ChezLark

Ryan’s title of the “Squeaker” got upgraded to “Squawker” during our trip, on account of increased decibels.

Also, Laura and I got a lot of joking mileage during the trip about how Ryan is always of paramount importance. If Ryan is tired, or hungry, or cranky, or bored, or cold, or hot, or restless, or asleep, the whole world screeches to a halt until the situation is to her satisfaction. For some perverse reason, I started flashing all the time on the classic Seinfeld episode The Face Painter (which also features such classic lines as “That’s the Letter D”). As a subplot in that episode, Kramer gets in a feud with a monkey at the zoo when it throws a banana peel at him. Kramer gets back at the monkey by whacking it back with a banana peel when it’s not looking, and this really embarasses the monkey, which gets depressed. Eventually, the zoo asks Kramer to apologize to the monkey, which Kramer does reluctantly, commenting at various times:

Don’t my feelings count for anything? Oh, only the poor monkey’s important. Everything has to be done for the monkey!

God forbid I should disturb the very important monkey!

So anyway, I decided that Ryan was clearly the Very Important Monkey. This fits well with her previous title of Hairy Monkey, since she had light fur all over her when she was born.

Along the same lines, when we got particularly tired of carting Ryan around in her carseats and strollers, we decided she was The Sultan. She even has a disdainful, distant expression that perfectly conveys “Yes, servants. Continue. Your work is satisfactory for now”.

The 2006 Photobloggies awards are now in their nomination phase. Anyone can nominate their favorite photoblog in any one of a number of categories. If you felt moved to submit chromalark, you would not make me unhappy.

[Posted retroactively]

Laura, little Ryan and I are in Rome, wrapping up our Italy tour. I am sad to say that tomorrow, we will be forced (by our pre-arranged logistics) to leave Italy and head back to Prague, where we will spend the final two days of our trip before flying home on Wednesday. In hindsight, this was a very foolish arrangement. It would have been much better if we had, instead, saved much expense, bought one-way plane tickets to Italy, and settled down in a Tuscan hill town, instead of ever leaving such a relaxing country.

We landed at Leonardo da Vinci airport about ten days ago, picked up our rental car, and drove immediately to an agriturismo in Tuscany, near Pienza and Montepulciano. Traffic on the Rome ring road heading away from the city was terrible, and we were getting tired and grumpy as the sun started setting and we hadn’t gotten to our destination yet. But soon we were off the freeway and picking our way along country roads, following the directions to the farm we were staying at, and we crested a hill into the full glare of the setting sun. It was burning blood-red and highlighted cypress trees on rolling green hills and Laura and I were both momentarily stunned. Shortly afterwards, we arrived at the farm, which features a commanding view of the surrounding vineyards and farmlands.

The next morning, Laura was sipping a caffe latte on the porch of the farmhouse, watching the morning mist clear over the farms, and asked me “why do we ever travel anywhere other than Italy?”, and I didn’t have a ready answer. We found Central (previously, Eastern) Europe very instructive, outside our usual European experience, and quite interesting. But coming back to Italy felt like coming home; the people seem friendlier, the language is approachable and expressive, the food is fantastic, the countryside is heart-stoppingly beautiful, and I even found that I liked the experience of driving on twisty Italian country roads, which I had been anticipating with some trepidation.

I took lots of pictures of Tuscany, and some of them even came out passably well. I will be running them on chromalark in the near future.

We stayed in the first agriturismo for five relaxing, lazy days, and visited the nearby Tuscan towns, large and small. Later, we stayed outside Siena (in Chianti), then in Spoleto (in Umbria) and finally, in Rome for the final two days so as to have a reasonable travel day tomorrow when we fly to Prague.

Spending so much of our time in small towns was a new experience for both of us, and it worked out extremely well. It got to the point that when we went on day trips into towns of any size at all, like Sienna, we were both turned off by the hassle of parking, navigating the town, and dealing with the crowds of tourists (though they were still tiny by large-city standards). Italy has done a wonderful job of encouraging countryside tourism with the agriturismo regulations; staying in one of these places is highly recommended.

We fly out of Budapest to Rome tomorrow, so we have officially concluded the Eastern-European portion of our trip. The remainder will be spent poking around hill towns in Tuscany and Umbria. I’m a little nervous about driving in Italy, but Laura tells me everything will be fine. I suppose Italy doesn’t have a Guantanamo bay to ship us off to (that we know about, anyhow).

we have very much enjoyed Budapest. In fact, I wish we could have stayed longer. Laura got to lounge in a Hungarian bath, although she reports that they have nothing on Turkish baths. We ran around and saw a bunch of sights, but more than Prague and Krakow, Budapest feels like a city you could spend a lot of time in and keep discovering something new. It’s sort of like Rome or London in that way. Budapest is huge, and stuffed with monuments, but like seemingly every other major European city, has a supremely functional transit system that got us everywhere we wanted to go, including out to the boonies to get a stroller (we finally caved in and decided that carrying Ryan everywhere in her wrap was going to ruin both our backs before long).

So tomorrow, we hitch a ride on (one of) Eastern Europe’s discount air carriers, SkyEurope. I was a little worried they were a fly-by-night operation, but there were ads everywhere on buses in Krakow for them, so they seem reasonably legit.

Our Internet connectivity is likely to be quite bad or nonexistent in Italy, since we’ll be in small towns and even farmhouses for the whole time, so this may be our last update until we get back to Prague at the end of our trip.

There are lots of nuns in Krakow. There are even more when you’re inside the city’s major cathedrals. Some nuns in St. Vitus took a liking to Ryan. The lighting was pretty much at the edge of my camera’s working envelope, but I got some passable pictures:

Aside from the That-Baby-Is-Cold police, Ryan has made us a lot of friends in Eastern Europe. People are very eager to stop and make funny faces at her, inquire about how old she is, etc. Ryan loves the attention!

Today’s photographic entertainment game is called: Spot The Five-Month-Old Baby Near This Old Eastern-European Communist Monument.

You get bonus points if your guess was: “I refuse to play your game on the grounds that it denigrates the glorious cause of the workers’ inevitable revolt against the oppression of capitalism”.

Ryan and company have landed in Budapest, where the weather is vastly better: cool, sunny, spring days. We have discovered that the That-Baby-Is-Cold police have a strong garrisson in Budapest: stern old Hungarian ladies are forever reminding us that Ryan needs heavy boots to, say, have breakfast in the hotel cafe, or that Ryan must have a hat even if she is wrapped up and enclosed in the Moby Wrap. We smile and nod a lot.

Anyway, here is Ryan being cheerful in the morning in Krakow before we left:

We’ve been in Krakow for four days now, and have had a wonderful time. The Old Town is extremely compact; it’s possible to walk across it in maybe 15-20 minutes. After a few days, this makes you feel like you’re intimately familiar with the town. We’ve been eating Polish food (surprisingly tasty!) and wandering around cobblestoned streets. As was the case in Prague, food is rediculously cheap, so once accomodation is taken care of, living expenses are very reasonable. Ryan has made us lots of friends; the locals love to stop and admire her.

We took a day trip yesterday to Auschwitz, which is an hour and a half outside of Krakow in the Polish countryside (where the camp could be well hidden during the war). The experience was pretty intense, but we thought it important to go see the site while we were in the area. The Polish government runs the camp site as a museum, and admission is free. They have done a good job of restoring and maintaining the site; at Auschwitz I, most of the barracks buildings are still standing and in good shape, along with the grimmer structures: the original entrance gate with its cynical “Work Will Set You Free” sign, the barbed-wire electric fencing, guard towers, and one of the crematoria. There are powerfully understated reminder signs at the most notorious locations reminding visitors to be respectful of the site; they read (from memory) “You are entering a building where thousands of people were murdered by the SS. Please show respect by keeping silent”.

The place was mobbed with tour groups, including several clutches of Israeli students, recognizable by the oversized Israeli flags carried by their tour leaders. I found it heartening that the site is so heavily visited. I read that the Polish school curricula includes a trip to Auschwitz for every gradeschool student when they turn 14 (children under 14 aren’t allowed into the museum, although they didn’t complain about Ryan). I understand that Israeli students are also brought to see the museum as a standard part of their curriculum.

I had read so much about the camp beforehand, and seen so many movies and documentaries about the Holocaust, that in a way it was underwhelming to see the site itself. The camp looks like a fairly pedestrian military barracks complex, aside from the fortified walls and watchtowers. On the day we visited, there were sunbreaks and some parts of the grounds were even quite pleasant. It seemed difficult to believe that this was the site of a systematic murder campaign. Everywhere, though, there are bouquets of flowers, notes, and other mementos left by visitors and relatives of the camp’s victims.

I admire the determination of the Polish government and others associated with the camp in running the camp, publicizing it, and keeping access free. The best way to never forget is to remind each generation what happened there.

We take the night train out of Krakow to Budapest tonight!

Imagine our surprise a couple of days ago when we woke up in Krakow and it was… snowing! It wasn’t all that cold; close to 40F, but it was snowing pretty heavily. Being of hearty Canadian stock, Laura and I were undeterred and went out stomping around. Here are Laura and Ryan on the main square in Krakow:

I’ve set up a set on Flickr where I’m parking pictures of Ryan and us in Europe. I’ll post little blurbs here about the pictures when I get a chance.

We’re in Krakow now, but back in Prague, we had a nice lunch at a brewery near the Prague Castle and a nearby monastery. Ryan decided she was very interested in Czech beer:

A funny thing happened to me this morning on the Charles Bridge in Prague. I was on the bridge at dawn, taking pictures (sometimes jet lag is useful), and was minding my own business when two young women wander up to me. Here is a stylized rendition of our conversation:

Woman #1 (very giddy): Hello! How are you?
Me: Fine, you?
Woman #1: Great! I’ve been up since 6am yesterday morning. I just spent all night in these great gay bars. I met this nice person (indicates companion). We’re friends now.
Woman #2: Hello.
Woman #1: Yes, the gay bars are great. Of course (stoned stage whisper) I’m not gay.
Woman #2 (overhearing, surprised): Really?
Woman #1 (surprised): Um, yeah. I’m not gay.
Woman #2: But I am.
Woman #1 (nervous laughter): No!
Woman #2: Oh yes; I’m gay.
Woman #1: Huh.

They had a prolonged conversation in Czech after this. I’m not entirely sure what the outcome was, but they wandered off together. Maybe Woman #1 decided it was time to experiment.