Tlacochahuaya

This morning (Friday the 22nd) we had another nice breakfast (a sort of scrambled egg covered with a red chili sauce), then caught the bus again (this time, I tagged along) to Tlacochahuaya. For such a small village, the church (San Jeronimo) is large and very beautifully decorated. People were restoring the murals inside.

We went up the steep, narrow, circular staircase to the choir loft, where there is a very elaborately decorated one-manual organ, one of the first restored. Guy Bovet, the Swiss organist and expert on Spanish baroque organ music, conducted a master class, in Spanish and English. Some young Mexican students and Cicely Winter, the director of the institute here, played short pieces and Bovet offered critiques and suggestions.

Mary Joy first encountered Guy Bovet on his home grounds, in the beautiful old village of Romainmotier, Switzerland, where every year he runs an organ conference in the medieval abbey. In 1989, Mary Joy attended that conference, where she met her friends Marika and Bernard, from Germany (she roomed with Marika). She went back in 1991. A few years ago, Bovet was in Minneapolis to inaugurate the new organ in St. Olaf Catholic Church downtown.

After the master class (during which I wrote almost all of this post), we got back on the bus and went back to Oaxaca, to have lunch at La Olla (The Pot). We had eaten there several times, eight years ago, and liked it very much. The menu stated that the meal was saludable (healthy). We started out with a glass of what they called “lemon tea” along with a much smaller glass of mezcal, which is related to tequila, but made in a different part of Mexico, also from agave plants. It was dark and tasted like wood smoke—we liked it. First came a nice organic salad, followed by a wonderful squash-flower soup (a specialty of Oaxaca). Then we had zucchini stuffed with cheese, corn and herbs. Finally, for dessert we had a Mexican bread pudding. We're going back to La Olla before we leave!


The evening was spent first at the Francisco Burgoa Library, where there was a slide presentation on Oaxacan organs, followed by an explanation of an exhibit about organs and their use in Oaxaca over the centuries, followed by a reception, with more mezcal and appetizers, along with other Mexican drinks, non-alcoholic (a sweet, dark red, cold hybiscus flower tea and horchata, a sweet, milky almond drink). We then all walked a number of blocks to the Textile Museum, where, in an old chapel that used to belong to a convent, we heard a concert of polyphonal songs from old books that had been found in a chest next to an organ out in one of the villages (San Bartolo Yautepec). The eight singers, directed by a Peruvian, were called the Capilla Virreinal de la Nueva Espana (the Viceregal Chapel of New Spain--i.e., colonial Mexico). The music was beautiful and beautifully sung. And so to bed.

A Garden

On Thursday, October 21st, we had a very nice breakfast consisting of a fried egg on a tortilla with a tomato, onion and chili sauce, along with chocolate croissants, muffins and fruit (banana, kiwi, watermelon orange and papaya slices). I needed my morning coffee, but Mary Joy had hot chocolate, with various spices. This is a specialty of Oaxaca. In the markets you can by chunks of chocolate with different mixes of spices (or none at all), for drinking. Oaxaca isn’t much known for chocolate candy, but it is famous (as one of the major centers of Mexican cooking, along with Puebla), for its seven mole sauces. Some of them involve chocolate. Most of them involve chilis. They are (according to Lonely Planet):

Mole negro (black): very dark and chocolaty, yet picante, mostly served over chicken.
Mole amarillo (yellow): tomatillos, cumin, cloves, cilantro, etc., usually served over beef.
Mole verde (green): delicate, with pumpkin seeds, walnuts, almonds, lettuce and tomatillos, over chicken.
Mole colorado (red): strong, with various chilies, black pepper and cinnamon.
Mole coloradito (little red) or rojo (red): sharp and tomato-based—sometimes dumbed down and exported as enchilada sauce.
Manche manteles (tablecloth stainer—it’s more watery than most moles): brick red and woody-flavored, used with fruit.
Chichilo negro: chilies, avacado leaves, tomatoes and corn dough.

We went down to the headquarters of the organ institute, where we signed in, then Mary Joy got on the bus to go to a master class in Tlacochahuaya, and I wandered down the main pedestrianized street, Alcala, past the spectacular Santo Domingo church, then over past the cathedral, across the Alameda to the Zocolo.

Oaxaca has two main squares next to each other, unlike most Mexican cities, which have only one, the Zocolo. Zocolos throughout Mexico are named after the huge square in Mexico City, which, in turn, got its name from an empty pedestal (zocolo, in Spanish--the statue on it was taken down because the person portrayed by it was kicked out of office). Rather than agreeing to meet in the enormous Plaza, people would say “Meet me at the zocolo,” so, eventually, the whole square took that name. In Oaxaca, the Alameda is the square directly in front of the cathedral, to its west. It is always full of activity and people—vendors of food and balloons, strollers and gawkers. The Zocolo, on the south side of the cathedral, is more heavily wooded and less peopled. There, along with the shoeshine stands, is a large gazebo, where bands play almost every evening.

It was pleasant to sit there and read my guides to decide what I was going to do. I had joked with Mary Joy that I would take the “chicken bus” over the mountains via a twisty, precipitous mountain road, the eight hours to Puerto Escondido, on the Pacific coast. She punched me in the arm.

Instead, I took the 11 o’clock English-language tour of the Jardin Etnobotanico (Ethnobotanical Garden). We had taken the same tour eight years ago, but most of it had been spent in the garden’s office, since it had begun to rain not long after we got started. The garden was originally the garden of the Dominican friary of Santo Domingo, behind Santo Domingo church. When the monastery was shut down in the 19th century, it was taken over by the military as a cavalry barracks and a high wall was built around part of the grounds. When the cavalry moved out, in the 1990s, the whole complex was almost turned into a luxury hotel and parking lot, but the artist Francisco Toledo got a foundation together, which saved the buildings as a wonderful regional museum and the grounds as the Jardin Etnobotanico. The garden contains specimens of plants from throughout Oaxaca State, relating to how humans had interacted with them over the centuries. Our guide, Diego, in nearly two-and-a-half hours, showed us many (to our eyes) exotic plants, explaining their uses. Most impressive, perhaps, was a huge barrel cactus, which they believe is around 1000 years old.

The tour finished around 1:30 and I went to lunch at Maria Bonita, where I had a tlayuda, another local specialty. It was a crisp tortilla with beans, mole negro and the local cheese (white and mild and crumbly), along with a bottle of Bohemia beer. I was proud of ordering and paying for everything without using a word of English.

Then I went to pick up Mary Joy at the restaurant Quince Letras (Fifteen Letters), where she was having lunch at a long table in the courtyard (open air, in part) with other organists, organ groupies, etc. It was a much larger lunch than I had had: a bean and tortilla soup, two chicken drumsticks (each in its own mole, one negro, one colorado) with rice, and for dessert a flan covered with caramel.

Lunch was running late, so it was after 4 p.m. when we got back to our room to take a nap, to the sound of children playing at the school next door.

A little after seven we walked over to the Basilica of La Soledad, looking unsuccessfully for something quick to eat along the way. We heard a concert of baroque and new neo-baroque music for organ and trombone. Unusual, but nice. Soledad is another gorgeous church, with plenty of gold leaf, baroque statuary and a miraculous statue of the Blessed Virgin over the main altar.

The concert ended a little after 9 p.m., and we tried to find some where to eat on the way back to the B&B, but didn’t find anything open that looked interesting. Instead, we sat on our balcony and had some snacks that we had brought from home. It was very pleasant. The weather has been unusually warm, in the upper 80s, but it cools down very quickly at night, to the low 50s.

Oaxaca

On Wednesday the 25th of October we caught the 9:35 a.m. Continental Express flight to Houston. It was an uneventful flight on an Embraer EJR-145 jet. These are small commuter jets, made in Brazil. There is a narrow aisle, and each row has one seat on the left side and two on the right. There is only one flight attendant. The overhead bins are only on one side, and so small that there is not room for normal maximum-size carry-on luggage. Before the flight, the woman who had earlier checked us in went through the lounge, putting blue gate-check tags on the larger carry-ons—they would have to be left at the plane door and picked up on the way into the Houston terminal.

There doesn’t appear to be any interesting place to eat at the Houston airport, so we ended up having an early dinner at Fuddrucker’s.

We saw a beautiful sunset on the plane (another EJR-145) going from Houston to Oaxaca, but otherwise another uneventful flight. Getting into the city was another question. We loaded onto a combi minivan-taxi with seven other people and headed off. It seemed strange that the driver, instead of taking the main highway to town, followed twisty back roads. It turned out that the recent heavy rains had wiped out a bridge.

We were in four groups. First to get off were two Mexican women, who were going to catch a bus for a five-hour ride to their village in the mountains, where, presumably, everyone’s first language was not Spanish but Mixtec.

Next were two young women from the rear seats, who got out at the central square, the Zocolo. They had spent the trip into town speaking to each other in some Scandinavian language. Occasionally I heard a word I recognized: Washington, Jefferson, Baltimore, Georgetown, Chiapas, fliegen (to fly), Mexico City.

Third were an older Mexican man, a younger American in a suit, who spoke little or no Spanish, and an American guy (not in a suit), who spoke very good Spanish. The two Americans, at least, were lawyers of some sort. They got off at the Holiday Inn Express.

Finally, we arrived at our B&B, not far from Santo Domingo church. It is very nice, though our room is kind of small. We were going to take our showers and go to bed, but the water was out. The next morning, the owner apologized, saying that this hadn’t happened for a long time. The city water hadn’t been working for five days, but they had five water tanks (tinacas) on the roof. Suddenly, these had stopped working. Sometime early in the morning they got the water back going, but they still had to bring in a plumber, who arrived at the same time (around 9:30) that I got back from leaving Mary Joy at the bus for her trip into the countryside. (I wouldn’t let him follow me into the house, since he didn’t have a key. He tried to explain that he didn’t have a key and was there for work, but gave up and just rang the doorbell. He looked more like a college kid, with a backpack, than a plumber.)

Oaxaca is a beautiful colonial city. In the eighteenth century it got rich on the cochineal trade. Cochineal is a brilliant red dye, made from a certain sort of insect that is found on prickly-pear cacti, collected and ground up. Much of the money ended up being spent on buildings, especially churches.

We spent a long weekend in Oaxaca in October, 2002. We visited the spectacular Zapotec ruins at Monte Alban and had a driver take us to the outlying villages, each of which is known for a particular craft. We ended up with a few small rugs, some black pottery and an alebrije, a fantastically painted little wooden monster. We also saw the restored baroque organ at San Jeronimo Church in Tlacochahuaya—something that we’ll get much better acquainted with on this trip. One result of the cochineal boom was that even small village churches ended up with beautiful one-manual, no-pedal organs. They have fallen into disuse and decay, but now there is a foundation that is restoring them and working to train young Mexican organists to play them.

North Shore

Saturday evening, October 3rd, after 5:30 mass, we drove to Duluth and spent the night at the Country Inn and Suites Duluth South (not bad). The next morning we drove up Highway 61, along Lake Superior. We stopped along the way at the rest area at Tettegouche State Park and took a short walk above the shore, with good views of Palisade Head and Shovel Point. We had lunch (not great) at the Bluefin Grille in Tofte, then continued to Grand Marais, where we checked into the Best Western Superior Inn (nice--we have a balcony overlooking the lake). We drove on through the autumn afternoon: bright sunshine, blue sky, bluer lake, yellow and orange foliage, hills, islands, water. Very pleasant.

By Mount Josephine we pulled off the road to photograph some particularly spectacular scenery. There we talked with a Canadian woman who had driven her elderly Mercedes convertible down from Thunder Bay, thirty miles across the border. Mary Joy asked what Thunder Bay was like. They are fixing up the area by the lake, but otherwise it’s apparently not very interesting. If we’d had our passports with us, we’d have gone to see for ourselves, but instead we had to settle for seeing Canada from Grand Portage State Park, across the Pigeon River (which is the international boundary at this point).

The park’s new visitors’ center has been open for just a week, but we were there for one purpose: to walk the half mile to the High Falls of the Pigeon River, the highest waterfall in Minnesota (though we have to share it with Ontario, since the international border runs right through the middle of it). As to how high it is, they apparently haven’t yet decided whether it’s 130 feet high or only 100. Whichever, it’s impressive.

Though the sun was getting low, we decided to go to Judge C.R. Magney State Park, 26 miles back down Highway 61, and take the walk to Devil’s Kettle Falls. This was about a half-hour walk, mostly uphill, but with a precipitous 120-130-step staircase down to the Upper Falls near the end. Since the Upper Falls are below Devil’s Kettle, we climbed another 700 feet and there it was: a bizarre double waterfall. The right half (as you view it from downstream) was normal, but the left half was a large pothole into which half of the Brule River disappears, no one knows where.

We managed to get back to our car before dark, and then drove a very short distance (just across the bridge over the Brule River) to Naniboujou Lodge. This was a private club for the rich and famous of the 1920s (founding members included Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Ring Lardner). It went bankrupt during the Great Depression and is now a hotel and restaurant. The restaurant is in the great hall of the lodge, flamboyantly, wonderfully decorated with Cree Indian motifs in red, blue and green. At one end is the largest fireplace in Minnesota, built of 100 tons of rock. The meal was very good, too. We both had Lake Superior herring on wild rice pilaf. One note of interest: the restaurant doesn’t serve alcoholic beverages, so we had sparkling lingonberry-apple juice.

We drove back the fourteen miles to our hotel in Grand Marais and eventually went to bed.

A digression: place names often sound better in French, such as:

Grand Marais = Big Swamp
Eau Claire = Clearwater
Prairie du Chien = Dog Prairie.

Monday morning (October 4, 2010) we had a buffet breakfast (nicer than the one in Duluth) at our
hotel, then decided to make a short run up the Gunflint Trail. Not far out of town is the Pincushion Mountain overlook, with a spectacular view over Grand Marais and Lake Superior. The Gunflint Trail is pleasant, lined with birches, pines and aspens, but not exciting, at least not in its earlier stages. We didn’t have time to go very far, so we soon turned around and went back to Grand Marais, where we picked up 61 and headed southwest (i.e., Duluthwards, rather than Canadawards) ten miles to Cascade River State Park.

Cascade River is a river that has many cascades (surprise!). As you will by now have realized, the North Shore is a good place for waterfall lovers. All of the state parks there have them—on this trip we didn’t even get to the highest fall entirely within Minnesota, the 70-foot High Falls of the Baptism River in Tettegouche State Park (we’ve seen that one a couple of times before). We saw the Cascades and Cascade Falls, then took the lengthy (four or five miles round trip) hike up to the top (630 feet) of Lookout Mountain. An impressive view of the lake and thousands of yellow and orange trees.

Next was lunch at the Angry Trout in Grand Marais. Mary Joy had a fish chowder and I had a large salad, both very good. The bathroom facility there is unusual, one room accessed from the courtyard outside the restaurant’s front door. It plays the “outhouse” for jokes, with a large half moon on the door. The inside has been colorfully tiled, by a local artist.

We then headed toward home, stopping again at Tettegouche, but this time going to the top of Palisade Head, with views to Shovel Point in one direction, and to the taconite iron ore plant at Silver Bay in the other direction. No waterfalls here.

But our next stop was at the most photographed waterfall in Minnesota: Gooseberry Falls, just off the highway in Gooseberry State Park.

We confirmed our dinner reservation by cell phone from the parking lot. We were going to dine at Nokomis Restaurant, near the beginning of the North Shore Scenic Drive, not far from Duluth. First, we stopped at Russ Kendall’s smoked fish shop in Knife River, where we picked up some smoked salmon and trout for ourselves and for Mary Joy’s father.

Nokomis is a very good restaurant with picture windows overlooking the lake. The dishes we had were very imaginative. Mary Joy had walleye wrapped in prosciutto, with olives. I had lake trout with purple sticky rice.

After an uneventful night drive through Duluth and down I-35, we got home around 10 p.m.

Chicago and Home

Philadelphia Airport had, apparently since the last time we had come through, three works before, adopted free wi-fi, so I was able to post to the blog from there. When we got to O’Hare, everything had gone too well. We took the Blue train downtown. Toward the end of the ride, we noticed that it appeared to be raining. We changed to the Red subway and then got off at Clark and Division. We came up out of the subway into a downpour, with thunder and lightning (one stroke was uncomfortably close). Our small umbrellas were pretty much useless and soon we and our luggage were very wet. Rather than walk the last few blocks to our hotel, I flagged down a taxi (Chicago is a very good taxi town—they are always cruising the major streets, and all you have to do is find one with the “Taxi” sign lit up and wave your arm). We got in and I told the driver (an African immigrant) to take us to the Ambassador East. He looked surprised and said that it was just over in that direction. I replied that we needed to get out of the rain. So he took us the three or four remaining blocks and let us off. Too little, too late. Our clothes were soaked through, as was much of what we were carrying in our luggage. Our room was soon festooned with stuff hanging to dry.

We managed to scrounge together enough clothes to go to dinner. We asked the woman at the front desk to recommend a nearby, informal, ethnic restaurant. She suggested Mario’s Ristorante, a block away. It fit all our requirements. The food wasn’t outstanding, but it was good enough, under the circumstances.

The next morning (Wednesday, July 7th), the last day of our trip, we had breakfast at a restaurant that we had been to a number of times, and liked our breakfast, but there was a problem with the bill (either gross incompetence or dishonesty, or both), so we won’t eat there again.

We went back to the hotel, checked out (they stored our luggage for us), and walked over to the beginning of Michigan Avenue. Mary Joy said that she could see herself living in one of the brownstone rowhouses we passed on the way—we guessed the prices in that neighborhood to be at least a million dollars. We went down Michigan, in what was already (10:30) sauna-like heat, to the Chicago Architecture Foundation, across from the Art Institute. We have, over the years, taken a number of their walking tours (all very interesting), and once we took their boat tour on the Chicago River, though Mary Joy missed most of the narration by being under deck, buying candy and pop for her niece, whom we had been talked into taking along.

We got there in time to take the 11:00 two-hour “Intersections” tour. The CFA has now gone hi-tech—the docent has a microphone and everyone in the group carries a radio receiver with an earphone. Our docent, Jim, walked us around downtown, pointing out how buildings very close to one another and/or with similar purposes and uses were built very differently, depending on the era. For instance, he showed us three houses of worship very close together—a synagogue from the 1950s, St. Peter in the Loop Catholic Church (with whose Schola Mary Joy’s brother and sister-in-law have often played and recorded) from, I think, the early 60s, in two very different modern styles, and the Chicago Temple Methodist church from the 1920s, which was like a medieval gothic church which had had the top half sliced off and a tall Art Deco office building stuck between the entrance level and the spire! Also, right near each other were the ponderously monumental neoclassical City-County Building of about a hundred years ago, the International Style 1960s glass and (intentionally) rusted steel city offices, and Helmut Jahn’s post-modernist phantasmagoria State of Illinois building, which looks something like a big circus tent. We ended up at the new Millennium Park, with its big, polished “bean,” its Frank Gehry bridge and music pavilion and the fountain that is a big block with films of people’s faces—every five minutes the person in the film opens his or her mouth and real water gushes out on the waiting kids below. We enjoyed the tour very much.

Afterwards, as suggested on the tour, we visited the Chicago Cultural Center, formerly the Public Library, and saw the Tiffany glass dome there. Gorgeous.

We had intended to have a late lunch-early dinner at Rick Bayless’s new restaurant, Xoco, but when we got there we discovered that it and his other restaurants (we’ve eaten at and greatly enjoyed the Frontera Grill) were closed so that Bayless could take the entire staff on their annual trip to Mexico, presumably to keep the food as authentic as possible and to come up with new ideas. This had happened to us once before, also in early July, so we’ll remember for future reference.

Instead, we ate at the reliably decent, if not exciting, Bistro 110, half a block from the Water Tower. We’ve eaten there a number of times and know what to expect (sort of like my dad and Perkins). Then we went back to the hotel, picked up our luggage, walked back to the subway, caught the Red train to Lake Street, got out and up the stairs to the El and eventually caught a crowded Orange train to Midway Airport.

What with lugging our (heavier than when we started the trip) luggage around, Mary Joy was exhausted by then and said “Never again!” as far as taking public transit in this sort of situation, even though it’s a lot cheaper than a shuttle or taxi. I passionately love the CTA and the New York subways. Mary Joy does not--she thinks they’re dirty and crowded and it’s too difficult to maneuver in them with luggage. I adore BART in San Francisco, the MTA in Boston (unlike the man in the song, I did return, and am not riding forever ‘neath the streets of Boston), the London Underground, the U-Bahn and S-Bahn in Berlin, the Metros in Paris, Rome, Madrid (even though a man I was jammed against in the Madrid metro attempted to pick my pocket—I stared him down and he got off at the next stop), Milan, Barcelona, Budapest, Vienna, Prague (as well as the streetcars in Vienna and Prague!) and even in Mexico City (you don’t know what a sardine feels like until you’ve ridden the Mexico City Metro at rush hour). I fell in love with urban rail, as the fastest, best and most efficient way to get around in big cities, at the age of thirteen, back in 1964, when I visited my uncle in Cleveland Heights and he took me downtown on the Cleveland Rapid Transit. There was nothing at all like that in Alliance!

Once we got to Midway, there were no problems, other than a half-hour delay due to nearby lightning, though I was disappointed that this Southwest pilot didn’t play the harmonica. We took a taxi from the Humphrey Terminal and got home around 9:30 p.m.

Dublin Again

Sunday morning (July 4th), before checking out of the guesthouse, we took a walk up the street instead of down, for the first time since we had arrived, and discovered the convent church of St. Ursula, with mass in progress (and a much better organ than at Herz Jesu).

But we had to leave almost immediately to catch the 10:28 train to Geneva Airport. There, after about a 2½ ride, we had no problem taking the 3:45 Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, where we again took the Airlink 747 bus into town and got off at O'Connell Street, a couple of blocks from our hotel, the Best Western Premier Academy Plaza, the same that we had had at the beginning of the trip.

Ireland, of course, is substantially different from Switzerland. The cuisine is much better, as we proved by following a Rough Guide (online) recommendation and going to a restaurant called Eden, on Meetinghouse Square, near Temple Bar. It has a kind of artsy, bohemian feel, with modern décor. Our table was right next to the open kitchen, so my back was warmed and Mary Joy had a front-row seat to watch meals being prepared. Our food was very good.

We wandered around a little, up the pedestrianized shopping of Grafton Street, to St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin’s central park (though not anywhere as big as New York’s Central Park). They were closing the gates as we arrived (9 p.m.), and all the shops were closed, since it was Sunday evening, so we walked back down Grafton Street, past Trinity College and the Old Parliament, across the Liffey and up O’Connell Street, back to our hotel.

There is an Ireland-related story that I forgot to tell earlier. On the night in Interlaken that we were unsuccessfully looking for wi-fi, as we left McDonald’s, Mary Joy saw a group of five or six young (12- or 13-year-old) girls. She approached them and asked them in German if they knew where we could find internet access. They were clearly having trouble understanding what she meant because, as it turned out, they weren’t Swiss but Irish. Assuming that someone walking on the Hoheweg in Interlaken lives in Interlaken and is not a tourist is like assuming that someone walking in Times Square in New York is a New Yorker and not a tourist. When the Irish girls learned that we were from the U.S., they asked if we’d been to Canada. Yes. Had we been to Toronto? Yes, Mary Joy had. Had we met Justin Bieber? Mary Joy had no idea who they were talking about. Of course, they didn’t really expect that just because we were from the same continent as the latest boy singer teen heartthrob, we would actually know him. I think that American girls of that age might have asked a Canadian the same thing, but they would have been louder and more obvious about it. Irish humor is deadpan, low-key, subtle, full of whimsy.

On Monday morning (July 5th), we got on a big bus on O’Connell Street for the Mary Gibbons tour to the Hill of Tara and Newgrange. Most of the other people on board, it turned out, were students from Loyola University in New Orleans, in Dublin for a summer program at Trinity College.

Mary Gibbons Tours, though very well reviewed in the guidebooks, appears to be basically a one-woman operation, with Mary herself guiding the tours. On the way to Tara, she was very informative about Irish history and prehistory, especially as it related to the valley of the River Boyne.

First stop was the Hill of Tara, where we were let out to look around for half an hour. Though nothing was left of its ancient glory as the seat of Irish High Kings except various earthworks, the site itself, with its views over long distances, was what must have impressed people back then. We had someone take our picture by the rock where the High Kings were crowned.

We got back on the bus, and on the way to the interpretive center for the great passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, we passed Slane Castle, home to rock concerts and the first “Celtic Woman” TV special. Then Mary told us about the Battle of the Boyne, which, in 1690, confirmed Protestant rule in England and Ireland.

At the interpretive center, we went through the exhibition area, then saw a seven-minute film and, eventually, walked out across a bridge to a pickup area, where we and the other members of the Mary Gibbons group had a 1:45 pickup time. The Newgrange passage tomb had had some sort of fungal invasion, so now the number of visitors was strictly limited. Each group had to be taken by bus to the tomb at a particular time, and was given one hour there. Our buses picked us up, went the 3 kilometers (about two miles) to Newgrange and deposited us at the gate, where we were met by an Office of Public Works (equivalent to the Park Service) guide, also named Mary. She led us up the hill at a brisk walk, leading us to think of hiking in Switzerland. There, while she was speaking, it suddenly started raining, heavily, and just as suddenly stopped. She put on a windbreaker without dropping a word and just as expertly (the Irish are experts in rain showers) took it off again. I got wet, but quickly dried off. Mary Joy had gotten her windbreaker on almost as quickly as Mary.

We learned about how the tomb had been built, around 5200 years ago—before the pyramids, a thousand years before Stonehenge, how the entrance had been discovered in the late 1600s, how it had been excavated and restored (controversially) in the 1960s to 80s. Mary told us the various theories as to what the geometric art incised in its huge stones meant and how the tomb might (or might not) have been used. She then took us inside, through a long, narrow, uphill passage and told us about how at dawn (8:58 a.m.) on the winter solstice and four surrounding days, light from the rising sun would penetrate to the center of the giant mound.

Then we got a chance to look around and take pictures before going back to the interpretive center, then back to Dublin.

For dinner, we went to Fallon & Byrne, a big food hall, plus wine bar, plus restaurant. Mary Joy thought it was pretentious and the meal she had didn’t work either conceptually or in execution. I didn’t like it as much as Eden, but I thought it was okay and didn’t get angry about it.

Then, we went to Stephen’s Green. Mary Joy found the number of drunks around in Dublin (begging, weaving around, talking to themselves, sleeping on benches) disturbing. Unlike in the United States, where most drunks and panhandlers look to be middle-aged (maybe prematurely), a large proportion of those in Dublin appeared to be in their twenties.

We went looking for Irish traditional music, but figured that the best we could do under the circumstances would be something heavily touristy. We were right. We ended up at Oliver St. John Gogarty’s Pub, which has “trad” music seven nights a week, and since that music is loudly amplified, it can be heard out on the street, to draw people in. We were drawn in, and ended up enjoying ourselves. There was a three-piece band—singer and M.C. on guitar (didn’t get his name), elderly accordionist Des Leach and Leach’s daughter Norie (?) on fiddle. They were very good (though it would have been better without the amplifiers), and the guitarist kept up a funny patter and interaction with the (overwhelmingly American) audience. The whole place was still decorated with American flags and the waitstaff wore black cowboy hats, in honor of the Fourth of July. We went to the bar, and I ordered a Guiness, while Mary Joy apologized to the bartender for not being able to have a beer and asked if a mineral water would be okay. The bartender, with typical Irish tongue-in-cheek, replied that he, too, was sorry that she couldn’t have a beer, but that a mineral water would be fine. We stayed for quite a while, and bought one of their CDs, before heading back to the hotel.

This morning (Tuesday, July 6th), we caught the Airlink bus to the airport. Dublin is one of the few places where you go through U.S. immigration before you arrive in the United States. The only problem with that was that the waiting area for the flight, after passing through Immigration, is too small. Otherwise everything has gone uneventfully. I have spent most of the flight catching up with this blog, to post when we get to Chicago.

Saas Fee

After leaving Leuk, we got on a train to Visp, where we caught the bus to Saas Fee. Saas Fee is surrounded tightly on three sides by mountains, a number of them over 4000 meters (more than 13,000 feet) high. Until not so long ago, it was inaccessible to motor vehicles. Once a road was opened, however, it quickly became a major ski resort, with year-round skiing and ski-boarding. It is also a hiking center and has a revolving restaurant that, at 3500 meters (nearly 12,000 feet), is 500 meters (more than 1500 feet) higher than the Schilthorn’s.

We didn’t go to that restaurant. We didn’t do any (serious) hiking. We certainly didn’t go skiing and ski-boarding. Instead, we went up to the lowest lift destination, Hannig (2360 meters, about 7800 feet), walked about twenty minutes, to a nearby glacial valley, walked back, had prune cake and mineral water (Mary Joy) and Rivella (me), saw a tame marmot and took the gondola back down to Saas Fee.

Another digression. Earlier, I compared Rivella to Fanta. That might create an incorrect impression. Instead of being a bright orange color, Rivella is an orangish amber. It isn’t nearly as sweet-tasting as Orange Crush.

As to the marmot, when we had taken the Marmot Trail above Zermatt, we hadn’t seen any marmots (except for the carved, wooden variety), but they had seen us, as indicated by the whistles we heard. The marmot at Hannig was used to being fed by tourists, so he posed for us (down and left from the blue framework).

We took the Postal Bus back to Visp, along curving mountain roads. Occasionally a bus would have to honk its horn to warn oncoming traffic that it was coming around a curve. The horn of a Postal Bus is not like your usual car horn, it is more like a bicycle horn, or the taxi horns in Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” It has at least three different notes, and when I heard it on the way to Saas Fee, it sounded like the first three notes of George M. Cohan’s World War I song “Over There,” only with an equal dash-dash-dash rhythm, instead of the song’s dot-dot-dash (i.e., “Oh-Verr-Theere” instead of “O-Ver-Theere”).

Up ahead, we saw what looked like rain, and soon we were in the midst of it. Mary Joy was uncomfortable with how fast we were going around those curves on slick, wet roads, with lower visibility, but apparently the driver knew what he was doing, because he got us to Visp, where the rain was over as quickly as it had started. We took the train back to Brig.

We went to the 6:30 p.m. mass at Herz Jesu (Heart of Jesus) Church. It is a semi-circular church from the 1970s or 1980s, not very large, with a baroque-style organ on the right side. At this mass, a visiting church choir from somewhere in Germany was singing. They started off badly, with an off-key Gloria, but got better later on. They were not, however, as good as Mary Joy’s choir. Maybe she can wangle an invitation to sing in Brig.

We went again to Restaurant Channa, where our third meal was the worst of the three—pizza with canned vegetables as the topping.