My "flight" to Vilnius

One of the things about off the beaten track Europe is that it's a little harder getting in and out of there, like there's not just a eurail going everywhere.

So I spent some time working on how we'd get into Vilnius and came up with a really cheap flight. 

The flight routed through Warsaw and Riga which is how we stopped back over in Warsaw.

Quick stop to talk about Warsaw too-- we really went through the old town this time, which has a more torun feel the cobblestone streets and flower basket restaurants. 

It made me excited like maybe there's other little Toruns around the place oozing romance and love. 

Ok so our flight to Riga is delayed and we miss our connection.  So because the Balkans are tiny they decide get this that it's faster and maybe cheaper to give us a taxi to Vilnius. 

So we wind up on this three hour taxi ride from town to town with two other people one of whom is this very intense but also very cool human rights activist vegan chick who does a lot of work with sex workers rights.  So interesting BC I come at it from a very sex slave perspective and her very much from a sex workers union red alliance perspective. 

We get to Vilnius at long last and it's just magic.  There's a Thai massage place attached to our apartment building.  To get to our apartment you have to go through this tunnel with graffiti to this local square with smoking waiters and
into a secret door with another courtyard and then you go down a couple stairs into our beautiful little hobbit hole.

Vilnius itself is also magic; it's only one block of stuff basically but we wandered around and
basically moved in seeing a bunch of minor church and pretty architecture sights.  Also here Hearts of Iron 4 came out so we played computer games and got massages as well. 

Ok party on.  Having an amazing time in Mongolia. 

Mother Russia I

We travel, Helsinki to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian, Helsinki to Moscow with my mom and Harmony.

The schedule runs

Helsinki 6 days

St Petersburg 7 days

Tula 3 days

Moscow 5 days

Yeketarinburg 2 days

Omsk 3 days

Irkutsk 6 days

Ulan-Bator 18 days in Mongolia

Beijing 4 days then a tour down China

At time of writing I am on the Trans-Siberian between Omsk and Irkutsk, where I landed today.

Tula

So Tula was a stand in for Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate. Though we did have some fun times at the official samovar museum and the local cathedral and the statue of Lenin, etc. Partying all around the city in a spare half day/ arrival day. Our apartment was a little scruffy, a real local haunt, and the whole town was like really not touristy. There was no way to hail cabs so we made friends with our first cab driver who became kind of our private driver. Very little common language but he was super sweet.

Ok Yasnaya Polyana.

We spent two full days there, the first walking the estate, the second we got a tour of the house.

So we arrived, and I know a lot about Tolstoy and his whole life takes place in and around here. And he writes it into things, writes about it, his biographers talk about it, and it is just so beautiful, so recognisable. You walk in the gates and the first thing you see is the birch prospekt. This is not the same trees that Tolstoy saw, birches only live about 70 years so they lovingly replant them in stages, some young, some growing old. They march up the wide and graceful avenue in a double line.

My dream was to walk every path in Tolstoy's estate and we did, wandering all over it. We went to the little carriage house all set up with traditional things.

We went to his grave, covered only with the lush green grass, overlooking the creek where he and his brother played. On the spot where his brother (died young) wrote the secret to life happiness and peace, the end to all striving of mankind, on a green stick and then buried it. Tolstoy always hoped to find it.

You walk a way in the woods to his grave. A woods that would have always been there.

We walked to the fields and as far as we walked there were people still before us, having picnics, gathering wildflowers, and family and a dog, the golden grasses. We walked to where the peasants would have laboured.

We wandered over the estate proper, with its fruit trees, the fruit trees the poor would cut down some times for firewood. It was Sonia's job to punish them, and what did punishing them mean when Tolstoy got his new understanding of life?

Just on the entrance is the large pond, the pond to which Sonia would have run in desperation threatening suicide, when Tolstoy began to say he must abandon the family.

And to the right was the wilder English garden, natural with a series of cascading ponds, small ones. With a bridge built of birch sticks we could walk over. This is how we exited both days. It was Tolstoy's mother's favorite part, where she would walk every day.

Above the English gardens near the house were the French gardens, where the formal flower beds were, where Tolstoy's father preferred to walk, still immaculately maintained and here are where the mock orange and lilac were.

There was a crooked old pine you could see from the study window, which must have been there. But his most long lasting study looked out on the lilac bushes, I didn't expect that.

We found the well, a spring and I washed my face, it was on the other side of a silent pine wood, where you could walk and hear the stillness, past where most people were, with a floor of moss and birch bark and pine needles. Mushrooms sprouted.

The house we got an incredibly sweet English speaking tour guide. She told us so many stories and answered our numerous questions with grace. We were slow enough she let other tour groups go past. We toured the school which had limited artifacts and was a bit story of his lifeish, and the house which had incredible artifacts.

Busts and statues and sketches his friends had done of him. His daughter's artwork. Portraits of his family back three generations. The original portraits done of him, the famous ones that are on the cover of his books. It was incredible. The drawing room set up with the furniture, so you could see how they set up the salons. The piano where people would play Chopin, Beethoven which would make him weep. Even when he decided music was sensuous and he wanted it no more. The gymnastic equipment set up outside where he did gymnastics every day until he was like 70.

Sonia's writing desk next to the door, between the public drawing room and the family one. It was so tiny, so modest, where such great work was done, where she copied out Anna Karenina 7 times. Her tiny desk where she laboured at the estate accounts, every day, for 50 years, itemising carefully, probably where she itemised everything after his death. Just a little inkwell, room for two pages.

And his books in every room his books, not like Nabokov's scattered to the wind, the whole collection lovingly preserved. The revolution came to this house, but the peasants did not want to destroy the great man and they set up a guard around it. The Nazi's came, I don't know what stayed their hands, but the Soviets made it a national museum, and his daughter worked with them, her sacrifice, she turned it over to the state, gave up her claim, and they preserved it in the public trust, destroyed nothing after all.

This grand estate and so it still is as it was, the work of so many people, and so much universal respect. You could read the titles of many of his books because he read in so many languages. In the guest room there was a section of books about him presented by friends, diplomats, the endless string of important and interesting people who passed through this house, modest for a lord with 8 children.

And his study. He had three studies, they showed you all of them and set one up, the last one near his bed, an old man's bed. His watch he wound every day was next to it, his comb his razor. The peasant blouses he wore around, called Tolstoys by the end.

And his desk, his large heavy wooden desk, with the low stool, made for one of his children but with a large cushion for him. And the couch, THE couch, the black leather couch he was born on, that all his children were born on. The black leather couch that was always in his study, that he kept always by him, that he would sleep on when he worked too long. It looked just like itself, its leather only slightly frayed. It was there his desk was there everything was right there, and I trembled and near wept.

His study he stayed in the longest with a view of the lilacs had a vaulted plaster roof like a root cellar or a monk's chamber, but good light, he liked it because the walls were so thick and he needed silence to work.

And of course for scholars they have so many manuscripts too. With his insane annotations and reedits scrawled all over. In his bedroom he kept portraits of some of his children, and of Sonia when he married her, and in her middle life.

It was so beautiful, so so beautiful and so like it was, with the birch and pine and fruit trees and flowers and avenues and paths. It was like the bright space in his heart, a home.

Trees

Birches rise like slender young girls their white trunks delicately covered by coruscating leaves, like eucalypts. The pine is darker, fir trees with tiny cones, dark dark evergreens. Neither gets big, so they are all slender, all multitudinous trunks with freefalling branches. Both of them have the kind of drooping branches, 'dying with a dying fall,' like willows. The trees are ghosts too, I had heard them written so many times and when I saw them, I recognised them. There's a prospect of white birches marching up to Tolstoy's house from the pond, past the English garden, in which his mother would wander.

On the train, stands of trees intersperse with farmlands and concrete block apartments and wooden shacks. It is not as untouched as I thought it would be. There are many little towns and homesteads and the stands of trees are small and scattered between the fields strewn with wildflowers and the hills strewn with birch and pine.

#Trainlife

So the Trans-siberian is going on the long list of adventures I've had where people worry how you're going to die, tie your door handles shut at night, watch out for the gangs and stabbings, you must speak Russian, blahblahblah, also it takes forever, friendships end, blahblah, that are just not true. Ok we sprung for first class, but our cabin is lovely two little couchettes and there's comfy pillows and included slippers, and second class is just two more people on the top bunk which is more crowded but still, and the dining cars are pretty with a full menu, some of which I can eat, there are waitstaff, a selection of 5 beers, people are charging their electronics in the hallway, we've made two sets of train friends on three trains. Where is the ruggedness, the intensity, the danger? Only in war zones I fear, cause those are getting to be the only places I haven't gone.

I feel like if I'd gotten on this train with literally nothing to do I would still not be truly bored of looking at the trees through the window by the end.

Ok so the cabins are lovely and we've shut down the restaurant car with new train friends twice, the second time staying out til like 2 in the morning. That's all been fun, and also feels.

I love being on the train, feeling the movement, and the first night it rocked me to sleep in the night, the most rested I'd been for ages, after a long kerfuffle of getting on the train where we missed our first one and had to pay a bunch of fees and get on six hours later and argue in a lot of russian and run with our bags down the platform with tears in our eyes as the train pulled away, but then it did pull away. And we were free, and I have felt the soft movement and scrolling scrub forests as a part of my trip more than a transition, a real part of life I'm not tired of when I leave it.

I read Tolstoy all at once, but I've been trickling Dostoevsky through my life, I read the Idiot in Vietnam, at the leprosy colony. I read house of the dead here, or am reading.

Yeketarinburg

Yekatarinburg is on the line between Europe and Asia, and we went to that line. To get here we have crossed the continent line.

It also has the church where the Romanovs were killed in the revolution. It was a house at the time but they built the church on the spot and canonized the Romanovs in modern times. It was pretty spec, extra gold as you do, and some monks were on a tour and started a hymn while we were there. Also it was called the church of the spilled blood like the last one we saw in petersburg where Alexander II was killed.

And we did a bit of going to bed early and getting up late, only there a couple of days, there was probably a little more of this town than we saw though we did like every sight.

An unusual thing is it was a college town so a bunch of super friendly semi locals proliferated.

Omsk

Omsk was where Dostoevsky was imprisoned. The Petrovists were a group that advocated rights to the serfs and some of them (including D, and maybe) the violent overthrow of the government but you know the French revolutions so Nicholas I was pretty sketch, and then he read aloud a letter Belinsky's letter to Gogol and he got sent to Siberia. The whole group was taken to Peter and Paul fortress (St Petersburg but I didn't make it there next time hey) where three of them were mock executed. Dostoevsky was next in line. The ghost of this follows him through every story.

So he went for 6 years to Siberia, some time commuted to get it down to that. And lived in a prison colony … he didn't get back for 9 years, and he published House of the Dead in the 10^th.

But nothing is there anymore. Not the prison colony or where he was held, we saw the museum but it wasn't much, but the town was lovely, about to celebrate its 300^th anniversary and redoing parks and avenues. We spent some time profitably wandering and seeing the cathedral and the streets and playing pokemon and doing laundry and talking. But in three days we probably had more time than we needed for the town.

Literature

Petersburg is full of ghosts. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, even Tolstoy write this city. So there are two things, one is that they write, and then you see, and you recognise it. And the second way, that the streets you wander are the same streets, the same names, the same buildings they walked down. You see the world through their eyes.

My mom and I slipped out one day while everyone else was still asleep and made it to Haymarket square where Raskolnikov knelt down and begged for forgiveness, and walked from there to Dostoevsky's house. Now when I say Dostoevsky's house, he lived in 10 different places in Petersburg and moved around a ton. Three of them were on the same road though, and he wrote the Gambler and Crime and Punishment and so much. And Crime and Punishment was the key one, the one I understood anew from being here. Because Raskolnikovs house is around the corner from his, a corner he walked looking up at the garrets and decided which one he would live in, which basement the landlady, which first floor his friend. The plaster was broken on the top corner where he was. And catty corner to D's house is Sonia's house, like I think you could see her window from his. As he wrote as he did. And then you can walk past Sonia's house to where he would commit the murder, along Gribdoyev canal and we stayed off the same canal, across the bridge where he agonised and thought of throwing the packet over but then he didn't he hid it under a stone and further to where he killed the moneylender, and there's a courtyard, fenced, where the construction would have been set up that covered his crime, where the workmen would have been milling. And I imagined all of his wanderings to be much further, but no they are all there in the few blocks he would have wound himself around and around. In his neighborhood where he lived. To see it all, so small so ungrand, changes my reading of the book I think, but I will have to read it again to know, it's been years.

The day my mom was sick, Jes and Harmony and I went to another major cathedral and Nabokov's house. Talk about your ghosts, you know for Nabokov his childhood and this childhood home loomed so large. And they had things like his chess problems and books they had reclaimed from his collection and his butterfly collection. Though you know he never could go back and the library was seized and sold and the ones that have been recollected it's years later, he talked about finding one of the books in a used bookshop in London. How did it get there? What are the chances of crossing paths with it again? How would it feel to find it and to find it on the terms that it is not yours? The house itself, so beautiful, wood inlay on the ceiling and walls, and so detailed, and again, I recognised it when I saw it, like seeing something you have seen in a dream.

And you know Nabokov, he drew an imaginary butterfly on all his books and dedicated it to his wife vera, and he would give each a genus and species and the imaginary butterflies fit into the real imagined genus and species.

And of course Yasnaya Polyana.  

Reading Dostoevsky in Omsk

Yes, man is a pliable animal- he must be so defined: a being who grows accustomed to everything!

Is it possible that men so differently situated can feel in an equal degree the punishment inflicted? But why think about questions that are insoluble? The drum beats, and we must return to barracks.

Is it not rather the feeling that overwhelms you directly you enter the prison that in spite of all efforts, all precautions, it is impossible to turn a living man into a corpse, to stifle his feelings, his thirst for vengeance and for life, his passions, and his imperious desire to satisfy them? (Why people working with convicts fear them)

Reading House of the Dead, and this incredible article I read in Petersburg

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer

means I'm musing on crime and punishment lately. 

Ok and one more from the TV show Mr. Robot. 

We got back from the beach and I emptied my shoes out onto the floor.  My mom yelled at me, but my dad didn't get mad.  He told me about the millions of years it took for the sand to be made and put on the beach that then I brought home in my shoes.  Every day we change the world, and that made me feel good, until I considered how many days and years it would take me to move all the sand off the beach.  Every day we change the world, but to change it enough to matter takes more time than most of us have.

Road trippin across the universe

Apparently Jeremy is bad for blogging. Hearts of Iron 4 came out while we were in Vilnius so there's been a lot of that plus TV shows he brought me in our downtime instead of this. Also road trip means no long train and bus rides. But here's some things I remember. 

Me and J's schedule since I wrote last:

Prague 5 days

Krakow 1 week

Stopover in Warsaw 2 nights

"Flight" to Vilnius

Vilnius 1 week

Bus to Riga

Riga 3 days

Road trip begins

Ethnographic park

Small ruins up to Gaujas national park

We went along the river to a little ruin, but it was so little, the remains of a wall that J cancelled our plans to do the next, yet smaller one down the line and instead we torched straight up to Sigulda, in the Gaujas national park. We stayed at a roadside motel, which was tots on the highway but charmingly backed by the river, and had a dinner that was all grey peas and globs of mayonaisse. I liked the salad and it was so local, lunch this day was also a grey pea pile at another tots local place but it was cool all these places no one spoke a word of english and you had to get by, it was like getting off the tourist track for real and we were the literal only people at the ruins. 

Gaujas national park 3 nights

So first day when we arrived we went to the Sigulda castle ruins, there's a pretty manor house which is now gov offices and the ruins behind them, and they were pretty well developed, tower you could climb, half fallen castle walls, and fantastic views over the river valley to Turaida castle on the other side. 

Second day we woke up feeling really lazy and spent all morning playing computer games. We were between canoeing down the river or walking this loop J devised, and we picked the loop and then there was no start time so we totally played til we got hungry which was like 3 pm. But then there we were in town so we took the cable car up to the top of Krimulda manor, now a sanitorium and a place you can stay yay might do that next time. And we walked along the river down the ridge one way and then crossed it on this fantastic pedestrian bridge and then walked back along the river and just as we were rounding our third hour of pleasant walking and I was thinking I'd really rather not climb this hill again a ski lift appeared by magic and we rode up it for a euro basically back to our car. Thanks god!  This was also the day J's knee gave up, it's doing weird weakness and popping, so we limited our walking thereafter. 

Third day was stormrainy and we were supposed to do castles but again we played computer games literally all day til night while the rain blew outside. It was v fun and lazy. But I will leave gaujas with a list of things I would still do there. Just full of fun that place, not the most spectactular scenery or great sights but there's just so much to keep you happily busy and the river and pine forests are always there and they just have all you need. 

Fourth day we left and we started the day at the ski lift which had a slide you could take down in a little cart on a metal track like a gravity fed roller coaster. Then on to Gutmanis cave which was billed as the largest cave in the balkans which I should have looked at the proviso bc it was not even a cave just an indentation in the limestone cliff. But it was the location of the Rose of Turaida.

The Rose of Turaida was a maiden lived in Turaida castle, until everyone in the castle was killed when it was taken over by the Swedes except her. The king found her in the rubble, still alive, and raised her as his own. She grew very beautiful, and came to be known as the rose of turaida. She lived in turaida castle and had a lover, a humble gardener, who she would meet in Gutmanis cave. One day a jealous suiter forged a note from her lover and got her to the cave where he gave her the choice rape or death. I think actually he just gave her the choice rape, but she had a red silk scarf and told him it would protect her from a sword and he should try which he did so, she chose death, and he left her there slain. Her lover came later and found her, in his distress he got covered in her blood, so the kingdom tried him for her death. But the servant who had delivered the fake message came forward, and so he wound up spared, and planted a linden tree on her grave. 

We then went to Turaida castle, which was still in the process of restoration, there were actively people building there some of the towers. The outside of the castle was really awesome. There is a big garden populated by statues from folk songs, and the castle is red brick and shingles which looks really charming against the green forest and blue sky, The inside was less impressive, but J found some fun info about bishops concubines and the like. We then drove up to Cesis. 

Cesis up to outside Parnu:

 Cesis rules! This was the fourth castle we had seen in the national park: Sigulda castle, Krimulda manor countsish, Turaida castle home of the rose of Turaida, and now this one, plus ones in other towns, really we're up to in the range of 10 castles this trip. 

Cesis caslte is not the best restored, or the most sumptuously decorated, or the oldest, but it was my favourite. It just felt like you were in a castle the whole time, so castle esque.  First you went to the dungeons, which a lot of them have, but in this castle you descended down a treacherous iron ladder into a hole, then down a steep stair, then you were submerged in the dungeon itself. I have a fear of incarceration, and going into this dungeon made me a little scared, even though I could get back out again. There was a window, or long hole, through which a little daylight came and it chilled you physically because underground and psychologically. We got out of there and the castle has been fully restored on one side which we didn't get to see and left original aka ruins on the other side or partially restored, so we walked through the grounds where the convent used to be and saw the place where some people blew themselves up to prevent capture bc that was apparently worse in some war, the balkans had a lot of wars as the christians, then polish then russians, then swedes all took them over basically from the 15th century on. 

We mounted the stairs which you need a lantern to do because the stairs are dark and shadowy so you go up in candle light and the top floors and the actual chambers are well lit because of the windows, but the stairwell has no windows and so it's pretty dark, you can't see your feet and really have to use the lantern to make your way. It's candlelight, so added romanticism. 

We got up to the maesters chamber which has get this original 15th or 16th century gothic brick archways, OMG people. This is the most beautiful gothic archway I'd maybe ever seen it was like stars within stars and back when it was plastered they painted the night sky in the panels. And the whole chamber was airy and beautiful. 

And you could go up two more levels but not in per say because the first level you could see the ceiling wanted to crumble, more restoration needed, but you could see the domed archway, and the topmost one where you could walk around an arcade but they hadn't built a floor over the aforementioned dome roof presumably for the same reason. And the views were so great because you know it's the other towers of the castle or the Gauja river and pine forests, or the lovely medieval town of Cesis. 

Which outside the castle there's an incredibly sculptured park and a manor house hotel, and the whole town is just pretty with the stone buildings and the hey hey hey.

We drove on out then, J's knee had had enough and it was 6pm so we got to our hotel at like 8:30, which made the no dinner a little sad but we'd had a sumptuous lunch in Cesis, this woman put herb butter on my bread with a pastry nozzle in front of me, you could watch the chef make the food in the open kitchen and like three people plated it all bustled around, our hotel was intentionally really remote, but we turned out to not want it so the next morning we headed into Parnu proper which was better. 

Parnu 2 nights: 

So we saw the ocean. Which was actually great I mean for Europe I mean. Travel books describe it as "ice blue" and that's ok, though also kind of flat mud brown, and there's sand, and the day we were there was the warmest of the whole trip so while you didn't feel like swimming you weren't wearing a coat. (Why don't more people live in the habitable areas of the world?)  And you could imagine, on this flat sea, kayaking, stand up paddling, sailing, rowing, all amazing through the thousand islands of Estonia. So not a crap sea, but you know. 

But Parnu itself was a lovely jazzy city with the coolest selection of cafes and jammin street culture since at least Riga, maybe Vilnius. J's knee is busted, and the brace we got him is not working, so he voted for a rest day. We found a small room in this really fancy old hotel that we laughed at the chance of staying at in the cafe ped mall district within our budget and have been there ever since, winning as the US in our game (mmm taking over the entire world) and splitting a bottle of wine at the fancy restaurant. We checked in just as the rain and bluster started but it was beautiful sun at the beach. So winning!  Today it's this and I made my last big purchase, flights home via the US. There are some more wrinkles to be worked out in travel plans today. And more war winning on the computer. Right now we're in the sumptuous lounge of our hotel, and it's still raining. 

Then the future

Parnu a third night or one more nat park?

Talinn 5 nights 

Helsinki 7 nights with mom and Harmony coming!

Say goodbye to Jeremy.

Aus Berlin

Ok travel from Africa to Europe.  I visited the Zimbabwe side of the falls the morning of my departure.  It was an incredible time.  I wanted to get a few souvenirs and presents as well so was on the lookout for my street seller friends.  The guys we had talked to before weren't there, in fact there was only one guy on the hustle at 7:30 in the morning. 

You see I was up quite early to maximize my falls time before 10:30 when I had to go to the airport.  I had it all worked out great, the taxi who was picking me up was getting me again and keeping my stuff in the interim.  It was bison again. 

Ok so I haggled across the bridge, got some stuff I was happy with, and then crossed the border.  Smooth, though I found some locals that crossed into Zimbabwe just to do their grocery shopping.  Cheaper prices see. 

I cut into the falls and saw the whole side, Jes and I had cut the ends a bit, so from the first vista where you watch the water tumble over from behind to the last view of the bridge with double rainbow. 

I broke my previous rainbow record of 15 with 19 total rainbows sighted.  As before it was so full there were some vistas you couldn't actually see for the mist.  But the turbo insanity of the Zimbabwe side where you see the whole fall and the horseshoe bit and you have to get at an angle to see the whole thing. 

And I was soaked from the spray in my bathing suit.  All in the plans but then I arrive at the airport some adventures later soaked to the skin.  I checked in and changed and caught my flight no problem.

I was feeling weak after the first 2 hour flight chilling in my 4 hour layover.  I was really tired, feeling over it, whatever but aware there was a 9 hour flight, another 4 hour layover and then a 6 hour flight.  I did not feel ready.  But God did me a big solid and the next flight was half empty, and my seat mate had taken my seat, so I kindly went and took over a row of three for me.  It took me three tries and some embarrassment, but plane takes off I lie down and determinedly sleep til plane lands.  Srsly.  So then it felt like nothing after that and I got to Berlin feeling positively human. 

Checked in with the nicest German I've ever met.  I was here for 6 nights so everything came out of the bag and I spent a couple of hours on it.  Went down to a local spot for veggie burger and double cocktails, showered, slept.  Not even a thang.

Next day was my solo day in Berlin, so I walked to the Kathe Kollwitz museum.  I am a genius of serendipity, so the museum was walking distance from my hotel and saw the cool Wilhelm gedenkenskirche which was the bombed church restored with beauty with the new awesome twilight themed chapel I wrote my last blog post at.  Kathe Kollwitz rules.  They had like all her work, lots of engravings and woodcuts and they had gotten permission to recast small her entire sculpture ouvre.  I savored it seeing everything twice. 

Beer pub and long wander back via some other spots. 

J arrived at 8:30 am the next day, I met him at the airport and we caught up some and then kept him up by a walk to the story of Berlin museum which was a little cheesy but fun and involved a tour of a nuclear bunker. 

Between the walking and museum and finding more German food, we kept him up til like 6pm.  Good work.  The next day we wanted to be big so we did checkpoint Charlie and walked all the way there, via the gedenkenskirche and the tiergarten (like central park v pretty and tons of songbirds)  and some bits of the wall and memorial stuff.  And we did the museum, which I remembered as better than I found it this time.  And then we went to the topography of terror museum which I found full of good info but very reliant on historical photos and text.  The best bit for me was listening in on the tours.  My memory of Berlin was very don't talk about the war but listening to these kids talking was very much like taking responsibility and respecting history.  I wonder if I'm seeing different things or if there has been a generational culture shift. 

Next day we struck out to monuments Brandenburg gate Reichstag Holocaust memorial all in a row on the other side of the tiergarten so another long walk. Then we continued to the afternoon Brecht walking tour, his grave, house, library (in house), theater and square with memorial.  The theater apparently still performs him often and keeps to his principals, even has some old timers who date from his time.  Oh for knowing German.  I had done the house and grave before but enjoyed them just as much this time.  The guide did many cute anecdotes. And it's a beautiful house and a beautiful graveyard.  Made me think how much our mothers would respectively love it.  And the theater filled me with feels. 

We trained home footbroken and spent our last day planning and scheming through Krakow.  Plus watching Netflix and chilling.

And today we enacted one of our schemes to great delight.   We are training to Prague and took a 6 hour stopover in Dresden, to which I have never been.  I did not think it would be so beautiful because you know the bombing.  But it's apparently a miracle of restoration, so we spent about 2 hours walking around seeing awesome buildings.  We spent another 2 having a lingering Italian lunch overlooking the Elbe.  And the last 2?  Well it turns out that the annual Dixieland blues and jazz festival of Dresden was on today, so pretzels and beer on tap big crowds of enthusiastic listeners and about 7 jazz bands proliferated helpfully starting right at the train station and continuing to old town.  Thanks God!  Way to do your job of making the world awesome!

So we meandered through that on the way out and back.  And there was much rejoicing.  And I found out Prague is playing Madame butterfly and don Giovanni while I'm there.  But tonight napful.  I'm so sleepy for having lazed all day yesterday.  This train is actually fun.  And going through the Elbe valley so pretty. 

As I looked at the beautiful world

So John Green was saying this thing about how he was arguing with someone about religion and  they were saying how there's all these contradictions in the Bible and therefore you can't believe in God and he was like um well I still do.

And then I was thinking about covering my hair in Zanzibar and how jes said it was like cultural appropriation and for me it's like the respect of tourism, like being extra polite in Asia, and how I try to cross myself in front of the alters in Catholic places.

And then I was thinking about why I feel respect for religion when I pretty actively antibelieve in it. 

So there's this part in mister Pip, I went back to try to find the passage but it doesn't exist in the book as much as in my head.  Spoiler alert.

The jaundiced and jaded corporal sends her mother off behind her, and then he turns her around.  And she describes how beautiful the world is, she lives on a tropical island.  And she talks about every sunbeam glittering off the waves, and the verdant jungle glimmering before her. 

And she hears him suck on his cigarette, and other noises behind her and later she finds out that her mother is being macheted to death.  And this is what happened as I looked at the beautiful world. 

And I think why that scene affected me so much is that it seems like a metaphor for what life is like.  I can't shake the belief that the world is a good and beautiful place.  But everything I know seems to argue against this, what with the wars rapes genocides etc.  But no amount of knowledge of how terrible the world is seems to be able to shake from me the truth that is evidently screaming at all my senses from every blade of grass and every rock.  And maybe that's what it's like for people who believe in God too, the same way, that you can't know enough to countermand what you see and more than see, what suffuses your being everywhere.  The world is good.  It just is.  And terrible things happen here but...

Maybe feeling this way is a luxury of privilege,  but I don't think so.  They know it in Malawi too I think. Anyway, that's what I'm thinking on a chilly Monday. 

I had a lovely rush of loving feelings for the northern hemisphere when I rode into Berlin.  Cornicing! Wisteria vines! Clouds! I can't even imagine anyone putting the first piece of litter on these pristine tree lined work of art streets.  Today I'm more remembering why the south Pacific is just better.  I'm wearing everything I own and shivering with a dripping nose.  It's May, people.  Adorable African guys on the plane had a similar reaction when we landed in Jo'burg in the fall rain.  "Is this Africa?" They said rubbing their shoulders vigorously.  Preach on brothers. 

Malawi

So we stayed at lake Malawi, a huge freshwater lake which consumes a third of the country.  We were near a village.  The most profound thing about Malawi was the people.  When you left the resort compound the kids would flock to you, and try to hold your hand.  They wanted to be picked up, and they had little songs they would all sing.  You could hold hands and sing with them and even when you weren't doing anything with them they would show up just to watch you.

We did a tourist sell thing where we did a painting with a local craftsman, who was like a lot better than his life.  He was a quiet thoughtful man with a delicate brush stroke.  But his only decent brush he had made by cannibalizing other brushes, and his paints were shitty primary school acrylics you had to take a 4 hour trip to get at the big market in Lusaka.  And he functionally only did one painting BC it was for tourists.  We asked him how many he could do in a day, and he said 15 but he couldn't sell that many, so he just did them as they sold.  He took a lot of patience with us. 

His nephew was one of the beach sellers, seen as a nuisance and kind of one, but very friendly and the only viable job in town and what all the young men were doing.  Independent but not cutthroat there were some accepted cultures about talking to one tourist at a time so they didn't get too inundated.  They held a bonfire party on the beach, I guess to lure tourists off the compound because they were still a bit on the clock but they also had the fire and the kids came out and danced and they taught us local games and invited us to the local bar. 

I later met a guy in Johannesburg who told us that when he was a kid in apartheid he used to think white people were like gods and he wanted to touch them to see if they were real, but your parents would beat you if you tried it.  This reminded us uncomfortably of the kids in Malawi. 

It would be strange and wonderful to be somewhere like that long enough that you became unexceptional, that you could interact with these amazing people a bit more like a person yourself. 

I went snorkeling with the super cool snorkeling guy who was living this dream along with the cool girl who was doing biodiversity research.  We motored out to the island and floated around seeing awesome fish. 

The fish color and diversity was great, the most diversity of species of a certain kind of fish  in the world.   There were these rocks from which the island was built and in the cracks in between those you could see the fish more readily, who his in their sheltered harbors. 

The downside of this is you have the waves from the wind crashing against the rocks.  And where I come from you don't hang out face first against crashing waverocks.  Jes gave up pretty quickly in the face of this and a dodgy fin, I continued around the island but as I came around to the windward side it got more and more intense and then I lost my mask and in the process of retrieving it lost a fin and in the process of dealing with all that washed up on shore.  I took this opportunity and the shakiness accompanying it to explore the island with Jes and hang out on warm rocks and then I went to complete my circuit around the island.  I did make it, and got some more awesome fish views, and then we motored back, a pretty great day all around. 

The night before we partied hard and late, at the bar then the bonfire, then when we got back there was dancing on the bar.  And the afternoon was the painter and then this local meal with dancing and singing with the kids.