small change

still on the road: 2

We spent a little time in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston yesterday. I don't recall much of the circumstances of getting there. I woke up yesterday to more clouds and rain and the deep fog of exhaustion from too much dislocation these days. The spouse watched me slump over the hotel bed, raincoat still on, and fall into a sudden deep slumber, and this shortly after a latish breakfast.

It was his idea to spirit me away to the eclectic quiet of this museum. He even bundled me into a taxi, shortly after I awoke, and suddenly there we were inside the Palazzo Barbaro turned inside out. In the dimly lit rooms, the art displayed every which way, had a ghostly quality about it, all of which reinforced my sense of still being asleep back in the hotel. But there was nothing ghostly about the bustle of tourists streaming through the rooms, which made it odd to arrive to the grand hall, empty, save for a docent bent on luring me in to stay and listen to a lecture about Isabella Stewart Gardner. I didn't want to hear about Isabella Stewart Gardner. The house and the collection of art spoke plenty about her.

The spouse is savors museums more deeply than I do, so not surprisingly, I found myself at the exit well ahead of him. I chose to sit near the garden, next to a Japanese tourist, whose family was probably still touring the building, as was my spouse. We both sat quietly, dozing off every now and then, oblivious to all the effort that Isabella Stewart Gardner had put in this place, but strangely grateful for the moment of respite she did provide through it all.

still on the road

We are becoming weathered travelers with our extended Boston stay. The clouds, winds, and rain have followed us, dutifully, all the way from Budapest to Boston. I am almost foolish enough to wager that as soon as we head back to California, the weather, in all its gloom, will also decamp for a sojourn with us.

In all the weather, though, it has been nice to see old friends again a couple of times. Good conversations, good food, some drinks, all made for a little sunshine for the soul, even if the sun itself has been missing from the visible skies lately.

Budapest deja vu: 5

June 2, 2010

The spouse is fighting an incipient cold. I am not surprised, seeing how he had insisted on taking that tour of Budapest on a bus that, though it had a roof, had no sides to shelter us in wind and rain typical of a California winter’s day. I am making him lots of linden tea, which I bought at the corner pharmacy on my mother’s advice. It seems to be helping. Well, it calms me thinking that it is helping.

The rain seems to have let up briefly and the sky is teasing us with a sliver of blue on this last morning in Budapest. We are due to leave for New York tomorrow, and then, if we catch our connecting flight in time, on to Boston. Aside from the tour bus fiasco, I haven’t done anything “touristy” in Budapest this time. Two concerts, but no museums, no excursions to charming little towns nearby. Only the well-trodden path between the apartments of my mother and friends. But this kind of visit was not about experiencing the old city in new ways. This was to be an experience of family, in the old ways, especially for my son, who had never been here, and for whom, the only living link to his foreign origins still of the distant soil is his grandmother.

Still, the city couldn’t help but intrude during this search for the familiar. For me, Budapest, like New York, has always been an in-your-face place. If cities had faces, New York’s would be that of an over-caffeinated friend, jazzed and jittery. Budapest’s, on the other hand, is that of a relative fallen on hard times, the brows deeply furrowed, whether in judgment, sorrow, or pain – or all of these, hard to tell, but equally hard to ignore.

And yet, on this visit, I found that those furrows in this city’s countenance had loosened somewhat. I don’t know if this lightening between the brows is merely cosmetic, like a shot of Botox that paralyzes overworked muscles, or if it goes deeper, the more cosmopolitan this city becomes. Not that it didn’t always think of itself as a great city, but now, this conceit is supported by all sorts of evidence, beyond the hordes of tourists and the ubiquitous shopping malls and upscale enclaves of shops and residences. It shows itself in the tiny little restaurant, off the beaten path, where at the next table our dining companion is a young Nigerian whose Hungarian is nearly flawless. Or the young Chinese girl singing in Hungarian, or better yet, in the increasing number of people I hear speaking Hungarian with an accent as they strive to master the language of their new home, for clearly, they are very much at home here.

For decades I used to think of Hungary as I once knew it as a child: isolated, dark, and brooding. For those same decades, I lived in a California of my mind: open, sunny, and light. It’s odd to realize that if I were to think my life through, as I am living it now, I would have to say that the California I live in is actually the Budapest of my past.

Ah, welcome to the Hotel California, then. As you know from the song, you can always check in, but as for checking out, well it’s time to check that little bit of lore out. Or better yet, just chuck it out.

Mamut Shopping Center ~ Buda

Rainy street from the tram ~ Pest

Two Japanese tourists taking photographs from the tram ~ Pest, along the Danube

Tram stop ~ Buda (contemplating the future)

Budapest deja vu: 4

On the first day of June, we wake to winter. Bitter wind and icy rain pelts the windows. I rarely come to Budapest in the summer, and this one time of a near-summer visit, near-winter greets me. Then again, it seems that wherever I go these days, rain awaits me, while the places I leave behind sigh with relief in full sun. I am saying this because I notice that the forecast for our next stop on our journey, which is Boston, is for rain. Am I that irresistible to that dark cloud that just won't quit my company these days?

The spouse promised our son a quick overview of Budapest via a tour bus, so we set out, in rain and wind, to board one at the start of the tour in the inner city. I didn't count on the fact that, though the bus had a top, it was missing most of its sides, so the rain and wind was sure to board as well and take up seats at will and whim with each turn the bus was to take. Waiting for the tour to start, we huddled at the front of the bus, near the driver, where there was a glass shield to be had for shelter. But the driver was sick himself, hacking away. Another driver came to relieve him, but the sick driver stayed on, and the two of them struck up a very loud conversation, making it nearly impossible to hear the audio part of the tour. I tried to switch from English to Italian, thinking that the additional effort to concentrate would drown out the cacophony of English peppered with Hungarian, but no luck. The hapless young blond tour guide did nothing to quiet the two men, not that she would have had any power over them to do so. Besides, she felt that with only us and three other hardy tourists on the bus, there was nothing for her to do either, except pout a little herself.

At the third stop, I had enough of the wind, the pelting rain, and the patter of the drivers, so I left the spouse and the son to tough it through this charming, but suddenly very cold city. In desperation to get warm fast, I even hopped on the Metro that goes deep under the Danube. Nothing like inclement weather to cure one, even if temporarily, of claustrophobia.

Once back at the apartment, I did more laundry, watching the clothes tumble around, instead of taking in the rich architectural mix this city has to offer, even through the rain-splattered bus windows.

Night brought more rain and a quiet spell for us old folks. The son, as I write this (or try to write, while my mother and her friend carry on a conversation in Hungarian), has gone bowling with his new friends. Bowling in Budapest! I would have never imagined his doing such a thing before, but here we are ... and I hope there he is, having a ball!

Budapest deja vu: 3

May 30, 2010

It’s a long, long way to come for lunch, from California to Budapest, but it’s not everyday we get treated goose cooked to perfection, a meal my friend put together in her small kitchen with the help of her son and daughter. My friend lives in Buda, in the shadow of the old castle walls. Her place is bohemian and elegant at the same time. Seating 7 people around her table poses a challenge, which is easily overcome with food and conversation. My broken Hungarian and the broken English of the rest of the Hungarian “crew” makes its own music from the strands of different accents.

The weather changes swiftly as we eat, going from bits of sun to thunder and lightening. The gentle greenery of the garden at the base of the castle wall, which we see from her table, turns a deeper shade with wind and rain.

The young people, my son and her children amuse us with their conversations, and, in turn, I think, they are amused by us, as they compare their exasperation with parents with the universal phrase that is in the roll of an eye.

It’s late afternoon when we leave my friend’s house and wait for the tram on the quiet street near the Chain Bridge. It’s Sunday afternoon, and the mood of this particular time erases all differences in landscape, at least for me. No matter where I am in the world, Sunday afternoon is the same place, a vestibule without doors.

Night comes with more rain and wind. My son’s plans with my friend’s children are spoiled by weather. We pass the evening reading and dreaming. We have no Internet access in the apartment where we are staying, and there is no chance of hitching a ride on someone else’s WiFi. All networks I find are secure. Posting has to wait.

May 31, 2010

My son and my mother have planned a day of their own.  My son initiated it by inviting her to lunch, and she, at age 88, did one better by organizing a little outing for the two of them to Piliscsaba to take a look at the work of Makovecz Imre, an architect whose organic forms caught my son’s attention.

The spouse and I tended to more mundane tasks. I did laundry, which was a challenge, given that the only instructions for using the machine (and all the labels on the machine) were in German. After the trial and error with the washing machine, which resulted in one load being washed twice, we went shopping for gifts and for food at the Csarnok, Budapest’s market hall, which is a foodie’s delight.

 

Later in the afternoon, we joined our son at my mother’s house. My mother, in her element, was happily guiding my son through some 125 years of family stories via photographs in two thick albums. My son is a man of few words, but I could see in his face that he had found a door in the vestibule in which he has been hanging out lately, cut off by a lack of interest in family stories. Here was now a connection to a place and a past filled with hidden treasures. The same treasure I let sink to the bottom of the sea when I abandoned ship by jumping on the dry land I gave him as his native ground.

With the weather still gloomy, I sent off my son and spouse to the Gellert baths and I went out to dinner with my friend. During the meal my broken Hungarian got mended here and there. Still, the words roll off my tongue oddly and with a foreign accent.

Budapest deja vu: 2

May 28 & May 29, 2010

Palace of the Arts ~ Budapest

On Friday night, we returned to the Palace of the Arts for another concert. This one featured Anne-Sophie Mutter playing Brahms with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which also performed Mahler’s 1st Symphony. One of my stepdaughters plays with the Pittsburgh Symphony, so our trip to Budapest was  (OK here comes the pun) orchestrated to coincide with the Pittsburgh Symphony’s tour stop in Budapest.

We had great seats, above the back of the stage, with a panoramic, yet close view of the orchestra, and especially of the conductor in action. From where we sat, we could see the brass section’s music sheets quite clearly and could easily imagine ourselves as part of the orchestra. Given our seats, though, we could only see Anne-Sophie Mutter’s back in her strapless gown – but what a back! As if it had been an extension of her fingers, the muscles on her back seemed to be playing with a well-honed technique all of their own.

The audience went wild at the end of the Brahms, clapping away with a crescendo that culminated in a thunderous rhythmic song. The enthusiasm of the Hungarian audience impressed Anne Sophie Mutter enough to comment on it appreciatively, after which she treated us to a little calming Bach.

Mahler’s 1st Symphony was a small delight for me, with 8 French horns playing and all, since I rarely listen to it. In full living sound it was a taste-teaser for me for his other symphonies, as I kept recognizing themes from them. Then again, I might have been hearing things still in the thrall of jetlag, which hit me hard during the day.

It’s more than jetlag. At my most tired moments, it’s like getting trapped in a room in the tower of Babel, since I am the “official” translator for both my traveling and my resident family, the latter of which is my mother. With the shadows of worry over changes in my aging mother’s behavior, there are those moments, too, when both English and Hungarian fail me, leaving bits of other languages, like French and Italian, cropping up like the wrong spice in the stew of words.

Throw in a little comedy of errors with a couple of cell phones my mother and friends lent us so that we could all communicate with each other and them, and things, in the haze of jetlag, turned even weirder, as the phones locked on us, or went dead, because the chargers were inadvertently forgotten, or the pay-as-you-go plan on it ran out of funds. As if the phones themselves had attuned themselves, like good travelers, to the Babelian universe in which I seemed to have landed when the plane touched down in Hungary.

Not long ago, I posted about a dream in which my cell phone, along with my wallet was washed away by the sweep of a tiny flood, which left me feeling untethered, not so much because my means of communications were gone, but because all the important numbers, which I no longer kept in my own memory but entrusted to a machine, were swept away in such an undramatic manner.

Here I was, not in a dream, but in the thick of jetlag, with a flood of phones (so to speak) but no numbers, not even in the phones, because we couldn’t figure out how to find the phones’ own numbers. I think this experience convinced the spouse too, to not leave home this far without a plan for our own and familiar phones.

At the end of the day, and after the concert all was resolved in a single language every tongue understands and speaks without the help of translators or devices: food. We took my stepdaughter and my mother to the duck restaurant we discovered on our last trip here. We had duck with fruit, duck with cabbage, duck with dumplings, and duck with rosemary. We were serenaded by a violin and a piano duo, and also by the chatter of the five Italian businessmen at the table next to us. For a brief time, the cacophony and the effort of shifting languages did not trip up my tongue or soul much.

Still, the next day, on May 29, I spent the better part of the day sleeping. When I woke up, close to 1 in the afternoon, I think my sense of being grounded has finally landed and joined me in body and spirit.

Budapest deja vu ~1

May 25 & May 26

Mid-morning we (the spouse and my younger son) leave the house, heading for the airport. This is the first leg of our journey to Budapest. The one that is the smoothest and the most comfortable, as it turns out in retrospect.

At the airport, we stand in line for the better part of an hour at the check-in at Air France. We find ourselves the odd filling in a sandwich of groups of elderly French tourists. They are a jolly bunch, but then, they happen to be heading home. The most animated of them is a mini-me version of Mel Brooks. But all the jolliness and twinkling eyes and even that brief burst of song must have been for show, because, once we are on the plane this bunch bares a few sharp and ugly fangs. The plane happens to be one of the most tightly configured 747s I ever had the displeasure of being trapped on for 10 hours, which is not lost on the young French people in front of us, who, early into the flight, decide to recline their seats all the way. This leaves us, long-legged people that we are, with crushed knees, spilled drinks, and a wallop of claustrophobia. At some point we just have to push that button and recline our seats, which renders the three elderly French tourists from the group behind us apoplectic. They tap our seats, and I try to explain, yes, in French, why we had to recline our seats, but they will have none of it. I try to talk to the people in front of me, asking them to be a little gentler with the incline of their seats because of the people behind us, but they give me a contemptuous look and say this is not their problem.

Well, yes, technically it is MY problem. By this point, the elderly gentleman behind me is yelling, and I try to tell him to talk to the guy in front of me. He tells me that he speaks no English. Huh? I guess my French not spoken like a native is not French, but English.

In the end, the stewardess has to intervene, but not before our little spat with the French in front of us and the French behind us provides a better sideshow than the in-flight movie. Apropos of the cabin crew, the best I can say about them was that they served dinner with great efficiency. This must have exhausted them, because after the dinner service they disappeared, letting the passengers fend for themselves in crowded lines for getting water and juice for the rest of the flight. In general, I try fly KLM to Europe, so my experience has been of being pampered, even in economy class, with an attentive crew that keeps coming around with food and drink every couple of hours, it seems.

We do not sleep at all on the long flight to Paris. How could we, propped up and with knees crushed? Yes, the French won this battle. So what do they care if, in the future, I will not fly Air France again? Exhaustion torments us for the better part of the three hours we have to wait in Paris for our connecting flight to Budapest. It also makes a blur of the rest of our journey, our arrival, and our first night in my cousin’s apartment, which serves as a home-away-from home for a good number of relatives scattered as we all are across the globe. 

Our first morning in Budapest, where it has been raining pretty steadily, brings a little sunshine. Which is good, because this is my younger son’s first morning in Budapest, ever. Yes, it’s a shame he has never been here, considering that his grandmother lives here, but he has never been the travelling kind before. My mother has come to stay with us lots, and we have met her in London before for family vacations, but never had this son wanted to set foot on the soil of ancestral lands.

First thing in the morning, we walk over to my mother’s apartment, a few blocks away, to have a quick breakfast, check emails (since my cousin’s place has no Internet) after which we head for a little sightseeing and the bookstore to buy the aforementioned son a Hungarian phrase book. He is taking in the sights, and by the looks of him, I think he likes what he sees. We have a leisurely lunch along the Danube, and then go back to the apartment for a rest. In the evening we go with friends to a concert featuring Gyorgy Ligeti’s music. My younger son plays the French horn, so I am excited for him to see a performance of Ligeti’s piece for piano, violin, and French horn.

After the concert we head for a little taste of nightlife in Budapest. My friend’s son and daughter provide my son with a new perspective on Budapest, and before our food arrives, the young people are already making plans for a different kind of concert experience for tomorrow night. We get back to the apartment past midnight and I keep hoping that jetlag won’t kick in, seeing how I managed to sleep 10 hours on our first night in Budapest. But hope is one thing, and the reality is that at 4 am I am up and typing. Which explains the odd rhythm of this post, but doesn’t excuse it. Especially when it comes to length.

travel jitters

A couple of years ago, Leslee, of 3rd house party ran a blog for sensitive travelers. I sure could use refresher tips from those wise posts, as I am heading out on a multi-destination trip that will also involve a number of festive family gatherings. All good, I suppose, but also quite stressful for someone of my constitution.

I should be packed by now, but travel anxiety has me undecided about what to take, so the suitcase won’t get filled until tonight. Ideally, I would just go with a carry-on and buy whatever I need at the other end. Wasteful, I know, but I am talking fantasy here.

Getting ready for the onboard part of the journey, though, is a different matter. My goodies, from the Lara bars to matcha tea and Tulsi tea are lined up, the iPod is loaded, and not one, but two Pashmina’s are lined up as security blankets. After all, I couldn’t trust those to checked luggage, which could get lost easily. And the notebook is dusted off, it’s pages blank, but not for long. The choice of a book will be last minute, though. The stack of unread tomes will have to put on a final contest, in which the lucky winner will get to fly hither and yon with me…

 

Oh, and what didn't make it into the picture is some yarn and knitting needles to keep the fingers busy to help settle the mind when nothing else from the already-well-packed goodie bag won't work.

of flights

A curious thing happens to me between going through security and boarding a plane. No longer home and not yet at my destination, I become slightly unhinged. Not in my mind, mind you, but in habits of thinking about who I might be. In practical (and plain) terms, this means that I will buy magazines and books (and at a premium price imposed by the last bookstands before take-off too) I wouldn't allow myself to even look at on account of the image of myself as “serious” – reader or writer. And so it was on my last foray into the wider world, some 10 days ago when I went off to see my older son in Washington, DC. Which means that I finally got to read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

Sure, I raced through it, and without carrying the excess baggage of my reader's guilt over following Gilbert on a journey of self discovery made so public (not to mention handsomely profitable). Her style is deceptively breezy and balmy, making the read a pleasure of its own. Her prose sparkles and is soft and comfortable, like the leather seat in first class, making for a cushy journey into the exotic, but still pleasant, landscapes of worlds that are likely to be a lot more unglamorous, unconformable, and even inhospitable to travelers who lack the ease of making friends, with people or words. But I don't mean to belittle Gilbert's book. Below that ease and comfort she seems to possess with words, I see the mastery, the greasy, sweaty, and decidedly unglamorous work, of the writer who had to tame the amorphous (and, at times, dangerous) beast of the subject with the expert whip of language. While others reading this book may be dreaming of tracing Gilbert's spiritual unfolding in spaces that lure one with as much of the scared as they do with the sensual, I find myself more in the category of the pigs trained to sniff for truffles. Only what I am after is the morsel of morel that pushes through the loam of language. And which can make the meal of memoir, well (sorry for the string of alliterations) memorable.

While I trusted Gilbert as a writer, and gave myself readily over for transport by her language, I had a harder time with the spiritual landscapes of the journey. Gilbert, though she makes the point that the better part of spiritual enlightenment, like writing, is about showing up for the work, and then getting down to it, makes of transcendence (or even its attempt) into a chat over a perfectly brewed venti with God in the latest bucolic spiritual Starbucks outpost. Like a friend said in a recent tweet over the subject, there something too facile about Gilbert's spiritual experiences, at least as she presents them, because they tend to come across as “how EG got her groove back.” And, the way I see it, even if this has never been Gilbert's intention – not to mention, her actual spiritual experience – there is something of the aura of glib reproducibility of her experience by every earnest reader of this book, who, means permitting, could retrace Gilbert's steps, much like an fitness routine, to get the same glowing results.

In my spiritual evolution, such as it is, language is the weakest link, fraying and breaking apart the strands that weave the heart of Yoga: the settling of the mind into silence. I did try to write about my spiritual explorations before, but I soon realized that my mind was a blunt tool, lacking not only the finesse to recognize the indescribable in the depths of silence, but also in its brute force to hammer away until it could provoke an echo, not realizing that this sound is of its own making.

A for traveling far to find oneself at home in the universe, I have my doubts. Coincidentally (OK, may be not so coincidentally, if you happen to subscribe to the idea that there are no accidents in the universe), as I took a break from writing this post, I read Simon Winchester's review of Carl Hoffman's Lunatic Express in today's The Wall Street Journal. From what I gather, Hoffman's year-long journey by the nightmarish methods of travel the majority of human beings all over the world endure while they get from place to place (an imperative of the new global reality), may well be the perfect antidote to reading Gilbert's “Eat, Pray, Love,” both as a travelogue and as spiritual discovery.

Well then, maybe on Mr. Winchester's suggestion, I will pick up a copy at an airport, as I am unhoming myself in the limbo between security and boarding the plane so that I can glimpse what's it like to be at home nowhere.

conversation among the ruins

Camera Obscura - National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Eons ago I had the desire, not to mention stamina and focus, to roam through museums for hours on end. I don't know what happened, if not so much to the desire, for there is some residual smolder of it, however ashy, but to the stamina and focus. Those seemed to have vanished with the years of a life lived mostly in the suburbs.

So then to find myself at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, was to find myself utterly lost and overwhelmed. Nostalgic for the old vision and suddenly inept at seeing anew.

Faced with such wealth of an augustly illustrated past, in so many diverse forms, styles, and colors, as in the statues of Rodin, Degas, the paintings of old familiars like El Greco, Lippi, Goya, Da Vinci, Tintoretto, Fragonard, Picasso, Whistler, Sargent (the list goes on) and all under one roof in an endless maze of rooms, all I could do was balk.

Like a petulant child, 10 minutes into my meanderings, I started to annoy the adult me, who wanted nothing more than to soak up the world made larger and deeper through these paintings, while the child whined for fun.

 

Giorgio de Chirico: Conversation Among the Ruins - National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The childish me kept arguing that all this art means nothing heaped together as it is. Impatient and unschooled, she mumbled away, something about being in church, as if every room I dragged her through in search of the next visual feast were but a chapel, and the art within, not representation, but simply iconic, in the service of some hidden agenda bent on, well, bending wills into a certain shape.

I don't know what this child in me meant by iconic, and because she is no art critic (that childish mini me) she tried to appease me by saying something about all the paintings in this overwhelming configuration,  being removed from their connection to both the world from which they sprang and from that of art, into which they rose fully formed, like Athena. Reduce to relics, int heir multiplicity, she mumbled, so that they are now simply objects that serve as conduits for worshiping at the altar of art, and mostly out of habit.

 

Smithsonian American at Museum - Grey Sun, by Isam Noguchi