Miró at the Kumu

Untitled. Undated. Gift from the artist.

I was so inspired when we got back from today's outing to the Kumu Art Museum of Estonia where there was a Miro exhibit, that I tried my hand. I'm going to make more.

TTT is looking forward to visiting Joan's hometown. She'll mainly check Gaudi's masterworks in their native environment. But I'll tell her to check out whether the landscape really looks different in Catalunya, if the sun resembles a gibbous inkblot and the moon is like a sharp-pointed banana there. Maybe they are.

Here is one of Morgan's efforts ("making of" video provided to fend off any possible action from the Miro estate):




As always, the Kumu's permanent exhibition and the 5th floor are a treat. More on that later.

Topics for an Estonian Seinfeld

Back in 1991, when the first self-serve supermarkets were introduced in Estonia, you couldn't enter one of these stores without first picking up a shopping basket. If there were no more shopping baskets stationed at the entrance, you were out of luck -- you had to wait. Even if you needed only one item. Slowly it must have dawned on people that perhaps it actually wasn't that big a deal, and in fact blocking people from entering the store might be at cross-purposes to the whole philosophy of moving as much product as possible. Though I'm guessing the stores initially kept the silly rule in place and bought more shopping baskets.

Another thing that struck many foreigners as strange (and which persisted well into this decade) was that Kalev, the only 50m swimming pool in town, required you to visit its resident physician and have the skin between your toes inspected for some sort of fungus. I say some sort, as it was never clear what was being searched for. If it wasn't such a nuisance, it would have been rather quaint -- a throwback to the early 20th century health boom era, with the curative emphasis transferred from the colon to the foot. You went to an old doctor's office above the pool and paid 5 kroons (50 cents) for a certificate that was good for an extended peiod and you had -- HAD -- to have it with you each time you went swimming. Eventually various private pools opened, which did not require toe screenings -- nor, as you might guess did they suffer epidemics of ringworm -- and after Kalev was remodeled the old physician was no longer employed there and her office full of contraptions was gone, too.

There are still a couple "relics" in everyday life for which there is no longer a rational need -- things that would keep an Estonian Seinfeld, if there were one, supplied with material. Keeping unopened cans of fish in the fridge, for instance. Supermarkets still pointlessly waste cold case space and energy chilling non-perishable cans. This is a "relic" whose provenance is easy to spot -- it comes from the Soviet days, when canning standards were not as high.

Some are harder to place. Whoever first mandated that only high cut brief swimwear is to be worn a pools? And whatever for? Some sort of prurient reason? What's with the female cleaning staff who scrub the floors, pointedly keeping their heads down? Suure, they're not looking... Is it for their benefit? (I recently saw kids wearing long Bermuda shorts in the pool area, so the Speedo rule now seems to be relaxing.)

Security guards come to mind right away. The per capita incidence of security guards must be among the highest in the EU. It's not connected at all to "beefed-up" global security in the wake of Nov. 11, but simply a parasitic phenomenon from the days when crime was perceived to be high. There is a incredible array of companies. They are everywhere. They make American rent-a-cops look go-getters. Usually loitering uselessly near doorways, or in the case of the US Embassy, the one case that is related to terrorism, lying down on the job in a parked car.

It's sort of silly, because crime is really not that high. How can Estonia as a society afford to pay these people? It's worse than silly, because lots of security guards dovetails perfectly with the ridiculous charges of fascism levelled against Estonia by some Russian operatives.

(Speaking of security forces, Kalev Spa's logo is five-sixths of a double Sig-rune - a coincidence but might do well to contemplate a change. Before the Russians seize on the connection with the newsreel and other period shots of perfect Aryan bodies in the site's Flash banner. Anyone?)

There are other less tangible persistent erroneous beliefs. The belief that in a cold climate, one must eat high-calorie food. Well...we're not lumberjacks, here. Most Estonians aren't busting their ass all day out-of-doors and this day and age. For a Nordic people, we sure fear the cold more than the norm. I am asked at least ten times in the course of a winter whether I am not cold. Of course I'm not cold -- I'm Estonian. Never mind emotionally.

There are bright spots, Oma Maitse, the culinary/lifestyle magazine, last month came down hard on fish companies for unnecessarily lacing everything they make with preservatives (kudos). But loth to fade is the belief that eating meat is healthy and essential. Pork is a national addiction, of course, and the various rationales represent denial at its purest. I should note for the record that my own suspicion has long been that pork is a cytotoxic meat, so I'm prejudiced. But when you have even German football coaches (the home of the wurst) expressing concern that Estonian players eat a "Neanderthal" diet and that they actually hobble their cause and their careers, and despite numerous examples of vegetarian athletes, you have to wonder why the message is not getting through.

Yet the excuses are legion -- that meat is essential for intellectual activity of the brain, for example. Well, I suffered a total shutdown of intellectual activity of the brain recently when I ordered eggs with bacon at the cafe on the street where I live. Instead of crisp slices, the bacon was slightly rendered lardy chunks mixed in with the eggs, and the plate was already swimming in grease. How a nation that is so steeped in pork can often do the meat so badly is beyond me, but that is a matter of taste, which I won't get into here.

The hypothesis I advance here is that our outdated dietary views are just as instrumental in our life expectancy being in the 60s for men, as are booze and smoking. Perhaps they should bring back the road-to-Wellville style Kalev doctor's office just so they could have a few posters of what nitrosamines and red meat can do to the colon.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and häid jõule!

We divided the 24th and 25th up between the two Estonian sets of grandparents as we did last year.

TTT's family had a real spread this year, cold dishes in the afternoon and the roast pork late night, which was a departure, and prevented food coma, though I noticed Joel was down for the count at one point.

When we arrived in the afternoon, Morgan needed to get some fresh air and so he and Mum walked from the corner store to the house. That left me and Joel, who had ridden with us from town. I thought it would be a good idea to let him get some driver's ed practice in. The Estonian road test is Byzantine, unfairly hard, and so a lot of people in their 20s don't have licenses.

I asked him if he knew where the pedals were. He said yes. He followed my directions on how to ease up on the clutch before giving it a little gas and only stalled once. He did a good job avoiding potholes, overcorrecting only slightly, then for some reason it was off to the races, he couldn't find the brake and started whipping the steering wheel around in an attempt to slow down, the Ford went into a shallow ditch. We've had worse near-disasters on Christmas Eve, and nothing was worse for the wear.

Morgan was thrilled with his wooden train set (which TTT bought in the States and shipped by container, red tape and all). He didn't seem to purely take after me in that he was interested in other presents, instead of getting engrossed in just one.

He sang the ABC song (with some help) and warmed to the task of having to perform for people before getting presents. By the morning of the 26th it was getting pretty good.

At his Estonian paternal grandparents, we had antipasti followed by a hearty Portuguese fisherman's soup, which is my mom's big specialty, justifiably, even though she is neither Portuguese nor a fisherman. But she has good connections. Even Sasha the cat had only the freshest -- four whole sprats.

Teele the dog gave some (very mild) warning growls around Morgan. This had never happened before. Maybe she felt left out as we forgot a present for her. Or Morgan's reputation as being a bit hard to take (in the dog world) in large doses is spreading.

Who makes the better sauerkraut -- TTT's father or my mother? TTT's father cooks it for 24 hours and there is pulled pork in there. Mom's bursts off the tongue with brown sugar and balsamico tones. Contentious question.

Morgan was audibly thrilled with cars he got all the way from the States. An Estonian-English kid's picture dictionary will be a hit.

Each year, we have to sing around the piano -- great fun and we must do at least Good King Wenceslas with the different voices. My sightreading skills have got imperceptibly (I hope) rustier but my left hand is still more agile thanks to guitar, so it worked out where I was glad to play bass notes and stepfather played treble.

No Country

Hardly a Christmas topic and with nary an Estonian tie-in (other than Estonia also being a tough place for old people to live in):

I saw a low-res version of No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers' take on the Cormac McCarthy novel, which I considered a great book and most critics are considering a masterpiece of a movie. It only opens here in February and I couldn't wait.

A couple observations:

1. Chigurh, the hulking, enigmatic serial killer, reminds me of nothing more than Chief Broom. I wonder if this is intentional, a cinematic quotation. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Chief Broom was one very odd cat. But one suspects, even though in that movie we rooted for him -- the Chief came to represent McMurphy's freedom (what McMurphy represented came to reside in Chief Broom) -- this wasn't someone you would want to meet on a West Texas road, either.

2. WHen I read the book, perhaps due to the difficulty of the prose I began entertaining a strange notion that Chigurh and the lead character Moss were one and the same man. That for some reason, perhaps Vietnam-related PTSD, Moss had snapped into two personas. I have to revisit the book, but I am sure there are sinister hints there. One of them is that both Chigurh and Moss at one point offer money for a new shirt.

One blogger also saw Moss, the sheriff and Chigurh as the same person split in three ways. Which is also intriguing.

3. Are the Coen brothers considered "light"? The Coens salt the movie with a little humour here and there, but Fargo it is not. There is a world of difference even between the final woodchipper scene in that movie and the violence of No Country, which is stark, despairing. The movie I saw was one of those illegal minicamera smuggled-into-the-cinema affairs. The audience seemed to often expect a laugh, and laughed too long in the wrong places.

It's a girl (apparently)

Morgan's first ultrasound was an inconclusive experience for me -- though it did result in a great T-shirt that Tiia-Triin made for me at the local mall. The image is clearly that of a fetus but at the time I couldn't understand what I was seeing.

Not so our current work in progress, or should I now say, Elanda-Liis's first ultrasound, which was a high-res wonder and the first couple seconds even showed her moving her lips, no doubt saying something like "turn that noise down".

This was our foray into private medicine at Fertilitas.

It did get a little abstract after that. The physician spent an interminable time looking at the heart, but apparently it was a checklist he was running through -- everything was fine -- and it built up the suspense for the revelation of gender.

It's official, no White Christmas; TTT's birthday

I had it all planned -- I was going to start every blog entry with "38 degrees F and overcast", peevishly harping on the unusual streak of such weather in Tallinn.

I was going to have a conceptual literary riff on how water reaches its highest density at 38 and how that may be responsible for the feeling of leadenness in everyone's limbs and head.

But it is now 44 and overcast. It is as if the Portland weather we are owed for being there in the beautiful summer, then escaping has caught up to us. Both cities are "left coast" and maritime, but Portland weather tends to be even more mathematically monotonous than Tallinn's this time of year probably because of the vastness of the Pacific's effect. Here you get a colder baseline temperature and fickle squalls funnelled down the Baltic that modulate rather than moderate the climate.

Anyway, 38 degrees is about the temprature where you can start running comfortably in shorts, and 44 is where you can think about short sleeves. Which is what I would have done yesterday if not for the wind. Still, nothing like a fast run after three days of inactivity and fatty Advent food.

***

For all her life, my wife has received birthday presents first thing in the morning -- and it's something she expects. Seriously, you don't want to cross her in this regard.

Seems to be an Estonian custom that birthday well-wishers file into the bedroom of the person even before the celebrant has gone through their morning ablutions. I've never been a great server of food or giver or presents -- I like doing it but it has to be done with a certain panache -- otherwise the whole thing ends up being a bit jittery. But I guess instant gratification is a good way to start your birthday.

But this morning, ha-ha, she had to be the early riser for an appointment with her OB-GYN. I planned a breakfast of Belgian waffles, but I foolishly left the iron for last, assuming that everything is now available in late-capitalist Estonia. But no. Only panini presses, and no one had any waffle irons to borrow. It was also possible she would be asked to donate bloodwork and wasn't supposed to eat anyway. We made do with flowers and presents. Morgan gave her a yellow rose. And something he had made with his grandmother, but this one TTT opened as soon it was midnight the night before.

Later today we will accompany her for two more appointments, an ultrasound and a meeting with her midwife. Some birthday -- it almost sounds like ritualistic, seeing two doctors and a midwife. If you added an audience with an astrologer and counsellors you would have everything covered.

Part of the reason for so many doctors is that we had to schedule a bunch of routine things (such as double triple etc) at a private clinic instead of through the public health care system -- didn't get into the loop in time upon our return to the States to be accorded preferential treatment.

Besides, the system is overbooked -- TTT notes that none of the not small number of doctors among her classmates are working primarily in Estonia.
People who are referred to a specialist and indeed everyone with something other than an emergency are having to wait a long time.

Later family will come by. TTT made cheesecake which was a great success I believe it was two years ago.

Another man from Hope

Oh God.

I'm not taking the Lord's name in vain -- I'm appealing to Him, because it looks like we're going to need Him to say who's right and who's wrong, and not in a vox populi sense, but beforehand.

You know it's going to be a great primary season when discussion turns right away to theological points, like does Mormonism believe that Jesus and the Devil were
brothers? Huckabee believe it does, Romney has yet to respond, if he hasn't already vaporized like a wraith in the dawn's light due to internal contradictions.

I know more about the the Lord of the Rings demi-gods than I do the Mormon pantheon, even after reading an excellent piece in the New Yorker that our landlord kept as bathroom reading material in Portland.

But anyway, what we have in Huckabee is the killer candidate, with the perfect combination of folksy charm -- and remember, folksy charm tends to include the disingenuous use of feigned ignorance or garrulousness as an arguing tactic -- a folksy guy right down to the mythic American name, based on Huckleberry Finn/my huckleberry friend, chuckling down-home to us from fireside.

The chance of people spontaneously associating him with the evil corporation in the film "I (Heart) Hucklebees" or huckster is much smaller.

"The Singing Revolution"

Speaking of positive Estonian posts, here's something I don't even have to force or reach for. I haven't seen the documentary -- like Ken Burns' The War, you just have to be in the right place at the right time to catch it -- but the trailer is fabulous...the kind of professional treatment and galvanic emotional rush you usually get from watching any number of things (Miracle on Ice, etc) that often are not as important as the fact that a country called Estonia regained its independence. (Without a shot being fired, mind you - though of course armed partisans were in the woods until the late 1970s and dissidents died in labour camps.) No, I haven't seen it, but a friend of mine who does PR for Estonian films abroad and throws translation work my way also tells me off the record that it is "good, surprisingly good".

Nowadays, with Orange, Rose, Saffron, and maybe even fuchsia revolutions often seeming to get their colourful monikers before they fully pan out, it's important to remember that along with the more general "Velvet Revolution" in Central Europe, the "Singing Revolution" was the original thing. And certainly far from what passes for revolution in the West -- what-have-you-got gutterpunks and leftists at any larger WTO meeting.

This has been a public service announcement.

Speaking of revolutions, and trying to imagine if the Continental Congress accompanied by largely spontaneous evening gatherings where people sang songs... I was just thinking about the American Revolution the other day. There was an interesting article about how many of the writings in the Federalist Papers have not yet been published.

Two hundred years later, do we really know these guys anymore? I think I do. But anything can be argued so many ways. It is possible that the Founding Fathers were Deists, or it's possible that they were committed to a Christian nation. (Two very different things, those.) And for example it's possible that Tom Paine was a great idealist, or it is possible, at least going by what one patriotic right-wing American told me not long ago, that he was an asocial liberal who died "deservedly" in the gutter. Geez. To me that seems to be as American as pissing on the grave on Mark Twain, but anyway...the second-guessing is pretty out of control. Thomas Jefferson may have had Asperger's, one scholar believes, and that's something that no DNA test will ever corroborate. Of course a refreshing exception is Joel Achenbach's periodic channelings of the Father of Our Nation.

Probably spoke too soon about Estonian Christmas markets lacking the charm and conviviality of Vienna's markets. Plenty of both Cs. I noticed they had some fire pits you could stand around warming your hands, near Town Hall Square... Really a cozy touch, for those people (like me) who feel more cold when they drink mulled wine.

Anyway, I am trying to think of more positive things to write about in regard to Estonia. In general, I write about Tallinn, which as other blogs have noted is a world apart from more rustic and laid-back life elsewhere in the country.

I borrowed a Philips Bright Light from my mom. I am taking "light baths". Besides perking you up, does away with the need for showering -- really quite incredible. The outside darkness seems much worse though. Did I mention it is still overcast and 38 degrees F? I've heard of the moderating effect of a maritime climate but this is ridiculous. Oregon must be Bermuda in comparison by now.

Perpetual restoration

I didn't see any churches on the recent whistle-stop tour of Central Europe that were completely free of scaffolding, even the tiny Austrian village of Vent on the slopes of Wildspitze had a construction theme, all the way up to the biggest Gothic cathedral of them all in Milan.



There's something quite nice about scaffolding -- intricate, goes with the whole filamented, latticed drip-castle world of ogives and vaults, chords and buttresses. Aesthetically acceptable, like the squeak of a hand changing positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. And a reminder that it was not just God who plunked down that spire way back when, but that people dangled like monkeys and chiseled for years on rickety platforms out in the elements as the spire evolved according to intelligent design.

But what's the deal with the huge banners over the scaffolding announcing the name of the firm doing the restoring? It's ostensibly informative, giving the start and end dates, maybe the price tag, but at the end of the day, it's advertising just as surely as the Benetton ad on the other side of the square. Only it's uglier. There's probably a clause in the contract that specifies that the firm will get a x x y sized area of face time.

Me no likey.

Milano-Trento-Innsbruck-Ötztal-Innsbruck-Wien

I was recently in some major central European cities, cities big enough to have subway systems. Milano and Wien were the biggest I have visited in many years, massive conurbations swollen with old money and culture, certainly, and -- surprising how keenly I felt it -- places where you will be miserably self-conscious if you don't wear good clothes. I don't care how well-adjusted a casually dressed North American you are...you won't feel right walking around with a backpack or the wrong footwear.



It wasn't a particularly smooth trip, at least not the Italy leg. Things I thought I would never have to deal with again...happened. Hotels were fairly full, so I had move from one cheap establishment to another; a hunt for a plug adapter in downtown Milan using very basic Italian proved a struggle (“German” plugs will not fit here; don’t think about filing or bending); translation work was heavy, which is usually a good thing, but not if you need to run errands; a public transit strike stopped everything on the day I was expecting to stay on the outskirts...

Why I was there in the first place? To run the Milano Marathon, and that didn't even happen. Because of an error on the page of the agency that does online bookings, I failed to register in time. Arriving at the Marathon Village in front of the Duomo, I was told there was no option for registering with less than 48 hours to go. "But it's Italy," I said, expecting to talk my way through a loophole, some last-minute option. "Yes, but this is northern Italy," came an answer from a bystander.

I know not why the marathon is run here on Dec. 2. Maybe this is as good it gets between the humid heat of summer and fog of winter -- fall sun and temperatures in the upper 50s. But the exhaust of ten thousand Vespas had already produced doubts as to whether I really wanted to run 42K. I was not in the shape I was last year, anyway. Not enough to register a improvement. Not enough to be sure of beating George W. Bush's best time, which I believe was 3:46 -- very important.

They say you're supposed to run 30 km once before the race, preferably with 2 weeks to go. I only managed 28 km and that was about nine days before the race. Then I came down with a cold.

Milan was far more attractive a city than I had ever given it credit for -- square miles and miles of presentable looking buildings, at least a few neighbourhoods of cobblestoned alleyways (Brera), a mind-blowing cathedral, especially for someone steeped in more severe Nordic Gothic architecture.

Naturally, this being Italy, and me being me, plus the fact that I was carb-loading for a race I still hoped to run, I was there to eat, and restock larders back at home.

The Milanese aperitivo tradition (pay cover charge, then feast on snacks) is a great feature, a bit of informality and gezelligheid in what I always considered an intimidating, slick city. At first I erred among old-man cafes with only a few gherkins and potato chips as snacks before I found the excellent Lelefante and Cafe Brera. Sadly, more and more places are simply advertising a "happy hour buffet -- €6", instead of the unspoken aperitivo thing where you pay for the drink and nosh to your heart's content.



I got plenty of Christmas shopping done, and not necessarily at premium prices. Far more inexpensively than in Estonia. I did duck into Peck's, the gourmet food emporium on Via Spadari near the Duomo, and here prices were astronomical (no deli item was under 20 dollars a pound, even for simple classics like lasagne hot out of il forno), but I bought a big hunk of premium Parimgiano around the standard 20 euros/kg level. Olive oil seemed to be more a chance for bottle designers to show off. A bunch of no-name fattorie, probably top quality, but in extravagant packaging -- it made me uneasy, especially after the excellent Vinegar and Oil on Charlottesville's Barracks Road, where you could pour your own (or the closest thing to that) from dozens of varietals from around the world.

Some Italian-made toys proved a real find -- creative Spirograph type drawing toys, a jigsaw puzzle for father-in-law. English language bookstores were no great shakes. Stocking was confusing, but they had a decent variety.

As the marathon was being run, I was already breathing Dolomite air, on a train to Verona and immediately on to Trento. I ran 25 km that evenng along the river Adige toward Bolzano, as cheap consolation. It was Sunday, so I didn't really get the full feel of the place. Ate at a popular plastic-looking fast food pizza place, the only thing that seemed open. Once again was incapable of finding bad food, no matter how low I went. A paper thin wood-fired calzoncino crust concealed tiny brown mushrooms and perfectly rendered proscioutto. Probably even the doner kebap stand by the train station would have been fine.

Crossed the low but idyllically snowy Brenner Pass the next day...

**

How does Austria do it? I'm talking about lodging. In Milano, you pay top price for hotels gerry-rigged inro cramped little buildings. But Austria has the greatest lodges and chalets I have ever seen, with thick timber and stone walls, no obvious artificial ingredients (except for some faux Busch Gardens trim painted around windows), balconies that look like they must have cost a fortune to hand-hew, yet the silent night's sleep you get will only cost you something like 30 bucks, especially at this time of year. Some are called gästhauser, which already sounds inviting. The breakfasts at the frühstuckpenionen are more Nordic than Continental.

Maybe they make it up by charging the extra euro for espresso. It adds up?

I slept well in Austria and skied two full days in the best powder conditions (right now) in the world, not that I am a good enough skier to tell. I prefer the slushy snowpack on trails through trees into town.

I had mixed feelings, though. Being away from my family, homesickness... I second-guessed my decision the whole week, especially after missing the marathon and being unable to find a cheap British Airways flight back from Innsbruck. The lodge I stayed at had a playground right in front. Talk about a poignant reminder. Was it fair what I was doing? Well, I was working no less than usual. Well, TTT gets to go to Barcelona by herself in January...

There's also a cultural aspect about being in places like Vienna and Innsbruck around Christmastime. It reminds me of Estonia. On one hand, it drives home how deeply rooted in German culture Estonia is. Which is a little depressing by itself -- how "unoriginal" we are, assuming we were influenced by "them". For example, blunzengrestl (a blood sausage food, without the casing, fried with smoked meat, and served with sauerkraut) tasted exactly like verivorst in Estonia. How can that be -- 2000 km apart, yet even the spice blend is the same? (OK, the sauerkraut is not the sweet caramelized perfection that it is in Estonia, so maybe we have improved on things.) There were the same booths serving mulled wine, the walnuts in honey, the crafts, the slippers, furs...

Yet in a place like Vienna, there is inevitably so much more rich bounty, and it makes me sigh. And yet things cost less than they do in Estonia. And the conviviality: people -- local people -- gather into the late night drinking mulled wine. In Estonia's Christmas markets, it's generally a few tourists, and the grog costs €2.30 whereas it costs only €2 in Vienna. There's always that margin you pay for being in Estonia.

A propos of rich bounty, in Vienna, I hit the Naschmarkt. I found it in 5 minutes, whereas it took me 2 hours of walking to get to the Old Town (kept walking the wrong way and taking the trams, which make corkscrew patterns around the city). This again may shows where my priorities lie -- food.

This market is linear, probably longer than Pike Street in Seattle, but hard to tell, because it is so much more crowded and it takes forever to be pushed down the aisle by other people. We are talking major league here, probably a km long, which explains why it was easy to find -- a corridor of people selling spices, various foods, fish, impressive amounts of seafood for a landlocked country.

The season's big hit, kind of anticlimactically, seemed to be wasabi peanuts, at least among the Turkish vendor contingent -- or maybe someone had unwittingly bought way too much and his clansmen were all desperately trying to unload it. It was the only free sample to be had anywhere, and well, what can I say, it was wasabi peanuts. Yet the scene of proper Viennese dowagers -- who might have been sitting in Cafe Sperl a few minutes ago -- huffing and breathing fire after allowing the infernal Saracens to dupe them into trying the peanuts, and exclaiming, most likely something like "Ach, kräftig der Wasabi-Peanuts richtig ist!" was kind of relieving in some way -- maybe European sophistication does have its limits. (And the peanuts weren’t even very spicy.) It's much like when the silly slapstick short films from TV come on at 4am on transcontinental airlines after the feature Hollywood presentation and it's the Europeans who crack up like it's the wittiest thing in the history of the world. You realize that maybe America is a little hipper in some respects.

But only some respects.

Anyway, I bought only things I had not seen elsewhere -- carob beans in the pod, fresh dates, jackfruit. I did end up eating a few too many wasabi peanuts.

*

The last night, I stayed at a hostel. Hostels are sad places. I had forgotten this. It’s supposed to work that you have four people to a room, all in their early 20s, and they meet and exchange interesting tidbits about their respective cultures. It ends up more like this: A) You and another American are the only guests at the Heidelberg hostel, except for a group of 50 retarded people, and neither of you feels like talking.

Or B) You share a room with an old man who while showered, is not laundered (curiously enough this can be much worse than the opposite), and a 40-year-old Austrian Turk who is finalizing his divorce and plans to fly back to the Old Country to his parents where (pending a moment of saner reflection) he will live off the bone-dry land grinding his own flour (which is odd given that it would be cheaper to get it at the new supermarket chain). The Turk spends most of the night sobbing and sighing, the other people come in lengthening increments, at 12:30am, 1:00am, 2:30am...and each time it takes you longer to fall back asleep...like some kind of weird story problem.

Actually, there was also a group of retarded people, bless their souls, staying at the Vienna hostel this time. They checked out soon after I arrived, but not before there was an incident. For a long time, it used to be I was unable to tell gay people apart (no "gaydar"). It seems that I have the same problem with retarded people. In Vienna, I was very generously allowed to check in early and then go downstairs and have breakfast. It was a Continental breakfast, but if there is a basket of eggs there and people are eatng eggs, I assume eggs are on the menu. When I would like an egg, I don't inspect the faces of the people eating the eggs for recessive traits. But as it turned out, eggs were only on the menu for the special group, and a later look confirmed that the group was quite special in chromosomal and developmental problems. So there I was, basically trying to deprive the less fortunate souls of their eggs. The eggs may have been a one bright moment in their institutional routine of Continental breakfast, Continental lunch, and Contintental dinner. Or that's how they served it up. I drew some nasty looks from the counselors all r´ight. I looked very bad. Maybe they even thought I was passing myself off as one of their charges. In that case, I wonder why some of the counselors seemed to take my side.

*

Saving the worst trip story for last: it would have to be the Innsbruck to Vienna sleeper. Austria isn't a small country, but it sure isn't a big one, and how they stretch a four and a half hour trip to an all-nighter is beyond me. But they do. The name of the train, Hollywood Megaplex Kino, probably should have been a tip-off to stay clear of those tracks. I mean, imagine Arlo Guthrie singing a song about this train. You can't. The train was actually OK, the problem was the people on it. Who knows, they may have actually been a bunch of Viennese on their way back from St. Anton, but alcohol is a great leveller and to me they will forever be yokels from Bregenz, where the train originated at 10pm. By the time the train picked me up in Innsbruck at 1am, they were drunk. Drunk, as in we're drunk, and we're going to do everything that drunk people do, and indeed they left nothing out. Basically, it was a cross between the Trans-Siberian Express condensed into seven hours and being kidnapped by a bunch of gypsies, all of it taking place in the dark and with me lying on the upper bunk. They plied me with beer, inquired into my personal life, tried to prise my wedding ring off when I feigned sleep. Apparently one of the young women was unattached and since one of the young men, Helmut, who had his earphones on, either wisely or unconsciously, efforts were made to find her a companion. The voice of one of the men was actually pleasant, intelligent. I couldn't believe they were travelling with such boorish women. Adding to the problem, there was no railing or ridge and the upper bunk was much narrower than most Liegeplatze, so I didn't really want to fall asleep. I had just translated something about Johannes Pääsuke the other day, an Estonian photographer who died at 26 back in the 1910s when he fell out of a bunk on a train. Finally I tied my sweater to the grille of some kind of duct and the other end to my leg. I actually got about four hours. Eventually the others passed out.