As I get close to the end of the larger, synthesizing topics I can discuss about our vacation, there remain lots of bits and pieces from my trip notes – odd sights, snatches of memorable conversation. I’ve collected them here.
* * * * *
In my report on Giles Ramsay’s theater talks, I mentioned the flat, unremarkable dialogue of Harold Pinter’s earlier plays. We actually heard that sort of conversation occasionally, most memorably at another table in the King’s Court restaurant aboard the Queen Mary 2. I was having breakfast and overheard two elderly British ladies talking as they looked out at the ocean. At first I thought they might be trying to be witty, but they were so deadpan about it, I decided not:
-- The scenery’s not very good, is it?
-- No, it’s a bit flat.
-- If you’re walking around the deck three times.
It was all rather Monty Python-ish. Appropriately, the sound system was playing a languid, sleepy female vocalist’s cover of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
* * * * *
While we were tooling around London by bus, we passed through the Sloane Square/Sloan Street neighborhood, apparently very trendy and posh. Our trip manager told us the wealthy young girls who lived and shopped here were known as “Sloane Rangers … they get jobs in the city to feel useful but take four-day weekends in the country.”
* * * * *
As we took a turn around the private club known as Home House, I noticed a framed cartoon on the wall of a woman reading from a magazine, “Middle age is when a narrow waist and a broad mind change places,” and then shouting, “Who brought this utter drivel into the house?”
* * * * *
A pancake house called “My Old Dutch” took its name from the extensive catalog of cockney-stock exchange slang, in which a word or phrase that sounds like what you mean to say gets substituted, and then evolves or reduces to something else entirely. In this case, “My Old Dutch” refers to the wife at home; but it got there from “Duchess of Fife” substituted for “wife,” which then reduced to “Dutch.”
Similarly, you might hear a smart young man say “Let’s have a butcher’s” before stopping into a shop, or glancing at his watch. It means “let’s have a look,” but it evolved from “look” => “butcher’s hook” => “butcher’s.”
Make sense?
* * * * *
Someone on our tour asked tour guide Mel Montgomery to explain the hierarchy of British aristocratic titles. He said the Royal Family is at the top, of course. Below that come five levels of hereditary titles: Duke-Duchess (addressed as “His Grace” and “Her Grace”), Marquis/Marquess-Marchioness (originating from a military officer who led marches from one country into another), Earl/Count-Countess (“today, they’re all foreigners”), Viscount-Viscountess, and Baron-Baroness. Everyone below the Duke level may be addressed as “Lord” or “Lady.”
After that come other titles that are not hereditary, such as Baronet.
* * * * *
The television in our stateroom aboard the Queen Mary 2 was always on whenever we returned to it, even though we never turned it on or watched it. (Several channels featured recent movies on closed circuit -- no ads, I presume -- throughout the day and night.) Presumably it was turned on by our housekeeper and set to the ship’s informational channel; most of the time, it merely featured an onscreen reminder to set our clocks back another hour for the next day.
On our final night at sea, Carole noticed it was playing a short video about debarkation procedures. A serious, very dry officer of the bridge was explaining that we were to put all our packed luggage outside the door before midnight, whereupon the staff would “very carefully” carry it up to the seventh deck, and it would “very carefully” be lifted on pads by crane, and “very carefully” lowered to the docks, whereupon “longshoremen will proceed to throw it 300 yards down the pier.”
* * * * *
Having noticed that several of the British passengers sank American country music tunes during the pub karaoke sessions, I wondered why that would be so popular in the U.K. Somebody told me he had been in a record store in Norway that was almost exclusively filled with country western records; the owner was a rabid Hank Snow collector. But the female companion of one of the fabulous Cunard singers -- a young woman named Hannah who had moved with her lover to Nashville two years before and was currently recording her first album -- assured me that such was NOT the case. Country music has only a 2 percent market share in the U.K., she said, while its market share in the U.S. is 70 percent! I was left to ponder how ghettoized our own country is (“Friedrich Niche-ied,” as someone remarked once I was back home; maybe it was me), since I am so seldom exposed to it myself.
* * * * *
One of our charming Elderhostel tour mates was a woman who said her second marriage, from which she had been widowed, had worked very well because “I didn’t need a meal ticket and he didn’t need a housekeeper. I had been on my own for eight years; I didn’t need him.” At one point during a spirited disagreement early in their marriage, he said to her, “What we have here is two chiefs and no Indians.” From then on, when he had to take up a serious issue with her, he’d say, “C’mere, Chief; we need to have a pow-wow.”
* * * * *
One of the London chains for finer lines of men’s clothing is Pink’s, founded by Thomas Pink. When we were preparing to fly out of Heathrow, I noticed a display in a Pink’s of “commuter ties”: regular neckties that have a tiny pocket on the back side capable of holding an iPod so you can listen to it on the commuter train/Tube, etc.
* * * * *
A famous old name in British retailing is of course Harrod’s. What Carole noticed in the Harrod’s outlet at Heathrow, at least, was the humorous and sad fact that nearly every item in the place -- miniature British flags, teddy bears, teacups and other dinnerware with English motifs from royalty to the Beatles -- was made in China.
* * * * *
One snapshot of the times we live in . . . in Portland International Airport, regular announcements over the PA warn that unattended luggage is “subject to possession and search by airport police.” At Chicago’s O’Hare, it “will be picked up by the Chicago Police.” In Heathrow, however, it will simply “be destroyed” (!)
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
David: British newspapers
At first glance, you might think newspapers in Britain are in much better shape than they are stateside.
News stands carry the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and an array of other newsprint dailies. Strangers thrust free copies of other publications -- City A.M., The London Paper, and others -- in your hands as you walk down the busy London streets.
Wow, you think: there’s much more selection here; a greater array of news sources and reading selections than in the rapidly diminishing one-paper towns and media mega-conglomerates back home.
But first looks can be deceiving. I asked our trip director Mel Montgomery, a native Brit and former official with the national tourism office where he was an assistant to Princess Diana’s stepmother, how many daily newspapers London has, and he said only one. The others are national papers. (Keep in mind that England has more than 13 times as many people as Oregon -- an estimated 51.5 million to our 3.8 -- living in a space that’s only a little more than half the size.)
If I’d had the time, money, and wherewithal to make a concerted comparison, it might have been interesting to examine which stories got the biggest play in Britain versus back home. The biggest news story that featured in both the serious dailies and the cheeky free papers concerned a scandal in which the British Attorney General, Baroness Scotland (the first woman ever to become the country’s top law official) had been discovered to employ an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. The girl in question, Loloahi Tapui, 27, had come to the UK on a student visa in 2003, married, and been working for Lady Scotland six months. Part of the reason it got big play is that the Baroness had pressed so hard to get the law against such practices passed in the first place.
The second, less sexy news story that predominated in the serious dailies -- sometimes on the front page, sometimes tucked in on page 2 -- concerned the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and whether and how readily he would use “the c word” (cuts in the national budget).
The alternative weeklies gave more play to a screaming fight between Rolling Stones bass player Ronnie Wood, 62, and his 20-year-old girlfriend Ekaterina Ivanova in the wee hours of Monday morning, Sept. 14. Neighbors heard screamed obscenities, and a threat by Ivanova to commit suicide. Later in the week, large “removal men” were photographed carrying Wood’s guitars out of their north London flat.
The papers speculated that not only was Wood tired of the year-long romance with a pouty teen, but missed his ex- (second) wife Jo and children. I may have seen a gossip column item in which her friends stated she was doing just fine without him. I would imagine far fewer column inches and photos (if any) were devoted to this one in stateside papers.
It turned out our five days in London were the final week for a lively free daily called The London Paper -- its masthead read “thelondonpaper” with “paper” in trademark purple ink. Since it was making a big deal about its impending departure (regular readers and British celebs from pop singer Pixie Lott to Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, offered quotes about how much they were going to miss it), I was able to learn a lot in just a couple of issues.
It was in tabloid format, like most of the older, more legitimate papers in England (and most of the alternative weeklies in the U.S.). What I liked was that the spine was stapled so it didn’t fall apart if I loosed my grip on it, the way the Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury back in Portland do. It had been launched by its young publisher and staff with backing money from … wait for it … Rupert Murdoch, and the tanking economy had killed its hopes, despite its apparently having made a big splash.
There was lots of color, both color photography and solid ink in the large ads. The content read more upbeat, less snarky in general, than the alternative weekly tabloids I’m used to seeing -- except in the fashion and pop star columns -- although the writers appeared to pitch their prose to twenty-somethings who were used to a lot of drinking and casual sex after their day at the stock exchange (or wish such were the case, I suppose). There were advice columns by gay and lesbian writers.
Among its most beloved items was a pet photo feature -- not just cute cats and dogs, sometimes doing a neat trick or dressed up in silly outfits, but snakes, pigs, hedgehogs, mice … everybody got into the act. Each photo included a brief list of the animal’s favorite TV shows, pet peeves, and worst bad habit.
News stands carry the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and an array of other newsprint dailies. Strangers thrust free copies of other publications -- City A.M., The London Paper, and others -- in your hands as you walk down the busy London streets.
Wow, you think: there’s much more selection here; a greater array of news sources and reading selections than in the rapidly diminishing one-paper towns and media mega-conglomerates back home.
But first looks can be deceiving. I asked our trip director Mel Montgomery, a native Brit and former official with the national tourism office where he was an assistant to Princess Diana’s stepmother, how many daily newspapers London has, and he said only one. The others are national papers. (Keep in mind that England has more than 13 times as many people as Oregon -- an estimated 51.5 million to our 3.8 -- living in a space that’s only a little more than half the size.)
If I’d had the time, money, and wherewithal to make a concerted comparison, it might have been interesting to examine which stories got the biggest play in Britain versus back home. The biggest news story that featured in both the serious dailies and the cheeky free papers concerned a scandal in which the British Attorney General, Baroness Scotland (the first woman ever to become the country’s top law official) had been discovered to employ an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. The girl in question, Loloahi Tapui, 27, had come to the UK on a student visa in 2003, married, and been working for Lady Scotland six months. Part of the reason it got big play is that the Baroness had pressed so hard to get the law against such practices passed in the first place.
The second, less sexy news story that predominated in the serious dailies -- sometimes on the front page, sometimes tucked in on page 2 -- concerned the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and whether and how readily he would use “the c word” (cuts in the national budget).
The alternative weeklies gave more play to a screaming fight between Rolling Stones bass player Ronnie Wood, 62, and his 20-year-old girlfriend Ekaterina Ivanova in the wee hours of Monday morning, Sept. 14. Neighbors heard screamed obscenities, and a threat by Ivanova to commit suicide. Later in the week, large “removal men” were photographed carrying Wood’s guitars out of their north London flat.
The papers speculated that not only was Wood tired of the year-long romance with a pouty teen, but missed his ex- (second) wife Jo and children. I may have seen a gossip column item in which her friends stated she was doing just fine without him. I would imagine far fewer column inches and photos (if any) were devoted to this one in stateside papers.
It turned out our five days in London were the final week for a lively free daily called The London Paper -- its masthead read “thelondonpaper” with “paper” in trademark purple ink. Since it was making a big deal about its impending departure (regular readers and British celebs from pop singer Pixie Lott to Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, offered quotes about how much they were going to miss it), I was able to learn a lot in just a couple of issues.
It was in tabloid format, like most of the older, more legitimate papers in England (and most of the alternative weeklies in the U.S.). What I liked was that the spine was stapled so it didn’t fall apart if I loosed my grip on it, the way the Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury back in Portland do. It had been launched by its young publisher and staff with backing money from … wait for it … Rupert Murdoch, and the tanking economy had killed its hopes, despite its apparently having made a big splash.
There was lots of color, both color photography and solid ink in the large ads. The content read more upbeat, less snarky in general, than the alternative weekly tabloids I’m used to seeing -- except in the fashion and pop star columns -- although the writers appeared to pitch their prose to twenty-somethings who were used to a lot of drinking and casual sex after their day at the stock exchange (or wish such were the case, I suppose). There were advice columns by gay and lesbian writers.
Among its most beloved items was a pet photo feature -- not just cute cats and dogs, sometimes doing a neat trick or dressed up in silly outfits, but snakes, pigs, hedgehogs, mice … everybody got into the act. Each photo included a brief list of the animal’s favorite TV shows, pet peeves, and worst bad habit.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
David: A Few Words about Comfort Facilities and Hygiene
I wash my hands a lot more than I used to.
I haven’t turned into Howard Hughes just yet, but it’s been impossible to ignore the occasional news stories about various unnerving studies.
For example, unless regularly cleaned and disinfected (and they rarely are), office desktops and computer keyboards are often filthier than nearby bathrooms.
Grocery shopping carts carry more germs -- from contaminated meats and infant riders as well as, one presumes, fellow shoppers who don’t wash their hands –--than the toilet seats in their stores … because the latter get cleaned and disinfected more often. Swabs taken from shopping cart handles turned up saliva, blood, fecal matter, mucus (and worse), plus Listeria, Salmonella, Staph, E. Coli, and general individual bacteria. The only public surfaces found to be more disease-ridden are playground equipment and bus rails.
And of course, going back to what Mom always told us: communicable diseases are most often contracted through one’s hands, so wash them often.
More and more, I not only wash my hands before meals and after using the toilet, but exit from public restrooms carrying paper towels to shield my fingers from the door handle; push open other doors with pressure on the door itself (as opposed to the marked handle; the best is a door that opens away with a kick-panel I can shove with my foot) or pull them open by whatever I guess is the least-handled portion of the door handle; and press elevator buttons with the back of my clothed wrist.
Better than all these options is when someone else is present to push the buttons, pull the handle, etc., and I can glide through behind them, with no more than a clothed shoulder or elbow to keep the door from closing on me. But I haven’t gotten to the point where I wait around for someone to show up, or turn on faucet taps with my foot, as an acquaintance told me a truly germ-phobic coworker does.
U.S. society in general has become more and more sensitive to the issue of germ transmission and its avoidance. Over the years we’ve seen the introduction of motion-activated flushing on urinals and sit-down toilets (but why do the latter make that weird squealing sound that, for an instant, make me think a live rodent has entered the stall?), motion-activated faucets, motion-activated hand blow-dryers and paper-towel dispensers.
The only other thing we have to touch with everybody else is the bathroom door, and the one solution I’ve seen to this is the space-devouring option that only airports can afford: an open passage of overlapping walls through which you wend your way.
All of this is prefatory to comments about preparing for my latest vacation last month, and what I observed on it.
Overseas travel offers an opportunity to see how well (or poorly) other countries handle comfort hygiene. Like languages, restrooms in other lands can vary astonishingly in how they address basic human functions.
But first, there’s the getting there and back. Every time we’ve flown anywhere in the past two decades, it seems that Carole has caught a cold. When hundreds of people file through an enclosed space in a day, the law of averages says a few of them are going to bring germs along.
Commercial airline toilets are incredibly germ-ridden. I was determined to have as little contact with them as possible. I packed breathing masks in my pockets but felt too inhibited to put one on until I noticed -- of course -- the older gentleman in the seat next to me coughing steadily. I actually timed him, surreptitiously, hacking once a minute or less, roughly.
This is one time I’m hoping that’s a smoker’s cough, I murmured to Carole, and quietly put on a mask. Oddly enough, the man stopped coughing as soon as the plane was airborne (an anxiety cough?), so after a while I took off the mask.
Through careful planning -- timing of a bathroom break before boarding and a sparing amount of drinking on the plane -- I managed to avoid the airline toilet altogether on the five-and-a-half-hour flight from Portland to New York. I knew that probably wasn’t going to be practical on the roughly nine-hour London-to-Chicago leg home. As it turned out, I visited that toilet for “number one” only once and didn’t have to touch anything: a couple of facial tissues in my hand protected me (I hope) from the door and toilet flusher.
Our trip to England took us to a land that was not considerably less “civilized” in this area than the U.S., via a route (the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2) that was even more sensitive to these issues than most.
We encountered nothing like the pair of foot-shaped pads above a small hole inside a blank stone room that constitutes a toilet in Muslim lands like Morocco (summer 1969, with my family); nor the home toilet in Tallinn, Estonia (summer 1994) that has a dry catchment, so you get a good strong whiff of your deposit before it gets washed away; nor again the long open pit at the equivalent of a fairgrounds in Estonia (I thought “I hope I don’t drop my wallet!”). Nor were there any bathroom foyers where an old lady in black sold individual toilet paper squares to the patrons as they enter, as in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Forewarned, we carried our own.)
On the other hand, none of the places we went had quite caught up to Finland (where, my bother Toby has shown us, showers have complicated faucet designs that allow you to set your ideal temperature, and then turn the water on and off at that preset level, to conserve without getting hit with overly hot or cold laving again) or Japan (where some toilets have a warming element in the seat and buttons for various other "services" for your backside, from a jet of warm, washing water to a blast of warm, drying air).
As I said, the ocean liner was considerably more sensitive to these issues than most tourist facilities. The welcoming line at the Britannia Restaurant for every meal actually included a staffer who held a large squeeze bottle of hand disinfectant, so diners could avail themselves of hand-washing gel before sitting at table. Many of the bathrooms had small cloth towels -- about the size of a wash cloth -- rolled into tubes and lined up in straw baskets for drying one’s hands (and a separate disposal for the used ones) as an alternative to paper towels.
I saw a lot more hot-air hand dryers on this trip than I think one encounters in the U.S. Some were motion activated, some had a button (though you can usually activate those with a poke of the elbow). The most impressive one was, I think, in Shakespeare’s Globe theater, because you put your hands inside a horizontal chamber where they were blasted with stiff warm air on both sides. It was faster and more effective than any other I’d seen. As I recall, it was motion-activated so you didn’t have to touch anything.
In Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, I encountered the first significant improvement on the old James River semi-opaque paper toilet seat covers: a seat with its own built-in, revolving or replaceable plastic seat protector. A plastic wrap encloses the entire toilet seat like a sleeve around a donut, with fresh plastic coming out of a compartment on the right rear side (as you’re looking down at it), and circling around the seat into the “used” compartment on the left rear side. Here’s what the instructions said:
“SaniSeat [with a registered trademark “R” in the circle next to it]
To use
1. Place hand in front of sensor
2. Wait for fresh cover to encircle seat
3. Seat now ready for use
After use sensor off for 20 seconds
Old plastic is destroyed and NEVER used again!”
The “never” was spelled out in italics. Pretty impressive, if it had worked. But it didn’t. After waving my hand in front of the sensor several times and getting nothing, I ended up pulling fresh plastic out of the right side and bunching up the used portion near the rear left side before sitting down.
I haven’t turned into Howard Hughes just yet, but it’s been impossible to ignore the occasional news stories about various unnerving studies.
For example, unless regularly cleaned and disinfected (and they rarely are), office desktops and computer keyboards are often filthier than nearby bathrooms.
Grocery shopping carts carry more germs -- from contaminated meats and infant riders as well as, one presumes, fellow shoppers who don’t wash their hands –--than the toilet seats in their stores … because the latter get cleaned and disinfected more often. Swabs taken from shopping cart handles turned up saliva, blood, fecal matter, mucus (and worse), plus Listeria, Salmonella, Staph, E. Coli, and general individual bacteria. The only public surfaces found to be more disease-ridden are playground equipment and bus rails.
And of course, going back to what Mom always told us: communicable diseases are most often contracted through one’s hands, so wash them often.
More and more, I not only wash my hands before meals and after using the toilet, but exit from public restrooms carrying paper towels to shield my fingers from the door handle; push open other doors with pressure on the door itself (as opposed to the marked handle; the best is a door that opens away with a kick-panel I can shove with my foot) or pull them open by whatever I guess is the least-handled portion of the door handle; and press elevator buttons with the back of my clothed wrist.
Better than all these options is when someone else is present to push the buttons, pull the handle, etc., and I can glide through behind them, with no more than a clothed shoulder or elbow to keep the door from closing on me. But I haven’t gotten to the point where I wait around for someone to show up, or turn on faucet taps with my foot, as an acquaintance told me a truly germ-phobic coworker does.
U.S. society in general has become more and more sensitive to the issue of germ transmission and its avoidance. Over the years we’ve seen the introduction of motion-activated flushing on urinals and sit-down toilets (but why do the latter make that weird squealing sound that, for an instant, make me think a live rodent has entered the stall?), motion-activated faucets, motion-activated hand blow-dryers and paper-towel dispensers.
The only other thing we have to touch with everybody else is the bathroom door, and the one solution I’ve seen to this is the space-devouring option that only airports can afford: an open passage of overlapping walls through which you wend your way.
All of this is prefatory to comments about preparing for my latest vacation last month, and what I observed on it.
Overseas travel offers an opportunity to see how well (or poorly) other countries handle comfort hygiene. Like languages, restrooms in other lands can vary astonishingly in how they address basic human functions.
But first, there’s the getting there and back. Every time we’ve flown anywhere in the past two decades, it seems that Carole has caught a cold. When hundreds of people file through an enclosed space in a day, the law of averages says a few of them are going to bring germs along.
Commercial airline toilets are incredibly germ-ridden. I was determined to have as little contact with them as possible. I packed breathing masks in my pockets but felt too inhibited to put one on until I noticed -- of course -- the older gentleman in the seat next to me coughing steadily. I actually timed him, surreptitiously, hacking once a minute or less, roughly.
This is one time I’m hoping that’s a smoker’s cough, I murmured to Carole, and quietly put on a mask. Oddly enough, the man stopped coughing as soon as the plane was airborne (an anxiety cough?), so after a while I took off the mask.
Through careful planning -- timing of a bathroom break before boarding and a sparing amount of drinking on the plane -- I managed to avoid the airline toilet altogether on the five-and-a-half-hour flight from Portland to New York. I knew that probably wasn’t going to be practical on the roughly nine-hour London-to-Chicago leg home. As it turned out, I visited that toilet for “number one” only once and didn’t have to touch anything: a couple of facial tissues in my hand protected me (I hope) from the door and toilet flusher.
Our trip to England took us to a land that was not considerably less “civilized” in this area than the U.S., via a route (the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2) that was even more sensitive to these issues than most.
We encountered nothing like the pair of foot-shaped pads above a small hole inside a blank stone room that constitutes a toilet in Muslim lands like Morocco (summer 1969, with my family); nor the home toilet in Tallinn, Estonia (summer 1994) that has a dry catchment, so you get a good strong whiff of your deposit before it gets washed away; nor again the long open pit at the equivalent of a fairgrounds in Estonia (I thought “I hope I don’t drop my wallet!”). Nor were there any bathroom foyers where an old lady in black sold individual toilet paper squares to the patrons as they enter, as in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Forewarned, we carried our own.)
On the other hand, none of the places we went had quite caught up to Finland (where, my bother Toby has shown us, showers have complicated faucet designs that allow you to set your ideal temperature, and then turn the water on and off at that preset level, to conserve without getting hit with overly hot or cold laving again) or Japan (where some toilets have a warming element in the seat and buttons for various other "services" for your backside, from a jet of warm, washing water to a blast of warm, drying air).
As I said, the ocean liner was considerably more sensitive to these issues than most tourist facilities. The welcoming line at the Britannia Restaurant for every meal actually included a staffer who held a large squeeze bottle of hand disinfectant, so diners could avail themselves of hand-washing gel before sitting at table. Many of the bathrooms had small cloth towels -- about the size of a wash cloth -- rolled into tubes and lined up in straw baskets for drying one’s hands (and a separate disposal for the used ones) as an alternative to paper towels.
I saw a lot more hot-air hand dryers on this trip than I think one encounters in the U.S. Some were motion activated, some had a button (though you can usually activate those with a poke of the elbow). The most impressive one was, I think, in Shakespeare’s Globe theater, because you put your hands inside a horizontal chamber where they were blasted with stiff warm air on both sides. It was faster and more effective than any other I’d seen. As I recall, it was motion-activated so you didn’t have to touch anything.
In Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, I encountered the first significant improvement on the old James River semi-opaque paper toilet seat covers: a seat with its own built-in, revolving or replaceable plastic seat protector. A plastic wrap encloses the entire toilet seat like a sleeve around a donut, with fresh plastic coming out of a compartment on the right rear side (as you’re looking down at it), and circling around the seat into the “used” compartment on the left rear side. Here’s what the instructions said:
“SaniSeat [with a registered trademark “R” in the circle next to it]
To use
1. Place hand in front of sensor
2. Wait for fresh cover to encircle seat
3. Seat now ready for use
After use sensor off for 20 seconds
Old plastic is destroyed and NEVER used again!”
The “never” was spelled out in italics. Pretty impressive, if it had worked. But it didn’t. After waving my hand in front of the sensor several times and getting nothing, I ended up pulling fresh plastic out of the right side and bunching up the used portion near the rear left side before sitting down.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
David: Notes on Giles Ramsay's lectures on theater
Theater was the particular focus of our Elderhostel package. There was to be a theater expert on board the Queen Mary 2 to offer lectures on the history of theater in general and in Britain in particular, and tickets to a selection of shows once we arrived in London.
Our expert, Giles Ramsay, had done this package a number of times before and could hardly have been better qualified for the job. An independent director and producer, he has not only directed many shows from Palestine to Vermont, lectured at various universities and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and toured with the British National Debate team, but has also had several of his own plays (“Shall We Go to the Alhambra?”, “Territory,” “Only as Multiple,” and “Crocodile”) produced in Britain. His recent long-term projects involve theater in “post-conflict” zones such as Kosovo and Zimbabwe. A native version of “Oedipus Tyrannus” with a local cast had gone over big in Harare in May 2009.
The notes I made of his shipboard lectures, which included not only video clips off a laptop but drawings and copies of theater plans and photos that were illuminated by a good old-fashioned overhead projector (remember those from school?), are very sketchy because I was familiar with a lot of what he was saying and only took down things that caught my fancy.
A few items below were already noted in our travel blog, but I wanted to collect all my notes on his lectures in one place.
THEATER’S ORIGINS
After a full round of three tragedies, a day of theater competition in Athens ended with a satyr play, which satirized everything and everyone in thoroughly obscene style as a way of cleansing the audience’s palate. Euripides’ “The Cyclops” is the only extant full satyr play today.
Someone asked why there are only a handful of each great Greek playwrights’ supposed works extant (7 of more than a hundred by Sophocles, for example, and 18 of 90-plus from Euripides), and how they survived. Giles said evidence of them, and whatever copies existed, were lost with their respective civilizations and the destruction of the Alexandria Library. It was mostly Arab/Muslim scholars who preserved copies of a few of them, and Western scholars eventually recognized and translated them into Latin or their vernacular.
To give a context to the fiery nature of Medea, a foreigner in the Greek court, Giles reminded us that she came from a port on the Black Sea in what has recently been known as Georgia. As an illustration, when he was in Tbilisi, Giles was puzzled by the beefy guys in sidewalk cafes who all had makeup bags, until he realized they contained guns.
Euripides “is the Ibsen of his day: he writes great roles for women, and he undermines the society he lives in and writes about.”
Giles showed us a video clip of a production of a Japanese production of “Medea” by Yukio Ninagawa which was totally Japanese (very foreign-looking) and yet utterly emotionally true and devastating.
Charlemagne “reboots Western civilization,” although “the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.”
POST SHAKESPEARE
Commenting on the fact that he was hugely popular/reasonably wealthy while at the same time doing groundbreaking writing for the stage, Giles said Shakespeare was “Lloyd Weber and Chekhov in one – in his lifetime!”
On the other hand, despite Jonson’s eulogistic tribute that Shakespeare was not of his age but “for all time,” Giles said Shakespeare was largely neglected and rewritten in the 17th and 18th centuries. From 1631-1838, Nahum Tate’s version of “Lear,” in which the old man survives and Cordelia also lives to marry Edgar, was “Shakespeare’s King Lear” for audiences in those years! Macready did the first revival of Lear as Shakespeare had written it, in 1838.
Margaret Hughes was the first known woman to appear legally on stage, in the 1660s, near the end of the Restoration. “Breeches parts” were roles written with plots especially contrived to put female actors in breeches to show off their legs, which otherwise would have been hidden beneath the dresses of the era.
Garrick launched the Cult of Shakespeare in Stratford and London. Giles showed us several depictions of Shakespearean productions from various eras, and noted that most of them performed in “modern” dress for the time. Thus, there’s nothing radical about modern dress productions of Shakespeare, and “period” dress “appropriate” to the time period of the characters as we conceive of it is a more recent development – an innovation, if you will.
Edmund Kean pushed for “realism” in the form of costumes and elaborate sets. Things could get pretty hefty: Giles showed us a poster for a production of “Macbeth” dated Nov. 5, 1814, which advertised 15 “principle witches” and a witches chorus.
For a time in the mid 19th century there was a vogue for child stars. Kate and Ellen Bateman made their stage debut at the ages of 6 and 4, and toured in the 1850s marketed by their father Hezekiah Bateman and by P.T. Barnum. (They toured in “Richard III,” for example, with Ellen playing Richard and Kate as Richmond.) “Master Betty” (William Henry West Betty) was the most famous of child actors, assaying Hamlet and Romeo in runs at Covent Garden from the age of 13 to 15. The fad for him was so huge that top adult names like John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons went into temporary retirement so as to avoid competing with him. By the age of 17, he was a has-been.
TWENTIETH CENTURY
While discussing Oscar Wilde and the subversive undercurrents of his plays: “Never underestimate the seriousness of the light, frothy plays.” You’ve got to work harder with the comedies – presumably as an audience member as well as an actor or director. Noel Coward went completely out of vogue for a good 20 years after the Second World War, until Laurence Olivier staged “Hay Fever” at the National Theatre.
Pinter acknowledged a debt to Coward: “It’s all about the gaps in life … how we feel isolated.” In the banality of Pinter’s plays, “there’s always a lurking menace….” The characters could lose it, “and often they don’t, but they could break out at any instant.”
Giles showed us a clip from a black-and-white 1984 BBC production of “The Birthday Party” which showed Joan Plowright serving breakfast to her husband. She natters on at him about his corn flakes and various people while, head buried in his newspaper, he barely responds. The dialogue is flat, unremarkable, superficially unrevealing, but painfully hilarious and in Plowright’s execution, terribly revelatory about her character’s desperation and insecurity. Is anything funny about the dialogue, Giles asked us. No. “You have to have incredible dexterity to make Pinter work,” Giles commented, “because on the page he doesn’t.”
Note to read or see “Saved” by Edward Bond, which caused a minor scandal because it depicts a couple turning up the volume on the telly to drown out a baby’s crying, and later the infant is stoned in its pram by street toughs.
RANDOM REMARKS
“Never think of the past as a primitive place. The past was always the present, and it was always cutting-edge.”
“Art is intended to prepare us for the great experiences of our life”: oh, this is love, I’ve observed this before; ah, this is what death is like.
He recalled attending a production of Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” during which a woman in the audience spontaneously called out, “I feel so witty!” Giles thought this was wonderful. My job as a playwright, he concluded, is to give you a new costume, so that you say, “God, I never knew I felt that before.”
“If you go to ‘Mamma Mia’ and it changes your life, I would change your life back.”
Our expert, Giles Ramsay, had done this package a number of times before and could hardly have been better qualified for the job. An independent director and producer, he has not only directed many shows from Palestine to Vermont, lectured at various universities and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and toured with the British National Debate team, but has also had several of his own plays (“Shall We Go to the Alhambra?”, “Territory,” “Only as Multiple,” and “Crocodile”) produced in Britain. His recent long-term projects involve theater in “post-conflict” zones such as Kosovo and Zimbabwe. A native version of “Oedipus Tyrannus” with a local cast had gone over big in Harare in May 2009.
The notes I made of his shipboard lectures, which included not only video clips off a laptop but drawings and copies of theater plans and photos that were illuminated by a good old-fashioned overhead projector (remember those from school?), are very sketchy because I was familiar with a lot of what he was saying and only took down things that caught my fancy.
A few items below were already noted in our travel blog, but I wanted to collect all my notes on his lectures in one place.
THEATER’S ORIGINS
After a full round of three tragedies, a day of theater competition in Athens ended with a satyr play, which satirized everything and everyone in thoroughly obscene style as a way of cleansing the audience’s palate. Euripides’ “The Cyclops” is the only extant full satyr play today.
Someone asked why there are only a handful of each great Greek playwrights’ supposed works extant (7 of more than a hundred by Sophocles, for example, and 18 of 90-plus from Euripides), and how they survived. Giles said evidence of them, and whatever copies existed, were lost with their respective civilizations and the destruction of the Alexandria Library. It was mostly Arab/Muslim scholars who preserved copies of a few of them, and Western scholars eventually recognized and translated them into Latin or their vernacular.
To give a context to the fiery nature of Medea, a foreigner in the Greek court, Giles reminded us that she came from a port on the Black Sea in what has recently been known as Georgia. As an illustration, when he was in Tbilisi, Giles was puzzled by the beefy guys in sidewalk cafes who all had makeup bags, until he realized they contained guns.
Euripides “is the Ibsen of his day: he writes great roles for women, and he undermines the society he lives in and writes about.”
Giles showed us a video clip of a production of a Japanese production of “Medea” by Yukio Ninagawa which was totally Japanese (very foreign-looking) and yet utterly emotionally true and devastating.
Charlemagne “reboots Western civilization,” although “the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.”
POST SHAKESPEARE
Commenting on the fact that he was hugely popular/reasonably wealthy while at the same time doing groundbreaking writing for the stage, Giles said Shakespeare was “Lloyd Weber and Chekhov in one – in his lifetime!”
On the other hand, despite Jonson’s eulogistic tribute that Shakespeare was not of his age but “for all time,” Giles said Shakespeare was largely neglected and rewritten in the 17th and 18th centuries. From 1631-1838, Nahum Tate’s version of “Lear,” in which the old man survives and Cordelia also lives to marry Edgar, was “Shakespeare’s King Lear” for audiences in those years! Macready did the first revival of Lear as Shakespeare had written it, in 1838.
Margaret Hughes was the first known woman to appear legally on stage, in the 1660s, near the end of the Restoration. “Breeches parts” were roles written with plots especially contrived to put female actors in breeches to show off their legs, which otherwise would have been hidden beneath the dresses of the era.
Garrick launched the Cult of Shakespeare in Stratford and London. Giles showed us several depictions of Shakespearean productions from various eras, and noted that most of them performed in “modern” dress for the time. Thus, there’s nothing radical about modern dress productions of Shakespeare, and “period” dress “appropriate” to the time period of the characters as we conceive of it is a more recent development – an innovation, if you will.
Edmund Kean pushed for “realism” in the form of costumes and elaborate sets. Things could get pretty hefty: Giles showed us a poster for a production of “Macbeth” dated Nov. 5, 1814, which advertised 15 “principle witches” and a witches chorus.
For a time in the mid 19th century there was a vogue for child stars. Kate and Ellen Bateman made their stage debut at the ages of 6 and 4, and toured in the 1850s marketed by their father Hezekiah Bateman and by P.T. Barnum. (They toured in “Richard III,” for example, with Ellen playing Richard and Kate as Richmond.) “Master Betty” (William Henry West Betty) was the most famous of child actors, assaying Hamlet and Romeo in runs at Covent Garden from the age of 13 to 15. The fad for him was so huge that top adult names like John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons went into temporary retirement so as to avoid competing with him. By the age of 17, he was a has-been.
TWENTIETH CENTURY
While discussing Oscar Wilde and the subversive undercurrents of his plays: “Never underestimate the seriousness of the light, frothy plays.” You’ve got to work harder with the comedies – presumably as an audience member as well as an actor or director. Noel Coward went completely out of vogue for a good 20 years after the Second World War, until Laurence Olivier staged “Hay Fever” at the National Theatre.
Pinter acknowledged a debt to Coward: “It’s all about the gaps in life … how we feel isolated.” In the banality of Pinter’s plays, “there’s always a lurking menace….” The characters could lose it, “and often they don’t, but they could break out at any instant.”
Giles showed us a clip from a black-and-white 1984 BBC production of “The Birthday Party” which showed Joan Plowright serving breakfast to her husband. She natters on at him about his corn flakes and various people while, head buried in his newspaper, he barely responds. The dialogue is flat, unremarkable, superficially unrevealing, but painfully hilarious and in Plowright’s execution, terribly revelatory about her character’s desperation and insecurity. Is anything funny about the dialogue, Giles asked us. No. “You have to have incredible dexterity to make Pinter work,” Giles commented, “because on the page he doesn’t.”
Note to read or see “Saved” by Edward Bond, which caused a minor scandal because it depicts a couple turning up the volume on the telly to drown out a baby’s crying, and later the infant is stoned in its pram by street toughs.
RANDOM REMARKS
“Never think of the past as a primitive place. The past was always the present, and it was always cutting-edge.”
“Art is intended to prepare us for the great experiences of our life”: oh, this is love, I’ve observed this before; ah, this is what death is like.
He recalled attending a production of Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” during which a woman in the audience spontaneously called out, “I feel so witty!” Giles thought this was wonderful. My job as a playwright, he concluded, is to give you a new costume, so that you say, “God, I never knew I felt that before.”
“If you go to ‘Mamma Mia’ and it changes your life, I would change your life back.”
Saturday, September 26, 2009
David: Kind of Like Being in a Movie
Traveling to and in Britain felt like being in a movie.
The main reason was that everybody talked differently. You could understand them because they spoke English – mostly – but with a bewildering variety of accents and dialects. Usually you only hear such voices in the movies.
The most striking verbal thing for me was the way a simple “o” sound acquired a hint of an “i” at the end of words like “So” and “No,” so that they came out in a way I find very hard to spell out. Think of the “uh” sound with a touch of “y” following it: “So” became “suy” and “No” became “nuy.” I couldn’t figure out quite how they do it . . . or why it ever came about.
There were many other things that looked familiar . . . but were not quite right.
Street signs for familiar purposes use different language. Instead of Detour, you saw “Diversion” or “Diverted Traffic.” The familiar upside-down triangle that typically says Yield became “Give Way.” Instead of Exit, you were directed to “Way Out.” Orally, you quickly got used to hearing that you’d need to join or wait in the “queue” instead of a line.
“Mind the Gap” replaces “Watch Your Step.” In fact, “Mind the Gap” is a rather famous phrase, since commuters on the Tube hear it relentlessly: “Please mind the gap between the platform and train,” a pleasantly officious female voice announces over the sound system as the train pulls into every station.
Then of course, there are the peculiar place names. I never quite got used to hearing that proper female voice remind me that a subway line I rode a few times ultimately terminated at “Cockfosters” (which, of course, sounds more like “Cuckfustuz”).
We saw lots of familiar fast-food outlets – KFC, Subway, Burger King, and LOTS of Starbucks – but there were many other repeated names we had never seen before: Caffé Nero, Costa Coffee, Pret a Manger (without, I think, the French accent egu), and just plain “Eat.”
Pubs and taverns often had “arms” in their name because of they feature a crest that references a family, region of origin, or noble charter (“Northumberland Arms,” “The King’s Arms”). Some also assured us they were “Free,” which meant they served a variety of brews instead of the particular brand or two they were contracted to limit themselves to.
I was always a little startled by a sign for a high-end women’s fashion chain called French Connection (UK), which brazenly offered the acronym FCUK. (I took a photo of one at Heathrow just before we flew out.)
Of course the money looked different, but there were a couple details that I particularly liked. The two-pound coin has a gold coin inside a silver ring – a design I recall seeing in other European countries. Most charmingly, the back side of the 10-pound bill pictures Charles Darwin, and it’ll be a cold day in hell when we see something like that on an American currency.
(While we were in England, I saw a news story in the Daily Telegraph that a new British movie about the life of Darwin – “Creation” starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, and Jeremy Northam – had gotten raves at the Toronto Film Festival and was receiving worldwide distribution, but had not landed an American distributor because the content was feared to be “too controversial.” As the Brits used to say, tommyrot!)
I kept looking for street signs in the usual American location – on a pole at the corner above an intersection – and it wasn’t there. Instead, street signs in London are plaques: larger than the typical sign in the U.S., with more information, but not dependably placed or even necessarily there.
The information will consists of the township (“The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea,” “City of Westminster”; usually in a red, gothic script), the street name (“Kensington Church Street,” in a larger black serif font), and the start of the postal code (“W.8.” – again in red).
Usually, it will be on a building near the corner, anywhere from ten to twenty feet up the façade, sometimes on a low wall. Sometimes, they’ll have extra helpful information: “Leading to: Hyde Park Place.” More helpfully, some buildings (residential buildings, not just commercial ones) will have the entire address (number and street name) painted on a column or the wall near the door.
The confusion isn’t helped by the fact that more and more service jobs are filled with immigrants. Most of the wait staff in our hotel appeared to be Russians, with a sprinkling of various Asians such as Malays and Nepalese.
Our final morning in London, I was tucking into breakfast when our waitress asked “Do yu vant sum tust?” Dust, I wondered. I had her repeat it. Still couldn’t grasp what she was asking.
Toast, Carole explained. Ah.
The main reason was that everybody talked differently. You could understand them because they spoke English – mostly – but with a bewildering variety of accents and dialects. Usually you only hear such voices in the movies.
The most striking verbal thing for me was the way a simple “o” sound acquired a hint of an “i” at the end of words like “So” and “No,” so that they came out in a way I find very hard to spell out. Think of the “uh” sound with a touch of “y” following it: “So” became “suy” and “No” became “nuy.” I couldn’t figure out quite how they do it . . . or why it ever came about.
There were many other things that looked familiar . . . but were not quite right.
Street signs for familiar purposes use different language. Instead of Detour, you saw “Diversion” or “Diverted Traffic.” The familiar upside-down triangle that typically says Yield became “Give Way.” Instead of Exit, you were directed to “Way Out.” Orally, you quickly got used to hearing that you’d need to join or wait in the “queue” instead of a line.
“Mind the Gap” replaces “Watch Your Step.” In fact, “Mind the Gap” is a rather famous phrase, since commuters on the Tube hear it relentlessly: “Please mind the gap between the platform and train,” a pleasantly officious female voice announces over the sound system as the train pulls into every station.
Then of course, there are the peculiar place names. I never quite got used to hearing that proper female voice remind me that a subway line I rode a few times ultimately terminated at “Cockfosters” (which, of course, sounds more like “Cuckfustuz”).
We saw lots of familiar fast-food outlets – KFC, Subway, Burger King, and LOTS of Starbucks – but there were many other repeated names we had never seen before: Caffé Nero, Costa Coffee, Pret a Manger (without, I think, the French accent egu), and just plain “Eat.”
Pubs and taverns often had “arms” in their name because of they feature a crest that references a family, region of origin, or noble charter (“Northumberland Arms,” “The King’s Arms”). Some also assured us they were “Free,” which meant they served a variety of brews instead of the particular brand or two they were contracted to limit themselves to.
I was always a little startled by a sign for a high-end women’s fashion chain called French Connection (UK), which brazenly offered the acronym FCUK. (I took a photo of one at Heathrow just before we flew out.)
Of course the money looked different, but there were a couple details that I particularly liked. The two-pound coin has a gold coin inside a silver ring – a design I recall seeing in other European countries. Most charmingly, the back side of the 10-pound bill pictures Charles Darwin, and it’ll be a cold day in hell when we see something like that on an American currency.
(While we were in England, I saw a news story in the Daily Telegraph that a new British movie about the life of Darwin – “Creation” starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, and Jeremy Northam – had gotten raves at the Toronto Film Festival and was receiving worldwide distribution, but had not landed an American distributor because the content was feared to be “too controversial.” As the Brits used to say, tommyrot!)
I kept looking for street signs in the usual American location – on a pole at the corner above an intersection – and it wasn’t there. Instead, street signs in London are plaques: larger than the typical sign in the U.S., with more information, but not dependably placed or even necessarily there.
The information will consists of the township (“The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea,” “City of Westminster”; usually in a red, gothic script), the street name (“Kensington Church Street,” in a larger black serif font), and the start of the postal code (“W.8.” – again in red).
Usually, it will be on a building near the corner, anywhere from ten to twenty feet up the façade, sometimes on a low wall. Sometimes, they’ll have extra helpful information: “Leading to: Hyde Park Place.” More helpfully, some buildings (residential buildings, not just commercial ones) will have the entire address (number and street name) painted on a column or the wall near the door.
The confusion isn’t helped by the fact that more and more service jobs are filled with immigrants. Most of the wait staff in our hotel appeared to be Russians, with a sprinkling of various Asians such as Malays and Nepalese.
Our final morning in London, I was tucking into breakfast when our waitress asked “Do yu vant sum tust?” Dust, I wondered. I had her repeat it. Still couldn’t grasp what she was asking.
Toast, Carole explained. Ah.
Monday, September 21, 2009
David: A Few General Remarks, Post-Voyage
Our second full day home, and we are still not recovered from the shift on body clocks: Carole tends to droop a lot mid-afternoon, although she tends to get a second wind in the evening, so we don't go to bed any earlier, but we wake up several times in the wee hours of the morning and have to force ourselves to go back to sleep.
We had a joyous reunion with our pets this morning. Pixie, who was terrified about having anybody other than the two of us touch or hold her, apparently took to Mary the pet handler within a day and a half, and by the time we got back to the States was spinning in circles in her company and kissing her, and barking furiously if Mary left the room. But she was overjoyed to see us again and took quite a few minutes to stop hyperventilating during the car ride home.
It will take me some time to gather up and organize the many slips and sheets of paper on which I took notes during this trip, about everything from snatches of funny overheard conversations and Giles Ramsay's lectures on the history of theater, to specific paintings we photographed in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Not to mention the roughly 700 photographs we shot on the trip! (Carole formatted a couple from the New York City leg -- of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and us in Central Park -- which went up on her Facebook page, so if you're an FB friend of her or me [I've linked to it from mine] you can look at them there. If you're not an FB friend of ours, then why aren't you?
I can, and may well, write essays on our odd hotel in London, and the varieties of comfort facilities we encountered along the trip (with a memory or two of similarly posh or spartan arrangements on past travels overseas).
For the moment, just a few general comments, now that it's over.
The cruise on the Queen Mary 2 was everything we could have hoped for, and more. I'll admit that up front I was fairly blase about that part: it was Carole's lifelong dream, and she found a theater-history and current shows package that appealed to me. Going in, I just sort of assumed the QM2 was a cruise ship rather like several others, maybe dozens, on the ocean. It was probably several decades old, and a copy of the original Queen Mary.
I would have been wrong on all counts. The skilled crew, from the commodore to the engineers, carefully stressed that this ship was an "ocean liner," as distinguished from a "cruise ship." The former can and does make direct trips across the Atlantic at all times of the year, in fair weather and foul, while the latter tend to linger in the warmer climes, and make long stopovers in exotic ports. The former is also officially empowered to carry Her Majesty's mail across the ocean, and therefore entitled to the designation RMS (Royal Mail Ship).
The QM2 is only five years old; she is the longest, tallest, and broadest passenger vessel ever launched (from the legendary shipbuilding yard at Alstom Chantiers de l'Atlantique, near St.-Nazaire, France). She is too wide to fit through the Panama Canal, yet her draft is only 32 feet -- meaning she can travel in shallower water than the original Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, which drafted at 42 feet and therefore sometimes had to wait for flood tide to dock in New York or Southampton. At 203 above the waterline, the QM2 enables passengers to look the Statue of Liberty directly in the eye.
Just about the only thing we could not say was superlative and perfection about the RM2 was the coffee. I rather regret that I didn't take a chance to stop at one of the dozens upon dozens of Starbucks outlets I saw in London -- they really are nearly as common and densely situated there as in Portland! -- to see whether the coffee drinks seemed comparable . . . because coffee under any other circumstances was pretty mediocre. It ranged from the truly awful (out of the automatic dispenser machines aboard the ship) to the barely acceptable (in the Queen Mary 2 dining room and our hotel). The Brits really don't know from coffee!
We came away from our visit to Hampton Court -- and to a lesser extent, to the London museums and theaters -- with a pressing desire to improve our knowledge of English history. So many fascinating personalities I'd certainly heard of but really need to know more about: Oliver Cromwell, Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, William the Conqueror, David Garrick, Harold Pinter, and on and on.
Also, as Carole recalled this morning, not once throughout the whole trip did anyone offer us an "English muffin" or a crumpet.
We had a joyous reunion with our pets this morning. Pixie, who was terrified about having anybody other than the two of us touch or hold her, apparently took to Mary the pet handler within a day and a half, and by the time we got back to the States was spinning in circles in her company and kissing her, and barking furiously if Mary left the room. But she was overjoyed to see us again and took quite a few minutes to stop hyperventilating during the car ride home.
It will take me some time to gather up and organize the many slips and sheets of paper on which I took notes during this trip, about everything from snatches of funny overheard conversations and Giles Ramsay's lectures on the history of theater, to specific paintings we photographed in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Not to mention the roughly 700 photographs we shot on the trip! (Carole formatted a couple from the New York City leg -- of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and us in Central Park -- which went up on her Facebook page, so if you're an FB friend of her or me [I've linked to it from mine] you can look at them there. If you're not an FB friend of ours, then why aren't you?
I can, and may well, write essays on our odd hotel in London, and the varieties of comfort facilities we encountered along the trip (with a memory or two of similarly posh or spartan arrangements on past travels overseas).
For the moment, just a few general comments, now that it's over.
The cruise on the Queen Mary 2 was everything we could have hoped for, and more. I'll admit that up front I was fairly blase about that part: it was Carole's lifelong dream, and she found a theater-history and current shows package that appealed to me. Going in, I just sort of assumed the QM2 was a cruise ship rather like several others, maybe dozens, on the ocean. It was probably several decades old, and a copy of the original Queen Mary.
I would have been wrong on all counts. The skilled crew, from the commodore to the engineers, carefully stressed that this ship was an "ocean liner," as distinguished from a "cruise ship." The former can and does make direct trips across the Atlantic at all times of the year, in fair weather and foul, while the latter tend to linger in the warmer climes, and make long stopovers in exotic ports. The former is also officially empowered to carry Her Majesty's mail across the ocean, and therefore entitled to the designation RMS (Royal Mail Ship).
The QM2 is only five years old; she is the longest, tallest, and broadest passenger vessel ever launched (from the legendary shipbuilding yard at Alstom Chantiers de l'Atlantique, near St.-Nazaire, France). She is too wide to fit through the Panama Canal, yet her draft is only 32 feet -- meaning she can travel in shallower water than the original Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, which drafted at 42 feet and therefore sometimes had to wait for flood tide to dock in New York or Southampton. At 203 above the waterline, the QM2 enables passengers to look the Statue of Liberty directly in the eye.
Just about the only thing we could not say was superlative and perfection about the RM2 was the coffee. I rather regret that I didn't take a chance to stop at one of the dozens upon dozens of Starbucks outlets I saw in London -- they really are nearly as common and densely situated there as in Portland! -- to see whether the coffee drinks seemed comparable . . . because coffee under any other circumstances was pretty mediocre. It ranged from the truly awful (out of the automatic dispenser machines aboard the ship) to the barely acceptable (in the Queen Mary 2 dining room and our hotel). The Brits really don't know from coffee!
We came away from our visit to Hampton Court -- and to a lesser extent, to the London museums and theaters -- with a pressing desire to improve our knowledge of English history. So many fascinating personalities I'd certainly heard of but really need to know more about: Oliver Cromwell, Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, William the Conqueror, David Garrick, Harold Pinter, and on and on.
Also, as Carole recalled this morning, not once throughout the whole trip did anyone offer us an "English muffin" or a crumpet.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Home Again!
We arrived home at about 8:45 p.m. Since we have been traveling for 17 hours and up -- more or less -- for 23, we are going to bed. But there's much more to report on our trip, which we will do after we've gotten some rest.
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