Diary

It’s been quite a while since I last posted, and there are a couple of reasons. First, I have been very busy—ports every day, and tours almost every port. Plus, the lectures required a lot of additional prep, since I just got this assignment after I left home in March. I had to develop talks on eight Baltic ports while on earlier cruises or the breaks in between, and they were not really as polished  as I was comfortable with sometimes until the day I gave them—one such talk pictured, rather blurry, here.

And then there’s the fun onboard stuff—I am on a great trivia team, have had excellent dinner company every night, and had fun the other day being one of the liars in Liar’s Club.  I had particular fun with the word “ prickmadam” ( look it up) , claiming it was an Elizabethan term for a transvestite, and making up a quotation saying that one character in Shakespeare was said to be “so void of common wit he would  chase a prickmadam to unskirt.”  Sounds pretty good, huh?  I told the truth with “gyrovagus,” making up a story about retarded medieval monks.  Great fun, and we liars were so good about half the audience got all of them wrong, and the best anyone did was 50 percent.

All of that to say I have been too busy to post, much less to think about anything but Baltic history, culture and the likes for talks, what to wear to dinner and whether to bring a raincoat on a sunny day ( answer: in the Baltic, yes—always!), and what lie to tell about the word ”spizzerrinctum.”

And too busy to observe much of any value to share.  I am flying home in a few days for a three-week hiatus in San Diego, and as I start thinking about going home,  with most of the work and play done, I will make some observations about how My Year of Living Travelly looks at the four-month mark, but for now, time for coffee and the NYT crossword.  Think later.

 

No , that’s not a typo. I once saw a comedian do an impersonation of Elvis in which he said something “was just like that—except different,” which in Elvis-speak came out sounding like the title of my post.

That observation by The King makes comically little sense on one level, but on another, I know what he meant. There’s a mental model I overlay on every cruise and most times they play out pretty much the way I figure they will. And then sometimes they are, well,  “diffnt.”

The biggest question mark for me as a lecturer is always dinner, because it is important to be sociable in my role.  I meet a few people right away and little by little, through my lectures, the tours, the onboard games like Team Trivia and golf putting, I end up with a full dance card of dinner dates long before the end of the voyage.

This cruise  was so different from the get go. I was traveling alone, so I knew I had to put more effort into finding dinner companions than when I have one ready made every night.  I figured when I  had almost full houses at my first two lectures that I would find it easy to strike up conversations around the ship, but with this crowd it didn’t really work that way. It was a one-week cruise, which attracts a different clientele.  There were a number of family groups on board as well as several very large groups who were part of travel clubs. Often these passengers aren’t really looking to be sociable beyond themselves.

Most nights I honestly didn’t know at 6pm who I would be having dinner with, but somehow it always worked out over happy hour.  I had a wonderful time whether with one solo traveler or a family of five, with one couple or two, or whatever.

I hadn’t done as good a job reaching out  this time as I might have—haven’t played the games or gone on as many tours—but tonight, the last night of this cruise, I came home to notes and business cards on my door from people who want to stay in touch. More so than on cruises where I have tried harder, so go figure.

I haven’t changed my mind—this was a tough one, but as The King well knew, and put it so eloquently, it was the same as the others in some ways, except memorably different.

 

 

The last time I was in St. Petersburg was four years ago, shortly after Malaysian Airlines flight 17, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, killing all on board

Russian rebels in Ukraine were widely believed in the West to be responsible, but Russian media fed people the most bizarre conspiracy theories. First they said enemies of Putin mistook his plane flying nearby for this one and shot the wrong plane down. In this tale, the  hero narrowly escapes the claws of perfidy, but don’t worry—he’s fine.

But the story  that is crazy beyond crazy  is the claim that no one had died on the flight, because it had gone off full of dead bodies  and the whole thing was a plot to discredit Russia. Here is a link to a story in the Washington post about this. All day as I toured St. Petersburg in 2014, I wondered about every Russian I saw, “do they believe this horse manure?” Sadly, I suspect many did.

The events of the last two years in my own country make perfect sense in light of this corpse hoax.  1) Russian leadership has complete confidence in its ability to sell anything to the public.  2) The Russians found ways to infiltrate the media to influence the American presidential election. 3) Worked just as well in the US. How about Hillary’s child pornography ring being run out of an East Coast pizza parlor? Pretty much on a par with a plane full of corpses shot down over Ukraine.

Back then, I couldn’t imagine such nonsense gaining a toehold back in the states, but what a different four years makes. Now we have Fox News spinning misinformation and utter lies nonstop.  We have  White House spokespeople telling us up is down, day is night—at least today. Tomorrow it may be be something else altogether. They may smile and laugh more than Russian spokespeople, and wear nicer clothes,  but they are the same ilk.   Any lie will do, since apparently most people aren’t listening and even fewer are thinking.

it’s the Fourth of July back home, and little paper flags garnishing drinks are already appearing on the pool deck on the ship.  Luckily, what’s underneath them is alcoholic.  I need several of whatever the concoction is  today.

I still believe in my country, but it is much, much harder. I hope it can survive this spate of bad faith and benighted thinking. Here’s to life (not lies), liberty ( not lawlessness) , and the pursuit of not just happiness, but truthfulness, and to having the  courage and strength to save what is best about America.  Then I will wave the flag again, but this Fourth of July, sadly, there is  little to cheer.

 

Russia is complicated.  In so many ports, one can avoid asking hard questions.  In so many other ports, one can simply be charmed.  St. Petersburg  maybe be impressive, even beautiful in parts, but it is not charming, even when one looks out to a view like this through my window ( the white marks are from this morning’s rain shower). Russia hasn’t ever tried to charm. Everything about it, from the massive buildings to the ferocious, barely survivable winters, seems designed to intimidate.

I have read that the shape and the gilding on the domes is to make them resemble flames from lit candles, reaching to the heavens.  The St. Uspenia  monastery church in the photo seems to me to be staring straight ahead, stiff and formal, not built at all for the benefit of the souls of the Russian people, who, according to Tolstoy, have “an infinite capacity for suffering.”  The passersby don’t look at it either, so I guess the church and the people of St. Petersburg are even.

If I had a Russian visa I could be over there right now , but like so much about dealing with Russia, it’s just a whole lot of worry and trouble to get one.   Without a visa, I can only go on tours to places they want to take us, led by a guide the government has vetted. It a pleasant prison on  the the ship to be sure,  but we are, in a sense, incarcerated here in the middle of St. Petersburg, apparently too much of a threat to allow out for a walk.

What harm would a stroll on the Neva  River embankment do?   Pervert the minds of those people over there with my command of Russian scarcely going beyond “da” and “nyet”? What are they so afraid visitors will see? Who are they so afraid their own people will meet?

I could throw out some oversimplified pablum here, but I don’t trust my own thoughts all that much.  They are lied to. But haven’t I been? Their place in the world and relationship to it has been distorted. But hasn’t mine?

These people can walk on that embankment because they are  Russian.  They got by birth the whole package—the winters, the governmental cruelty, the infinite suffering, the constant reminders of how small they are, as measured against the towering churches and palaces.  They also got  the ability to exercise the small freedom to go for a walk on a beautiful afternoon. Be at peace, all of you out there. I wish you well.

I got something different in life, something incomparably better.  I can travel far beyond this embankment. I can see things for myself. Except for here.  But even here they can’t stop me from seeing  some things about Russia pretty clearly for myself, through my spotted window.

it’s a difficult balance in this travel diary to keep it about travel when the burden of being American gets heavier with every news cycle.

I had a painful  conversation yesterday over breakfast in Riga, sitting at the table next to an Australian. Very clearly a political conservative, he nevertheless expressed his disbelief that the person in the White House now is the American President. He said he had soured on the US to the extent that he didn’t want to go there and be among people who had let this happen to the world. He wondered if Australia could even count on the US to honor its commitments to it. Australia! The country most like us in many respects. There is so much fear, from Australia to Europe and beyond, because the impossible seems highly possible, now that the official American position, as defined by the president, is that enemies are terrific folks and allies are ripoff artists and must be put in their place.

People tell me how lucky I am not to be home in the middle of this toxic stew. Indeed I can shelter myself a little by not turning on the television and limiting myself to the email headlines and snippets I get from several reliable news sources.  But I feel a little guilty, as if I should be home in the middle of the battle for the soul of my country, for indeed that is what it has become.

How could the floor threaten to fall out so quickly from under more than two centuries of American democracy?  Certainly it hasn’t been equally democratic for all, but the ability to make positive change has done a lot to improve things when the will of the people has been strong enough. Now it seems the will of the people is being manipulated towards a negativity so at odds with how I want to think of my country, with American “ideals” and “values” now being interpreted and vomited daily by individuals of such crassness and cynicism as to be both mind boggling and nauseating.

The  founders  of the United States took seriously every worry they had at the time.  They feared losing the ability to arm themselves against threats, being forced to quarter foreign soldiers in their homes, and many other things they had experienced under British rule.  There’s a bit of the bad boy/girlfriend syndrome at work here.  We are keenly aware of qualities we will avoid in future relationships, but not experienced enough to be aware of what flaws to watch out for the next time.

We are in the middle of the worst bad date in our history. What the founders didn’t think to question was that all the checks and balances they put into the structure of government would work because people would act in good faith. People can disagree, and since people are often elected or laws enacted by the slimmest of margins, at any given time a lot of people will be unhappy.  If we are one of the elected, we accept what we can and cannot do with our power. If we are in the minority, we work toward compromise, try to be constructive, and wait our turn.

That doesn’t apply anymore.  We are in the middle of a coup moving at freight train speed to destroy democratic institutions, creating an autocracy so quickly there won’t be time to follow the rules and vote the hustlers and swindlers out.

All with hand-over-heart verbal salad about patriotism. A day later at breakfast in Riga, I started thinking about the great conundrum of liberty that underpins all American history. The first colonists wanted freedom of religion, but only for themselves. The rebellious history of American individualism took root there, but the toxic downside was soon apparent, with persecutions of anyone whose individuality did not suit community norms.

We have a history that  celebrates liberty and enshrines it in our constitution, but doesn’t really have a history of meaning it, except for certain people some of the time.  How else could one possibly assert freedom of speech  to spew ideologies of racial, ethnic and religious cleansing  antithetical to the rights of others? How could one assert the right to own an automatic weapon intended to kill people who have a right to life? How could one assert there shouldn’t be regulations protecting  small investors from predatory lending, or insider trading? How could one say that absolute equality of treatment is fairer than a concept of equity that takes into account past and present disadvantage and discrimination?

So now the fuse is lit. The rich see openings to get even richer.  The  “base” is aroar with outrage about how our  country is supposed to be Christian. Didn’t the Pilgrims come over to make that happen?  Well yes, but they didn’t write the constitution.  People fearful of religious myopia did. And don’t forget how we’re supposed to be (and some think even obligated to be) personally armed.  And afraid.  Always afraid.  Afraid someone else’s liberty will make us uncomfortable.

in Plato’s Republic  one of Socrates’ critics claims that we aren’t really moral  deep down at all.  We are willing to follow a law against stealing, for example, not because stealing is wrong, but because we don’t want to be stolen from. We accept laws limiting our own ability to be selfish and unfair only because we don’t want others  to behave selfishly and unfairly toward us. It’s an interesting concept, and one with which Socrates violently disagreed.  Morality, he argued, was innate.  We simply knew right from wrong and were obligated as human beings to choose right.

Well, Socrates, it seems all bets are off in the America I see coming.  Immorality and contempt for the law are working so well at the top.  Things will be great when the rest of us just fall in line with what works so well for the elite. It’s so simple.  And so, so gut wrenchingly wrong.

 

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I am in Riga, Latvia right now doing some research for my upcoming Baltic cruise, and I am having the same problem I have in much of Europe.  Everywhere I go I see “I *heart* Latvia” souvenirs and other specifically Latvian things, from weaving to jam. The thing is, I don’t know if I *heart*  Latvia.  Sure, I can say with certainty that I am enjoying the beautiful parks and squares, the fantastic roofs of buildings dating back to the Hanseatic League and the rest.  Riga is a beautiful city with a lot of charm.

But I have a problem with any place that was complicit in the Holocaust.  Yes, I know that the Germans rolled in and changed the rules, but people in the Baltic countries were far too willing to lend a hand.  Too many of them disliked Hitler for other reasons, but not because of his views of the Jews. In fact, far too many of them agreed with him that here was a chance to solve a “problem,” turning in neighbors, and gladly participating in psychological and physical harm to their fellow human beings.

Riga has a Holocaust Museum in what remains of the Jewish ghetto, and as far as I am from embracing any city that needs one of those, it is still an improvement over Vilnius, Lithuania, which has scarcely acknowledged this chapter in its history at all.

Today I decided to walk rather than take public transportation  to the site of the ghetto and museum.  It wasn’t that far—maybe a mile each way—but it gave it more the aura of a pilgrimage, something  sacred, which of course in many ways it is.

Riga’s museum has a wall listing the names of all who died here—first Riga’s Jews, who were mostly shot in the nearby forest when room was needed for Jews deported from elsewhere in Europe. Eventually almost all of these Jews were marched into the forest as well, if they didn’t die some other way before that point.  One exhibit consisted of dozens of hanging paper lanterns, each  lit from within to reveal photos, documents and memorabilia of the  victim it commemorates. “Never again,”  I found myself whispering to them.  Never again.

 

Another startling exhibit is housed inside a cattle car of the type used to transport Jews to Riga and elsewhere.  Trunks of birch trees to represent the killing fields are arrayed in the empty space of the car. On one end is a montage of photos about the camp, and the other end is lined with mirrors, so you turn to see yourself, lost among the trees, reflected here and there, alone.  There you are.  It could happen to you.

 

As always, when I am in a plane going to the Baltic, I look around at all the healthy , robust blue-eyed blondes and wonder, “ what did your relatives do when the Nazis came?” This started when I was writing my book Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance (St. Martin’s 2008) and was on edge every minute of my time in Lithuania while doing the research. I just wasn’t feeling all that forgiving because I wasn’t sure how much had changed.  Would these fresh-faced new generation (s) on the plane do the same thing?  Maybe not today, but could they be persuaded to?

I wish I could feel more confident they couldn’t, but now  I am even less so than I used to be. Fascism and nationalism are on the rise, and it is probably naive to think we’ve learned any lessons at all from history.  So no, I don’t *heart* Latvia because I don’t trust it, much as I don’t trust many other places, including, more and more, my own country. This time will we liberate the camps, or build them?

 

 

I awoke this morning at Barcelona’s cruise terminal, now a familiar sight. It’s debarkation day, and I won’t be marking time before another assignment in the Mediterranean.  My season here is done, after three cruises and ground stays in St. Remy, London, Cornwall, Nice, and Corfu, along with short touchdowns in Barcelona, Marseille, Rome, and Athens.

I arrived in early April after a 24-day crossing beginning in Manaus, Brazil, down the Amazon and across the Atlantic to the coast of Northwest Africa before ending in Monte Carlo. I’ve been gone from San Diego three months now, and in the Western Mediterranean for a little over two.

Today I fly to Riga, Latvia for a few days before going on to Copenhagen for back-to-back Baltic cruises, and in about three weeks I will head home for the first time in My Year of Living Travelly.

A few observations are in order.

1.  I have never thought “I’ve had enough.  I want to go home.” That was something I wondered about when I set out on this adventure.  I have, however, looked forward to every change of venue, as in “Oh great! I’ll be on land for a while,” followed by “Oh great! I’ll be getting on a ship soon!”
2. This  morning at breakfast overlooking the port, I saw a ferry heading out and immediately thought,”the next time I’m here, I’m going to take a ferry trip somewhere.” On the Travel Bug scale of 1 to 10, I am way up there!  If I am not already somewhere exciting, I am planning how soon I am going to get there.
3. Despite having been to some ports a number of times, there isn’t one I wouldn’t return gladly to, if only to take a different shore excursion. Still haven’t seen nearly enough of Corsica, for example, or Catalunya, or Mallorca, and so many others.
4. With every voyage, I feel more part of the family on Silversea and Seabourn, and I get a little better at my job. We really are a team, and I like to fit in, to play my role in making sure the guests have the best and most rewarding experience. Doing that feels really, really good.
5. i need to stop buying things.  I had to mail parcels home several times to stay under the weight limit for my flights. Another moment of truth comes today on my flight to Riga. On international flights, the check-in people are often kind, but these dirt-cheap hopper flights around Europe make their money off of the extra charges, so they can be merciless.  On the other hand, I can’t wait to check out the shops in Riga, so observation number four doesn’t have a prayer.
6. There is no way around it: cruising is hard on the gut. Gastric unhappiness is inevitable after this length of time.  Even if I eat lightly, it’s too much, compared to the limited regimen I prefer at home. I say “I never want to eat again as long as I live,” then two minutes later it’s “Oh look! Food!” I  miss my blender for my morning smoothie—and I could use a little detox from my new favorite drink, the Aperol Spritzer.  Despite all the overkill, my clothes still fit, including my “reality check” pants ( the ones without the stretch waistband), but I can see a bit of a challenge brewing, and the battle with those pants is underway.
7.  I love the sociability of cruising, and I love the fun I have with Dan and the friends I share my cabin with.  Still, solitude is important, and I am looking forward to a stretch of it in Latvia and as a solo traveler on my first Baltic cruise. Deep breaths….

I had a very strange experience yesterday in Civitavecchia, the port for Rome. I am making the transition to destination speaker from enrichment speaker, which I have been for five years ( the difference is  often minor, but with destination one ties in the ports more extensively), so I thought I should go in to Civitavecchia to take some photos of what is of interest there.

I was operating on the assumption that I had never been there, but when the shuttle bus pulled into the drop off point, I thought to myself, “wait a minute—this looks familiar.”  Then I realized it was indeed somewhere I had been on a past cruise. I plumbed my brain as  to when and with whom I had been there, and when I finally figured it out, I realized it was with Dan, barely three weeks ago.

Now,  that is weird! One would think that it wouldn’t be possible to forget something so utterly so soon. So here are the options:

1) my brain is rapidly disintegrating

2) all this cruising is turning into one big blur

3) Civitavecchia is really that forgettable

i see no evidence of the first.  As for the second, it is true that it is easy to forget the specifics of each port when they march by in such quick succession, but basically, I do remember almost all of them with at least a few concrete mental images or memories.

So that leaves number three.  No, I am not losing my mind.  Civitavecchia is indeed that easy to form no impression of whatsoever.  However, I did remember with Dan that we found a remarkable open market clearly not for tourists but where the locals got their tomatoes, peaches, and fish.  Here is a photo.

And next time I am in Civitavecchia I will remember the second time, with its big “huh?” moment much more than the first, which apparently I don’t  remember at all.

 

 

 

Occasionally someone will write to me and say they are enjoying ny blog and wonder if I am planning to write a book about My Year of Living Travelly. The answer is simple for me: No.

The answer may be simple, but the reasons are less so.  They have to do first with not wanting to go through the—let’s face it— crap that is involved in publication.

And then, putting together lectures is very time consuming. It doesn’t take me over in the way writing a novel does, but it is still a lot of work.  Since I write out my lectures fully ( basically treating the computer as my audience), just for these Med cruises, I ended up with a stack of printed pages that was actually fatter than a novel.  So yes, I am busy writing. It’s  just of a different kind.

But the main reason I am not writing a book about this experience is that I know it would change it—and me—in ways I don’t welcome. With apologies to poet Archibald MacLeish (“Ars poetica” for all you non-English majors), a Year of Living Travelly should not mean, but be.

In other words, if I were to be thinking about a book, I would feel as if I had to find the point, the lesson, the insight in everything, when I really just want to experience it.  It’s that simple.  Even thinking about writing a book makes me feel weighed down, so I shake it off, in favor of heading out gloriously and happily  not in direct pursuit of deeper meaning.

When the phone runs out of juice, or we leave it behind accidentally, our  whole day changes.  With a camera, we are always trying to frame experience. It is great to see with the photographer’s eye, and in some respects we see more intently, but we also give our attention over to the photos more than the  experience of being there, as if somehow the real experience will come later when we get to the hotel room, or the restaurant, or wherever, and look at images of where we sort of halfway were.

That is  what not writing a book is all about.  It hard for me to be all the way in the moment as it is, and intending to write a book could just make it worse.

The second reason?   It bothers me when people claim to be sad I don’t have plans to write another  book, when they haven’t read the five I have published.  There’s  a “new” book—or books— out there waiting for all those folks without my lifting a finger. In my mind, only those who have read them all have standing to hope I write another.  Yes, I know this book would be different—my personal eat, pray, love—but still, my Year of  Living Travelly is also about figuring out what I owe to others and what I owe to myself.  In this case, the answer is simple. Not a book.

 

 

 

 

 

“Don’t worry, ‘bout a thing, cuz every little thing gonna be alright…”

The club band on the ship was in the middle of that number when I walked around the pool deck yesterday at the sail-away happy hour. It was a beautiful late afternoon in Greece—a little cooler and breezier than the brutally hot weather of previous days—and the perfect recipe for Bob Marley’s sentiment. Everything, down to the last detail, was not just going to be all right, it already was.

Except I had just come from a fresh dose of headlines.  Canada’s leader is insulted as weak and dishonest, while  North Korea’s is treated as a friend.  Children are torn from their parents at the border and kept in atrocious conditions. The support network for Americans ( social security.affordable health care, etc.) is being undermined.  Equity, fairness, and diversity are scorned, and ugliness towards fellow human beings is upheld, and sometimes even encouraged. Regulations protecting the environment and consumers are gutted to make sure nothing gets in the way of the rich getting richer.

I plan to stay away from politics in this blog, but I want it to be an honest record of my Year of Living Travelly, and that requires at least occasional acknowledgment of the emotions I feel at a remove of many time zones,  as I watch what seems to be the deliberate unraveling of the values and institutions that have been the strength of my country and its relationships with the world.

Bedrock becomes shifting sand when our world is assailed daily by the malice, pettiness, and childish tantrums of the most powerful person in the world.  And though he may, despite his insistence to the contrary, not be the best and the brightest, he has unleashed some of the worst and the brightest (and a few utter dunces) to do their mischief on the domestic and world stage.

And the most frightening part is  that it’s not just him.  Republican politicians gloat at a changed landscape that permits them  to act with astonishing meanness of spirit and dishonesty of intent towards the people they are supposed to represent. World leaders antagonistic to democracy see openings they could hardly have dreamed possible to destabilize alliances among western nations and undercut democratic institutions.  Unparalled opportunities exist now to shape the world to benefit the one percent, and in their wake, leave an unlivable world for the poor and an unstable and more seemingly hopeless world for the rest of us in the middle class.

No need to pile on here. I just wanted to say that at most being so far from home makes the present reality more of a drone in the background than the buzz saw it must feel like back in the states.  But the drone is still always there. Tell me, Bob Marley, is every big thing going to be all right too?