Traveling Confusion

Arriving and driving at a foreign place can be confusing. Then there is Heathrow which is in a mega-confusion category of its own..

I was hoping to drive the few miles to Datchet on a back road from the Heathrow rental car madness. On the dashboard screen, the rental folks progammed in some route on an M-XX. "Oh it's easy. I went to school there. It's a short, easy way on the motorway," assured our friendly young Sikh Europcar desk clerk.

I took a wrong turn just trying to get out of the parking lot, then ended up on the wrong side of the road after my U-turn. Stressed? You betcha.

Our Kia for the month behind our York pub inn,
the Old Grey Mare.

A couple more wrong turns, a couple more disastrous U-turns, a missed roundabout direction and a missed motorway exit trying to interpret the dashboard voice, and we find our hotel after driving by it twice. It took me about five minutes and three tries to squeeze the car into the teeny, tiny marked parking space in back.

But here's the confusion. I had assumed the Brits had converted to metric. Our first morning, we tackled the one and a half mile drive to Windsor.  I am mindful of speed limits and I notice the big numbers on the speedometer are mph and the teeny ones that I can't read without reading glasses are km. For about a day, I was thinking I need to complain to Europcar. How can they rent a Kia with right hand drive and mph on the speedometer?! I was getting indignant.

Full day two was the four-hour motorway drive to York. Brits have speed cameras on their freeways and tickets by mail. I got to make sure whether to use the tiny marks on the speedometer (i'm wondering, looking in the rear vision mirror, "Why are there so many cars tailgating me?") or the big ones. Then I just try to keep up with traffic. After about a half an hour on the motorway, I notice mileage signs list place name, a distance number, and an "m". Not a " km" anywhere.

Then there are electrical devices. Like the electric kettle in our Datchet room. Doesn't work. Fumble with it. Play with its switch. Nothing. Each wall plug in Britain has its own switch. We play with them. Nothing. We are about to complain to the front desk when it occurs to us to follow the cord from the kettle. It's not plugged in.

Our shower this morning in York depended upon an instant water heater mounted in the shower cubicle. Heck. We'd seen them in Thailand. We know how they work. We play with different combinations of the two dials and one switch. Nothing. Not even water, much less hot water. Shari is about to put on some clothes and ask for help from the folks downstairs.

There's this pull chain outside the shower stall. We assumed it was an emergency cord for when you fall down and break a hip. We had seen them before in nice hotels. Of course, our assumption was completely unwarranted. This was no nice hotel, no one frail could possibly climb the two narrow, steep staircases to get to our room, and it is impossible for anyone to fall down in that tiny shower cubicle about the size of a coffin.

I look at the small plastic box from which the pull cord dangles. In rough, faded, permanent ink lettering, someone had printed, "SHOWER".

A good pull, a click, and fumbling with the switch and two dials produce wonderful hot water.

Datchet

Datchet from our hotel room.
The tower of St. Mary the Virgin is visible
behind the Royal Stag.

Datchet is a village on the Thames a mile and a half from Windsor. Stuff around the Thames is old. The river is life, a barrier, and a highway.

Datchet has its roots in Celtic times, if not earlier. It used to have a ferry to take kings and travelers on the road from London (north side) to Windsor Castle (south side). If they weren't taking a boat or the train.

Queen Victoria protecting Windsor Castle
from tourist busses.

Datchet is the location of the hotel we booked online for our first two nights in Britain so we could visit Windsor. It's the Manor Hotel. The desk clerk told us it is three hundred years old. Maybe people were smaller back then because our corner room was small. Like the vaudeville joke, the room was so small even the rats were hunchbacked.

It rained last night. Shari woke me up when she gasped, then cursed. Drops on her face. We had left the windows open. But the drops came from the ceiling onto the bedstand next to her and splashed on her face.

The night clerk feined surprise and explained that they had had no rain for a while. That did not explain the mold on the ceiling, or the pretty stainless steel jug standing on the floor in a doorway where we went for breakfast. That is in the middle of the hotel building. The roof is two levels up. The jug was catching about half of the drips from the ceiling.

Three hundred years old, you say? i believe it.

We got a new room this morning. Much bigger. This hotel advertises its facilities for weddings. I think we got the wedding room. It's not really a suite, but it's almost three times bigger than our first room. Which says much more about the first room than the second.

We still have our view of the little village center with its church steeple peering out above a giant tree by its entrance. The church is surrounded on all three sides by weathered gravestones. No landscaping. Just graves that, far as I can tell, go back to the early 1800's.

After our visit to Windsor Castle, I had to visit that church. It is named St. Mary the Virgin. It is a charming place, not just because of its age and Gothic style, but its human scale (compared to Windsor Castle), and the obvious fact that it is very much a working church. Folding chairs set up for meetings and prayer groups. Collection plate still had coins in it, out in the open. Bulletin boards, children's drawings. A box with donated reading glasses. Beautiful stained glass windows from the early 1800's. And a plaque with names and dates of its early rectors and vicars. Earliest date? 1239.

If a graveyard surrounds three sides, what is on the fourth? The Royal Stag. look it up on the web. The pub dates back to the 15th Century when it was an ale house. We headed there for dinner. I had its signature dish: beef and ale pie on mashed potatoes. Great. The carrot coriander soup was excellent, as were Shari's ribs.

And the pub itself? Imagine a community living room.

Fighting, Fighting

I have only fifteen pages left to translate out of five hundred fifty-five. I am towards the end (obviously) of the final, all-out Turkish assault on Eger Castle, October 14, 1552. That's about the fourth major assault over the thirty-nine day siege by some 40,000 Ottomans. The castle defenders number about 2,000. Or at least they did when the siege started.

The Women of Eger,
painting by Bertalan Székely

There is a great deal of mayhem in this Hungarian historical novel published in 1899, Egri Csillagok (Eger Stars). Most recently during this final assault — as I described to Shari yesterday afternoon, then again to Ray and Judy before going out for dinner — a widowed mother, Lady Balogh, her young son having just been killed in the fighting, grabs a sword and runs to the bastion. Meanwhile, the captain of the castle, István Dobó, wrestles with a giant Turk who falls off the platform by the bastion onto the cobblestones below. The Turk loses his helmet and gets up just as Lady Balogh is running by. Enraged, she swings her sword and, as the novelist, Géza Gárdonyi, writes, severs the Turk's head from his neck.

The siege takes up only the last half of the novel. The first half begins with two children skinny dipping, five-year old Éva and seven-year old Gergely. They are captured by a one-eyed janissary named Yumurdjak. What follow in that first half of the novel are descriptions of life in 16th Century Hungary and Constantinople. The last pages will surely complete the story of Yumurdjak. Éva and Gergely, now grown up and married, through a highly unlikely set of circumstances only a novelist can weave, are both fighting on the ramparts against the Turks, the husband not knowing his wife is there. It's a page-turner.

It is a historical novel. The siege of Eger really happened. Only two years later, Sebestyén Tinódi was composing ballads chronicling the heroism of the Eger defenders. The characters the novelist develops in the first half of the book actually existed and fought at Eger. Their names and deeds are known and were recorded, not just by Tinódi, but also in records kept during the siege by the aged castle steward, János Sukán. We know the names and deeds of soldiers and officers, blacksmiths, millers, the two priests, and the mayor of Eger, the inventory of supplies the castle steward maintained, and that the castle had thirteen barbers. Back in those days, the novelist explains, there were no doctors. Barbers washed, sewed and bandaged wounds. Someone counted 12,000 cannonballs inside the fortress, not including those embedded in the walls or those the defenders hurled down on Turks climbing siege ladders.

Granted, the first half is more novel than history, but even so the historical setting is accurate. The brutal suppression of the peasant revolt led by György Dózsa, the catastrophic Battle of Mohacs, and the Ottoman ruse to occupy Buda are all facts. And in the hands of a skilled novelist, which Gárdonyi certainly was, this brutal history is strikingly vivid.

The Siege of Eger Castle
painting by Béla Vízkelety

There is a great deal of mayhem. Gárdonyi is constantly weaving in colorful details that bring the medieval period alive, together with humor — sometimes black, sometimes almost slapstick, particularly his use of a gypsy character, Sárközi, for comic relief. But there is a great deal of mayhem.

And it's that mayhem that makes me reflect and write this blog post. It's the realization that we haven't changed all that much over the last six centuries.

I'm flipping through Netflx documentaries and see Rick Steves in Europe. I flip through his episodes, passing over four or five travel shows set in Germany, and stumble upon Bulgaria. ¿Bulgaria? It's one of those Balkan places loaded with centuries of animosity and bloodshed. Being raised Hungarian, I have such associations. I'm curious. The half hour program is delightful. You know, there is a lot of beauty and culture in Bulgaria.

So, someone remind me. Why do we hate and slaughter each other?

Polyglot

Warning. This is a rant about how mean we can be. But  when out Hair Product in Chief incites a crowd to chant, "Send Them Back", I get angry at our own stupidity and meanness.

I've mentioned before. This country doesn't even have its own name, but that doesn't stop some people from waving flags and taking it out on others.

Yeah, it's the United States of America. But then there is the United States of Brazil, and also the United Mexican States, but at least they have their own unique name. There's nothing unique about "America", but we throw the label around as if Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America aren't in the Americas.

It's arrogant. That's an epithet the USA'ns earned a long time ago. The Ugly American.

Now we have crowds happily chanting, "Make America Great Again" and "Send Them Back". That's disgusting.

You are uncomfortable with dark colored skin? Deal with it. You bristle at not understanding someone talking in a foreign language. Deal with it. You don't like people wearing ethnic clothes, whether a head scarf or baggy shorts hanging off someone's butt? Deal with it. Because the problem is you, not them.

You want to blame others for your problems? Stifle the urge because you are either a hypocrite or a conspiracy theorist; probably both. Go join a religion. They cater to such weak minds.

I'm angry at the intentional ignorance and ugliness in this country. People are actually proud of being nasty, vicious, even violent. I am angry at Fox Noise for making money by inciting the meanness in people. I am angry at a Republican party that shamelessly incites and exploits its nasty, vicious and mean base. Hypocrisy doesn't begin to describe such low-lifes.

But mostly I am angry at people who vote for such low-lifes. Or don't bother to vote. It's not like any of this is news. But hatred, even if contrived, is powerful.

The world is getting smaller. Cultures, languages, and skin color are getting a lot less isolated. Deal with it. "French", "English" and "Italian" are getting new meanings. Yes, it's shaking up our cultural identities. Deal with it. Maybe it's karma: just deserts for centuries of imperial and religious exploitation. And you complain?

And who is leading the free world in this orgy of hatred against "others"? Why, one of the most polyglot societies of them all. The political collective that shamelessly cleansed a half a continent of its inhabitants, and imported slaves and the poor in order to exploit and exhaust its natural resources, a political collective that doesn't even have its own name.

We have to deal with this. We have to do better. The alternative is too ugly to imagine.

Eger Stars

Its fascinating to be immersed in another’s world; another’s fantasy world. The images, characters, costumes, and customs linger in the mind, if only for a short time, like a dream.

A good movie can draw me in. Each movie and TV program is someone's creation of a re-playable dream. Most are silly endless chase scenes, unnecessarily violent, unduly salacious, and/or simply boring. I prefer to go to bed and create my own dreams. But some movies draw me in, typically period pieces, foreign settings, intelligent dialogue, and gorgeous cinematography.

Nowadays we watch movies on a television with all the distractions of domestic life. When we were young, a trip to the movie theater was special: vivid colors projected onto a huge screen in a darkened theater supported by a sound system that moved across the walls. I remember receiving printed programs, even assigned seating, to showings of Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and the Walt Disney Sydney premiere of Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Remember the after matinee surprise of emerging from the theater to see sunshine illuminating a familiar world that, for an instant, seemed very strange?

The fact that we were younger then is relevant. We are more impressionable before our imaginations became prejudiced with the familiarity of ordinary reality.

Think of reading books. They too are someone's creation of a dream, another world. Reading books is uncanny. What is it about reading that inherently triggers our imagination? They are only printed letters forming words that the eye reads and the mind silently interprets as sounds. There is no soundtrack and no moving images. Illustrations play a minor role compared to cinematography. Yet as abstract as the printed word is, and although reading requires more effort than passively watching moving images accompanied by sound, books are more engrossing. Images, characters, customs, even costumes and scenery, all conjured up with twenty-six outlined shapes symbolizing sounds, linger in the mind.

All art does that. Music, the most abstract and powerful form of human creation, painting, sculpture, architecture, jewelry, gardening, cooking, even straightening up the house are expressions of creativity and opportunities to be drawn into a different world.

But it's a book that is now lingering in my mind and competing with the ordinary around me. Actually, it's not just a book. It's a triple or quadruple whammy of a classic novel, a period piece, and an iconic Hungarian story in Hungarian, a language intimately familiar to me from childhood which, anymore, I use talking to myself or the dog, or composing emails to my cousins in Hungary.

I am laboriously translating Egri Csillagok (Stars of Eger) by Géza Gárdonyi and originally published in 1901. It begins in 1533 and ends in 1552 with a small Hungarian force defending the fortress of Eger from a large army of Ottoman Turk besiegers. It's required reading for a Hungarian education.

I have a bad habit with reading, I read quickly in order to get the plot. When I was in high school, I read Jane Eyre in one day; War and Peace in three. I rarely slow down to appreciate style or description. Which is why I do not read Hungarian. It’s a language I know from simple conversation. I was never schooled in it. I'm impatient. Sentence structure is different, the relationships of words are embedded in suffixes, strokes and dots over vowels change pronunciation and meanings, and my vocabulary is about third grade, at best.

Fortunately, many years ago my Uncle Zoltán gifted me with a two-volume Hungarian-English dictionary, each volume some twelve hundred pages of eight point font. It is invaluable. I relied upon it extensively to translate my father's memoirs. Since then, Google Translate has become most helpful, but one has to be suspicious and cross-check with a real dictionary. Still, Translate is a time saver for me because it helps with spelling and I know enough Hungarian to recognize when Translate is off base. I have a great story of my cousin's email greeting to Shari, kezit csókolom (“I kiss your hand”) translated as “I handcuff you.” In fact, I just plugged in kezit csokolom (no accent over the “o”) and got “hands with chocolate” in return. Well, if you know a little Hungarian, you would never confuse csokoládé (chocolate) with csókol (kiss), Hershy’s notwithstanding.

I tried reading Egri Csillagok in Hungarian decades ago and gave up after a dozen pages, and even then I barely got the gist of what was going on. I am too impatient to look up two or three words per sentence, then spend time figuring out how they are related: which word is subject, what is the action and what the object, and who belongs to whom. There was no English translation at that time.

As I approach my golden years of retirement, I need hobbies. Why not give Egri Csillagok another try? I looked for an English translation. All that is available are used, hardcover editions running thirty or more dollars a copy. The only available ebook was in Hungarian. I got it. My mind clouded over trying to read and understand. I realized that to read it, I had to take the time and the trouble to write down an English translation. Why not translate the entire book? I managed to translate my father’s writing, I have my dictionary and Translate, and I boast about using my Hungarian skills two years ago when I was in Budapest and visiting cousins in Hungary.

So off an on for the last fortnight I have been translating Egri Csillagok into English. Actually, it’s been more than off-and-on because when I am “on” it's very intense. I am immersed in Hungarian text for many hours at a time, figuring out the meanings of literary words, even medieval Hungarian words and archaic Hungarian expressions. Fortunately, Gárdonyi's prose is elegantly simple, often terse, but that still leaves plenty to decipher.

I was about a tenth of the way through when I decided to splurge and buy the hardcover English translation. I was apprehensive. For several days after the book arrived, I didn't open it, nor did I work with the Hungarian ebook. I was afraid that reading it in English would be too easy and would detract form my self-imposed discipline. In turn, I was afraid that the translation would take too long and have little value if there was already a good one. But I had already collected twenty or more Hungarian words highlighted in yellow for which I could find no translation. So I turned to the English book.

Fortunately, it’s a flawed translation. Although the Hungarian is mostly all there and translated, Mr. George Cushing felt it necessary to contribute his inventions to Gárdonyi's novel. At first I thought that maybe the Hungarian ebook I had purchased cheap from Walmart and Kobo had been dumbed down. I found another ebook version on a Hungarian library website and downloaded it. It is identical to the Walmart-Kobo version. Son of a gun. In addition to the pastime pleasure of translating an interesting Hungarian story, my translation would not only be more faithful to the original, it could be made available as an ebook.

I use Cushing’s version as resource to translate the occasional word (which I cross-check with my English-Hungarian dictionary volume) and, in the odd sentence, to occasionally check for relationships of who is doing what to whom.

What is amazing to me is becoming more familiar with reading Hungarian. My vocabulary isn’t increasing appreciably, at least not so far. I find myself looking up zarándók (pilgrim) again and again, but maybe with repetition and time, words and meanings will attach themselves in my mind. But it has become much easier for me to recognize and read familiar words whose sounds I know but whose spellings are unfamiliar with accented vowels and odd combinations of consonants.

Most amazing of all, I find myself immersed in a Hungary of the 16th Century with wagons, horses, swords and clumsy guns, castles and fortified village houses, children skinny dipping, peasant villages and paprikás stews cooking in cauldrons over fires, dusty, rutted cart trails, brutal janissaries and marauding akindji raiders, vitéz (heroic, Hungarian, of course) fighters, Catholic, Protestant and Moslem adversaries, and intrigues and names familiar from Hungarian history and geography.

It’s a fascinating world. The images, characters, costumes, customs and Hungarian words linger sweetly in my mind.

Reflections on Jason and Argonauts

Like Odysseus lashed to the mast, but perhaps more like Jason with his fellow Argonauts sailing through the Bosporus past Sirens and Crashing Rocks between Scylla and Charybdis on their journey through the Euxine Sea in their quest for the fabled Golden Fleece of exotic Colchis, I have passed through the Gates of Medicare and now the Gates of Social Security Full Vesting on my quest for the Golden Fleece of Retirement. Such is the passage of time marked by birthdays.

There are many more adventures ahead as I sail the Black Sea with kith and kin, wending by, through and around a cast of fellow laborers, restaurant servers, competing horseless chariot drivers, and innumerable extras towards my mythical goal.

The Golden Fleece of Retirement remains unattained as the habits and rewards of my professional if surreal labor, not to mention the daily chores of tending furry and floral children, constrain and bind. Ah! But to sever the knots! To be carefree and revel in pastimes of . . .

. . . not bloody likely.

The adventures, boredoms, frustrations, perils and decrepitudes of traveling life are without end. But I do have fellow Argonauts, heroic kith and kin with whom souls are interconnected, fellow characters who have cast ourselves together in this play of consciousness. They are my inspiration, sources for my astonishment, admiration and encouragement in this reverie we call life.

I hope to still write another book or two, marvel at the wonders of creation and our cultural histories, participate in foodie gatherings with the best of friends, record, edit and narrate more video documentaries, plant and nurse cacti and agaves, and cherish nieces, nephews, their creations and progeny. Hopefully, there will be less need to social-post expressions of disgust at the less wholesome aspects of our humanity. But the meaning of life remains clear: do something, anything.

And always, nourishing me from within, is the actual experience and subconscious certainty of the Divine Play which illuminates all phenomena as equally known and equally unknowable.

My sincere thanks to all shipmates on the Argo vessel: those who have already passed over to journey on other ships, and those who still enliven this one.

Palo Verde Bloom

This spring, thanks to monsoon and winter rains, pretty much all the palo verde in our area decided to bloom at the same time. Normally, some bloom early, others follow, and a few bloom late. This year, it's as if someone set off fifteen minutes worth of fireworks in a single minute. It follows the spectacular wildflower bloom we had -- and the acacia and mesquite are also going bloomey.

Follow the drive down our driveway, then shots in the gully (coat hanger valley) on the south side, shots in back on the north side, and, only two days later, the beginning of the yellow carpet of golden blossoms under the trees.

Sarod and harp music by Madhu Murthy,