Birthday

Our younger granddaughter turned seventeen today. (I'm writing this late at night, so it was really yesterday that I mean when I said 'today'.)

We had a party for her at her dad's house. Grandma and Grandma did the cooking. There was also a delicious Princess cake with marzipan.

Happy birthday, sweetie.

Haiku

Steam rises like fog
Friends gather at our table
The feast is ready

Our Friend

Yesterday we visited our friend who is bedridden in hospital. We had last seen him two weeks ago, before the latest crisis brought him back once more to the emergency room. On that visit, he had been much less responsive, being barely aware that he had visitors. In the interim he has lost a considerable amount of weight. He is on oxygen, and is undergoing kidney dialysis. Perhaps because of the dialysis, he is more alert today than the last time we saw him. His loving, patient wife comes daily to attend to his needs, gently spoonfeeding him. His voice is weak. Speaking requires much effort, and his breathing is raspy and harsh. Yet he can make himself understood. He wants his wife to bring some white asparagus on her next visit.

Bordeaux & Guernsey

Chateau Palmer

Countryside, Medoc, France

St Peter Port,Guernsey, Channel Islands, incoming tide

St Peter Port,Guernsey, Channel Islands, outgoing tide

St Peter Port,Guernsey,street scene

Bordeaux, France

Bordeaux

I've always had trouble with French geography, and I won't try to get into it here, not much anyway. Suffice to tell what little I know about Bordeaux and the fine wines of the region. Bordeaux is situated at the southern end of the Gironde estuary, which is so long as to almost be a river, but it is simply an estuary with a tidal bore, into which several rivers flow (Garonne, Lot, Tarn, Ariège), one of them beginning in Spain, on the other side of the Pyrenees.

Bordeaux

Bordeaux is a well-laid-out city with pretty civic buildings. Unlike in Paris, its people are friendly and show none of the notorious arrogance of the people of the capital. It has fine shops and restaurants, some quite chic. But best of all it has very fine wines from the many chateaux in the vicinity, with names such as Médoc, Graves and Saint Emilion. To have a meal in one of the excellent restaurants in Bordeaux, with a good bottle of a vintage beverage bearing an appellation controlée is to have an experience worthy of any bon vivant or boulevardier worth his sel de mer.

Upon leaving the port of Le Verdon, at the very northern tip of the Gironde, our bus took us on a long drive through the Médoc, past rolling vineyards which Brigitte, our charming oenologist of a guide, said had some of the best soil and growing conditions for grapes to be found anywhere in the world. We Californians could have disputed her claims, of course, but out of a surfeit of la politesse, we did not.

In the center of Bordeaux is a shopping complex called Grandes Hommes. We found a pleasant little restaurant nearby, the 'Jardin des Landes', where we enjoyed a tranquil and leisurely lunch of the local guinea fowl and fresh produce prepared with the most subtle and delicate of sauces. The service was impeccable as well. The charming middle-aged French couple who were the proprietors showed us a photo of their adopted Vietnamese-born son.

A heavy afternoon shower foiled shopping plans as we began a stroll along the Cours de l'Intendance, and we were quite soaked by the time the bus picked us up for the long ride back through the vineyards to our waiting ship.

Bilbao

Biscay is the Anglicized version of Vizcaya, which is one of the Basque provinces of Spain. Bilbao is its capital, and a truly remarkable city it is. I always enjoy visiting cities which have trams or streetcars, more than those that only have subways. Some European cities have both (Vienna and Bilbao are examples). The Euskotran, bright green, lowslung, and very modern, glides delightfully through Bilbao's streets, and lends a flash of color to a city that is generally more overcast and rainy than bright and sunny.

EuskoTran

The only signs of the Metro from street level are the futuristic covered subway entrances, looking for all the world like giant translucent prawn shells. Since our time in Bilbao was limited, we did not get to ride in either form of public transport.

Bilbao is well laid out with neat public parks and civic monuments. The public art is everywhere, including various incarnations of Robert Indiana's ubiquitous LOVE sculptures (also rendered in Spanish).

But of course the reason tourists flock to Bilbao is to visit the Bilbao Guggenheim, a fabulous showpiece of modern architecture designed by Canadian Frank Gehry.

Click here to link to the Museum

Inside are San Franciscan Richard Serra's "Snake" and "Eight Torqued Ellipses", and Berliner Anselm Kiefer's installations.

No pictures or videos are permitted inside the museum, so I had to rely on some images from the Internet to give an idea of these art works (which, unfortunately, can't effectively be done because of their monumental size; they have to be experienced in the flesh, as it were).

Richard Serra sculptures

Anselm Kiefer painting

Where the rain is art

Here's a link to a webpage with innovative photographs of Santiago de Compostela by Pablo Cobos, titled "Espejos en El Camino" (Mirrors on The Way)

Espejos en El Camino

Galician Story

Galicia is closer to Portugal than to Spain, culturally, architecturally, and linguistically. In fact, history and language buffs will find this northwesternmost piece of the Iberian Peninsula an interesting study. Here is a link to a Wikipedia article, for starters. Galicia

We had lunch at the famous hotel, the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos (Hostal dos Reis Católicos in Galician and Portuguese) which is one of several luxury paradores operated by the Spanish government. Busloads of tourists, mostly from the same optional shore excursion, filled the large dining hall of what had originally been built as a hospital for pilgrims to Santiago.

Some of us were jammed into a tiny elevator to get up to the third-floor restaurant, and the car refused to move once the door had clanged shut. Only later, when an agitated janitor came to free us, after several phoned-in SOS's, did we discover that we were ten in an elevator car meant for five, this according to a posted sign. No wonder our rescuer was annoyed!

Hung on the walls of the cloister surrounding the central courtyard were pretty decent copies (not prints) of oil paintings of El Greco saints. At first glance they might even have been mistaken for works by the master, and I had to do a double take.

Santiago de Compostela

When you figure that it takes about two of our dollars to equal one British pound, it soon becomes painfully apparent that things are mighty expensive in the United Kingdom. A traveler from the United States will get sticker shock the minute he arrives and has to change money. You would spend a pound in the U.K. as you would a dollar back home, but over there the greatly diminished value of our poor dollar makes every purchase twice as expensive.

We look back with nostalgia to our last visit to the U.K. in 1984. Then, the dollar was almost on a par with the pound. But even then, London was an expensive place to visit. Over the past couple of decades, costs have risen higher, and coupled with our money having taken a nose dive against the Euro and the Pound, we seem on this trip to be visiting the ATMs with greater frequency and lesser outcome.

Visitors to London who arrive at Heathrow Airport should know about the Hotel Hoppa Bus service, which takes arriving passengers and their luggage to hotels in the vicinity for the relatively small fare of four pounds per person. A whole lot cheaper than a taxi.

It was just a short ride to the hotel. We were going to spend one night there, before proceeding down to Southampton to join our cruise ship the "Sea Princess". This is an older vessel, having been built in Italy in 1998, and it would not be as steady in rough seas as one might have hoped. So no sooner were we out of The Solent and headed southwest in the English Channel than we were subjected to a stomach-heaving ride over the waves and swells.

It would take a full day's sailing to get all the way across the Bay of Biscay to our first port of call, La Coruña, set in the rugged coastline northwestern Spain. (The Spanish call the Bay of Biscay, el mar cantábrico, or Cantabrian Sea.)

La Coruña in Galicia is not what one would call a prime tourist destination. However, it does have the advantage of being the seaport closest to one of the major Christian pilgrimage sites in Europe, namely, Santiago de Compostela, now designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is the second most-visited pilgrimage site in the Catholic world, after Rome, and its famous Cathedral (Romanesque, with Baroque encrustations and enhancements added since the Middle Ages) is reputed to contain the remains of St James the Apostle. (St. James = Santiago in Spanish.) Compostela is derived from the Latin for 'field of the star', for legend has it that a star led to the discovery of the resting place of the saint's remains, upon which site the cathedral was built. The legend has a similarity to that of the Star of Bethlehem.

Here is a link to The Way of St. James (El Camino de Santiago):

Way of St. James

On several visits to the Iberian Peninsula, my wife and I had wanted to see Santiago de Compostela, and never did. We only wished we could have stayed a bit longer. There's much to see and to experience.

Interesting aside: the rugged coast west of La Coruña is called the Coast of Death, due to the number of shipwrecks along it.

The enormous square in front of the cathedral is called the Praza Obradoiro, and along one side of it is the famous Hostal dos Reis Católicos, built as a hospital by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and now a luxurious hotel, or parador. Facing the cathedral is the government palace, for Santiago is the capital of the province of Galicia. The historic old town center of Santiago yields much of architectural interest, and an easy walk will take you around the many monumental buildings and through side streets, where outside cafés and pastry shops young women offer samples of Galician cakes and sweetmeats, of which the best known is the tarta de Santiago, a delicious item particularly for those who, like me, possess an incurable sweet tooth.

Santiago's slogan: Donde la lluvia es arte (Where the rain is art).

The Daughter

Faithful she comes,
cheerful she arrives
day after day,
visiting

Never impatient
not lamenting
notwithstanding
the fading memory
and the demands
so carefully repeated

This the daughter
understands:
their time together
must be treasured;
and each arrival
will draw out
the pleasantest
of shared memories,
the very sweetest
of her mother's
smiles

Commuting

I'm still working on a story about our recent vacation. Meanwhile, here is something to fill the gap.

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When I was commuting every weekday to my office in San Francisco, I seldom drove, preferring to ride either the train or the bus. In the early years it was the train. It was a smoother, more stable ride. Reading was possible, as was the ability to grab a few extra winks if necessary. (This last bit was true going in to the city, but risky on the homeward trip, as missing your station while asleep was a real possibility.)

The disadvantage of the train was that the terminus lay many city blocks from where my office was. I either walked, as did many other train passengers, when the weather was fine, or took the crowded city buses when it was rainy.

Later a bus service was inaugurated in the suburbs which could deliver me close to the building where I worked, and so I switched from the train to the bus. Some mornings I had to stand up in the bus all the way, because where I got on was the final pick-up point before the bus entered the freeway, and so the bus would often be quite full by then. (No dozing while standing for me, though I saw some other guys doing it.) Later on the bus company put more buses on the route, as the ridership grew, and from that point on we were no longer packed in like sardines.

Whether I took the train or the bus, I still had to drive from my house to the respective stations. The local train station had a metered city parking lot adjacent to it, which allowed for long-term parking for the commuter. Street parking in the immediate vicinity had a one-hour limit, but if you were prepared to walk a few blocks, there you could park all day for free.

Nowadays, free downtown parking in our suburb is getting harder to find, and parking meters are sprouting all along the sidewalks. Ten years ago, you could park at a meter for an hour for a dime. Not any more. It's a quarter for thirty minutes. But still we're not so bad out here. In San Francisco, the meters take only quarters, and you get only ten minutes per quarter. I suppose we can soon expect to see suburban meters that will accept paper money, ore even credit cards, rather than metal.

It's getting to be as bad as New York City.

Travel

It gets a bit harder to overcome jet lag these days. As I've said often enough — traveling is fun, but the getting there and back is not. And coupled with the orological disorientation resulting from jet lag, the heightened security measures at airports these days just add to the reduction in the fun factor.

Still, in my view all these inconveniences are worth the rewards of travel. You get to see places you've never seen before, and meet all sorts of people. We are lucky in that we have friends in many parts of the world, wonderful friends.

We will talk more later. Right now I'm off to a doctor's appointment.

Stay tuned.