Tripped

Hey Look, It's the Pope!

Somehow he's the least likely person you expect to see when you show up at the Vatican, at least if it's not a regularly scheduled papal audience or blessing day. And yet there we were at the end of a long afternoon visiting the museums and St. Peter's Basilica, admiring Bernini's piazza, and wondering why the carabinieri were herding people away from the entire south side of it. The motorcycle cops lined up on the street just beyond the piazza cobblestones were the giveaway, although it still seemed pretty low-key - maybe it's just a bunch of cardinals, we thought.

Then the motorcade roared up - too fast for me to capture as anything but a blur, as you can see, but slow enough for us to recognize the distinct face of Benedict sitting in the back of the sedan with the two yellow Vatican City flags perched on the front fenders, and waving at the crowd. Turns out when he doesn't have to ride in the Mercedes-built Popemobile, the old German still prefers a Mercedes, with the same special Stato della Città del Vaticano license plate "SVC 1" affixed to the rear that adorns any car he rides in. No way to tell if the sedan is also adorned with the Popemobile's Natuzzi white leather seats.

An entertaining end to our multiple visits to the site, which were really about the art and the architecture and the history, of which more shortly ...

Normandy

When in France ... one must visit classic tourist sites like this one. Extraordinary from afar, ordinary and touristy up close - that's Mont St. Michel. 

We're in Normandy for a couple of days with Eileen's brother-in-law Jim to tour the D-Day sites, while Eileen's sister Beth is on a business trip. But one of the benefits of a trip to the province is that you can also see plenty of other history, including Mont St. Michel and the Bayeux Tapestry. One thing you can't fully appreciate until you spend a day driving around here and seeing them firsthand is what the WWII chronicles mean when describing "hedgerow country." Pictures and film do a good job of capturing it, but can't quite do full justice to how confounding and claustrophic some of the fields are that the opposing armies had to fight through, with root mounds that have built up several feet in many instances.

Things You Didn't Know About the Swiss

They like to fold up their clothes, place them in a waterproof bag with their wallet and watch, and jump in the Rhine to float downstream. This is especially popular amongst the senior citizen set. We emerged from a week-long hibernation at my sister-in-law's to wander around their neighborhood and saw this guy, his personal effects neatly tucked away, headed for the bank. He was one of several we saw jumping in the fast-flowing river just below the Basel hydroelectric dam on a weekday afternoon. Two days ago (Thursday) we were at lunch at a riverside cafe and I saw numerous heads bobbing in the current.

Preservationists, Take Heart

Don't let my two previous posts mislead you into thinking this whole place is falling down - there are some beautifully restored and maintained architectural gems in Budapest. On Friday we saw a couple of them during a self-guided walking tour of some highlights from the Secession movement here. The first was the spectacular restoration job done by the Four Seasons on the Gresham Palace, originally built by a UK insurance company and now (obviously) a luxury hotel. This is an interior door to the staircase, under the imposing and completely rebuilt glass roofed lobby atrium:

 

Another highlight was the Uj Szinhaz or New Theater, built originally as a nightclub in 1907 and twenty years ahead of its time - Art Deco before Deco was even a movement:

Some of the up-close details are gorgeous, like the angels and lettered tilework on the roof facade:

Bullets Over Budapest

The guidebook hype turns out to be true: wander around the Pest side and you'll see plenty of buildings like these, still scarred by Kalashnikov and heavier weapons fire from the 1956 uprising.

It also offers some perspective on the state of the economy here and its effect on the pace of building renovations.

Your Standard Couple of Days at the Salzburg Festival

The first thing you need to do when attending the Salzburg Festival on the back end of a round-the-world trip is just ignore the disapproving looks from the Austrians because you're not decked out in evening wear. Entschuldigung, mein herr, but the tuxedo and the gown just didn't make it into the bags!

What we were supposed to be wearing:

Or better yet, a dirndl:

The second thing you need to do is sit back and let the music envelope you, because it's spectacular. Two nights ago we got the traditional all-star heart of this festival - the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Chorus - doing Rossini under the baton of Ricardo Muti. As I mentioned to a friend on Facebook, it's hard to believe Ricardo is 68 years old now, given that our first memories of him are when we were in college at Penn and he had just succeeded Eugene Ormandy at the Philadelphia Orchestra. Then he was the hot young Italian conductor; now off that post and a long stint running La Scala, he's turned into a distinguished eminence grise, with still only a sprinkle of gray in the mane. (For all we know, he's dyeing it, of course - he's certainly vain enough to hide the fact that he wears glasses, not putting them on until after he's taken his bow at the podium, then turned his back on the audience to face his musicians and singers.)

Rossini's Moise et Pharoan is one of his lesser-known works, but just as filled with beautiful melodies as The Barber of Seville or The Thieving Magpie. Sometimes a little too beautiful - there's nothing really bouncy about the Jews plight in Egypt, but he can't help but give you that sort of song.

Last night was a guest appearance by the London Symphony Orchestra, under Valery Gergiev, who is quite the character, and as with Muti, it starts with the hair - in his case, a monkish bald spot fringed by long straight gray hair, with bangs that he must continually wipe from his eyes while he's trying to coax maximum emotion from his orchestra. No baton and lots of wrist and even some extensive fluttering of the fingers in his directing style. Really a perfect match for the emotion of Debussy's La Mer and the Shostakovich 8th Symphony. I think I even heard him singing along with the music at times during the Shostakovich.

Mozart, the Sublime Experience

Friday night, three days before we went to Mozart Haus and took our tacky gift shop photos, we attended a performance of Mozart's Requiem in an appropriate setting: the ostentatiously baroque Karlskirche, the church dedicated by Emperor Charles VI to his namesake, Saint Charles Borromeo. It was a wonderful performance. 

When I say ostentatious, I'm thinking of things like the altar sculpture of St. Charles. B., where the old priest is being carried to Heaven on a cloud erupting from the wall:

Choose the Tackiest Mozart Gift

... from the shop at the Mozart Haus, where he lived during some of his more flush years from 1791 to 1794. My vote is for the golf balls:

Eileen favors the tissue pack. Blow your snot into Figaro!

But there's always the breath mints, too:

Do You Prefer the Strangling, the Garrotting, or the Defenestration?

In castle and palace histories, it's the kill count that counts. Or so we have to conclude after visiting both Edinburgh and Prague. In both cities the audioguide tours to the historic venues have taken a particular delight in highlighting the homicides; the more gruesome the better. In Edinburgh Castle it was the "Black Dinner," when Sir William Crichton used trumped-up charges to accuse the teenage Earls of Douglas of treason and had them summarily beheaded - in front of their ten-year-old cousin, King James. In Holyroodhouse it was Lord Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots, dispatching his wife's secretary in her presence. Here in Prague, it's the mother of "Good King Wenceslaus" ordering two of her henchmen to strangle her mother-in-law Ludmila.

But my favorite is the "Second Defenestration" at Prague Castle, and not just because there have been multiple defenestrations here, forcing the historians to assign numbers to them. What? You say you haven't heard of it? For shame, for shame: where's your historical knowledge? Without the Second Defenestration there's no Thirty Years War! And we all know what that means. (We do, don't we?)

Another reason the Second Defenestration is my favorite: it only ended up being an attempted murder, since no one actually died in it. When the Protestant Hussites tossed two of the newly-elected Bohemian King's Catholic counselors out a window in one of the castle towers, they fell 50 feet, but landed in a manure pile and survived. Saved by dung, and yet they still went to war over the incident! Thus giving us, three decades on, the Treaty of Westphalia, the end of big religious warring on the Continent, the rise of the modern nation-state, etc., etc.

In Search of the Untacky

It's fashionable amongst the travel cognoscenti to say that Prague has been ruined, that it's Disneyfied, that it was better in the old days. And it's true that some of the most heavily touristed areas have been completely tackified by vendors dispensing the cheap and the plastic and the t-shirts. But you can say the same thing about Venice, and somehow the beauty of Venice manages to overwhelm all the junk shops in the end. The same is true here - the main squares and the Charles Bridge may be overwhelmed with crowds, but the guidebooks are right that the real Prague is still there and easily found, by wandering down a side street or an alley.

One thing that stands out here, in the jumble of architectural styles accumulated over the centuries, are the sculptural facades on many of the buildings, with putti in particular spilling out all over the baroque buildings, as well as the sculptures on the Charles Bridge.

The poor bridge, unfortunately, is not particularly attractive these days since its undergoing a major renovation - half the sculptures are covered by scaffolding and extensive sections of the cobblestones are torn up as they rebuild the underlying road bed. Guess we'll have to come back to see it in its full glory when they're all done.