tours - grand and otherwise

It's been over a month since we got back and being in Europe is receding into memory's rearview mirror. I was going to post about the last stops - Dubrovnik, Corfu, Santorini, Mykonos, and Athens. But them I started thinking about tourism more generally and then I got back into my usual habits and so I didn't post anything at all.

Let me think about tourism.

From a bunch of historical fiction I've read over the years, I've gotten then impression that it was once essential to every rich, young, European man's education to take The Grand Tour. That meant hitting all the capitals of Europe by coach with an entourage or at least a tutor. The idea was that exposure is educational, that someone would come back with a broader view of the world, more cultured, or at least with some swag.

Now is not all that different, though travel is available to more than a tiny percentage of the population. People from all over the world come to Europe to, well to do what exactly? Some people spend long periods in a single place and try to get a sense of a particular culture, society, how people live. Others do a tour, by train, boat, or drive to see different cities, different countries. There's all that history. There are all these cultural markers. And so there are tons of us trooping dutifully through and over them.

The picture above is the Acropolis. It was a cool drizzly day. (It began to rain in earnest in a few hours. we got drenched.) There's was a crowd. Admission is 12 euros, about 15 - 16 bucks. There were people in loosely gathered clumps who were clearly on a tour together. (Guides hold little paddles overhead to keep their flocks in order.) There were families and couples and singletons. We all trooped up to the top. The marble on the top was nearly glassy with rain. It was strange to walk on the mainly red marble that was the matrix of the surface, not tiles or flagstones.

What do we get by standing on these places, in front of these things? What do we get by taking pictures, often selfies, at these sites?

I don't think it's education. To learn something takes more time than an hour or two, takes more focus than reading the helpful signs in multiple languages (but nearly always English). I think at its worst it's acquiring experiences, which is never bad. At best, it's making connection to people who, in most ways, were exactly like us.

trogir and split

Trogir and Split are both UNESCO Historic sites. I'd never heard of Trogir, but Split. The moment the guide said Diocletian's palace, I knew where I was.

One of the most amazing books written in the 20th century is Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She wrote it just before the beginning of WWII. It was published in 1940. It's about a trip she and her husband make through Yugoslavia.  It's a huge book, over a thousand pages. She mixes history, politics, economics, traveler's notes, and personal anecdotes in a way bloggers only dream about. She's opinionated and some of the things she says seem incredibly dated now. But she's insightful and writes with so much engagement with the places she's looking at and a sharp analysis of how Europe is coming to war.

She talks about Diocletian in the section on Dalmatia. He was a Dalmatian boy who went to Rome and made good. He rose to be a general and then they made him emperor. He ruled from age for to age 60, retired in one piece, and moved back home to Dalmatia where he built this palace and died ten years later.

West wrote, "It is not, of course, remarkable as an example of Roman architecture. It cannot hold a candle to the Baths of Caracalla, or the Forum, or the Palantine. But it makes and extraordinary revelation of the continuity of history. Once passes through the gate that is squeezed between the rubbisheries on the quayside straight into antiquity. . . . the vistas have been filled in with people. Rather less than one-fifth of the population of Split, which numbers forty-four thousand, lives in the nine acres of the palace precincts; but the remaining four-fifths stream through it all day long because the passages which pierce it from north the south and east to west are the most convenient ways to the new parts of the town from the harbour."

This is still true and there's a huge market on the east side of the market.

istria

We arrived in Rovinj. We had been told that a local women's choir was going to meet us. But we didn't quite expect this.

It's a Croatian lesbian singing group. They sang an old love song that everyone (who's Croatian anyhow) knew, so the entire dock was singing along. (They'd changed the sexes of the people in the song, too,) They also gave us postcards and cookies.


They say there are two different soils on the Istrian peninsula - terra rossa (red dirt) and terra blanca (white dirt). The guide, who was from Rovinj, said the red dirt was stronger, made more flavorful vegetables.

Who knows? The soil was red as the dirt in Oklahoma.

The morning was cloudy on the way to Motovun, the first of several walled cities we'd see. They could have called this the Venetian Conquest Cruise. Every place we stopped the Venetians have held long enough to throw up a fortress, set up a double line of walls, and tag the place with the lion of St. Mark. Here the lion holds a closed book, meaning not open for business. The Venetian held it for a long time, then Napoleon, then the Austrians, then it was Yugoslavia for a short time, now it's Croatia. These histories are not unique. Nor is the city square idea, but there's something oddly modern feeling about the proportions in this one.

Motovun has this city and an annual film festival, but what the region really has is truffles. Some guy here pulled a 20 kilo one out of the ground and made his fortune. I've had them in pasta and had salads with the oil, but that was no preparation for the sheer funkiness of the real things a foot from my nose. There were like cheese and feet and inexplicably delicious smelling.

The Romans settled here.It's the oldest human settlement I'd seen until Athens. People often write about how much longer European history is than this US. It's undeniably true, but, after this trip I'm less and less sure what that means. More stable political systems? Hah. More tolerance? You should hear how Croatians talk about the Italians. Better healthcare? Yes, but I don't think that's about the age of a society and some modern European nations are younger than the USA. What the great age of these places show me is humans being humans, in all the ways we are human over a long, long time.

venice

I picked up a copy of Death in Venice for my iPad before I left town. I wasn't very careful, so it's a poor translation by some languages guy from Oxford. I should dig up the version I've had for years to compare. The writing is cumbersome, which is not what I remember about Mann at all, but I did remember correctly that he mentioned the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido as a hotel on the beach where Aschenbach watched Tadzio and eventually died.

We were staying at the Hotel Excelsior. From our window we could see the beaches, which in summer must be filled with people on the sand or under the little tents that lined the sand facing the sea. It is fall and it was raining, but there were people surfing in the morning, though the waves looked small and tame compared to the Pacific.

We only had one afternoon in Venice, so even though we'd been on a plane for over ten hours we took the hotel's water taxi over to St. Marks. It was completely worth it.

Venice is lovely, even when it's pissing down rain and there are a ton of people walking around taking pictures of the architecture and selfies and what all. We walked around the piazza and a bit into the city. The place is a combination of old beautiful buildings and Fisherman's Wharf-style stores. It makes sense. Every tourist in the world has to come here and there are great reasons for it. It's a gorgeous city and not like anywhere else (sorry Venice, CA). It feels both exposed to the public eye and incredibly private. I was standing on a bridge looking down a canal to take a picture, when I looked up to see a man in a cardigan looking down at me from a room two stories up. He waved and I waved back. Soon we were starving and ended up having indifferent pasta at a place not far from the piazza. The house facing me had lit up windows, though it wasn't quite dusk. At one point, I looked up to see a dark haired girl in a red dress reaching to close the heavy green shutters. She'd pushed aside the gauze drapes to reveal a room completely lit by chandeliers. It was wonderful, brief, and gave me a sense of this intimate side of the city, just a step away from the tourists.

Coming back through St. Marks on the way to the taxi, there were the first of these guys with the weirdest toy I've ever seen. Basically, it's a plastic, vaguely spherical thing, that completely flattens when smacked down on a flat surface. It slowly regains its original shape of a frog, or tomato, or whatever. I saw them in Croatia. I saw them in Greece. Darker skinned guys sold them and I never saw anyone buy one. There was also this LED toy that spun up into the air. And there was the woman with pigeons on her arm.

going to europe - it starts at the airport

So, we went to Europe for a ten day cruise. At the international terminal, we were through in less than twenty minutes and then into the spare, modernist Air France terminal. There were plenty of places to sit. There was some interesting food to eat. There were a bunch of people not speaking English or Spanish. There were unruly lines.

I knew we were headed into something new.