London Again and Home

Four hours later, we were up. We got dressed, finished packing and went to Marika’s apartment for a quick breakfast. Then she drove us to Schoenefeld Airport. We checked in, then sat with her for a while before saying our goodbyes and going through security.

Our 9:20 a.m. flight to Luton was uneventful. We took the shuttle bus to the train station, where we had spent hours in 2003, due to a signal malfunction that had shut down the rail line. We caught the train to London St. Pancras Station, which had been refurbished and upgraded in 2007, in order to serve as the terminus for the Eurostar trains to France. There I bought Underground tickets, but was unable to use them then, since the line we would have used was shut for repairs. We probably could have walked, but instead flagged down one of the famous London black taxis. The relatively short ride to our hotel cost less than the tube tickets.

The side streets in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London are full of 18th-century townhouses, many of which have been turned into small hotels. The Arosfa Hotel, at 83 Gower Street, is one such hotel. In this building, where the painter John Everett Millais lived with his parents at the middle of the 19th century, the Pre-Raphaelite Society was supposedly founded. We’d seen several Millais paintings (including Ophelia) at the Tate Britain, as well as his statue, at the rear of that gallery.

We were greeted by Nicholas, a 40-ish man with what sounded like a Russian accent. Our room (number six) was ready, so he showed us up and gave us the key. The room, as well as the hotel as a whole, was pleasant and comfortable. The windows, overlooking Gower Street, were well soundproofed, but since there was no air-conditioning and it was becoming warm, the windows had to be open. However, there was an electric fan in the room. Not only did that cool things down, but its white-noise roar drowned out the traffic noises from the street. This was a very small room. It may have been the smallest double hotel room with ensuite bathroom that I’d ever seen, much less stayed in! It was, at most, eight feet across, and maybe fourteen feet long, including the bathroom.

As soon as we’d settled in, we went out lookjng for lunch. We found it at an Italian restaurant on Tottenham Court Road. Mary Joy was very pleased with the food,and made that abundantly clear to the staff. Once again, her enthusiasm charmed a restaurant’s staff so much that they gave us something extra--little after-dinner glasses of limoncello. As we left, the waiter and waitress even gave her the European greeting of a triple air-kiss, while I was out front putting up my umbrella!

Rather than contend with the heaviest rain of the entire trip, we went back to our room, and I blogged , my chair backed up to the bed, while Mary Joy napped.

We left around a quarter after four to head for Westminster Abbey, and immediately ran into problems. I couldn’t find the Goodge Street underground station, probably because it was closed. We walked down to the Tottenham Court Road station, at Oxford Street, and discovered that the entire Metropolitan Line was shut down for a year or so, so we had to rearrange our route, and when we came out into the sunlight at Westminster, beneath the gleaming tower of the Houses of Parliament, it was already after five. We missed the first fifteen minutes, but evensong was still very nice. Mary Joy says that no one does this sort of liturgical music better than the Anglicans (whenever she hears the choir of St. Peter’s in Rome on TV, she cringes).

We walked down Victoria Street to Westminster Cathedral, as we had two weeks before, for six o’clock mass. Mary Joy wasn’t feeling well, so we went straight back to our hotel and went to bed early.

The next day (Sunday, August 21st), we had a hearty breakfast with scrambled eggs and English bacon at our B and B, and wandered around a little in Bloomsbury, picking up our tube tickets in a crowd at the Russell Square station. We then checked out around 11:15, went back to the Russell Square station and discovered that I had not two tickets, but one ticket and a receipt! However, since there was now no crowd, I could quickly buy another five-pound ticket. We took the “lift” down to the Piccadilly Line platform, and I realized that I wasn’t sure which terminal we were flying out of at Heathrow. I would have guessed that it was Terminal 4, but I wasn’t sure, and the first train that left was going to 1, 2, 3 and 5, rather than 4, 1, 2 and 3. We asked a British couple on the train, and they thought that Terminal 4 was only for cargo. But there were signs on the train saying that fifty airlines were having their terminals changed at Heathrow, and sure enough, when we got off at Terminal 3, we discovered that Delta was at Terminal 4. But tube employees got us back down to the platform, where we caught a train back to Hatton Cross (the last previous station), then another to Terminal 4. From there on, no problems, and we were back home around 6 p.m.

Potsdam

Marika met us around 8:30 that night at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. She hadn’t been able to read Mary Joy’s e-mail informing her of my condition, so she had put together a dinner that, for the most part, I wasn’t allowed to eat. I did have a bowl of marvelous pureed zucchini soup, but I had to excuse myself, inflicting serious feelings of guilt, when Marika and Mary Joy started on what looked and smelled like a very good quiche.

The next day, Friday, August 19th, I was feeling much better. After breakfast, we caught the S-Bahn to Potsdam in time for a bus tour of the city, followed by a guided tour of Sanssouci Palace. Sanssouci was Frederic the Great’s summer retreat, where he would commune with philosophers (such as Voltaire) and musicians (such as J.S. Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emmanuel) and no women were allowed. Potsdam was in East Germany before reunification, but since then has become a wealthy, sophisticated suburb of Berlin, as it was when the Hohenzollerns ruled and built a number of palaces there. The tour stopped at the last, Cecelienhof, a half-timbered English country house built for Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife, Crown Princess Cecilie, during World War I itself. There is a large amount of green space between these palaces. There is also a church, the Friedenkirche (Peace Church), built in 1845-48 as a copy of the church of San Clemente in Rome. We had our lunch (the remainder of Marika’s wonderful quiche) on a terrace attached to this church, overlooking a small lake.

We then walked into town through the Brandenburg gate (a few years older than the one in Berlin) along the length of the Brandenburger Strasse to St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. We happened to walk into the church while the organist was practicing (impressively) and stopped awhile to listen. Then we had coffee and pastries at La Maison du Chocolat (where Marika and her friend Marie Louise had once seen and talked to Danny DeVito, in Berlin to receive an award). Marika called Marie Louise, who was to meet us, and it turned out that she was just a few blocks away, so we met and greeted her again, remembering our lunch together the Sunday before.

By this time it was beginning to feel rather cool, though there was no rain in the picture. I had neglected to bring my sweater, so I was persuaded by the three ladies to go on a shopping expedition. Karstadt’s department store was nearby, so I found a suitable (blue) sweater at a reasonable price (15 euros=about $21.00). We took a bus to the Neues Palais, the very substantial home that Frederick had built for himself in order to celebrate the end of the Seven Year’s War, known in the U.S. as the French and Indian War.

Every year, Potsdam holds the Potsdamer Schloessernacht (Potsdam Palace Night). The parks surrounding the palaces are filled with stages, and you can wander from one to another, sampling various sorts of music. Meanwhile, the palaces themselves, along with other buildings, fountains, statues, etc., are illuminated.

The night before this extravaganza, there is the Vorabendkonzert, a symphony orchestra concert with the Neues Palais as a backdrop. That is why we now found ourselves drinking complimentary Sekt by the Neues Palais. A digression: in Germany, there is Sekt; in Spain there is cava; in Italy, prosecco; in France, and only in a particular region of northeastern France, there is champagne. Under European Union law, the only sparkling wine that is allowed to be called “champagne” is wine from Champagne itself, the region of France around Rheims and Epernay.

We picked up some fast food from the food stands, then hurried to our seats and got out our new, complimentary (advertising a classical radio station) folding cardboard opera glasses, as a local radio personality in a formal red dress introduced Zoltan Kocsis and the Hungarian National Philharmonic. They opened with Liszt’s “Les Preludes.” Then, the Russian violinist Vadim Repin played my long-ago (fifty years ago, in fact) first love in classical music, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto—an exciting performance. After intermission, the orchestra played Dvorak’s “New World” symphony and, as an encore, one of the Brahms (?) Hungarian Dances. When the live orchestra finally left the stage, it was replaced over the speaker system by a recorded orchestra, playing bits of the New World Symphony that we had just heard, as well as small portions of the Brahms “Academic Festival Overture” and the Borodin “Polovtsian Dances.” But while this music was playing, there was a massive fireworks display, synchronized to the music. Awesome!

Then the crowd, including the four of us, headed off for a stroll through the illuminated gardens. At the beginning, by the Neues Palais, the large throng was forcing itself, like toothpaste from a tube, through a narrow gate. Eventually someone, probably in officialdom, realized that this was a double gate, and the closed half was then opened, allowing everyone to get through much more quickly. We made our leisurely way past all the illuminations, the length of the park, eventually coming out at the far (eastern) end, near the Luisenplatz, where we caught a shuttle bus to the station and took the S-Bahn back into Berlin.


We finished most of our packing and, again, got to bed around 2 a.m.

Health Issues and Farewell to Poland

Late that night, my digestive tract felt very uncomfortable. Around seven in the morning, I thought that I was feeling better, but suddenly my sixty years of experience with stomach viruses and food poisonings told me that I should head immediately for the bathroom. I was correct.

Our plans to go back to the Old Town for the morning were immediately dropped. Agnieszka called a friend who is a doctor and can speak English. After a discussion of the symptoms, it was decided that before we caught the 2:27 train back to Berlin, I should rest, drink large quantities of very hot mint tea and eat nothing except bread and an extremely bland mush very similar to Cream of Wheat.

With the help of this regimen, and a very sweet syrup of aluminum phosphate (or something of the sort), I was feeling somewhat like a human being when we went to the Central Station. When Agnieszka went to park her car, a man walking through the lot gave her hand directions to avoid hitting the neighboring cars. “How nice of him,” I thought, then, the cynic in me immediately (and correctly) smelled a rat. When Agnieszka got out, the man asked for money. She offered him two zloty (about two-thirds of a dollar, I think), which he accepted. Of course, as Agnieszka and I explained later to Mary Joy, this was a low-grade protection racket. The implication was that if she didn’t pay, something bad might happen to her car. It would have been a problem if he had scowled at her offer. She would have had to raise her offer or risk the consequences.

We were early and, in the end, the train left more than half an hour late. Very graciously, Agnieszka stayed with us the whole time, waving goodbye as we left the station.

When I was talking with the doctor on the phone that morning, she said that it was too bad that this bad thing had happened to me on our last day in Warsaw and that she hoped that it wouldn’t leave me with bad memories of the city. I replied that any bad memories would be more than offset by my many wondeful memories.

Lazienki Park

The next day, Wednesday, August 17th, we had been going to take the train to the great shrine at Czestochowa, but that would have required catching a 6 a.m. train on our own since Agnieszka had a 10:00 doctor’s appointment. Even getting up early enough to do that was beyond our strength at that point. In any event, we wouldn’t have been able to, because there was a sudden one-day railroad strike, for higher pay, and no trains at all were running. On the news that night we saw pictures of stranded travelers camped out in stations.

Instead, after Agnieszka returned, we took the bus downtown, to the Lazienki Park. One of the first things you see when you enter the park is a large garden. The center of attention of this garden is a huge bronze statue of Chopin. He sits under a bronze tree that is almost blown over by the wind. His hair blows, his eyes flash—the Artist as Romantic Hero.
But the heart of the park is dedicated to the artistic taste of a slightly earlier figure of Polish history, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, last king of Poland. In the 1780s and 1790s he turned a small bathing pavilion on an island into the Island Palace, his pleasant mini-Versailles. We walked around the lake, stopping at the Theater, which pretends to be the ruin of a Greek or Roman theater--the audience is separated from the island stage by a narrow bit of lake—the inspiration for Bregenz or Wannsee? There were a couple of “gondolas” on the lake, substantially wider than their Venetian counterparts.

We toured the palace (which has a nice Rembrandt), the Chinese-themed White Pavilion, the Orangery and a couple of other buildings on the grounds (one including a museum dedicated to Ignacy Paderewski, the pianist, composer, statesman and first president of the post-World-War-I Polish Republic).

We had lunch (nice bratwurst, etc.) at the terrace café behind the theater and ice cream from a stand in the park, then strolled out of the park and into the adjoining Botanical Garden, which was pleasant, but mosquito-infested.

We then took a bus to the Old Town, where we walked around, visited a church and stumbled onto a concert in the interior courtyard of an old building. There was a young woman on violin, accompanied by a young man on the piano, playing a violin sonata by some Polish Romantic composer whose name I don’t remember. Then the young man played, impressively, a wonderful piano piece by Paderewski. They finished with a piece by Hans Huber. I am sure that I heard the emcee call him the greatest composer of the second half of the nineteenth century, but Mary Joy insists that he said, instead, “the greatest Swiss composer of the second half of the nineteenth century.“ Either interpretation has problems. If I am right then the emcee was stark, raving mad. If Mary Joy is right, then he must have been impressed by the idea of someone being the greatest Swiss composer of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Chopin, Mahler, Brahms

The next day, Tuesday, August 16th, Agnieszka drove us about an hour out of town to the small village of Zelezowa Wola. There, on either February 22, 1810 (my –141st birthday) or March 1, 1810 (depending on whether you trust church records or family memory), was born Fryderyk (as the Poles call him) Chopin. His father was a French immigrant, while his mother was a woman of the impoverished Polish nobility, living on the estate of one of her much wealthier friends. Only a few months after Chopin was born, the family moved to Warsaw. In the late 18th century, Poland had been divided three times among Russia, Prussia and Austria, until in 1795 there was none of it left. But at the time of Chopin's birth, it had been temporarily revived as a dependency of the Napoleonic Empire. Unfortunately for the Poles, two years later, in 1812 (to be celebrated in an overture by another Romantic composer), Napoleon lost his Grande Armee in Russia. Then, in the fall of 1813, he lost another army, including, heroically, much of his Polish Legion, at the “Battle of the Nations” at Leipzig, and while, afterwards, part of Poland had a nominal autonomy under the Tsar, that ended with a revolt in 1830.

The Polish national anthem, by the way, is the song of the Polish Legion, which can be translated to begin “Poland is not yet lost”—a rather low level of aspiration, but fitting with the nation’s situation at that time.

In 1830, the same year as the revolt, the 20-year old Frederic Chopin, already acclaimed as a musical genius, left his homeland forever, ending up in Paris. His heart, however, following a deathbed wish, has returned and is now in a pillar in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.

In the intervening years, Chopin and his family had visited their friends at Zelezowa Wola a number of times, but the place did not play a major role in his life. The estate was sold off, and the building where he had been born, which was not the main building , and had included a bakery, fell into some disrepair. In the 1890s, the Russian composer Mili Balakirev made a pilgrimage to the site and was shocked. He wrote a letter to the newspapers, and, as a result, money was raised, the building was bought, and by the 1930s the whole area had been transformed. This is not a historically accurate recreation of the place where Chopin was born. Instead, it is a sort of shrine to his glory. The house, really more of a farm estate outbuilding, was prettified. The surrounding grounds were made into a gorgeous park, with walkways among the gardens and trees and down to a gently-flowing small river, with several picturesque footbridges. There is a heroic (though not as heroic as the one we’ll see tomorrow) statue of the great man. There is a reception center with a short film, restaurant, gift shop and restrooms. There is a separate cafeteria on the grounds. You can take an audio-guided tour of the house (all five rooms) and grounds—it doesn’t provide much information, because there’s not much to provide. As you stroll around or eat your lunch, loudspeakers discreetly play the same short piano piece over and over.

We had lunch at the cafeteria. Agnieszka insisted that we have golabki (pronounced “go-WAHMP-kee"--cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice—and a cold, pink, vegetable cream soup. It was all very good .

We went back to Warsaw and took the bus downtown to the Warsaw Philharmonic's concert hall, where we heard the opening concert of the Seventh International Chopin and His Europe Festival. The orchestra was the Witold Lutoslawski Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of Wroclaw. The first piece was a marvelous rendition of the Chopin 1st Piano Concerto by the young Bulgarian pianist Evgenii Buzhanov. Mary Joy said that this performance was a revelation to her of unexpected sides of a familiar piece.


During the intermission, I went to the restroom. Seeing a sign for Toaleta, with a circle above it, I entered an outer room, only to notice that everyone there, going and coming, was female, and there appeared to be only one inner sanctum. I turned and left, and across the entrance hall found another Toaleta, this time with a triangle above the word. Since everyone entering and leaving this was male, I assumed, and was later assured by the laughing Agnieszka and Mary Joy (who had read Rick Steves more thoroughly than I had), that a circle must be the equivalent of a stick figure with a skirt, while a triangle must mean the opposite.

The remainder of the concert was a long drawn-out anti-climax—a performance of the reconstructed Mahler 10th Symphony, led by a conductor who Mary Joy said didn’t have the least idea how to conduct Mahler. “Too long,” said Agnieszka. The whole concert ended up being more than two-and-a-half hours.

We rushed over to the Holy Cross Church (mentioned above as the last resting place of an important element of Chopin’s circulatory system), to hear the Festival’s second concert, a free (standing-room only, and we started out standing) performance of the Brahms “German Requiem,” by combined choirs from Ghent, Belgium and Siena, Italy, accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of the Champs Elysees, from Paris. It was wonderful.

A Digression on the Minnesota State Bird

This year, since it's been unusually wet in central Europe, there is a bumper crop of mosquitoes. Many of them, especially in Poland, were so hospitable as to meet and greet their American visitors. Of course, we in Minnesota are especially proud of the size and ferocity of the mosquitoes produced by our ten thousand lakes, but Agnieska, who has extensive experience of both varieties, insists that Polish mosquitoes are much bigger.

Mary Joy and I came to the conclusion that she was probably right, but that the increase in size led to a decrease in speed, so that Polish mosquitoes were easier to swat. However, this lack of mobility was offset by stealth and numbers

Warsaw and the Polish Woods

The next day, Sunday August 14th, we slept in (having gotten to bed at one or two a.m. for the second night in a row). We went to the church where Marika generally goes when she’s not playing. As the priests came down the aisle, I noticed that one of them wore a purplish-pink skullcap. "That's a bishop," I thought. "But he's not wearing a miter." Indeed, the pastor immediately told us, the guest presider at this mass would be the retired archbishop of Maracaibo, Venezuela, in Berlin for a conference. At the end of the mass, the pastor complimented him on his German.

Afterwards, as Marika generally does, we went to a nearby sidewalk café for lunch with her very pleasant friends Erika (whom we had met the week before) and Marie Louise. Later, Marie Louise’s daughter Jana arrived. Jana spoke very good English, having spent a year as an exchange student in Virginia. She was looking for employment and had a new interview lined up, but she had hoped to get an unpaid internship in Los Angeles. She had never received a reply to her inquiry.

Marika drove us to the Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station) and waved goodbye as our Berlin-Warszawa Express headed east. It was supposed to take five hours and twenty-four minutes, but it arrived in Warsaw around 11:30 p.m., twenty-five minutes late.

We were picked up by Agnieszka, the mother of our friend Ania, who is a Polish woman married to an American and living in the Twin Cities. We first met Agnieska in 2004. We were going to be in Cracow, and Ania insisted that we visit her mother in Warsaw. As it happened, getting from Cracow to Vienna by train would have been a lengthy and involved process, so, instead, we decided to take the fast train from Cracow to Warsaw, spend six hours with Agnieszka, and fly from Warsaw to Vienna. She picked us up at the station, took us home for lunch, then gave us a tour of the old town, in spite of the fact that her English was extremely limited. She made it clear that six hours was not enough time to see Warsaw, so we would have to come back. And now we have.

Even though she has now spent much time in the United States, since it is generally in the company of her daughters and, even more, her grandchildren, with all of whom she speaks Polish, Agnieszka still speaks little English. What little she speaks, however, she can communicate very well in. She says that she is too old to learn a new language, having had to learn Russian and German when she was young. Our conversations were a combination of simple English, (extremely) simple Polish and (not quite so) simple German.

Agnieszka lives in a three-bedroom apartment (very small rooms by American standards, but as she said, it was “luxurious” during Communist times) which she had shared with her late husband and her daughters Ania and Kasia, who are now both in America. She is a teacher at a technical high school, and during the school year has a very rigorous schedule, getting up at 5:30, taking the bus to the school, getting out at 5:00, then grading papers, etc. until 2 a.m., five days a week. This is offset somewhat by the fact that she gets two months off in the summer, as well as several holiday weeks during the school year.

The next morning, Monday, August 15th, was the feast of the Assumption, so, after a nice breakfast, Agnieszka drove us to the nearby Divine Providence Center, which is in the process of being built. I didn’t bring my camera along, so I have no pictures. When it is finished, the church will seat 4,000 people. On an upper level, with great views over Warsaw, will be a museum dedicated to Pope John Paul II and Stefan Cardinal Wyszinski, who led the Polish Catholic Church in its decades of confrontation with the Communist regime. At the moment, however, the church is just a huge concrete shell, and mass is held in the lower level, where there will be a Pantheon of Great Poles (currently seven of the three hundred grave spaces are filled). There are shrines with relics of Pope John Paul (I think it is a piece of bloody cloth that he was wearing during the assassination attempt) and the Solidarity martyr (murdered by the secret police), Blessed Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko (a piece of his arm).

Nine a.m. mass had two musicians playing an electonic keyboard and singing. Everyone took communion in the mouth instead of the hand. Afterwards, we took part in a Polish-English tour of the facility (we were the only English-speakers).

Then we drove to the nearby Wilanow Palace, which we toured with the use of English-language audio guides (as at the Gruenes Gewoelbe in Dresden). It had been built in the late 17th century by the great Polish king Jan III Sobieski, as his summer palace. Perhaps the high point in Polish history, and a major turning point in the history of Eastern Europe, was in 1683, when a large Turkish army besieged Vienna. Sobieski led a relieving army that attacked and utterly destroyed the Turkish force, leading to, among other things, the decline of the Ottoman Empire as a Great Power, the freeing, within a few years, of Hungary and Croatia from the Turks, and the invention of the Viennese (and, later, any other European country's) cafe—for among the spoils of war found in the abandoned Turkish tents were large quantities of coffee beans. The Viennese tried them and developed a taste for them, later inventing the Sacher Torte and other pastries as powerful auxiliary devices for the better use of this Turkish secret weapon.

The Wilanow Palace was interesting and pleasant, and there were some connections with Dresden. Augustus the Strong of Saxony was also King of Poland and tenant of Wilanow. On one of the upper floors there is a Canaletto painting with no caption but clearly showing the Frauenkirche and the Elbe waterfront.


We had some Polish crepes (nalesniki) and coffee at a nearby outdoor restaurant terrace, then we went back to Agnieska’s apartment, where we had a more serious lunch.

Later in the afternoon we drove more than two hours out to Agnieszka’s dzialka (country house--pronounced "JOW-kah"), in the woods—sort of equivalent to a Minnesotan’s lake cabin, but with no lake. It is small and very simple, but comfortable, and something that she’s put a lot of work and love into. She said several times that it is her life. After less than an hour there, we headed back for the city.

Wannsee Magic Flute

Saturday, August 13th, we got a late start, then went to Marika’s local farmers’ market, where Mary Joy and Marika did some shopping, while I went scouting for Wi-Fi. I found it at Starbucks, so we had some coffee and caught up with e-mails.

Late that afternoon, we caught an S-Bahn to the Wannsee, one of the places Berliners get away to on weekends. We took a ferry across to Kladow, walked around a little, had coffee and pastries at an outdoor restaurant, then took the ferry back. I've never seen more sailboats on a lake at one time, even on Lake Minnetonka.

We caught the S-Bahn again, going back one stop to Nikolassee, where we got off and caught the bus to the gigantic Seebad Wannsee (Wannsee Lake Bathing) complex. The roads were filled with people driving, biking and walking to the opera.

The original idea had been that there would be a floating stage, out in the lake, with spectators viewing from the shore. We saw such a stage when we were overnighting at Bregenz, Austria, in 2000, so there is plenty of experience with ironing out the difficulties with such a production. There is a beautiful view of the Wannsee Seebuehne (Lake Stage) on the covers of the production’s brochure and program. Unfortunately, this was as much a fantasy as the opera itself, The Magic Flute. Apparently, the obstacles to building such a stage were too great, so it was set up, instead, behind the bathing complex.

One good result was that they had to reconfigure the bleacher seating, so Marika, Mary Joy and I ended up in better seats than we would otherwise have had—high up, but nearly dead center.

The performance itself was wonderful, though opera fanatics might not agree. At the center of the stage was a large pyramid, hollowed out in a circle. There was a catwalk from one side to the other. In front were fake trees and rocks, to provide hiding places. There were a volcano for the trial by fire, rain for the trial by water and fireworks for the celebration at the end. For the first appearance of the Queen of the Night, she was suspended by a crane. It must have been difficult to sing her first aria while one of the stiff wings on her costume was accidentally banging into a light fixture.

She sang it very well. The singing was generally of a high caliber, especially by the South African tenor playing Tamino. Sarastro, noticeably, took a while to get into voice. There were two unusual things about the voices. The star of the show, as is only fitting, but not usually recognized, was the Papageno, who rather than being an opera singer, was a TV actor. He handled the comic bits wonderfully well, but his voice was not at all comparable to the usual Papageno, such as Haakon Hagegaard in Ingmar Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute. On the other hand, the tenor who sings Monostatos usually sings it with a creaky, comical voice. This Monostatos was a young Portuguese tenor who is more used to singing roles like the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto, and he sounded wonderful. Although alternate Taminos trade off on alternate nights, I would not be surprised if this Monostatos were the understudy for Tamino. In addition, the three Spirits, roles for boy sopranos, were sung by adult women instead. This made for singing that was stronger but less ethereal.

Saxon Switzerland

From Dresden, we headed southeast, along the Elbe River, to what is known as die saechsische Schweiz (Saxon Switzerland). Two years ago, driving through Normandy, we came close to la Suisse normande (Norman Switzerland). There are, of course, no Saxon or Norman Alps. These appellations are a result of 19th-century pride in some spectacular and wild local scenery. If they were to be named today, maybe we would have a “Saxon Grand Canyon” or “Norman Grand Canyon.” Saxon Switzerland (which the Michelin Green Guide, perhaps as a matter of French pride, mistranslates into English as “Swiss Saxony”) is a part of the Elbe valley filled with towering, eroded rocks and deep, dark forests.

Our specific destination was the Bastei, or Bastion, a high point overlooking the Elbe where it bends at the town of Rathen. After driving along the autobahn to the town of Pirna, we took back roads north of the river, got onto a side road that was being repaired, with traffic lights switching single lanes of traffic. We parked in a lot surrounded by woods and walked for about fifteen minutes, past the hotel and Panorama Restaurant, then up some steps cut into the stone, to the Bastei. It is a sort of small mesa of rock, capable of holding maybe forty people, if they were crammed tightly together. When we were there, there were no more than eight or ten, in total.

In order to walk down to Rathen, if one is so inclined, one must take the path down a little way from the Bastei and across the Bastei Bridge, a stone footbridge, finished in 1851, crossing a deep gap between monoliths.

We finished our visit to Saxon Switzerland with coffee and pastries at the Panorama Restaurant. The waiter was a little snooty, but the views southeast and southwest along the river as sunset approached were spectacular, and the goodies were delicious.. The three-hour-or-so drive back to Berlin was uneventful, except for some rain.

A remark on the weather: generally cool and damp, unusually so for this time of year, though the rain never lasted long enough to cause us serious problems, and when we needed perfect weather, such as the very next day after our return to Berlin, we got it.

Dresden

We arrived at our hotel in Dresden, the Hotel Windsor, at 6 p.m., after running into street construction that blocked our planned route and left us wandering around for a short time before we found the correct way. The hotel was pleasant, comfortable and had “wireless LAN”—i.e., Wi-Fi. It was in the New Town, one block from Leipziger Strasse, one of the main streets. There we could catch a streetcar to the Old Town.

The way a Dresden streetcar works is that you get on one of the sleek, yellow cars at a stop (Haltstelle) and, if you don’t have a ticket, you can buy one from a machine on the car—unless, as happened to us, you don’t have coins. The machine doesn’t accept paper money or credit cards. We bought one ticket with the two euros in coins that we had, stamped it in another machine, and rode on into the Old Town, waiting for the ticket inspectors to pounce (the driver was sealed off in his own compartment in the front). But unlike on the vaporetto (water bus) in Venice, where we once had to pay a $90 fine because I had goofed up the stamping of our tickets, no one came around to check.

We got into the Old Town a little after seven, just as the tourist information office was closing. We went to the Frauenkirche (a very large, bell-shaped Lutheran church) to see what we could find out about the next day’s noon service (with music). Then we had dinner at the Pulvertum (Powder Tower) restaurant, in the basement of an old mansion just across from the Frauenkirche. It was good, hearty food—I had Saxon sauerbraten, Mary Joy had roast suckling pig with sauerkraut. Then we got streetcar tickets at the Postplatz machine (which accepted paper money) and went back to our hotel.

The next morning (Thursday, August 11th), we had the buffet breakfast (rolls, cheese, sliced meat, sliced sausage, cereal, fruit) at the hotel. Not great, not awful. We caught the streetcar downtown, bought tickets for 5 p.m. for the Gruenes Gewoelbe (Green Vault—the treasure chambers of the kings of Saxony). Then we walked back to the Frauenkirche for the service.

Dresden is a very lovely city. It had been even lovelier before February 13, 1945. That night, although Dresden had no military value and was known as “Florence on the Elbe,” British bombers dropped thousands of firebombs on the city, destroying 75% of it. Until German reunification in 1990, restoration of the city was slow. Early on, as we were told on our tour of the Semper Opera, one local Communist leader had said that the Allied raid had been a good thing, leaving room for the creation from scratch of a new Socialist city. But, eventually, the need for tourist dollars and deutschmarks trumped ideology, and the East German government began to restore the wonderful baroque buildings built in the reign of Elector Augustus II (“the Strong”) and his son, Augustus III, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The Frauenkirche was the last to be completed, in 2006.

The noon service, accompanied by organ, lasted about half an hour. There were prayers, hymns, readings and a sermon (which I couldn’t understand). Afterwards, a woman came forward to talk about the history of the church. I could understand very little of that, either. Mary Joy, on the other hand, does very well in German, and understood most of what was going on, though Marika had to explain a few things to her. It was a beautiful service, with beautiful music, in a magnificent space.

We went to lunch at La Osteria, where we had pizza and salad, then we went over to the Semper Opera for the 3 p.m. English-language tour. Our guide, Cosima (she said that she was glad that her father, a Wagner fan, had decided to name her after Wagner’s wife, instead of Brunnhilde), was a funny, fifty-ish Dresdener, who said that Communism had wasted thirty years of her life. We went through the opera house while she explained its decoration and history. The original opera house had burned down in the 1870s, after seeing the premiers of a number of operas, including Wagner’s Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhaeuser. The original architect, Herr Semper, had left Dresden for political reasons, at the same time as Wagner, and refused to return. However, his son took over the rebuilding, but completely under the thumb of the father, who sent him detailed plans and hundreds of letters. This correspondence was not in Dresden at the time of the firebombing, and so became an important reference for the postwar restoration. The most famous opera to premier at the “new” Semper was one of our very favorites, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.

After World War II, Cosima said, the Communist regime was going to tear down the ruins and build something else in its place, but the story is that one of the opponents of this idea got a bottle of vodka and, in one long night, met with two high Soviet officers, during which the bottle was consumed. As a result, the destruction order was countermanded. Cosima joked that this story had greatly angered a Russian on one of her tours. ‘That’s a lie,” he shouted. “They would have finished more than only one bottle!”

Afterwards, we had coffee and Kuchen (cakes) on the terrace of the nearby Schinkelwache Café, which is in a former guardhouse designed by the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

Then we toured the Gruenes Gewoelbe, a collection of precious odds and ends accumulated by the Saxon rulers and displayed much as they would have been by Augustus the Strong himself. Visitors have to get a particular time reserved, and have a fifteen-minute window during which to enter the collection. You go in two-by-two—a pair of glass doors in front of you swing open, you step into a small compartment, the doors close behind you, and after a moment the glass doors in front of you open, to let you into the chamber containing objects made out of amber. By the way, I learned here for the first time that the German word for amber is Bernstein. I will no longer be able to think of “West Side Story” without thinking of amber.

Marika and Mary Joy enjoyed the Gruenes Gewoelbe, but I would have to say that I wasn’t much impressed, especially comparing it with the much more historically important things in the Hapsburgs’ treasure house in Vienna. I rushed through it in an hour, too fast, and was punished by having to wait another hour for the others.

So a little after 7 p.m. we went to dinner at a restaurant called Max, near the Postplatz, where we ate lightly but well.

The next morning, after breakfast, we checked out of the Hotel Windsor and took the streetcar to the Old Town for the last time. We went to the Zwinger, a baroque palace that has one of the best collections of old master paintings in the world. The pride of the museum is a large Madonna and child by Raphael. The expression on Mary’s face is wonderful, both earthy and ethereal.

There are many mimes around the old town, dressed up and painted like statues. They would stand absolutely still until someone put some money in their cup, then they would do some little routine. Marika
gave some money to a silver butterfly and I took their picture together.

We looked into the Hofkirche, the Catholic cathedral, then went to lunch at another terrace restaurant near the Frauenkirche, the Kurfuerstenzecher (? The Elector’s Drinking Hall). Another good meal (they all begin to run together) spiced up by a short period of light rain. Then we took the streetcar back to the New Town and left wonderful Dresden.

Internet Access

I've written a lot about Dresden, but while we have internet access here in Warsaw, it's not Wi-Fi, and our friend's computer is rejecting my thumb drive, so I won't be able to post for a few days. That will give me a chance to write some more on the way back to Berlin.

Spreewald

After breakfast on Wednesday, August 9th, we loaded up Marika’s little Mazda 2 and headed south on the autobahn toward Dresden. On the way, we got off at Luebbenau, to visit the Spreewald.

The Spreewald is a place where the Spree River splits into many branches, dividing numberless wooded islands. This area is still inhabited by a Slavic people, the Sorbs, with their own language and culture. The normal mode of transportation is the Kahn, a flat-bottomed skiff or barge, poled like a gondola. We went to the main Hafen or harbor at Luebbenau and got into one of these boats for a three-hour round trip to the little village of Lehde, in the heart of the Spreewald.

The three of us boarded the boat, lined across, facing, over a table, a young German family of father, mother, 9-year-old daughter and two-year-old son Moritz. Moritz did very well, though he did get a little tired and cranky toward the end of the trip. He spoke slowly and deliberately, like an elder statesman. As a duck flew off, for instance, he might say: “En-te geht nach Hau-se.” (“Duck goes home.”).

When the captain had gathered enough passengers (10 or 12?) to fill the boat, we set out. As he poled along through the waterways, he kept up a running commentary in accented (Brandenburger? Saxon?) German, of which I understood barely a word. Mary Joy had some trouble understanding it, but Marika said that we weren’t missing much—it was jokey, wordy, but not providing much useful or interesting information.

When we got to Lehde, we were let off there for an hour on our own. We opted for lunch on the waterside terrace at the Gasthaus Oppott, where we had a very good lunch of fresh fish in a cream sauce, boiled potatoes and a wonderful pickle salad. The Spreewald is famous for its Gurken or pickles. But these hadn’t been sitting around in jars. They were fresh cucumber slices, newly pickled.

After our return to Luebbenau, we visited the town center and its church, then stopped for a coffee and goodies, before continuing to Dresden.

It may be a few days before we can post our adventures in that wonderful city.

From the Holocaust Memorial to the East Side Gallery

On Tuesday, after another wonderful breakfast, we took public transit to the gigantic Hauptbahnhof (Main Railroad Station) and walked from there past the major government buildings, past the Reichstag again and over to the Holocaust Memorial. This is hard to describe. Lonely Planet’s Berlin City Guide says that it “consists of 2711 sarcophagi-like columns rising up in sombre silence from undulating ground.” Sometimes these columns are very short. Sometimes they are much taller than you are. They are laid out on a strict grid, but as you walk among them you have a sense of unease, because the ground level rolls up and down and the size of the columns gradually increases and decreases, for no perceptible reason. It is impressive and powerful, but you don’t know why.

We went on to Checkpoint Charlie, which had been one of the main points for crossing the Berlin Wall. There is still the big sign in four languages: “YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.” Above the crossing there is a large photograph, in color, of an American soldier, on the other side of which is a photograph of a Russian soldier. There are also a couple of live “American soldiers” (with German accents) below, for the tourists to have their pictures taken with.

We read the history of the Wall set out in text and photos along a wooden fence around a construction area right there, then decided not to visit the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, which was about the Wall and people’s ingenious or deadly attempts to escape from East Germany over, under or through it.

Instead, we walked down to the Gendarmenplatz, the prettiest square in Berlin, to have a picnic lunch of the sandwiches that Mary Joy had made. We then had a coffee at an outdoor café next to the French Cathedral (built for the many French Calvinist Huguenots who had been welcomed to Berlin after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes had ended religious toleration in France).

Serendipitously, from our table, we saw a sign advertising an organ concert at that church in less than half an hour. We finished our coffees, went in and heard a short concert of some familiar baroque organ works. Mary Joy liked the organ but wasn’t impressed by the approach to the pieces. She thought it lacked planning, so the bits of each piece didn’t hang together (at least, that’s the impression that I, a non-musician, got of her critique!).

Then we went to the Nikolaiviertel, the oldest part of Berlin, where we took a quick look at the 13-century Nikolaikirche, whose spires are kind of like those of Assumption Church in downtown St. Paul, but much taller. Nearby is a museum dedicated to the turn-of-the-20th-century illustrator, caricaturist and photographer of the Berlin lower classes, Heinrich Zille. Mary Joy had heard about this from one of her German-language audio magazines, so we went in and saw some interesting pictures and part of a film about Zille's life.

Nearby there was a cute-looking cafe or tearoom, so we stopped in for coffee and soup (Mary Joy) and goodies (Marika and I).

We took the S-Bahn (aboveground)—or maybe it was the belowground U-Bahn—to the East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometer (0.6-mile) piece of the Wall that had been turned into a canvas for numerous peace-and-brotherhood-related murals in 1990, restored in 2009. We walked to the end of it, then across a 19th-century medievalist bridge over the Spree to the bohemian-ethnic Kreuzberg neighborhood, where we picked up an S-Bahn train back to Marika’s neighborhood. After a nice dinner prepared by our talented hostess, we retired to our apartment, to prepare for the trip to Dresden.

Touring Berlin

The next morning (Sunday, August 7th) we got up at 6:00, had a nice but very quick buffet breakfast in the hotel restaurant (included), and walked across to the airport to check in with EasyJet. Hardly anyone was in line, so we had time to kill and Mary Joy, who had brought the wrong makeup (don’t ask me!) had a consultation at the Clinique shop, which led to a very satisfactory (again, don’t ask me) purchase.

Our plane left at 8:50 and arrived early (a little after 11:30 local time) at Berlin Schoenefeld Airport. There we were met by our friend Marika, who drove us into the city, where we are staying in a guest apartment in the building where she lives. After a very nice lunch (Marika had made roast pork medallions in an onion-cream sauce) and a little rest, we went to the church where Marika played the organ for Mass, accompanied on the flute by her friend Christine. I couldn’t understand any of the homily, and even Mary Joy had trouble with it, due, apparently, to a combination of the church’s acoustic and the homily’s depth of thought. But the music was wonderful. In particular, as a postlude Marika played a “Rumba Toccata” by Planyavsky—a very unusual and delightful piece.

Afterwards, we stayed for this congregation’s version of the coffee and doughnuts after mass at St. Mary’s—except that here it was wine and pretzels. We sat at a table with Marika, Christine (a native Berliner) and Marika’s older friend Erika, who had been in Berlin since 1967, after having lived in England for three years. After several hours of pleasant conversation, we left around 9 p.m. and drove back to Marika’s apartment. We then walked across the park to a “rustic” restaurant, where we had a very light supper (I had a nice salad with thinly-sliced sausage). And so to bed.

The next morning (Monday, August 8th), after Marika provided us with a great breakfast (bread, pastries, ham, cheese, fruit), we took public transit downtown and walked over to the bus stop for one of the hop-on hop-off bus tours. We bought our tickets, then made a quick visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

The wrecked tower and shell of the original late 19th-century church had been left unrestored as a memorial to the victims of World War II. Currently, the tower is surrounded by an outer building shell while it is being worked on, but we visited the new, very modern church next door, also memorializing the victims of the war and of the Nazis. It is sort of a box, made of deep blue glass, so that the sanctuary is bathed in blue light, with a large crucifix-like figure of Christ hanging over the altar. Very impressive.

After this, it felt almost like an anticlimax to get onto the bus. Since we were the first on, we got the seats at the very front of the open top deck,, right by the guide (named Stephanie). When we had gotten up that morning, the sun was shining and the sky was bright blue. By the time we left Marika’s, it was clouding over. Just after we sat down on the bus, raindrops started to fall on us. Stephanie rolled the removable top back over us, just in time. We watched the streets below as people rushed around in a heavy downpour, their umbrellas being blown inside-out, while lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. But not long into the tour, the rain tapered off, then stopped altogether. By the time we got to the City Hall, the sun was out again, and Stephanie could roll back the canopy again.

She was very good, giving quick commentary on the major sights in both German and English. As I said, it was a hop-on, hop-off tour, so you could get off at one of the 16 stops, do some more intensive sight-seeing, then pick up where you’d left off with one of the other buses that came along every 15 minutes. But we were feeling lazy in the bright, pleasant sunshine, and we wouldn’t be able to get the same perfect seats on following buses. So we stayed on for the whole thing, getting off where we had gotten on. We walked to a café, “Zimt und Zucker” (“Cinnamon and Sugar”) with tables outside, across the street, overlooking the River Spree. We had coffee and various wonderful concoctions of fruit, sugar and cream, which, unfortunately, we had to share, since we were joined by first one, then several, then a dozen or so yellow jacket wasps.

We walked over to the Brandenburg Gate, as it started to sprinkle again, and then, just as suddenly, stopped. Weather in Berlin is, as they say, wechselhaft (changeable). The new American Embassy is right next to the Gate--that seems vaguely hubristic.

At 5:00, we met Marion, a day-job colleague of the flutist, Christine—they both work for the federal government. Then Christine herself showed up, and they gave us a tour of the Reichstag building.

This was originally built for the German Imperial legislature in the 1890s, and was the seat of the parliament of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 30s. After Hitler took over as Chancellor, in early 1933, one night the building caught fire, and became a burnt-out shell. The Nazis blamed the Communists, and used this as an excuse to consolidate power and completely eliminate democracy in Germany. The building suffered more damage during the war. During the Cold War, it was right next to the border with East Berlin and, after 1961, practically up against the Berlin Wall. There were various ideas for reusing the Reichstag, but it wasn’t until the reunification of Germany and the decision to make Berlin the capital again, that the British architect Lord Norman Foster was awarded the job of designing the building’s restoration for use as the seat of the federal legislature, the Bundestag.

The original building had had a small glass dome, but Foster designed a huge glass cupola, with a ramp the people could use to walk up to the top, symbolically looking down into the open chamber as their legislators carried on the nation’s business. The views over Berlin were spectacular and our guides were informative and delightful (Marion was very funny). We got to see some of the areas used by the political parties. Mary Joy even got to have her picture taken with Chancellor Angela Merkel (or a reasonable facsimile thereof)! The building is impressive not only in itself, but because of what it stands for: democratic Germany, destroyed at the beginning of 1933, reunified and renewed in the 1990s.

Afterwards, Marika, Mary Joy, Christine and I went across the river to an Italian restaurant, Cinque, where we shared good food and good conversation.

Westminster and Gatwick

Finally, Wi-Fi, at our hotel in Dresden.

On Friday, August 5th we had dinner with Mary Joy’s brother at a restaurant near our house, then he took us to the airport. An uneventful flight on Delta from MSP to Heathrow. It was at an unusual time, 9:45 p.m., and arrived ahead of schedule, around 11:40 a.m. Not until the last minute did we decide what we would do from there. One alternative was to take the bus straight to Gatwick, check into our hotel there, then visit Brighton. Instead, after picking up some pounds at an airport ATM (one pound cost $1.71), we went to the Underground station. We took the Piccadilly line to Hammersmith, where we crossed to the District line for Victoria Station (five pounds apiece). There, we left our big bags at Left Luggage (8.5 pounds apiece) and went out to see what we could see of London in a few hours.

First, we bought some pasties at a stand in the station and a couple of coffees from Costa Coffee, and had a sort of lunch in a nearby park. One thing that travel across time zones disrupts is one’s meal schedule. We had had a light dinner around 6:30 p.m., before going to the airport. We had another dinner on the plane around 10:30. We had a small breakfast (a sort of egg sandwich) about an hour before landing. Most of the day, my digestive system felt vaguely grumpy, and not really hungry. We walked the few blocks to Buckingham Palace, but tickets to get in, we were told, sell out early in the day, so we took some pictures of the outside and headed down to the Tate Britain. Since J.M.W. Turner is one of my favorite painters and this museum has the largest Turner collection on Earth, I was very happy. We also saw some of their Constable paintings and William Blake illustrations. The café didn’t have any soup left, so Mary Joy had some berry juice and I had a bottle of ginger beer—a special recipe brand containing lemon juice and a lot of ginger—it nearly burned my mouth out.

Then we walked up past the Houses of Parliament and around Westminster Abbey. They had just finished the 5:00 Saturday evensong there and there was no entry for tourists. Last time we were in London we had heard Anglican evensong at St. Paul’s Cathedral and liked it very much. When we come back to London, we’ll try evensong at Westminster Abbey.

We continued on down Victoria Street, ending up at Westminster Cathedral. The difference between the Abbey and the Cathedral is about 800 years and one Reformation—Westminster Cathedral is the seat of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, primate of the Catholic Church in England. It was built early in the twentieth century and has an Italianate brick campanile (off of which a spy falls in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent). We arrived during their version of evensong, in the elaborately mosaiced Lady Chapel, and stayed for the beginning of 6:00 mass. A guest choir was there (the Cathedral Singers from Sidney, Australia, singing Palestrina’s Sicut Cervis at the offertory. Barely awake by now, we left after the Sanctus, interestingly Scottish-tinged, by the well-known modernist (and very Catholic—sort of kind of a Scottish Messiaen) composer James MacMillan, who had a piano concerto premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra last spring.

We walked the few blocks to Victoria Station, picked up our luggage, and instead of standing in line at the Gatwick Express ticket booth, went straight to the train and bought our tickets (17.50 pounds apiece) from the conductor. After a half-hour ride, we arrived at the airport and found our way through a maze of passageways and new construction to the Hilton. This hotel is a little worn around the edges, and pricey, and, unforgivably, charges fifteen pounds (around $26) for in-room internet access (which we declined to buy). It is a very large hotel and there was a crowd of people checking in. When we finally got up to the desk, we were checked in by a nice Spanish woman from Valencia (her mother makes great paella), who, unlike any native-born British person who would have heard us speak, assumed that we were English when she was telling us how to fill in our check-in card. After settling our luggage in room 2117, we went back to the airport and, with some misgivings went to a chain restaurant there called Giraffe, where we had a very good Moroccan-style soup. The couple at the next table was there in spite of having reserved a flight out for 3:00 that afternoon. They had left their home on the south coast an hour-and-a-half ahead of time, as usual, but when they got on the expressway M25, they discovered, too late, that there had been an accident that had damaged the highway. They went seven miles in seven hours, and had to change their flight to 6:00 the next morning at Stansted airport, which was in the far north London suburbs. After many hours with nothing to eat or drink, they finally got to Gatwick, and now were having dinner at 9:00. They now had one particular problem: they had to leave their car there, because that’s where their return flight would come in, but they had to somehow find their way up north to the Stansted area (near Cambridge), get a hotel room, and be up in time to catch their 6 a.m. flight. They would have a long and very expensive taxi ride, because it would be too late for trains or buses.

Internet Access

I am writing, but getting it out may take some time, since our Berlin friend Marika has only dial-up access and no USB port that I can find. Eventually!