hopped the train in the Westbahnhof. Maeve likes looking for windmills, corn, sunflowers, trees, and hay. Also cows and other livestock when it’s around. She also likes walking up and down the train. The ride to Melk is about 90 minutes, and from Krems back a little over an hour – we tend to pick day trips with travel times significantly less than 2 hours. Melk is all about the Benedictine monastery. From the train station you walk 2 minutes into town and see this yellow enormous structure covering the top of the hill towering over the town. The town’s main street just caters to tourists – Melk is on a main long-distance Danube biking trail and there were tons of bike tours as well as cruise ships, bus tours etc. We also saw several people from our AM train on the boat and return train – so that package was also frequently used.

It’s a five minute walk uphill to the monastery which has huge gardens outside the gates which we didn’t really have time to see much of. We were there in time for the morning English tour. We walked through the first courtyard with a fountain and koi (Maeve likes fish and can say both pez and koi) and up into a museum. The museum was off the long corridor, the longest side of the monastery, and presented history of the Benedictines and the monastery. The monastery was founded by the ruling house of Austria before the Hapsburgs, over 900 years ago. The buildings were completely redone by an Abbot about 200 years ago – the original buildings were razed and this impressive fortress complex was built on the site. It really makes you realize that these were princes of the church with massive wealth and resources at hand. The view from the balcony over an arm of the Danube was magnificent. The library was also interesting – trompe d’oeil ceiling and books floor to ceiling with a number of concealed doors that lead to alcoves behind the shelves where there were windows and better light for reading.

There was a little walk down the Danube to the boat dock. The boat was a river cruiser, and we got a spot on the upper deck in the shade, with a great view of the refreshment stand. We were trying to stay out of the sun and out of the cigarette smoke. We ended up spending most of the trip in front of the covered section in the shade of the roof behind the pilot’s house. The Danube was just beautiful, sometimes steep hillsides with half ruined castles sitting in craggy outcroppings, other times gentler slopes covered with vineyards, other times valleys with villages nestled between fields. There was also plenty of business on the river to keep Maeve busy looking around: other boats, people swimming, buoys, ducks etc.

The train ride home from Krems was uneventful. Catching the train was a trick – we looked at our ticket, which said we went from Krems school, but didn’t understand where that was. We asked boat personnel, also clueless. So we set out to walk to Krems main train station. About half way there, we realized we had about 5 minutes or we’d miss our train. I had Maeve asleep in the sling on my back by this point, but we transferred her to Mike and woke her up and I got the backpack and we started running, maybe 6 blocks or more. We got there in plenty of time as the train was a few minutes late. It turns out that there was a local train from the Krems school, which is near the dock, that went to the main train station and there you switched for the train to Vienna. Oh well. We made the train and Maeve slept for maybe 5 minutes that day.

Food in Vienna was generally good. There were tons of vegetarian restaurants listed on HappyCow.com, and when we bought a city guide, it had some more options. We went to one or two that weren’t good. These were the typical Viennese food, which was breaded, fried, oil-swamped and salty. But the cafes, Chinese, neuveau cuisine etc veg options were all good. Our favorite restaurant was Wrenkh, between Stephansplatz and the river. We ate there after we did the walking tour. The tour left us off at the old Jesuit University, and we walked past the Hoher Markt, where there were tons of people milling around. They’d stopped to look at the Ankeruhr, a clock that had a procession of people in very fancy clothes representing each hour every day at noon. So we got to watch that, and then headed to Wrenkh, which was not oil-drenched and very flavorful veggie food.

We spent one day at Schoenbrun castle. We paid to go in the maze, and got detoured on the way there by a really nice playground. Each section of the playground had a different focus, like musical instruments, mirrors, a maze, or water. The neatest equipment was a huge bird that you could climb up a rope net to, sit in, and push your legs off the netting to make the wings moved. Maeve enjoyed sitting up there with her Mike for a while. Later, we had some issues with the maze, but eventually found our way to the middle.

There was a huge fountain behind the castle, near the maze, that was off when we first got there. By 10 AM the Neptune fountain was going, spraying water high in the air, halfway between the castle and the Gloriette, which was set at the top of a hill. We walked up the hill to the Gloriette to get good views of the castle grounds and Vienna. The whole gardens were very impressive and we could have spent the whole day, not just the morning there. We didn’t bother to go in the castle to see the apartments, but they’re also supposed to be rather luxurious.

One morning we went to see the Hundertwasserhaus, an apartment block in the art deco style put up by Vienna’s answer to Gaudi, Hundertwasser. There’s the apartment block, a shopping center next door, and a few blocks down a museum. Maeve liked the fountain. The building was interesting, mostly because there were plants growing off lots of the balconies and looked very organic.

Most afternoons we just took long naps and then went out to dinner, getting over jetlag. I wanted to try some Vienese café food, but it was a bit tricky finding ones that served veggie options. We went to one, Café Florienhof, in Josefstadt, right outside the ring, and the food was yummy. The weather was also beautiful, and we were always looking to sit outside. But there are a lot of smokers in Vienna, and they often (but not always) can’t sit inside, so outside was an iffy choice if we wanted to stay away from the smoke. On the way back to our train, we passed the house where Kurt Goedel lived as a student. Mike took a picture.

Towards the end of the week we started planning afternoon excursions. One day we went to the Wienerwald to do a hike. I love saying Wienerwald – it’s the forest just outside of town that actually belongs to the city and is very heavily used for recreation. We took a bus from Ottakring S-Bahn station up to the forest. We actually took the wrong bus – we couldn’t find the bus we were supposed to take so took another one that went to the same stop a different way. We walked from the bus stop up to a forest tower. The views were amazing – it was mildly cloudy and we were still way over the trees, could see villages several ridges over and see the city. On a fair day, you’re supposed to be able to see into Slovakia. We then walked a bit more along forest paths, never deep in the woods but skirting through a part closer to civilization. We picknicked in a field with several tables – our usual fare of bread and cheese sandwiches, boiled eggs, yogurt, and fruit. Maeve now can peel and salt her own egg. On the way out, we walked up an endless stair and came out on the road our bus had taken. By that time, the sky was very very ominous. We debated walking back to the S-Bahn, or just taking the bus. It was late, we were lame, and we opted for the bus. Sure enough, on the way home, the bottom fell out and it poured. We were staying in the Dachgeschoss, which means attic, of our apartment house. This mean that our rooms didn’t have windows – just skylights, which actually let in plenty of air and light. But luckily, that one day, we’d shut the skylights before leaving. So we got home mildly damp from our 3-minute trot from the train station, but neither we nor the apartment got soaked.

Our last day in Vienna, Mike was starting to get a cold. That morning, he decided to stay home and go back to sleep, so Maeve and I went to check out the farmer’s market and find a book in English on Budapest. We went to the Naschmarkt, Vienna’s biggest farmers market, and got all kinds of neat things like organic fruit, organic cookies, black olives stuffed with cream cheese (Maeve loves black olives), blueberries, and lunch, which was falafel sandwiches, which we took back to the apartment and ate with Mike. We also walked around a bit – through the Museums quarter on the way to an English bookstore, which was closed. Then from the Nashmarkt, we went to the British Bookshop, which had tons of good books, so I bought a novel to read. The book was the Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, by Louis de Berniers, a very funny magical realism story. So they had good books but no travel guide for Budapest. But they told me of a travel bookstore between das Graben, one of the main pedestrian streets, and Michaelerplatz. So Maeve and I walked there, stopping accidently first at a bookstore 2 doors down, and got a book on Budapest. Mission accomplished. We then headed home for lunch and an early nap, because we wanted to take a tour of the cathedral that afternoon.

The cathedral tour was definitely worth it. To go in the central apse, you have to pay (either tour or audioguide) and our guide was good. The pulpit was my favorite – it was carved with pictures of saints and going up the stairwell were little carvings of animals. Underneath there was a head sticking out a window – probably a portrait of the carver. The cathedral was bombed in WWII, Vienna lost about 30% of its downtown. Actually, Vienna seemed much older than many cities in Germany because it lost so few buildings – the cathedral and Opera had to be rebuilt, but most of the other monuments had minimal damage. Anyway, much of the cathedral decorations were stored in the basement – one huge crypt was too heavy to move, so they sandbagged it and it survived. So there was some rebuilding, and they have a new roof, but many of the statues, altars etc are actually originals.

We left Vienna on Sunday morning, with a one-night stopover in Gyor, Hungary in route to Budapest. More about that in the next installment.

2008-08-12T10:27:00.004-04:00

August 12, 2008

We just spent three weeks travelling - the 3 weeks that Maeve's day care was closed for summer vacation. We spent the first week in Seattle and the last two in Vienna and Budapest. I'll blog more about those later, but first a video. In Hungary, many water fountains in public parks just run constantly. Maeve loved drinking out of these and washing her hands. Near our apartment in Budapest was a public park. One afternoon, we went there and there was live rock music, jumping games and fried food for sale. Maeve enjoyed the park, but especially the fountain.

Maeve drinking from a fountain in Budapest, August 6, 2008

2008-06-26T04:39:00.004-04:00

Luxembourg
June 25, 2008

Mike, Cat, Maeve, Keya, Joseph, Diya, Chandana

We went to Luxembourg yesterday to visit Joseph Joy, Chandana Surlu and their kids Diya and Keya. They were in Europe for a conference and travel, and we drove the hour to Luxembourg to visit for the day. Our first time there, and great to see friends for the morning.

We learned several things on the trip there. First, Luxembourg has rush-hour traffic, especially on the 2 K of highway that turns into 1 lane about 20 K from the city and then into 2 lanes 18 K from the city. Who designed this highway?

Second, Maeve gets carsick. This is the 4th car trip of around 1 hour we've taken in Germany, and the third time Maeve has barfed. We usually feed her breakfast in the car as a time saver, but this will change. I'd brought a change of clothes, which we put on her after she ralfed up her blueberry muffin. Then we gave her a bit of drinkable yougurt, which she ralfed up as we were coming into Luxembourg City. Hmm, no more clean clothes. We washed out and luckily the day was warm (although rainy) and Maeve's T-shirt dried on her.

Joseph and Chandana were staying near the Place Des Armes, the main square in the center of town. We were walking that way, crossing the Market square, and ran into Chandana. Mike was busy trying to text her to figure out where she was and walked right past her. There was a fruit and veggie market on the market square, as well as a small playground that all the kids loved. We spent the morning walking around the city ramparts, past the ducal palace, into St. Michel for a bit, and across to look at the walls. The old city is built on a promontory about the river Alzette, and there's quite a cliff. The lookout was full of people sketching. Below there was a formal looking vegetable garden, all the plots laid out very neatly.

We then walked over a small bridge to wander around the foundations of the first fortress built by the Luxembourg Dukes on the Bock Promontory. Underneath were the Casemates, kilometers of tunnels and rooms that were dug out under the fortifications to house cannon and people. These rooms held over 30,000 people during the shelling of the world wars. We ducked into these just in time, as it started pouring and we spent the downpour underground. Diya (aged 8) especially liked exploring all the tunnels, stairways and openings. Apparently, there used to be over 20 K of casemates, most of which were destroyed or bricked up as a condition of peace treaties.

(View of fortifications from the Casemates)

The city fortifications (natural and man-made) are truely impressive and it makes it clear what kind of protection was necessary for such a small Dutchy to stay mostly independent in the heart of Europe with larger powers always prowling around.

2008-06-26T04:30:00.004-04:00

Maeve's 2nd Birthday
June 24, 2006

She's still not clear on how to blow out candles.

She can now open presents all by herself. Here she's opening some books from Grandma Shirley.

Here, she's opening her birdfeeder. She got the birdfeeder open and is wondering what it is.

She also got some house socks that she wanted to try on.

2008-06-15T07:45:00.000-04:00

Father's Day: June 15, 2008

Maeve helped me to bake a chocolate cake for Daddy for Father's Day. After mixing the batter together and waiting for the oven to preheat, she finally got to lick off the beaters. Yum.

2008-06-07T09:02:00.000-04:00

Panorama of Neuschwanstein.

Munich May 22-28, 2008

We visited Munich along with Rebecca Lantz and lots of her family. I'm posting photos first and will come back and fill in with some more text.
Cat, Mike and Maeve at the Marienbrucke (Mary Bridge), a short walk up from Neuschwanstein, Ludwig III's famous castle in the Alps.

Better view of Neuschwanstein from the Marienbrucke.

Our whole group at the Salzbergwerks. This is an amusement park set up in a Salt mine in the Alps on the border with Austria. We had to don these "mining" suits and then took a train ride down the shaft, followed by information about the salt mining process interspersed with other rides. The slide was the best.

Munich Dom. It was build of brick

Cat and Maeve outside Schloss Nymphenburg. It was originally built as the summer palace of the Bavarian king's mother, but was extensively rebuild and remodeled over the years. We spent our time there in the garden, looking into several opulent pavillions and checking out all the ducks, geese, and other wildlife.

Inside and outside view of the Asam Kirche, a church built by the Asam brothers, architects and interior designers. We took a tour with the local priest who explained all the baroque splendor, including the tongue in the reliquary.

Englisher Garten

Rathaus Glockenspiel. This plays twice a day, and the figures turn as the bells ring. The top scene is of knights jousting and the bottom scene is coopers dancing to celebrate the end of the plague.

2008-05-19T15:17:00.001-04:00

May 19, 2008

I’m way behind on the blogging – since Paris we’ve done a number of day trips while my Mom was here, a great visit especially for Maeve who got lots of Granma time. Trips include Volklinger Huette, an industrial site near Saarbruecken, which is way cooler than that brief description sounds, Trier, an American WW2 cemetery in France, and Chris Kribs who was visiting his extended family on a farm in France just across the border. So hopefully more about those soon. We just got back from Leipzig, where Mike was attending ICSE, so I’m going to write about that while it’s still fresh.

I was in Leipzig 15 years ago, not too long after the Wende, and it was my favorite former East German city. It was half-broken, with empty lots, boarded up buildings etc like all former East Germany, but it was also very dynamic, people everywhere, lots of construction, and I took an excellent tour with the tourist information people that took us behind many of the building facades to look at old arcades and hofs (patios) previously used for commerce. Leipzig has been a trade-focused city for a long time. So I was interested to see how it’s changed.

It’s quite different. New, modern high-rises are everywhere, huge amounts of construction going on. Some buildings like the university building, which was built post-war on the remains of a school/church and that the people hated, had been torn down and is being rebuilt. Other street and building construction was just renovation. And other construction was just new. In Berlin, there was tons of construction right around the path of the wall, as that was all the empty space, and the city of Berlin has overreached itself financially with all the construction. I don’t know about Leipzig finances, but it felt like it was booming, with construction and repairs throughout the old city. There are also plenty of empty lots around, not right in the main drag of the center city, but only a few blocks off, which have probably been empty since the city got bombed out in WWII. There’s a lively street scene, lots of cafes, etc. Of course, the weather was also beautiful, upper 60’s to 70’s so everyone was out. All around an enjoyable city to bum around in.

The ride to Leipzig was 6 hours on the train, quite a ride for a 2 year old, but overall train is not a bad way to go. There is plenty of freedom of movement and tons of interesting people to see, a dining car to explore, and almost always other babies to look at. When we got to Leipzig on Monday, it was a holiday here called Pfingsten (Pentacost) so things were relatively quiet, except for the thousands of Goths. We caught the tail end of Europe’s largest Goth convention. My favorite Goth accessory was a black parasol made of lacy material that had black boa fringe to keep the sun off. Very Goth chic.

Our first evening we were pretty much all beat and did an easy supper – Auerbachs Keller. It’s in the middle of the main drag and was a 15 minute walk from our hotel, which was right outside the ring road. And it had vegetarian options. Mike was suspicious because it’s totally on the tourist map as it was featured in Goethe’s Foust and Goethe is a big deal. But the food was good. I was on the lookout for Leipziger Allerlei, one of the culinary specialties of Leipzig which is pretty much a Spring veggie stew and is only available during the Asparagus season (asparagus is a big deal here in Spring which suits me just fine). Auerbachs Keller had their version, but it had crab meat so we didn’t get it. But I was going to try again and again to find a veggie version of this one German veggie specialty. Anyway, Auerbachs Keller is in the basement of the Maedler Passage, which is an indoor mall very near the Old Rathaus (townhall). These passages are a typical Leipzig construction that were used starting hundreds of years ago (Leipzig got the royal okay to be a trade city in the 1400’s) as showrooms for goods. The Maedler used to have lots of little stalls for silk merchants, but is now an upscale mall. The glass ceiling is neat. Over the next couple days, Maeve and I walked through several other passages, all of which are now malls.

On Tuesday we went to Dresden, as that was the one full day we had when Mike wasn’t at the conference. Our first stop was VW’s Glaserne Manufaktur, where they make their high-end car the Phaeton. It’s a VW limo, made almost completely by hand (there are only a couple of robots) in a factory line that you can tour. The line wasn’t running when we were there – it’s only 1 shift a day, so we were able to see most of the factory. They assemble 30 cars a day there, and they are all made to order. If you order one, you get a private tour and can be present for the baptism (when the car gets its VIN) and the wedding (when the engine is put in). The electronic wiring weighs 90 kilos. The tour was interesting but all in German so Mike didn’t get everything out of it. We needed advance reservations for English. At the end, there was a demo Phaeton so we got to try out all the fancy features, including seat massages and a trunk that opened with the press of a button. The car is too heavy for a spare tire, so the spare is full sized. Pretty fancy.

Afterwards, we wandered around town. We basically walked the tour in our Lonely Planet, past the old and new markets, Rathaus, Frauenkirche, river bank, and Zwinger palace. Much of downtown is post WWII construction, as the downtown was leveled with firebombing. When I was last there, the Frauenkirche, the main protestant church that was built as a foil for the Catholic Hofkirche (the rulers were Catholic even though Saxony was overwhelmingly protestant), was deliberately left a ruin as a war memorial. It’s since been rebuilt and has a beautiful interior. They put most of the stones back in their original positions, an amazing accomplishment. We wanted to climb to the top, but children under 6 aren’t allowed. We could have gone up the Rathaus tower or a tower at the Palace, but ran out of time.

One of my favorite spots was the raised promenade by the river. It is just behind the Frauenkirche and Residenz, right at the city center, and on top of what’s left of Dresden’s original bastion. The river there is full of tour/cruise boats.

By 11:30 we were dragging hard and Maeve was fussy, so we went to lunch at the main veggie restaurant in Dresden called BrennNessel, which was a 10 minute walk outside the city center past the back side of the palace garden. It was in a quarter that was outside the original city gates and had been used for pasturage, and later for institutional buildings such as hospitals and orphanages. The food was excellent. We got a stinging nettle soup, which was a little weird, and a gnocchi with pears and blueberries (yummy) and potatoes with lentils and tofu (yummy). After lunch we all felt better and went back to wander a bit more through town. We just walked through the courtyard of the Zwinger, which was a pleasure palace for the rulers of Saxony and now houses several museums. Some of the museums would have been nice, but since we only had one day we’d decided to just get the overview and look around without doing any museums. Maeve liked the palace entrance as it went over a moat that had big koi, which she correctly labeled over and over as “peces.” The entrance was called the crown tower, as it was topped by a gilded crown. Next stop was a huge ceramic mural of all the Saxon kings on horseback. It was originally pained, but had been redone in Meissen ceramic tiles, and covered the back of a building for a whole city block. It was neat.

By that time, I was getting a little worried about making our train back and we started back to the train station. Then we realized that we had plenty of time to walk to the train station in Neustadt, on the other side of the river. We could pick our train up there as well, and then we’d see a new part of the city. So we turned around and walked over the Augustusbruke and down the main drag of Neustadt. It was pretty much all post-war buildings and a major shopping area, but there was a nice gilded statue of Augustus the Strong once you got over the river. There were also several fountains with water that Maeve liked playing in since her shoes are waterproof and the day was warm. We made our train with plenty of time – we could have wandered a bit more but I didn’t want to miss it.

Maeve as usual didn’t sleep on the train and it was going to be late by the time we got to Leipzig, so we decided to be crazy and instead of going back to the hotel for a nap, touring around in Leipzig. It was Mike’s only day-time hours chance as his conference started the next day. So we got to Leipzig and walked to the hotel where Mike could register for his conference because we wanted the tourist information. We could have also gone to the Tourist Info, but this way we killed two birds with one stone. Then we walked over to the Stassi museum in the Runde Ecke ( building with round corners) on the ring around the city center. This building was the Stassi headquarters for Leipzig, and the Stassi was the East German secret police, a government-sponsored terror organization. The building was occupied as part of the Wende and a group of concerned citizens took control of the Stassi records so that they wouldn’t be made public. This group later formed a non-profit which runs the museum and deals with people who want to look at their records. The museum had a model of an office and a prison cell, but most rooms dealt with different Stassi branches, like the one that censored the mail, provided surveillance, took scent samples of dissidents so dogs could later be used to find them, shredded dissident materials, provided border control etc. Some of the displays were really interesting but impossible to make sense of without reading the labels. For example, in one room there was a big machine with big 1-foot grey rocks with dust in a corner. It turns out that this machine was a shredder that was used to shred dissident materials and then mixed it with water to make a paste. The “rocks” in the corner were paste balls of materials that were destroyed during the Wende. The museum was put up soon after the Wende and needs some serious design help – there is too much info, all in German. The titles of each of the displays are done in magic marker – seriously low-budget but also hard to make sense of all the disconnected info. I was also trying to get Maeve to take a nap in the sling, and she wasn’t cooperating, so I wasn’t able to read as much and explain.

From the Runde Ecke we walked into town, thinking we’d just head south to dinner. About 1 minute from the museum, Maeve fell asleep in the sling, so we changed plans and decided to see the Thomaskirche, where Bach was rector for 25 years. The interior of the Thomaskirche is also beautiful, mostly start white with red-stained wood-looking rafters that soar from gothic-style arches. There is one wall of stained glass windows, which include a WWI memorial with guys in trenches, and window for Bach and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The most interesting anecdote we learned about the church was about the Bach organ, which was in the middle of the apse on the balcony. They actually changed that organ out a few years ago for a smaller organ that is more like the organs from Bach’s time. Outside the church is a statue of Bach with one of his pockets turned out. He had over 10 kids and was apparently always broke. In front of the church is a fountain with sprays of water that alternate and little metal bridges that cross over the water. Maeve was asleep this day, but this fountain later became her favorite. She’d look at the water under the bridge and step gingerly from the cement to the metal and then run across.

Maeve slept through the Thomaskirche, but we decided not to push our luck and headed to dinner at the one vegetarian restaurant in Leipzig, called Zest, which is a bit south of the city center. We took the tram, which goes straight there, although we got off a stop too early. The service was slow and food was okay but not as good as lunch, and we were all happy to get home and go to bed after a serious day of tourism.

Wednesday Mike had to conference, but decided to skip the first section so we had a little time together in the city. We first went to the GDR museum, which is on the main pedestrian street cattycorner across from the town hall. It’s very slick, modern, and well done, following the history of East Germany from post WWII aftermath, through the tensions with West German and reunification, with a fair amount of information about daily life. We only had 45 minutes and didn’t get to see nearly everything, but the museum is free so we went back for another 45 minutes the next day. Actually, Maeve and I went back for another 45 minutes later that day, and Maeve pulled on a hand cart that refugees had used to move their belongings after the war and pulled it off its display. After that I was kind of embarrassed to stay at the museum any longer and I didn’t want to let Maeve run around, so we left. But we went again the next day with Mike and the display was fixed but we left a decent donation.

We popped by the other main Leipzig church, the Nicholaikirche, before Mike had to head to the convention center. It was also beautiful inside, done in peach and light green and all of the columns looked like trees. Maeve and I passed by this church a couple of days later on our way to meet Mike for supper and there was organ music coming out, so we popped in and listed to the practice for a couple of minutes. We’d have listened longer, but the practice session ended. I forget how powerful big organ music can be.

Maeve and I spent the rest of the morning wandering around downtown, revisiting the museum, checking out the passages etc. We also looked at a lot of menus to see which restaurants had more than 1 veggie entrée for later. We finally ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant off behind the new art museum just north of the Market square. Good, cheap, and had tofu. Then it was home for a nap, more afternoon wandering, and meeting Mike for supper.

The next day we spent a little time in the GDR museum again and then Mike needed to head to the conference. Maeve and I walked around the south part of downtown to what’s left of the old city bastion, which is now a multi-level café and venue and over to the new townhall. We got back to the hotel early enough to take a swim before lunch. There was a little lap pool in the hotel and I’d brought suits to go swimming with Maeve. Last summer she never got into swimming and I wanted to spend some time in the pool with her. She didn’t want to go in and protested hard. She doesn’t like it when the floor is cold and says “coco” for cold, which she said repeatedly and emphatically about the pool. I took her in holding her next to me and started walking in the pool and she got into it. We “walked” back and forth in the pool for a while with me holding onto her and her with the deathgrip around Mommy’s neck for a while, and then she loosened up. We talked about the fish and ducks that swim, and Maeve likes fish so we tried to be like fish. First I let go of her with one arm, and then with two so I could use my arms. Then she was willing to let go and use her arms, although the legs still had Mommy-chest-grip-of-death. Later we practiced kicking our feet and she didn’t want to get out of the water. Altogether a successful swimming experience and we really need to do more of it this summer.

Lunch was a Chinese food truck outside the hotel (cheap, convenient and tofu), then nap, then wandering around a bit before meeting Mike for dinner. After dinner, Mike had an optional reception and music evening in the Gewandhaus, the symphony hall. Mike had given up his ticket for a grad student as he wasn’t going to the concert, but we went by the Gewandhaus to crash the reception, which was still going on. They wouldn’t let us in without a ticket, even though we weren’t staying for the concert. So as we were walking back to the hotel we passed a couple people Mike knew who were also going to try to crash the reception, also as it turns out unsuccessfully. No one told the conference attendees they needed the tickets for the reception. Oh well.

Our last day Maeve and I went to the Zoo. First we bought a stroller at the baby superstore next to the hotel. We haven’t had a stroller in Germany, usually use the bike, the sling, our shoulders, or Maeve walks. But she’s getting heavier, and we need another sleeping option which for many kids seems to be the stroller. So we got a small umbrella stroller and Maeve and I headed to the zoo. There were flamingos as we entered the zoo and they were squawking so Maeve spent the next 10 minutes squawking and getting me to describe the flamingos. We wandered a bit past a prairie dog family with a baby that they carried around by the scruff of the neck. Maeve likes babies and kept saying “baby.” We also saw bears, lions, zebras, and gazelles. Then we wandered past a buffalo, think Maeve saying “buffalo” over and over, and to the simian area. There is a huge island with a warm indoor dome that has gorillas, orangutans, and other monkeys, and we watched these guys for a long while. We had lunch there on the only vegetarian option (except for French fries) which were kartoffelpuffer (fried potato pancakes) with applesauce. Maeve also had yogurt and fruit we’d brought with us. We’d past a lot of water but no fish and Maeve by that point was tired and asking for “peces.” So we headed back to the entrance where the aquarium was and checked out the fish. Often the aquariums make me a little ill as too many fish are in too small a space, but this one, like the rest of the zoo, was small but not overcrowded. We spent a long time looking at the fish and even longer sitting by the koi tank while Maeve watched other kids touch the koi, asked Mommy to touch the koi, and resolutely refused to touch them herself. The whole zoo was great – not too big even though we saw less than half, the animals had some freedom of movement and for the most part weren’t pacing badly, and Maeve really enjoyed it. We just missed the tram on the way out and there wasn’t another for 30 minutes, so we just walked back to the hotel. Maeve was down for nap late, but had done well in the stroller.

That evening we wandered a bit more around town and did some shopping (cheese for the train and other provisions) and met Mike and some friends for dinner next to der Coffe Baum. The Coffe Baum is the oldest coffee shop in Leipzig, and the regular restaurant next door just happened to have multiple vegetarian entrees. Dinner was good and I finally got to meet Bill Griswald, who had so kindly sent us the Philadelphia Chickens CD, full of truly evil children’s music as many of the songs stick in your head. Needless to say, I never found Leipzier Allerlei that was actually vegetarian. I found it with crab or shrimp, or made with beef stock, or in some other way not-vegetarian form. So I missed eating the one “vegetarian” German specialty.

Home was another 5.5 hour train ride, but we shared the children’s compartment (kinderabteilung) with a 4 year old and she and Maeve had a good time. Most of the German high-speed trains have a children’s compartment, that you can reserve or just use if no one reserved it. It sometimes has a climb-on horse/motorcycle or other toys, but generally provides more space and privacy. In the second train from Frankfurt to Saarbruecken we shared with a nursing mother who could leave her kid sleeping the bassinet/stroller and stretch her legs.

2008-04-23T06:38:00.000-04:00

Paris March 21-28, 2008

Easter Week we were in Paris as Maeve had day-care vacation. It’s been several weeks since we were there, so this blog is a bit impressionistic. In our usual travel mode, we rented a 1 BR apartment near the Reamur Sebastopol metro stop in the 3^rd district, 10 minutes walking from the Pompidou and 20 from the Louvre. A great location. A somewhat seedy apartment – especially the smoke that seeped through the floor from the restaurant below was unpleasant. And getting locked in our first evening was less than perfect. We’d gotten in the apartment and Mike locked the door from the inside, as is only safe. An hour later, Maeve was down for the evening and I was ready to head out to the grocery store for milk and staples. And we couldn’t get the door open. The key just was spinning in the lock. I called the rental agency, which was closed for the holiday weekend so just a message. I emailed them, no reply. Half an hour later, we were considering skinnying down to the ground floor (we were one floor up) on a sheet, calling the police etc. Mike was looking out the window and saw a neighbor coming in the building, and asked him to let us out. Our (barred) bathroom window opened into the stairwell, we’d briefly considered going out the window but in no way could fit. So as the neighbor came up, we handed him out the keys out the bathroom window and he let us out. Big, big relief and a scary way to start the Paris vacation. Luckily, that was the low point of the week.

Paris is only 1 hour 50 minutes from Saarbruecken on the TGV, so the trip was easy. Near the boarder, the train isn’t so fast, but once we were in France we were often going over 300 kilometers an hour. We had a bit of trouble getting our 10-ride metro passes when we got there. The Paris metro invariably has very long lines at the customer service counters and often shorter lines at the metro vending machines. We had trouble understanding the machines, finally figuring out how to change the display to English and using our Germany ATM cards. The 10-metro ride passes are great – the machine just spits out 10 metro tickets and you use them up and buy 10 more. There are also several day passes, but we walked a fair amount and aren’t on the go the whole time because of Maeve’s nap schedules, so figured getting the 10-pack was cheaper. Our Germany ATM cards were valid pretty much all over Paris, but often took a very long time to be validated.

Easter was early, so the weather was not quite yet the proverbial Paris in the spring. It was chilly (40’s) and overcast and rainy most days. Not really anything was blooming yet, and the trees weren’t green, just a faint tinge of getting ready to open. But nonetheless a great city. Our first day, March 22, we went to the tourist information station and then took the bus to see the Eiffel Tower. The lines to go up were enormous and there was no way we were waiting for an hour or more in a line with Maeve in the drizzle and cold. Lines in general were very long all week, but after all, it was Easter week. So we took lots of pictures and ate a snack in the park between the tower and the Champs de Mars, and headed back into the Metro to warm up a cranky and cold little girl. From there we headed out for lunch at a very nice vegetarian restaurant on the left bank near Notre Dame, called Le Grenadier de Notre Dame, in the 5^th district. It’s a rare treat to find a veggie restaurant that is fine-dining oriented and the food was very very good. I got peasant food that was a baked-bean like dish and Maeve very much enjoyed the beans. After lunch, the sun briefly came out and Mike got a couple of good pictures of the outside of Notre Dame. We walked home in 25 minutes, down rue Beaubourg past the Centre Pompidou.

For dinner we walked down to a section of town we’d read about that had good falafel joints, on Rue des Rosiers in the 4^th district. When we got there, we realized Rue Rosiers was the Jewish area of town and everything was closed for the Sabbath. Outside of the falafel and other stores on Rue des Rosiers, it was a totally happening area of town, with tons of people sitting outside at cafes under the heat lamps trying to fight off the chill. So we wandered around until we found another veggie-oriented café nearby and had dinner before heading home to get Maeve down for a very late evening.

On Sunday March 23^rd we spent the day in the Louvre, walked there from our apartment through the park at Chatelet les Halles and past a small farmers market. Later in the day we stopped there for some bread and saw several groups of older men playing boule in the park.

The Louvre is amazing and worth more than one day. We spent the AM there, did lunch and another 45 minutes, left to take a nap, and then back for 90 minutes in the evening. We were beat at the end of the day and didn’t nearly see all the collection – not even all we wanted to see, including a history of the building in the basement that was really appealing but we didn’t have time for. Next time. We first did the highlights – Venus de Milo, Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa. Venus de Milo we both liked, she’s a great statue. Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa were less impressive. Winged Victory is up on her boat on a pedestal in a huge stairway – a very impressive setting, but I felt that after the very human scale of Venus de Milo, she was just too monumental. The Mona Lisa was a riot – it’s not a very big picture, and it is cordoned off at a 10 foot distance, so you can’t get close enough to even begin to see detail. And it’s very dark, so without being close enough to get out of the glare, you can’t make out anything. And it’s surrounded by hoards of people, so even getting to the rope through the people all holding up their cameras and taking pictures over the crowd is difficult. I basically don’t have too much to say about the actual picture. But we did enjoy some of Leonardo’s other pictures – I particularly liked St. Anne and some of his portraits.

The Louvre itself is a beautiful building. Maeve at this point knows to admire the ceilings. Many of them are stuccoed and painted with mythological or royal scenes. Just to remind you that the Louvre used to be a royal residence before it was a museum. The numerous courtyards are also monumental – huge arches and wide expanses of building. The Louvre is shaped more or less like a flat-topped A – 2 side wings, and a top and a middle connecting wing. The IM Pei pyramid in the open courtyard at the “bottom” of the A doesn’t seem out of place in the midst of the fountains. And the Louvre clearly needed the extra entrance/bathroom/restaurant/facility space that opened up with the pyramid. Maeve especially liked the ducks swimming in the fountains around the pyramid. We didn’t actually enter through the pyramid in the morning, we got there at opening time and there was a huge line. We walked around the side and entered through the underground mall that also feeds into the main entrance. We bought tickets from a ticket machine and got through security quickly. Definitely the way to go. In the afternoon we went back to the main entrance and entered there – there was a line but it went quickly through security and once underground, entering any of the three wings was easy.

We wandered through the European painting section of the Louvre after hitting the highlights. In the afternoon we saw the Michelangelo gallery and I think my favorite statues of the day. He had two statues which were of escaping slaves, and the slave’s beautiful bodies were struggling to escape their bonds as well as escape from the block of marble. There was so much tension and movement emerging from the stone.

On the way back home, we stopped at a street near the apartment (Rue au Marie) that had lots of Chinese restaurants. We went in the busiest one and got yummy food although they didn’t have scallion pancakes even though they were on the menu. Maeve loved the tofu in the soup and drank all her soymilk.

On Monday, we took a walking tour of Ile de la Cite with Paris Walks. The tour was great and we would recommend this company – although 2 hours was enough for Maeve to be outside in the cold. We learned about Ste Chapelle and the Conciergerie, which used to be the royal palace, then the jail around the time of the revolution, and is still the courthouse. There are still 5 medieval towers fronting the Seine in the palace construction. We weren’t able to go in St. Chapelle, but decided to come back another day to do the interior and inside Notre Dame. We learned that many of the statues on the front portal of Notre Dame were defaced during the revolution. The statues were of Biblical kings, but by the time of the Revolution, everyone thought they were French kings, so they were vandalized. Sometime in the 20^th century, they found the head of the kings when they were doing some rebuilding in a townhouse that had belonged to a staunch royalist during the time of the revolution. These heads are now in a museum and replicas are on the façade. Anyway, the first theory about the heads was that the owner of the townhouse was a royalist so he somehow got the heads and buried them as it would not have been politically expedient to have them in his possession. A later theory suggested that this guy just happened to be expanding his stables and needed rubble to fill in the foundation and the heads just happened to be in the cheap rubble he bought. Go figure – but regardless a great story.

I particularly liked the spire of Notre Dame, which sits atop the crossing, not on the bell towers. It seems kind of out of place to have the spire and flat bell towers, but I liked it. The spire apparently had been hit several times by lightening and is now grounded. I also liked the clock that was on the back side of the wing pointing towards the left bank. Just a nice everyday (large) clock over the buttresses. The buttresses on the side of the church seemed heavy but those around the back really flew.

One other neat thing we learned on the tour was about a restaurant that was on a side street near Notre Dame. The restaurant was cheerily painted red and had bars over the windows. The bars were not for security, but rather at some point in the past, the Paris government passed a law saying that taverns had to have bars on the windows so that when the police went in to cool off a fight or other problems, the patrons couldn’t jump out the window to get away from the authorities.

After the nap, we headed out to a restaurant near Montmartre that had fondue, as we wanted to visit a cheese restaurant in Paris. On the way there, we walked by the Moulin Rouge, which basically just has a bit neon windmill on the outside. The whole red-light district was a bit seedy, although plenty of families were still wandering around outside and we weren’t at all out of place with Maeve. And there were plenty of tour busses parked nearby with their passengers ensconced in one of the review for dinner and a show. We walked uphill a bit to the restaurant and found out their cook was still out so dinner would start 30 minute late. What to do on a rainy night while waiting for dinner? Walk uphill to Sacre Cour! The walk uphill wasn’t actually very far, and Sacre Cour is worth seeing. It’s a relatively new church, it was finished in the early 20^th century, and the onion domes are distinctive. We walked up and the porch was full of people milling around and trying to stay dry. Inside, a service was going on and the church was full of people attending mass and a solid pack of people walking around to see the chapels. The dome over the main alter was a mosaic of an enormous Jesus, and both Mike and I rather liked it.

We walked back downhill and had cheese fondue. The dinner consisted of melted cheese and bread cubes. It was good, but not something I’d need to do again. Maeve was not terribly excited and was more than ready to go home. She even managed to break a glass – something she’d never done before.

On Tuesday we went to the Musee D’Orsay. We figured changing up between museum and walking around was good. Neither is perfect for Maeve – outdoors was too cold and museums were only as good as the benches they had to be climbing on – but she’s a trooper. The Musee D’Orsay was great. We again got there first thing in the AM, spent the morning there, ate lunch, spent another 45 minutes, went for nap, and went back in the late afternoon for another hour. We didn’t get to see everything, but did pretty well, and really liked the museum. What’s not to like about impressionism? I think my favorite was an “unfinished” painting of turkeys. I just really liked it. Another painting I really liked was one of some workmen refinishing a floor by Caillebotte. He was a new artist for me, but this painting was great.

But it was also nice to see a lot of paintings I’d seen in books. The colors of some of the clothing, like the Renoir of two people dancing – you can see all the white with rose and grey in her dress and he’s almost completely obscured. The colors of the clothing or the landscapes and they way light played over water or foliage are really amazing. I also liked the Seurat of the circus – I think the pointalist paintings gain from being seen in person, I’d never really understood the technique before. Anyway, the circus painting still had a wonderful sense of line and movement, even though most individual brush strokes were tiny. Maeve liked the horses. Dejuner sur L’Herbe is still a ridiculous composition, even in person. Why are the women naked and the men dressed? It makes no sense. I kind of liked the Gauguins, the Samoan women he paints just seem so approachable. I also really liked the Toulouse-Lautrec drawings. My favorite sculpture was Degas’ small dancer girl – she looks so weary yet patient. I really got overwhelmed with art I enjoyed looking at – this museum is a must-see.

On a logistical note, if you have a kid in tow, you can go in the group entrance, which has a much shorter line that the general entrance. This is very convenient. On another logistical note, I recommend that you not lose your claim check, as I did. If you do, your husband has to go into the cloak room and search for your bag. Then you say what the contents are before you pull them out so the attendant believes the bag is yours. Then you fill out a missing claim check log. Don’t do this, any of this.

On the 26^th we headed back to Ile de la Cite to see inside Saint Chapelle and Notre Dame. St. Chapelle had a long line because the metal detector was broken, but it was so worth it. You go in and are in the lower chapel, which has a gift shop and a starry ceiling. Nice but no biggy. Then you go up the curving stairs and come out in the main chapel that is a riot of color from the stained glass, even on an overcast day. The walls tower above you with skinny columns of stone supporting and separating the stained glass windows from one another. The scenes in the windows are really too small to make sense of the Bible stories they’re telling, but the overall impression is just amazing. I think this chapel is my favorite piece of Gothic architecture ever.

After St. Chapelle, Notre Dame was just another big cathedral. There was a service going on while we were there, so the English-language tour we’d been hoping to catch was happening later. Just the main altar was lit up, and then there were several hundred people attending the service, with many more walking around the outside of the apse and looking around. The people were dwarfed by the architecture and the priest was miniscule and isolated, like a little mouse, during the service.

Next to Notre Dame are a couple of major tourist streets with tourist cafes, street food, and junk for sale. Before entering the cathedral, I wanted to get something hot to drink, so we looked at the street food. The first vendor was selling crepes for maybe 5 Euros each, a lot of money. So we went 3 or 4 vendors down and got them for 3 Euros, still no bargain but a lot cheaper, and got some hot chocolate. This is important, because that’s where Maeve learned to say “cocoa,” her word for chocolate. It’s now become an important part of her life.

That evening we headed out to another cheese restaurant, or so I thought. We did a lot of looking for cheese restaurants. On the way there, we stopped by the Arc de Triomphe. We had planned to go up to the top of the arch, but there was a military ceremony going on and the arch was closed for 90 minutes. There were tons of police and a few protesters, and lots of old veterans marching to the arch. All the traffic in L’Etoile, the huge traffic circle going around the arch, was stopped. Once the procession got to the arch, traffic started again and 8 lanes or more were buzzing around. Bizarre. After L’Etoile we hopped back on the metro to head to the cheese “restaurant” which was part of a local chain in the 17^th district. It turned out to be a cheese shop, but not a restaurant. I had info about another one of the chain, so we hopped back on the metro after a detour through a very smoky restaurant for a diaper change. Smoking isn’t allowed indoors so all the smokers are on the street-side tables, which is fine except when it’s raining and the restaurants put out awnings to keep people dry, which also funnels the smoke into the restaurant. Yuck. So we hopped on the metro to head out for the other cheese restaurant on Rue Mouffetard in the 5^th district. This restaurant also turned out to be a shop, so we just bought some cheese and some bread at a nearby bakery and headed home for dinner. The area was pretty lively with lots of little shops and good street life. Apparently, this chain of cheese shops, called Androuet, does in at least one of its shops have cheese dinners, but somehow when I was researching, I didn’t realize not all the outlets had food. Oh well, we saw two new neighborhoods while searching and ended up with a very good soft goat cheese and one harder cow cheese. Apparently restaurants that serve cheese do exist in Paris, but we never found one.

Our last day in Paris we went to the Picasso museum in the AM. The collection is fabulous, but the signs are all just in French which was difficult for me and impossible for Mike. In the afternoon, we went to the Centre Pompidou to look around, and somebody leaving gave us their tickets. There were some street performers outside the building and Maeve enjoyed running around the huge open space. With the tickets, we went in with Maeve and checked out the children’s exhibit on the first floor (after first taking a lot of stairs, elevators, and escalators around the first 3 floors) where she could play with blocks and then see what she made on TV. She mostly enjoyed moving blocks around. For dinner we went to a very small restaurant near the Centre Pompidou on Rue Rambuteau, Le Potagier du Marais. The food again was excellent, my favorite was the soup/puree, but the mains were also good. Maeve particularly enjoyed looking at the sous chef through the bar and the server gave her a small bit of smoothe left over when she made one for another customer. Altogether a good dinner and it was nice to have two really nice vegetarian meals in one week.

The next morning we headed out bright and early on the metro, Mike going to Charles de Gaul and the US, and Maeve and I taking the train home to Saarbruecken.

2008-03-16T09:42:00.000-04:00

March 5-11

Berlin

Photo: Brandenburger Tor

We were in Berlin for a week to do some site-seeing around an MPI retreat Mike had there. We had a great time. Maeve and Cat were coming off a cold, so we did a fair amount of resting. We also got there the first day of an U-Bahn strike, which meant that the metro and the buses weren’t running. Luckily, Berlin also has a system of light rail, which was running, and our apartment was a 20 minute walk from Bahnhof Zoo, the central rail station in former West Berlin, so we did more walking than we had anticipated, but were able to get around okay.

We were staying in an apartment off the former government area in former West Berlin. Now, all this has moved back to former East Berlin, which was the original government district. Our first day in Berlin, we took the bus from the airport, planning on getting off to take the U-Bahn to our apartment, which was a 2 minute walk from an U-bahn stop. We mistakenly got off at the S-Bahn stop (Schnell Bahn or light rail), which turned out to be lucky. After taking the S-Bahn one stop, we asked around and found out about the strike and a helpful Berliner helped us make a plan about how to get to the apartment. At the same time, we were talking on the cell with the lady who rented us the apartment – she was supposed to meet us there but got stuck in traffic as the metro wasn’t going. After 90 minutes or so, we got to the U-Bahn stop near the apartment, but couldn’t find the apartment because the street numbers were going up instead of down, and we needed to find number 3. We called the landlady several times, who helpfully told us to keep walking until the numbers went down. We eventually found the apartment. It just so happens that some streets in Berlin are numbered with evens on one side and odds on the other. Other streets, like the one we stayed on, are numbered going up on one side, and when the street ends, the numbers switch sides and keep going up. We were looking across the street and saw the numbers increasing, while they were decreasing on our side. Very confusing. Luckily it had stopped snowing by the time we started walking around towards the apartment and ended up being a chilly but pretty day.

We spent our first morning getting into the apartment, and then went to eat lunch at a veggie restaurant called Einhorn, across from KaDeWe, Berlin’s biggest department store. The food was fine, and it was close to the apartment. After the afternoon nap, we went to wander around Kurfurstendamm, the main shopping street of West Berlin. A slow tourism day.

March 6 we went to Unter den Linden, the main drag of Berlin, which used to be in East Berlin. From Freidrichstrasse train station, we walked down through the business district. Unter den Linden is a boulevard with businesses, embassies etc, but not really a street to hang out on. We walked past the Gedarmenmarkt, which has 2 very similar looking churches, one for the French Huguenots and one for the German Lutherans. In the middle of the square is the Schauspielhaus, a former theater. The square is supposed to be on of the most beautiful in Berlin, but it seemed somewhat bleak to me, as by that time we were all getting cold and Maeve a bit more unhappy. Nobody was around as we stood next to the Schiller monument in front of the theater and read about the churches, perhaps a cool, rainyish morning in March is not the best time to see life there.

We then headed out for the Musueum insel, an island in the Spree river that was the original location for Berlin, and that now has several excellent museums, the cathedral, and used to have the Berlin palace. On the way there, we went through August-Bebel Platz, which is across Unter den Linden from the main building of Humboldt University and inbetween the Opera and formal Royal library, which is now the law faculty of Humbolt. This used to be called Operaplatz, and was the site of Nazi book burnings. Now there’s a plack about the book burnings in the middle of the plaza and a plexi-glass covered hole in the ground that has empty library shelves below it. Creepy. From there we hurried to the Pergamon as Maeve was cold and fussy, and got there right as it opened at 10AM.

The Pergamon is an amazing museum, and good to visit with kids. The museum is full of large-scale reconstructions of buildings and monuments. You walk into the museum and see a reconstruction of the Pergamon altar, a Greek altar built about 200 BC in Turkey. The façade of the altar is reconstructed with as much of the frieze as they could find. The frieze is hundreds of meters long and depicts the battle of the giants and gods in high-relief, with the typical Greek beautiful bodies engaged in dynamic movement.

We spent most of our time in the Near-Eastern wing of the museum. It was full of monumental gates. The Ishtar gate was first (after a Roman market gate in the process of being reconstructed). It’s made of blue tiles, and was part of the processional way in Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar. It’s huge, and the part of the processional way that has been reconstructed is something like 3 times as narrow and only a fraction of the original length. There were also a number of other gates from the Sumerian times – my favorite was one off to the side that was made from small ceramic tiles that looked like corks – centuries older than the Babylonian tiles and much simpler, but impressive nonetheless. We quickly did the Islamic art floor as Maeve had to be changed and gotten home for a nap, but the Mschatta façade – a stone-carved façade for a palace in Jordan, was the main highlight. There were lots of smaller prayer niches as well, but having Maeve run around the main architectural reconstructions was the best way to see the museum.

On March 7 we started the day at the Brandenburger Tor, which used to close Berlin in (Berlin then ending at the end of Unter den Linden and the area where Tiergarden – Berlin’s Central Park area- and former West Berlin being out of the city limits) and later was a symbol of the split city as it was off-limits for years, located in the no- man’s-land in between the two walls separating East from West. We then walked to the Reichtag (now called Bundestag), the parliament building that was burned in 1933 and served as Hitler’s excuse for dissolving the legally elected government. Its dome was redone in the 1990’s as the Germans prepared to move their parliament from Bonn to Berlin, and is now a huge tourist attraction. We’d read that the lines to go up get quite long, but if you have a baby in tow you can skip ahead. Sure enough, when we asked a security guard for directions, he said we should go in the handicapped entrance, and we went straight up. The dome is all glass and has a history of the German parliament with a lot of pictures on display at the base, as well as the requisite restaurant. To go up to the top, you walk a spiral ramp, and a different ramp spirals down. On non-rainy and cloudy days, you can apparently get a great view of Berlin, but our view was better near the bottom of the dome where the slope of the glass was greater and not so many raindrops distorted the view.

From the Reichtag, we walked a few blocks to the new Holocaust Memorial. Aboveground, it’s a whole block full of concrete slabs of varying heights forming a maze. Belowground is a museum and visitor’s center, luckily again very kid-friendly. The room I spent the most time in had excerpts from the last narratives of about 15 holocaust victims, mostly letters home, on the floor. There were also a number of benches in the room that Maeve enjoyed climbing on which gave me the opportunity to read. The most telling part of the room, however, were the numbers of victims in different countries which were like a decorative band around the top of the wall. Germany had maybe 300,000 Jewish dead, of course, this was after massive amounts of people had fled or been expelled. But Poland and Russia – Poland was several million and Russia was almost 10 million murdered. It’s unfathomable.

Leaving, there was information about other Holocaust memorials around Europe, and plenty of disclaimers saying that although this museum focuses on Jewish victims, memorials for others are planned.

From there, we walked to Potsdamer Platz, which was a major hub before WWII and got mostly bombed out. It was never rebuilt because the wall went through the middle of the square. When I was last in Berlin in 1993 or 1994, Potsdamer Platz was an urban wasteland – just huge tracks of empty lots in the middle of the city. Not anymore. It’s now a major shopping and entertainment hub, with two malls and plenty of high rises. Not being that interested in malls, we ate lunch in a food court and got Maeve home for a nap.

That evening, we took the S-Bahn to Oranienburger strasse, which is just north of the area with Unter den Linden and used to be the Jewish quarter. It’s now very funky. We walked past the New Synagogue, which was saved from being burned by the Nazis by a policeman, only to be totally bombed out by the Allies. It was recently rebuilt, but as a cultural center not a site of worship. We had dinner at Diafana, a little organic/vegetarian café and bakery around the corner from the Synagogue, and got to listen to a lecture on bread baking. On the way back to the station, we walked through a Hof. Hofs are like patios behind buildings, but in this section of town there are Hofs connected to Hofs, so you can walk through the interior of the block. This Hof had a very touristy candy-making shop, where we saw them pull out hot raspberry-flavored glass-looking play-dough, run this through a mold machine, pop out any candies with bubbles while the candies were under a fan to cool off, and break the candies into pieces, separating out the extra hard candy connecting the molds. Then they ran the candies through a big drum to break off any remaining extra pieces and coat them with a little bit of sugar. Neat. The rest of the Hof was cafes and boutiques around nice gardens, but was mostly shut down for the evening.

On March 8, we went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum. This is a museum, originally set up right on the boarder between East and West Berlin, that was a foundation for human rights and helping people escape East Berlin. It’s very kitsch and needs badly to be modernized, but has tons of information about how people resisted oppression and escaped from East Berlin, including modified cars, a little submarine, a hot-air balloon, modified suitcases, and even a contraption used to turn power lines into zip lines to get over the boarder. Each detail was interesting, but the museum needs to invest in providing more general information about the context of each exhibit or room. We at this point were picking out museums we wanted to see that we thought might be kid-friendly, and again, Maeve had a good time running up and down stairs, climbing in old cars, and generally wandering around the exhibits.

On the way back to the S-Bahn at Potsdammer Platz, we stopped by the Topographie des Terrors, an outdoor exhibit on the grounds of where the SS-building used to be, about the Nazi war and terror machine. They’re thinking about reworking the exhibit, and most of the site was under construction, but they had one very full wall of information in what used to be the basement of the SS-building. We had a hard time making sense of it all, and could have used more overview. At that point, I was pretty much museumed out anyway and tired, so we got some fast food pizzas on the way home for lunch and took naps. The plan was to get Maeve down early and up from her nap to go out that evening.

We did get Maeve up at a reasonable time and went to the Kathe Kolowitz museum, which was walkable from our apartment. She’s a 19-20^th century artist/sculptor who lived most of her life in Berlin. Her art feels heavy, and her themes emphasize the oppression of the masses, mothers and children, and is very anti-war. It’s a small museum with only 4 floors in an old mansion, and again was very kid-friendly, in part because it only takes a little over an hour to see everything. It’s still well-worth going to see if you like her work.

Our last free day was Sunday, as Mike had to check in at the retreat Sunday evening. We packed up the apartment and then went again to Potsdammer Platz to walk to the Jewish museum, which is a very new museum and we were hopeful would be kid-friendly. It was. We entered through an older building where they have the coat check, restaurant etc and then you go underground to walk to the new building and up to the third floor where the exhibit starts. The museum is very well done, starting from Jewish life in the Roman times and continuing to the present. It has information about architecture, daily life, travel journals from businesspeople, biographical information about famous people like Mendelsson etc. It also has plenty of interactive exhibits as well as audio texts, but those were in German only. Maeve found plenty to play with in each room, so we were able to move along and have one of us keep an eye on her while the other browsed the museum. Like at the Pergamon, we ate in the museum café so we could go back in the museum for a little while after lunch. We left the museum a bit before 1 and decided to get a taxi to take us back to the apartment and then straight on to the retreat site which was out near the Free University, outside the city center in Western Berlin. It would have been easy to get there on the metro, but… Anyway, we were out on the street outside the museum and a fair number of taxis were coming by, some to drop people off, some with passengers. I was trying to call a taxi, but the line was busy. Sunday with no metro is not a good time to try to get a taxi on the fly. After about 10 minutes, Mike finally flagged a taxi that was free and didn’t mind taking a kid without a kid seat.

An aside about car seats for kids: some drivers didn’t have a booster seat and wouldn’t take Maeve without it, others had a booster seat, really for kids much larger than Maeve who should be in a car seat, and wouldn’t let Maeve sit in our laps because they said the booster seat was safer, and others just let us hold her in our laps. Our CambioCar (the car-sharing service we use in Saarbruecken) claims to have a child seat in every car and actually does have a booster seat, but we take our own car seat along when we use it as Maeve is still too small for the booster. Most taxis do seem to have these booster seats as well.

So we hopped in the taxi, went by the apartment to pick up our bag, and headed to Harnak House where we’d be staying for the retreat to put Maeve down. When we go there, we realized it’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the Free University. After Maeve’s nap, we walked about 15-20 minutes to Dahlen, the nearest village, to get Maeve and me dinner. Mike had dinner later with the retreat. In Dahlen, there is a working farm which if Maeve were a bit older would have been lots of fun to visit.

The next two days, Mike was mostly working and I also listened to a few talks during Maeve’s afternoon naps. But the mornings Maeve and I got to explore. We called a cab to take us to the nearest S-Bahn station and then took the train into town. The first morning we went to KaDeWe, as I wanted to see if they had a baby monitor and to find some pesto. On the way there, we stopped by the interior of the Kaiser Wilhem peace monument, which is the bombed out remains of a church right on Kurfurstendamm near Bahnhof Zoo. We’d seen it from the outside before, but hadn’t gone in. Only the vestibule remains (there’s a modern church beside it) but the vestibule has a lovely mosaic ceiling. I had Maeve in the sling and we walked around with me staring upwards and Maeve bending over backwards to be able to better see the ceiling.

About the pesto, Maeve is allergic to nuts – not the deathly allergy some kids have but every time she eats nuts, including peanuts and coconut, she gets a skin rash. And all the pesto I can find in Saarbruecken has cashews in it. When I make pesto, I use pine nuts which is no problem for Maeve, but I don’t have a food processor here and we want non-nutty pesto. So Maeve and I went to the gourmet food section in KaDeWe, which is a very very upscale department store. They did not have non-cashew pesto, but they did have ground up basil and garlic paste, so I got a couple of jars and can add grated parmesan at home. The baby monitors were 59 Euros at the cheapest, so I passed on buying that. We got lunch at our buddy Einhorn restaurant and got some take out to take back for dinner.

March 11 was our last day in Berlin. Maeve and I headed out to explore in Kreutzberg, a section of Berlin just south of Mitte, the section with Unter den Linden. The neighborhood was more edgy, and we spent some of the morning walking up to the top of Kreutzberg, a small hill in a park that had excellent views of downtown. We then had lunch at Seerose, a vegetarian café, and got some take out for dinner, which was going to be in the airport on our way home. We stopped by a Turkish stand in a market on our way home and got some flatbread and a zucchini fritter, also for dinner. The fritter was a big hit with Maeve in the airport.

We got home to Saarbruecken at about 9 that evening – a very late night for Maeve who usually goes to sleep about 7. She was hyper on the plane, but not fussy and traveled very well.

2008-03-16T04:11:00.000-04:00

Maeve’s words

March 8, 2008

English

Mommy
Daddy
juice
moo: moon
hot
hat
up
down
up a high: star
pea
baba: banana
bea: bear
mo: more
cheese
ball
uh’oh
key: used to say but not now
boot
dis: this
pee
book
mole
eye

Spanish

a’m: aqua
‘am: hambre
ba: uva
ma: mas
papa: pata
luz: used to say, but not now
pa: pajaro
pan
te
gat: gato
milla: semilla

English/Spanish

German

tschuss
nein
ei: egg

Other meaningful communication:

trill: yuck, when sees trash
moo: cow noise
ba’a’a: sheep noise
mmmm: yummy
lip smack: kiss
ululation: ear, as in wants an ear to pull on for comfort
waves
points 3 ways, ie, self, mommy, bed, meaning Mommy puts Maeve in bed
ah: yes

2008-02-21T13:08:00.001-05:00

February 21, 2008. Maeve in the bath in Saarbruecken.

2008-02-07T02:49:00.001-05:00

February 2, 2008
Mike and Maeve with a balloon hat.
Cologne, Germany

We were in Cologne for Carnival weekend, and a friendly clown made Maeve a balloon hat while we were watching the Funkenbiwak. You can see the green Funken (soldiers) on the stage in the background of the picture. This event was at 10:30 in the morning on Saturday, and the red and green Funken paraded onto the stage, made political speeches about how the Neumarkt, where this event was held, should continue to be available to the people, sang songs about Cologne and Kolsh, the local variety of beer, showed off their Marie (a young female soldier) to the crowd, danced, and wiggled their tushes as they rode their "horses." It was hilarious, watching with hundreds of other people, almost all in costume, and most buying copious rounds of kolsch from the stands set up in the square. People sang along with the songs and swayed. Many people even had little knitted bags hanging around their necks, perfectly sized for holding a glass of kolsch.

We found a couple of good vegetarian restaurants our first day in Cologne, but most of the time the restaurants were closed for lunch and had Karnival parties at night which had DJs, lots of smoking and little food. Also, all the museums and churches were closed, so we got to see the Dom, Rathaus, and Gross St. Martin, one of the Romanesque churches, from the outside, but weren't able to do any serious cultural tourism. But there was plenty to do with the Karnival activities and walking around the city watching everybody dressed up and having a good time. On Saturday when we were walking around the pedestrianized area, businesses all along the parade route were closing shop for the evening and construction crews were everywhere. In some cases, they were putting up reviewing stands for the parades. In many cases, they were boarding up the storefront windows with plywood. We saw plenty of not quite sober people at the parade, and lots of candy and flowers were being thrown, but no property violence or even very rowdy behavior. I'm not quite sure why the stores boarded up.

On Sunday, we watched the children's and neighborhood parade, which was tons of people marching in costume and bands. Little kids were everywhere scooping up the candy and flowers. Everyone was in costume. Monday was the Rose Monday parade, which included a lot of Funken groups as well as other floats, bands, and marchers. Award winners from the children's parade also marched. Again, there was tons of candy and roses being thrown out. On Sunday, the groups were generally carrying their supplies with extras in baby carriages or pushable wagons. Monday was serious - floats were pulled by horses or tractors decorated with horses, and there were van and truckfulls of extra gummy bears, chocolates and flowers. Mike later found out that there were several tons of candy given away over the weekend. It was amazing. Maeve started out the parade sitting in my lap, but pretty soon realized the other kids were scrambling for candy and started making small forays into the street to pick up the goodies. Compared to the huge Thanksgiving day parade floats in the major parades in the states, the floats were generally small and most of the parade was made up of costumed marchers and bands. However, they are walking down small city streets, and some of the bigger floats on Monday really did take up most of the street, so policemen had to come through making sure everyone was off the street.

Monday we were invited to stand with a pig, two unicorns, and several other characters. This was very nice as it meant that Maeve didn't get crowded and we had a dry spot to store our backpacks. The unicorns were particulary well costumed and got lots of candy and kisses from marchers. You can see that everyone had empty bags around their necks, just waiting to fill them up with candy. This group had at least a couple of kegs with them, which seemed to be typical of many of the groups. We stored our backpacks under the keg table which kept them nice and dry through the rain. There were also plenty of places to buy beer and sausages and other street food set up around the parade route. We hung out on the parade route near the start - it was out of the center city and a little less crowded, plus the parade started earlier which worked well with Maeve's nap schedule. We watched the parade for an hour and a half or so, then headed back to the hotel for lunch and a nap.

After the parade, the city was a pit. On Sunday, we wandered around the pedestrianized area after Maeve's afternoon nap. Everyone was in costume, bars were full, and street vendors were everywhere. Around the city hall square, we saw clean up crews coming through. They consisted of several workers with big push brooms pushing trash into piles, several street cleaning trucks and one big vacuum truck. This truck had a tube maybe 1.5 feet in diameter that was connected to a huge vacuum and couldsuck up piles of trash, including whole wine bottles.

On Monday, Maeve got up early enough that we made it back out to the end of the parade route and watched a bit more near the Dom and main train station. The streets were packed. The apartments along the parade route were also packed, and people on the upper stories were raking in a lot. The larger floats had people throwing candy on level with the second floor anyway, and some were throwing to third floors and above. At the start, the street was narrower and the second floor people also had the advantage of often being over a sign or some type of overhang for the store on the first floor, and were ingeniously laying out blankets, baskets etc connected with strings so they could haul up the loot that was thrown to them but didn't quite make it.

2008-01-29T08:21:00.000-05:00

Aswan-Cairo-Frankfurt
December 29-31
Written in Saarbruecken

Just a bit about the end of our Egypt trip.

Philae Temple outside Aswan is in an amazing location, after the Hatshepsut temple, the most beautiful location for a temple we saw. It’s on an island between the two Aswan dams, and was moved there because the island it was originally on was getting flooded. There was a lot of time, energy, and money put into saving some of the these temples from the High Dam. We had to take a boat to get out to the temple, and then got to walk around. It had the usual offering scenes, birth house, and additions by later rulers. I’m now about blogged out, and by Philae we were about templed out. We saw a lot of temples, and pretty much could make sense of the architecture and main pictorial themes. To get any deeper and continue to learn would require some real study and more time than we had.

We also went by the High Dam, which we were excited to see, but really you just stop in the middle of the dam and look both directions. There is no tour of the machinery. There is also a very stark memorial to Soviet-Egyptian friendship by the dam, as the Soviets helped pay for a lot of it. On the way back into Aswan, we stopped by an old quarry where a half-excavated obelisk was left when the quarriers realized it had a crack. It was an interesting wander.

We also got booted from our hotel rooms in Aswan at noon although we didn’t have to leave until mid-afternoon. We got back early from our trip and got Maeve down before noon. Then everybody went to check out, while I camped out in the hall outside our room until Maeve woke up. She slept maybe an hour and a half, not too bad.

The trip back to Cairo on the plane was fine, bur our travel agent had booked us in a hotel near the Pyramids instead of a hotel by the airport, and the traffic, as usual was horrible. We were so tired and exhausted by the time we got in. We first negotiated a later pick up time the next morning to get to the airport and ordered to go boxes so we could eat on the run. We got Maeve down, ordered room service, ate, and went to bed. Yay!

The next morning, Mike took a quick picture of the pyramids on our way out of the hotel. We had no problem making our flight from Cairo to Heathrow. We got a quick bite in Heathrow, and we headed for our flight to Frankfurt, leaving Mike’s parents to make their way to Dallas. In Frankfurt, there were no problems getting through the airport and we had time to hit a bakery and the grocery store and still waited a few minutes for our train although I’d originally been worried we wouldn’t have time to make our connection. Two hours later in Saarbruecken, and a taxi ride to the Max Planck guesthouse on the Uni campus, and special for new year’s eve – sleep!

2008-01-29T08:02:00.000-05:00

December 28, 2007
Aswan

We’ve been in Aswan 3 days, and are staying at a hotel a kilometer or two out of town, but luckily, there is a shuttle bus. Aswan is nice, about the size of Luxor, so very walkable on foot. The souk here is very large, and has less touristy parts, meaning that people who live here also buy some things in the market here.

Our trip here from Luxor wasn’t the greatest. We flew out at 9 PM, and it was just way too late for Maeve, who imploded on the flight. We finally got her to stop crying, but Mike and I were both wiped out. We couldn’t stay late in our rooms in the hotel in Luxor because Sarcosy, the French prime minister, was staying in the hotel starting the day we checked out. So we spent the afternoon by the pool, and managed to get Maeve to sleep a bit over an hour, but this wasn’t enough to last until 10 PM. This is the second time Maeve has imploded on a flight, not so bad given the amount of traveling we’re doing and how difficult it is for her, but it’s basically a bad experience for all to have an uncontrollably crying baby.

Our first day in Aswan we all slept in, and then went into town to do some shopping and arrange excursions. We went by Karnak travel, which we’d scoped out in Luxor to by our Abu Simbel excursions. This is a temple 250K south of Aswan, near the Sudan border. It’s an all day car ride trip down, flights are also available but booked out this week. So, we went into Karnak travel and the office was so smoky Mike couldn’t stay inside and took Maeve out. Then we tried to pay with a credit card and their machine wasn’t working. So we went next door to American Express and bought the same tours for $5 less per person, with a credit card and in a non-smoky office. We’re taking turns traveling down to Abu Simbel – the other couple will stay with Maeve and hang out in Aswan. No more imploding babies, please. Maeve had a great time moving brochures from Mike to Carolyn while we completed the travel arrangements.

We walked a bit in the souk and saw a number of bakeries where they were pulling out steaming pita bread and putting them on wooden racks to cool off. There were long lines at the bakeries – Carolyn and I were in line at one while Mike and Paul went to a nearby fruit stand to buy bananas. Some Egyptian came by and facilitated our purchase and we got some yummy pitas, paying only 1 Egyptian pound more than the price for the expediting. The pita were yummy – we’re also buying yogurt, fruit, juice etc to self-cater. The cheese we buy is a variety of La Vache que Rie, little processed cheese wedges that are ubiquitously sold here. Maeve really likes these and scarfs four wedges at a meal – she’d eat more but we cut her off.

After the afternoon nap, we headed uphill out of town from the hotel to get dinner at the Nubian House. It was a farther walk than we thought, about 15 minutes, but doable. It’s comfortable weather here, but I can see how it must be really hot in the summer, as we’re located right on the tropic of Cancer. The restaurant had a wonderful view over the Nile – the Nile here seems much narrower – mostly because there are lots of islands and hills close in on both sides, so there is very little arable land. We weren’t able to actually eat there, as they weren’t going to be able to feed us for at least an hour – their kitchen was booked with tour groups, I suppose. There were little boys outside the restaurant running around with “baby crocodiles” that you could touch for baksheesh. So we walked back to the hotel and ate on the terrace there, which turned out to be great. We got Maeve a strawberry milkshake, which here does not include ice cream. We discovered that she liked this in Luxor, when Paul ordered one and then Maeve drank it all. This has become part of her dinner – a habit we will probably change when we’re not traveling, but for now it means very heavy overnight diapers and a well-hydrated baby.

Yesterday Mike and I went to Abu Simbel and the grandparents hung out with Maeve. We went in convoy at 11 AM - there’s also a convoy at 4 AM which I expect is very popular in the summer, but we opted for the later one that gets back at 7PM. We went in a “limo” which was a Toyota corolla. The 30 K or so outside Aswan is habited- you go over the old dam, past the airport etc. And the 30 K or so outside Abu Simbel is also habited – mostly human impact is irrigation projects, though you also pass the airport there. But everything else in the middle is just desert. It really makes you realize the power of the Nile – this land is all desert except for this very thin strip, but the fertility of that small strip powered civilization.

Abu Simbel is one of the many many temples built by Ramses II, Ramses the Great. It was built on the border with Nubia, by the viceroy in charge of administering this area for the pharaoh. It’s cut straight into the cliff face of the Nile. This temple was one of many that would be inundated by the High Dam, and a Unesco lead effort cut it out of the mountain and moved it up 100M. The temples are now under artificial mountains, but despite this, they are pretty impressive. The main temple is for Ramses, and the second one is for his wife, Nefertari. Not Nefertiti, who was the beautiful wife of Akhenaton, but Nefertari, the favorite wife of Ramses II. Her tomb is the best in the Valley of the Queens and visitable for the small sum of $4000.00. Needless to say, we didn’t visit it.

In the sanctuary of the main temple, there are statues to four gods, the god of night, the god of the noon-day sun (Amon-Re), Ramses, and the god of the morning sun. Two days a year the sun would shine on 3 of these status – not the god of the night. When they moved the temple, they kept the same orientation, but the sun now shines in one day later.

Mike and I figure we’re getting templed out – we thought Abu Simbel was neat but weren’t overwhelmed by it. One of the most interesting things was making sense of all the offerings. Most of the side rooms in the main temple showed Ramses making offerings to different Gods, including himself. We’re starting to be able to identify some of the gods as well as some of the different offerings, like lotus, bread, other food, essential oils, and incense being burned in censors. That’s interesting. We’re trying to learn the cartouches for the different kings, and took some pictures of Ramses’ cartouche on the outside of the temple – photography wasn’t allowed inside. But these didn’t match the cartouches in the inside so this remains a bit of a mystery. When we get home I’ll have to look at all the pictures of cartouches I took and see if I can sort it out.

Nefertari’s temple was interesting because she featured in many of the decorations. In the valley of the Queens, we visited two tombs of princes. Their tomb decorations included depictions of the youths with a sidelock, denoting their childhood. But in these pictures, they invariable followed behind their fathers. The guide said that because they were children, they didn’t know about the afterlife and their fathers, the pharaoh, acted as their guide through the underworld. But the effect for me, at least, was that their tombs seemed more about their fathers than about them. In most of the iconography we’ve seen, the pharaoh is physically much bigger than his wives, and children are even smaller. Even in the mastabas we saw at Saqqara, the person being buried (a man) was shown very large and the members of his household much smaller. So Nefertari’s temple was quite an exception, in that she’s depicted the same size as her husband and making her own offerings to the gods. In a couple of scenes, she’s watching Ramses defeat their enemies, but in others either she or Ramses are making offerings, and there is a scene of her coronation. Also the columns are square and have Hath or heads, the god the temple is dedicated to, which is a human head with cow ears. I like those columns.

In our drive back, it was mostly dark and our driver mostly didn’t have his headlights on. Here, like in Tanzania, they use their directional signals to tell you when it’s okay to pass and when not. They also use their headlights, as in turning them off and on, to make sure a car going in the other direction sees them at night. In the city, there are generally street lamps, and many cars run with either parking lights or no lights at all.

Lake Nasser, the huge lake formed behind the high dam, in addition to covering lots of temples, swallowed up all the fertile land on the banks of the Nile for hundreds of kilometers, completely displacing the Nubians from their ancestral land. There are cliffs on either side of the lake, at least the parts we could see, so it’s not a simple thing to farm using the lake waters, as they’d have to be pumped pretty high to be useful. The Egyptian government is sponsoring some large-scale irrigation plans at Tosca, not too far from Abu Simbel, but all the Nubians basically got relocated 40 years ago, giving up their land. It’s not clear to me how they’re making a living now.

This morning Mike and I took Maeve to the Nubian museum, which she also visited yesterday with her grandparents. It was built about 10 years ago, also in response to the destruction of the Nubian lands by Lake Nasser, as a way to preserve some of the cultural artifacts that were submerged. The museum is well labeled in English, with the usually misspellings and grammar errors that seem to be the status quo. There was tons of information, but both Mike and I felt it was a bit hard to keep track of the Nubian history – we needed more of an overview of the different periods and how independent Nubian states interacted with and were incorporated into the Egyptian dynasties. There were also many dioramas about Nubian life as well as models of old buildings, forts etc. Maeve liked these, as well as the ramps throughout the museum.

Today we had to replenish our larder and this afternoon went out to buy more fruit, yogurt and cheese. We had a lot of trouble finding yogurt, and learned the Arabic word for it – zabaadi. Several stores only had plain yogurt, which is fine for Maeve but Mike’s parents don’t like it. We found some strawberry yogurt at the third store and bought it. Shopping today was much more pleasant, at this point, we more or less know the prices for things, so are able to know how to bargain for a fair price and are paying something closer to the Egyptian prices, with a tourist premium thrown in I’m sure. We then tried to buy stamps, it costs 150 piasters, or 1.5 Egyptian pounds to send post cards. I went to the bookshop in our hotel, which sells stamps, but they were selling each stamp for 4 pounds. A bit of a markup. We decided to find the post office, which we did, but it was closed because today is Friday.

We had dinner at a restaurant on the corniche. We walked through the restaurant, past an internet café, down one level on the corniche and across a little walkway to get to a floating dining room on the water. It was a great view across to Elephantine Island, and we got there right at sunset, in time to see fellucas and ferry boats bringing their loads of tourists in. It was a perfect setting, except for the intermittent aroma of diesel fuel. The waiters (all male) were as usual enamored of Maeve and all wanted to play with her. Maeve liked the water, which was covered with a sheen of oil, but you could still see pretty large algae plants in it.

Tomorrow our plan is to do a half-day tour of Philae Island, a temple to Isis that got moved after the High Dam was built, and see the high dam. Sunday we’re leaving for Cairo in the afternoon, and again can’t stay in our rooms past noon as the hotel is fully booked. We’re trying to think about how to make sure Maeve gets a nap.

2008-01-29T07:46:00.000-05:00

Mortuary temple of Hatshepsut

Luxor Take 2
Covering Dec 23-25, 2007
Originally written in Aswan and lost somehow
Rewritten January 28, 2008
Saarbruecken, Germany

Let’s see what I can remember, first about interesting happenings while in Luxor and then a bit about the monuments on the West Bank, which were phenomenal.

Luxor, like most of Egypt, has a fairly strong tradition of aggressive tourist touts. Walking up and down the corniche, you’re constantly approached asking if you want a felucca ride. On the sidewalk anywhere, horse-drawn carriage drivers approach you. Walking through the tourist souk, shop keepers approach you right and left. One afternoon while Maeve was napping and Paul was supervising/napping from the adjoining room, Mike, Carolyn and I went out to look for a small plate for Carolyn to take home as a souvenir and water and other food for the group. We went first to the tourist souk. On the way there, we passed a shop that said “hassle-free zone.” Several shops advertised this, as a way to make tourists more comfortable. On the sidewalk, while walking past this shop, we were approached by a driver. The owner of the shop came out and started yelling at the guy hassling us and throwing rocks at him. We were somewhat taken back by his aggressive method of promoting his hassle-free space.

In the souk, Carolyn saw a shop that had porcelain plates, and eventually bought one. The “owner,” they all say they’re the owner, but often somebody young who speaks decent English is the one helping you, so I don’t think all the 20-year-olds can be the owners, offered Mike some tea (not Carolyn or I) and was very hospitable. Carolyn bargained a bit, but at her first counter offer the owner accepted her price, so we figure she overpaid, about $7-8.00 for a pretty porcelain plate. But she was happy with her purchase. On the way home, we decided to walk back to our hotel a different way, via the train station. On the way back, we found a shop off the tourist track and bought about 9 liters of water very cheap. Probably actually close to the Egyptian price which we were always assured we were paying. Then we had to cross some construction work to get to the road back to our hotel, which we did by walking a plank across a ditch in the dark. Always an adventure.

Our first day on the West Bank was great. It started out with a new guide, who we could understand as he spoke slowly and loudly and talked towards Paul. Much better. He also, however, had some relationships with other vendors around the sites, but he was open about this and let us choose whether or not we were interested, so we didn’t feel pushed. He also gave good info, so we were all much happier and kept him for the rest of the trip. The guide really makes all the difference.

We started the morning by visiting the Colossi of Memnon, which aren’t really Agamemnon, that’s just what the Greeks thought when the first saw them. Rather, they’re what’s left of a mortuary temple for Amenophis III. Apparently the rest of the temple got re-used by later Pharaohs. They were nice and big, and the AM balloons were coming down all around the area so it was a nice brief stop. Then on to the Mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut. Her temple is set in the side of a hill that arches around it, possible the most dramatic setting I saw in Egypt with a majestic interaction between the natural features of the landscape and a huge human architectural endeavor. Hatshepsut was one of the few female Pharaohs, and had two obelisks at Karnack (one fell over) and had a relatively long reign, most as a regent to Thutmosis III, who after she died did his darndest to erase her memory. We heard several stories about why – one was because she was a woman and women shouldn’t be pharaohs, and the other was that she was his regent for a long time and he wasn’t able to assume the throne until she died, although he was already grown.

We had to park some 300 meters from the temple, and there was a little bus made of multiple little golf-cart like carriages to take tourists from the parking lot to the temple. This wasn’t really necessary for us, but I can imagine that the Egyptians do everything they can to make the visit more bearable in the heat of the summer.

The temple itself was built into the hillside, in a series of receding colonnades. Much of the carving was defaced, but we could see several series of stories, one of the most famous was the Punt Colonnade, which showed the exploits of a expedition Hatshepsut sponsored to Punt (Somalia) with her soldiers bringing back exotic items like myrrh trees (the stump of one that’s 3500 years old remains outside the temple), wild animals etc. There are fish depicted that aren’t the fish in the Nile, so the reliefs are showing the exotic fish of the Red sea. Most of the portraits of Hatshepsut were chiseled out. There were several ramps with steps to walk up to the top terrace, which contained the real temple, which we weren’t allowed to go in. It was a dark hole leading into the hillside. On the way out, we again to the little trolley and then passed by the ubiquitous tourist souk on the way to the bus. Every antiquity has a souk attached to it where you can buy books about the site, post cards, t-shirts, and other tourist junk. You run the gauntlet to get back to your van.

After Hatshepsut, we went to the Valley of the kings. Here there was a new Japanese-funded visitors’ center. The most interesting part of the center was a 3-D fiberglass model of the valley. As you walked over to the model, you could see the valley with all the entrances to the tombs marked. Then from the backside, the model looked like a many-legged spider, as it showed the actual shafts. Very interesting and gave you a feeling for exactly how much digging these guys were doing and why is was near-impossible to hide their tombs. It was a huge industry, and it’s no wonder they all (except Tut) got looted thousands of years ago. The valley is just that – a not so impressive valley in the desert. There’s absolutely no vegetation, just rocky sand, as the valley is well out of the flood plain of the Nile. When I think of a valley, I tend to think of a wooded, alpine valley with water running through it, which would of course have been completely out of place in Egypt.

The valley of the kings is situated in the hills, so that the pharaohs that were buried here were still technically under a pyramid, just a natural one. The hope was that the remote location without a man-made pyramid on top acting as a beacon for grave robbers, that the pharaohs would be able to have a safe journey though the afterlife. When the priests tried to hide the tombs after the Pharaoh was buried, they could just push sand and rocks on top of it, and it would look like the sand had been there forever. The priests clearly tried to protect the pharaohs in the afterlife, near Hatshepsut’s temple they made a secret cache of 40 or more mummies in an attempt to keep them from getting stolen. I need to do some more reading, because the priests were trying so hard to keep the tombs secret, but there were whole villages working on building the tombs, and the tombs almost always got robbed. Also, we saw one tomb, of Ramses III, that had its axis shifted after builders broke through into another tomb, but this didn’t happen often. Even though the tombs were hidden, there was clearly some way of determining where the tombs were so that the next Pharaohs could use a new area, and this must have been in writing as the New Kingdom lasted a long time, and there are over 60 tombs there. I never got clear on exactly how all this worked.

With the entrance to the Valley of the Kings, you get to see 3 tombs. From the visitors’ center, there is again a little trolley that takes you up to the tomb area, where there are several areas with benches and roofs where you can sit and chat. Our guide had picked up some nice photos of the murals in some of the tombs, and walked us through some of the iconography we were likely to see, and then recommended three tombs to us. The guides aren’t allowed in the tombs – tourists with guides take longer and they don’t want that much sweat in the tombs. For each tomb, we had to go down staircases of varying lengths, usually waiting a bit in line. There was a guard at the entrance to the tomb who stamped our tickets, only three stamps allowed. And you couldn’t take photos inside. Once in the tombs, there was usually a wooden floor and the walls were covered in plexiglass so you couldn’t touch. There was plenty of lighting so you didn’t need a flashlight. It was also incredibly warm and stuffy in all the tombs, despite it being December and not too hugely crowded. Summer must be miserable.

We visited the tombs of three Ramessoid kings: Ramses IX, Ramses III, and Ramses I. The entrance to all of the tombs had the same figure over the lintel: the winged sun disk. This figure was also often over the portals. The tombs had somewhat different iconography, and I can’t now remember exactly what was where, but here’s some of what we saw.

Many of the tombs had depictions from some version of the book of the dead, where the deceased wanders through the netherworld and is judged on whether or not the soul should be allowed into heaven. On the way down to the coffin rooms, there were often several side rooms which were used to store goods that would be useful in the afterlife (i.e. things like oil that you couldn’t get from the gods – one goddess was a cow so it wasn’t necessary to take milk with you). Many of these had depictions of offerings as well. Of course, none of the tomb goods were in there – everything was bare except for the decoration. Ramses IX was late in the dynasty, and a lot of his tomb was just painted instead of also carved. His tomb had a depiction of Nhut, the sky goddess. She’s usually dark, and wraps around the whole ceiling. Her arms go down one side, her body along a long side, and her feet along a third. She’s swallowing the stars and giving birth to the day. We ended up seeing her represented several other places, most notably on the roof sanctuaries in Dendara, but this was the first time I tried to make sense of her depiction. Another common theme was different depictions of the sun god – as a scarab beetle in the morning, the sun disk at mid-day, and the waning sun of the afternoon – depicted as a ram-headed god with horns sticking out to the sides. Falcon-headed Horus was also a popular depiction.

What was really amazing was the color. Some of the tombs had parts that were partly destroyed, like the second half of Ramses III’s tomb, which is closed off, but in general, the detail, color, composition, everything was just amazing, given that these tombs were built 1300BC-1100BC (at least the three we saw). And we later saw similar iconography at Dendara and Philae, which were Greco-Roman temples from 1300 years later, that still had a similar pictorial vocabulary. And the new Kingdom was continuing a tradition from the pyramid builders, from 2500 BC. It’s hard to fathom that length of cultural tradition.

We also had a lot of fun figuring out each Pharaoh’s cartouche, a game that continued throughout the trip. Everything they owned, everything they offered to the gods, everything that they hoped would happen to themselves in the afterlife, they clearly labeled with their own names. We saw this again in the Valley of the queens two days later, where we visited the tombs of two princes. Since the boys died young, their tomb art showed their fathers leading them around through the underworld. And these were labeled with their fathers’ cartouches. Also, when every pharaoh added to a temple, they made sure to label their additions with their own cartouches. Actually, Ramses II was famous for erasing other King’s cartouches and replacing them with his own so he’d get the spiritual credit. At Ramses III’s mortuary temple (Medinet Habu) the cartouches were incised very very deeply so they couldn’t be erased. He’d learned something from his daddy.

After the Valley of the Kings, we made our last stop of the day which was at Medinet Habu, the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III. On our way there, our guide offered to take us by an alabaster workshop, where he knew the owner. Mike’s parents were interested, so we went. First they showed us how they worked the natural alabaster, which was neat. Maeve enjoyed watching the guys sitting on the ground and chiseling the rock, and she enjoyed playing with the drills they use to hollow out the inside of the vase. The pieces were lovely, but heavy, and we couldn’t imaging having to tote it around. Carolyn bought a piece as a gift.

Medinet Habu was impressive. Particularly all the carvings. Like the other temples, it was formed by a series of pylons leading into ever higher and darker courts and finally to the covered sanctuary. Although there was no roof left, many of the pylons still had lintels and a fair amount of color remained. Farther into the temple precinct there was just a sea of column bases left.

On our way back to the hotel, which was well after noon, we asked the guide to stop by a kushari joint for us to pick up a quick lunch of the noodles, rice, lentils, spicy red sauce and fried onions we’d come to love. He thought we were a little weird to be asking for this, but found us a place. The first place was closed, and then we walked a bit to another place that was on Television street, near the local shopping area (as opposed to tourist bazaar) that Mike and I had walked around in the day before. Mike and I managed to order 4 servings of kushari, which in Luxor came with the addition of a few chickpeas on top. We got ours in round plastic containers with lids, and got two kinds of sauce in little bags to add on if we wanted. There were school boys getting maybe a fifth of what we got each, mostly rice and noodles and very little sauce, which they got in plastic bags to eat. We took it back to the hotel and ate a quick lunch before getting Maeve down for an afternoon nap.

The evening of Dec 23, we ate dinner at a tourist restaurant on the corniche almost in front of our hotel. The food was fine, but not amazing. We did get to see lots of tourists offloading from boats coming back from the West Bank while eating dinner. Paul ordered a strawberry milkshake and let Maeve try it. That was the end of his milkshake – Maeve was a fan. She ended up drinking quite a bit of strawberry milkshake, which was basically just strawberry milk, no ice cream, for the rest of the trip.

On Dec 24, we went to Dendara, which is a temple for Hathor, the cow-headed nice goddess, that dates from the Greco-Roman period. We picked up in time to hang out with the tourist convoy – all the tourists going to Dendara, and all the tourists leaving Luxor for Hurgada on the Red Sea, travel “together” down the road. This just means they all leave together and then get all spread out over time, as far as I can tell. So a load of busses, vans, and limos (i.e. private cars) all massed around the staging area and left together. At major crossroad, the traffic in the opposite direction was stopped and there were tourist police out with big guns. We went through Qena, a big town, right before we turned off for Dendara, but weren’t allowed to stop. Once we got to the turn off for Dendara (most were going on to Hurgada) we had to wait until all the cars going to Dendara were together and then we took off again.

The ride up to Dendara, which is downriver from Luxor, was interesting – we followed the highway that parallels a big canal off the Nile. We passed lots of villages and agriculture – they have portable pumps that they use for a bit in one location and then can move to another irrigation ditch to pump water into a different part of the field. It’s very intensive agriculture, but that’s necessary given the very small amount of land on either side of the Nile that is available for irrigation. Since the high dam ended the flooding, they can now get in three crops a year. With this comes the usual problems of needing to use fertilizer and the slow salinization of the soil. None of these have been worked out yet, but the Egyptians are not starving, unlike people in some of their neighboring countries. We also saw many partially constructed houses – people were living on the first or on several completed floors, and there were steel beams sticking up covered with concrete and spaces for windows but no roof on the second or third floor. In some cases, these upper floors were also inhabited and covered with thatch. We figured that people built more as they got more money. I enjoyed the stop signs that were in both Arabic and English.

It turns out that about 40 tourist vehicles visited Dendara the day we were there – that was there whole tourist output for the day. We were there maybe 90 minutes, after an over 1 hour drive there each way. We had to head back at the time of the convoy that went into Luxor. A big pain, those convoys. Dendara was much more laid back in terms of its tourist bazaar – it basically didn’t exist, maybe because of the small number of tourists.

The site was beautiful and the temple grounds had a newly refurbished visitors center and gardens. It would have been nice to be able to hang out there for a bit, but we basically barely had time to wander thoroughly through the temple, first with our guide and then a bit on our own. This temple is much newer, built around 100BC. It has the requiset birth house, in which the ruler that’s putting up the money for the temple creates a story saying how they were born to the gods, suckled by goddesses, and therefore have the right to tell all Egypt what to do. This was particularly important for the Greco-Roman rulers, as they were foreigners and had legitimacy problems. But the main site was the temple itself. It was so special because the roof was still intact, and seeing this temple really helped me imagine what the other, often larger and more ornate, temples might have looked like.

The front façade of the temple had six huge columns all with Hathor as the column top. You can tell it’s her because it’s a human female face with little cow ears sticking out from behind the ears. I liked the Hathor columns. The interior of the Hypostyle hall was also filled with Hathor columns. And there was a roof, which was mostly blackened with smoke. We heard a couple different stories for the origin of the smoke. One idea was that early Christians hid out from Roman persecution in the temples and their cook fires blackened the ceilings. Another was that the early Christians hung out in the temples to avoid persecution and wanted to deface the pagan icons. In Dendara, as in other temples, you can often see Christian iconography, including crosses or altars. These are often not at floor level, as the temples got sanded over and the floor level was sometimes meters above where it’s been excavated to. In Dendara, the reliefs at floor level were beautiful for maybe 2 meters, then there was a lot of destruction and chiseling out of the images. Then towards the ceiling again the releifs were intact – the Christians clearly defaced what they could reach at the time.

Nonetheless, there was still a good bit of color, especially the blue stripes on the Hathor column’s crowns. And where they were doing restoration work, the blue of the ceiling was beautiful. The side rooms around the sanctuary were full of carving, showing rulers making offerings to Hathor, Hathor the cow walking around and being bountiful, Hathor’s barque being taken out on the river so she could consort with her godly husband Horus once a year. It was quite dark inside, even though there were ancient skylights that brought light down from the roof. The releifs were lit with electric lights, so it was easy to see the walls, but you got a much better impression of what the temples must have been like in ancient times.

From a side hall, you could go down into one of the many crypts that were used to store offerings. You had to crawl down a ladder and then could walk along a small passageway on either side of the entrance. These too were covered in carvings. On either side of the main sanctuary, there was a well-worn stairway leading up to the roof. The front part of the roof had more ceremonial rooms on it, and there was also a second story on top of those, but tourists weren’t allowed to go up there. The roof was interesting because you could see how they made the skylights – they went from the upstairs rooms all the way through the ceiling so that the inner sanctuaries wouldn’t be completely dark. There was also an Egyptian zodiac on one ceiling – the priest apparently made some pretty accurate start charts. The zodiac in Dendara was a replica – the original was stolen and is now in the Louvre. The Egyptian zodiac is recognizable, with most of symbols being recognizable. In another room was a depiction of Nhut, the sky goddess who devoured the night and gave birth to the day. And all the doors had the familiar winged sun disk on the lentils. There was also a room that depicted the Osiris myth, where he got cut up by his jealous brother Seth, his wife Isis found him and managed to put him together enough to get pregnant while she flew over him as a bird, and then he died and became the god of the afterlife. There were pretty graphic pictures of Osiris masturbating to be able to impregnate Isis. Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, was the husband of Hathor.

The stairs going up and down to the roof were interesting. In one direction they showed the priests bringing offerings up to the goddess, and in the other direction showed them coming back down. The last interesting part of the Dendara temple complex was that Cleopatra was depicted on the back of the temple giving offerings to the gods. You could tell it was a woman, and women were rarely depicted giving offerings, which is what made Nefertari’s temple in Abu Simbel so special.

This evening, we went to find another kushari/fitter joint outside the tourist beaten path. This restaurant, like Gad in Cairo, had the kitchen on the first floor and the second floor was the dining hall. We were the only non-Egyptians there, and ordered falafel for Maeve as well as some fitter for ourselves. The savory fitter came out more like pizzas, but the sweet ones were more like pancakes. Definitely all very yummy. We generally found that the Egyptian food was quite tasty, and the tourist-produced food was fine but not necessarily as yummy as what the Egyptians were eating. We left as soon as possible because Paul and Carolyn were going to the sound and light show at Karnak temple. That turned out to be mostly another tour of Karnack, walking though at night with explanations and then sitting down a little at the end for a light show with more history. They very much enjoyed it, although it wasn’t what they expected and they came back pretty tired.

Our last day in Luxor was Christmas Day, and we’d planned an easy day because we were flying out late to Aswan, always a tricky maneuver with a young child. I’d been checking with reception the whole time we were there, trying to be able to stay in one of our rooms later so Maeve could nap. It was a no-go because Nicolas Sarcosy and retinue was coming in from France and the hotel was completely booked up. Bummer. Anyway, we did the second day of the west bank, which included the Valley of the Queens, valley of the Nobles and the Ramaseum. The Valley of the Queens was much smaller, and we visited one Queen’s and two princes tombs. The colors here were just amazing. For the two princes, the principal themes were their fathers showing them how to make offerings to the gods and otherwise easing their way into the afterlife. The princes were distinguished by their sidelock of youth. The queen was allowed to do this for herself, and her burial chamber had a neat picture of Hathor as a cow.

Next we went to the Valley of the Nobles to see two tombs, Ramose and Userhat. Ramose’s tomb had a huge courtyard that included a change in artistic style, as he was a court official when Akhenaton came to power and moved the capital to Armarna. So in some pictures he is making the usual offerings to different gods, and in others he’s receiving the bounty of the sun-god Aten. His features also change so that in the later pictures he has the more elongated Armarna style. His tomb was unfinished because he also moved to Armarna, so you can see the grid lines traced in red that the artists were using to make the design on the wall for the carvers. Userat’s tomb was smaller, but had two interesting quirks. First, it had been a cell for a monk at some point, and you could see Christian fish and other symbols drawn over the reliefs. Luckily, the monk added his icons but didn’t destroy the art already there. The other was that the tomb has no lighting, rather the guards use mirrors (cardboard coated in tinfoil) to light the interior, which is apparently what the ancient Egyptians did as burning candles or lamps would have damaged the interiors.

Our last stop for the day was the Ramaseum, or mortuary temple of Ramses II. This was mostly ruin. The most impressive part was a huge statue of Ramses that had fallen over and broken into multiple pieces. It’s amazing how they could cut and transport something that big. There were also extensive excavations happening outside the Ramaseum precincts.

After a picnic lunch in the Hotel gardens after being kicked out of our rooms, we went to the pool to hang out and try to get Maeve to sleep. She finally got an hour of so of sleep, not enough to last through a late evening. Mike spent some time trying to locate our mail – we had had a package of mail forwarded to us in Cairo, but it didn’t make it there. Then it was supposed to be sent to Luxor, but it apparently never made it there either. In Aswan, we tried one last time to get it, but ended up having to send it back to the states were it could be sent to us again in Germany. Two day delivery does not work in Egypt. We had Christmas dinner at the same restaurant on the Corniche near our hotel – convenient and decent food. They had Christmas music playing, which Maeve just loved, and after dinner we had a quick Christmas dance. A nice Christmas dinner.

The trip to Aswan wasn’t great, but more about that in the next blog.