I’m going to be getting together with some people tonight to play music. This is likely to be one of the songs we’ll do:
Be sure to note the sideburns on the singer. And doesn’t the guy blowing into the jug look like one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers?
So I watched ‘La Grande Illusion‘ again this evening. A marvelous film, depicting World War I prisoners of war, living in a much different and more genteel civilization which was in its final years. Class differences are highlighted in the story. Dialogue in the film was mostly in French, some German, and the occasional bit of English.
Can you envision the following dialogue during prison-camp in-processing in a World War II movie?
“This conduct is unbecoming.”
“Sorry, it’s our duty to search you. This is war.”
“I perfectly agree, but conduct it courteously. If not, I’ll see your commanding officer.”
I’d seen the movie once before, and there were two scenes I recalled – the first was in the prison camp theater, which had just received a large basket of women’s clothing so the prisoners could put on a stage production. As they were going through the contents of the basket, Lt. Marechal, one of the main characters, and newly-arrived at the prison, was describing the current fashions back in France to the men who’d been prisoners longer. A very young, baby-faced lieutenant was talked into trying on an outfit, and a minute or so later, came out dressed in women’s clothing with a wig on. Everyone in the theater suddenly stopped what they were doing and stared at him. The scene was as powerful as I remembered.
The second scene was in the second prison camp, a castle, and involved a conversation with the prison camp commandant, played by Eric von Stroheim, during which he describes the injuries he’s sustained:
“A silver plate (pointing to his head). In my kneecap, too. I owe this wealth to the misfortunes of war.”
I’d completely forgotten the part of the movie concerning the escape. Beautiful scenery, strong story, and powerful acting in that part, too.
I’m glad I took the time to see it again.
I doubt I’ll be able to attend, given my broken ankle, but I’ll certainly try to show up for a while if I can arrange transportation
So, Marion and I went cross-country skiing today up in Breckenridge. It was a nice day for it, if a little windy. Unfortunately, parts of the trails were icy – the wind had blown the loose snow away. Coming down a short, steep, section of trail, I didn’t have a lot of control. The trail took a turn to the right at the bottom, and there was a drop into a creek if you missed the turn.
I could tell that I wouldn’t make the turn, so I managed to head left into some soft snow off the trail before the turn. Unfortunately, when my skis went into the soft snow, they dropped into it. My right ankle folded over and I flipped over completely and ended up face down. I thought I’d sprained my ankle, because it hurt, but I could still put weight onto it. A passing skier named Tim was kind enough to carry my skis back to the lodge, and I used my poles as support while I hobbled back to the lodge. It was probably close to 1/2 mile to get back.
I stayed in the lodge with ice on my ankle while Marion got in a little more skiing, then we came back down the mountain. I had her drop me off at the emergency room so that I could verify that it was just a sprain.
It wasn’t. The doctor who looked at my X-rays said I’d “smashed” my fibula. He also said I must be a really tough guy to have been walking on it. I don’t know … there’s pain, but it’s really more uncomfortable than painful. Now I’m concerned that I have deficient pain receptors. In any case, I now have a splint that goes up past the knee on my right leg, and I have to keep all weight off it for two days. Tomorrow morning, I find out what my options are. The ER doctor said he believes that I’ll need a screw on the inside of my ankle, and a plate on the outside. Not what I was looking for when the day started.
Ah, well. My first broken bone. I’m sure my parents would be so proud, if they were still around to hear the story.
I’ve had some trouble getting my mind in a state to write about this, and it’s no longer all that timely.
I’m glad that the troubles in Egypt and Jordan didn’t get going until after Marion and I had returned from our trip. Apparently, the first incident (in Tunisia) occurred a couple of days after we arrived in Egypt, but we’d finished our tour before it spread to Egypt or Jordan.
I’m not going to recap the entire tour, but here are some of the things that stuck with me:
It was a marvelous tour; besides sights I’d heard of all my life, like the Giza Pyramids and Abu Simbel, we saw things I’d never heard of before looking at the tour schedule, and learned a lot I hadn’t known. I came back with a few thousand photographs, which I’m still going through. I wasn’t the most prolific photographer on the tour, either. I kept a log of what we did day-by-day, so I can associate the photos with what was happening. After a while, many of the temples tend to run together, so you need something to help keep track (“Was that the Temple of Isis at Philaea, or the Temple of Edfu?”). I also took photos of the admission tickets, which helps keep track of what was what.
We got in a day before the tour group met, just in case we had problems getting there, so we had a day to ourselves in Cairo. We ate lunch at a small restaurant in Tahrir Square – in the photo of Tahrir Square in this article, the restaurant is just off the right side of the photo. Or maybe it’s just inside the right side; it’s kind of hard to tell.
Pretty much everyone in Egypt was friendly. Sometimes, too friendly – some days, it seemed like just about everyone you met was a pushy con man. That first day in Cairo, we had someone try to run the “I’ve got a friend at the government store; there’s a sale there today” scam not more than an hour after I’d read about it in our guide book.
I had my pocket picked while visiting the pyramids. I guess the small black Moleskine notebook looked like a wallet or a checkbook. The tragedy there was that it contained my day-by-day notes from the Galapagos/Ecuador trip we took two years ago, so I’ve lost those. It also contained the first couple of day’s notes from Egypt, but I was able to reconstruct those, since visiting the pyramids was the first stop on the tour.
I hadn’t realized just how close the pyramids are to town; Giza and Cairo grew together over the years, so they’re now part of a single metro area, and the pyramids are right on the west edge of town. Our guide told us that Egypt had a population of about 80 million, and 22 million of them lived in the greater Cairo area. I can believe that – the traffic certainly suggested it. Heading from the airport to our hotel in the tour group’s van, there were five lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic at one point, with motorcycles and scooters advancing between the lines of cars. This was on a road with three lanes marked for traffic. Crossing the street was not for the faint of heart.
Abu Simbel was tremendously impressive, not just for what it was, but for the engineering effort put into saving it from Lake Nassar when the High Aswan Dam was built. The massive temples were cut into pieces and moved away, after which the area it had been removed from was built up. The temples were then put back into place, 64 meters above where they’d originally been. There is a sanctuary in the main temple that the sun lights up two days per year – it’s now lit up one day later than it had been lit up before, which shows how closely it was restored to the original alignment.
Marion and I were the only ones in the tour group who took the optional tour in Aswan. We saw the unfinished obelisk, the High Aswan Dam, and the Temple of Isis at Philaea (“feelay”). The unfinished obelisk was impressive. It was abandoned before it was completely carved out of the quarry because it broke. It wasn’t found until 1922, because that part of the quarry had been covered in rubble. The Temple of Isis had been moved from an island that flooded to a nearby island. The High Aswan Dam is a dam – not much to say there.
Our hotel in Luxor was right across the street from the Luxor Temple. We didn’t tour it, though. We were two of the three people on the tour who went to Karnak, though, which was a pretty impressive sight. The third person said she went because, after seeing some photos of it, she realized that Karnak was what she thought of when she envisioned Egyptian ruins.
Jordan was a lot cleaner than Egypt. The people there were just as friendly, but nowhere near as pushy. Drivers actually obeyed traffic signals, even when there were no police around. Speaking of police and similar authority figures, Egypt’s highways were full of military checkpoints. We went through a lot of them when we went to the Sinai Peninsula, and normally, everyone on the tour would have had to show their passport. We didn’t have to, because our driver had a couple of current Cairo newspapers, which apparently sufficed to show that we weren’t dangerous spies or something. We saw sunrise from the top of Mt. Sinai on Christmas morning, which was beautiful, but pretty damned cold.
Metal detectors were a bugaboo for me during the first part of the trip – I got the naked scan and a patdown at the airport when we left, I got a patdown after going through the metal detector at Saladin’s Citadel, and we had to go through a metal detector and bag inspection at the foot of Mt. Sinai before they’d let us climb the mountain.
Everyone on the tour got sick at one point or another. For most of us, it was the normal “tourist trots.” I got them when we were in Wadi Rum in Jordan. The person who got it worst came down with amoebic dysentery while we were in Aswan. She had to stay overnight in the hospital; I’ve got a photo of some dirt floor outside her fourth floor room.
There’s a marvelous bakery that has stores in Amman, Jordan and Jerusalem. Among the things I brought back were two tins of goodies, one of which is not sold online. Of course, my luggage took a detour in Frankfurt, Germany on the way back, and it took me ten days to get it. The luggage had split completely open, but they’d put it into a plastic bag, and nothing was missing.
I’m glad we went, and I’m glad that we missed the trouble. I think I’d be willing to visit Jordan again, but as for Egypt, I think it’s “been there, done that” for me. Sure, there’s more to see – for one thing, I’d have liked to be able to spend more time in the Cairo Museum, but I’ve seen the big stuff, and I’m not an Egyptologist. I don’t need to put up with the irritants in order to see more of the minor attractions.
I went away over Christmas. Marion and I took a two-week adventure travel tour, and we got back yesterday evening. Unfortunately, my checked luggage didn’t make it back with me. I’m hoping to get some word about what happened to it beyond what I was able to find out before I left the airport (which was, “It was loaded onto the airplane in Amman.”) I’ve had no luck so far, though – the tracking website just has the information I gave them about the missing luggage, and the phone number they gave me doesn’t appear to be answered by anything other than a recording machine. It may be a long time before I can say that I’ve unpacked after my trip.
Overall, I liked Jordan better than Egypt, even though there was more to see in Egypt. They were both pretty dry and dusty, but Jordan was cleaner, and traffic wasn’t insane. And by insane, I mean that in Egypt, particularly Cairo, traffic laws appeared to be an unknown concept. Getting to the hotel the first night, our van was in one of five lanes of traffic (on a road with three lanes marked), with motorcycles moving in whatever spaces they could find between vehicles. Traffic lights appeared to be ignored unless a policeman was present, and pedestrians had to be pretty bold.
Traffic and general cleanliness aside, it was a good trip, but there were problems. I think everybody on the trip came down with traveler’s trots, and we had one full-blown case of dysentery that required hospitalization. My own digestive problems weren’t all that serious, but they came late in the trip, and I just got more-or-less over them right as the tour ended. I also came down with something flu-like right at the end, which gave me problems on the flight home and is still affecting me.
The monuments and ruins we saw were impressive, and I’m glad I got to see them. Abu Simbel particularly impressed me, not so much because of the size of the monument itself, which is pretty damned amazing, but because of the magnitude of the effort required to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser.
Petra was also impressive. The whole site is about 265 square kilometers in size, and it’s only about 30% catalogued. Our guide told us that we walked about 18 kilometers (and went up and down about 800 meters vertically) the day we spent there.
Anyway, more to come later.
My car has been giving me a few problems lately. About a week ago, I had some errands to run at lunch. When I tried to start the engine, it ground for several seconds without starting. Releasing the key and trying again produced an immediate “catch.” However, the engine light came on, and the car had no acceleration. Instead of running my errands, I drove it to my mechanic. The starter coil assembly needed replacement. Just under $800 later, I had my car back.
Less than five miles later, the engine light came on again. I went in to the mechanic the next morning to have the codes read and reset. Catalytic converter and rear 02 sensors. I left with the admonition to bring it in if the light came on again. Five miles later, it did. So, I brought the car back. About $250 later, I had a new rear O2 sensor.
About 30-40 miles later, the engine light came on again. My next visit showed that the catalytic converter needs replacement. I’m taking it in again next week, and expect to get my car back in another $600-$900.
Bleah. Oh, well. My father’s rule of thumb for when it was time to buy a new car hasn’t been met yet (continuing repair bills equivalent to a car payment), so I’m not happy, but I’m not particularly worried yet.
Every year, I think I’ll carve an impressive Jack-o-Lantern. Most years, I don’t even try; I just carve a simple face at the last moment. A few times, I’ve worked up a pattern of my own and carved it.
This year, I downloaded a few patterns, then picked one that appealed to me and carved it. There are a number of people who do more impressive ones, but I like the way this one came out.
First, a photo with flash:
Next, a photo taken without flash in a darkened room, showing the image better:
I think it came out pretty nicely, and I expect my daughter to appreciate it.
Over at Urban Infidel, there’s a post about terrorist street art, showing the following photo of some “artwork”:
It’s a lot more sinister than the graffito I saw stenciled on the sidewalk the last time I was in NYC:
… of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone:
I think that’s the better picture, but this one, taken a short time earlier, is a nicer one of the coyote itself:
One of the nice things about having a girlfriend who likes to travel is that I get the opportunity to see things like this. I’d never been to Yellowstone until we took a trip there about a year ago.