Bears, Part 1

I have a bear phobia.  They featured prominently in my nightmares as a child so when our family packed into the Sierras, camping on the shores of Waugh Lake, I lay awake in my pup tent for what felt like all night every night listening for bears, convinced I would be a midnight snack for one of them.

But the universe has a way of making us face our fears, or at least taunting us with our fears, in a variety of ways.

This summer it seemed I received a number of bear themed postcards.  This one is from the Kodiak National Wildlife Refugee, established in 1941 to protect the habitat of the Kodiak brown bear.  This bear is the world's largest land carnivore. NOT on my bucket list:  seeing  a Kodiak bear in the wild.

P.S.  Thanks to Sandy & Duke for sending me all the postcards from their Alaskan adventure!

P.P.S.  Previous bear postcards:  here (the bear in the strawberry tree statue/sculpture in Madrid) and here (grizzly bears).

Japanese Umbrellas

In case you haven't noticed, I'm having fun with segues, shifting effortlessly (at least in my view) from "The Umbrellas" of Christos in California and Japan, to umbrellas in Japan.

Another Postcrossing postcard, this time from Kazue who lives in Nara, close to Kyoto. To me, this is a spectacularly beautiful, and very Japanese image, which came to mind often during and after the tsunami in Japan.  I find the stark contrast between this shot and the shots of the tsunami destruction particularly moving.

Japan is a bucket list place for me, in part because I lived there for a couple of years when I was very young, and while I spent a lot of time with our Japanese neighbors, I don't remember anything. I'm told I spoke Japanese at a two-year old level, which is how old I was.  When I am with a group of Japanese speakers, I feel the rhythm of their language at a visceral level, and would love to immerse myself in the culture one day.  I'm convinced the language is buried in the deep structure of my brain, and through a combination of studying and total immersion, I might actually be able to learn the language without too much difficulty.  Wishful thinking, perhaps, or not..

Mount Rushmore

A particularly beautiful view of Mount Rushmore, at Sunset, sent from Duke and Sandy during their second cross country odyssey.  It's a bucket list place for me, and I'm under the impression that the scale is not really imaginable unless you see the monument in person.

From the Wiki:  South Dakota historian Doane Robinson [note the first name - no relation] is credited with conceiving the idea of carving the likenesses of famous people into the Black Hills region of South Dakota in order to promote tourism in the region.  Gutzon Borglum  chose the site and decided the sculpture should have a ... national focus,...choosing the four presidents whose likenesses would be carved into the mountain. After securing federal funding, construction on the memorial began in 1927, and the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. ...Though the initial concept called for each president to be depicted from head to waist, lack of funding forced construction to end in October 1941.

The U.S. National Park Service took control of the memorial in 1933, while it was still under construction, and manages the memorial to the present day. It attracts approximately two million people annually.

Ring of Kerry

The Ring of Kerry is a tourist trail in County Kerry, southwestern Ireland.  My friends, Jack & Lorry, went to Ireland for a friend's 60th birthday party, and did a bit of touristing while they were there. 

Bucket list alert - not necessarily the Ring of Kerry, but Ireland somewhere. 

Mongolia

My friend Julie travels to the most exotic places, and has been very generous over the years in sending me postcards from most of them.  This postcard she sent from Mongolia captures my vision of what Mongolia must look like:  small bands of nomadic camps in a vast expanse of barren land.

Turns out Mongolia is the second most sparsely populated independent country in the world, after Greenland, characterized by vast steppes (definition of "steppes":  region characterised by grassland plain without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes), mountains in the north and west, and the Gobi Desert in the South.

Just the name "Mongolia" conjurs up images of Genghis Khan, the silk road, and yurts.  It is a second tier "bucket list" place for me.

Prague, Czech Republic

Black Light Image Theatre in Prague, sent by my friend Corrine, from her vacation in Europe with her son and her husband, celebrating her son's graduation from Columbia University. (High five!)   

The website of the Image Theatre is well worth looking at (access through link above) as the copy is written with a sense of whimsy and passion for the art that is a pleasure to read.  From the "Welcome" page:  Sometimes it is difficult to be in the right place at the right time. But if you are sitting right now in the auditorium of the IMAGE theatre then you have succeeded. Welcome! Of course, not all the theatres are the same. Black theatre is different; the light is different and the dark is different. The intense darkness of black theatre is full of fantasy. Poetic pictures are approaching you from the mysterious and almost indefinite depth of a black cabinet. You cannot see the actors, as they are invisible. Suddenly you can see them rather well and almost dangerously close. Dance will express the unspoken, disturb emotions and overcome laws of physics. Music will bring inanimate to life, tragic will change into comic, unbelievable will become real. And, moreover, your imagination will fully awake. If you are willing to join our exploration, inside you may find something you have never known existed.  Bucket list!  Sounds very cool.

Prague is classified as an alpha- world city, a concept I hadn't heard of before.  The term is applied to "a city deemed to be an important node point in the global economic system".  Its city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and at 4.5 million visitors a year, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe.

 

When I look up "Czech Republic", I realize I feel more than a bit inadequate in my knowledge of post-Cold War geo-political boundaries.   Given that this is one subject area I always considered myself pretty good at, I should really start the process of re-learning world geography.  How else can I reclaim my status as the go-to person in Trivial Pursuit for Geography questions?   I've found one geography game site but if anybody has any better suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

New York City Skyscrapers, III

While these postcards from the 1915 "New York City Skyscrapers Souvenir Folder" don't focus on any particular skyscraper, they do feature well-known intersections surrounded by skyscrapers.  In the upper left corner, Wall Street, looking pretty much the same today, with the exception of the cars and the clothes.  In the upper right corner, Herald Square,  known primarily by most non-New Yorkers from the line in the song Give My Regards to Broadway where the singer asks "remember me to Herald Square".  The flagship Macy's Store is also located here.  Next up, lower left, the intersection of 5th Avenue & 42nd Street, dead center of one of the most expensive shopping areas in the world and the location of the New York Public Library.  Finally, in the lower right, Times Square, nicknamed the "intersection of the world".  and well-known for the New Year's Eve midnight countdown and ball drop, the theater district, and its seedy past. Around the time of this picture, it became the eastern end of the Lincoln Highway, conceived  in 1913 as the first automobile road across the United States, starting from 5th & Broadway (part of Times Square) and ending in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, 3,389 miles away.  The route has been streamlined over the years, and is now 3,142 miles long.   [Road Trip Bucket List!]

P.S.  It's Flag Day and Postcard Friendship Friday.  Check out the posting (as well as the other postcard people's postings) for an interesting history of Flag Day.   

Cromeleque dos Almendras, Portugal

Cromeleque dos Almendra, or Almendres Cromlech, is a megalith complex outside of Evora, Portugal.  During our recent trip, my mom and my sister and I searched and finally found this place, promptly renaming it "Doan-henge".   [For anyone who doesn't know, my last name is "Doan"].

Undiscovered until 1964 (because it was so damn hard to find!), archaeologists don't know who built it or why, but think it may  have served some sort of religious purpose and functioned as a primitive astronomical observatory.  There are a few other sites like this in the area, one of which features a single large megalith (Menhir Almendres) , and another with a long passageway leading to an underground "room". 

It's not clear to me the difference between the term "megalith" (from the Wiki:  "a large stone that has been used to construct a structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones" and a "menhir" (also from the Wiki:"a large upright standing stone. Menhirs may be found singly as monoliths, or as part of a group of similar stones. Their size can vary considerably; but their shape is generally uneven and squared, often tapering towards the top."   Whatever these rocks are called, there are groupings or singlets of them all over Europe and the rest of the world, some possibly as old as 6,000 or 7,000 years, but definitely as old as 3,000 years.

And to think I had only heard of  Stonehenge (bucket list)!

P.S.  It's Postcard Friendship Friday.  There are a variety of postcard blogs to check out, if you're interested.

Finland

For the size of its population, it seems as if the Finnish are particularly active Postcrossing people.  Per my Postcrossing stats (one of the features of the project), I've sent 32 postcards to randomly generated participants, eight of which have been to addresses in Finland and have received two postcards from there.  The above is one of those.  The other is here.

On both cards, the stamps have been particularly interesting or beautiful, so I tried to find out a bit more about Finnish stamps.   I didn't look that hard, but I did find out that the Finnish postoffice has a program in which you can upload your own images and for an additional fee on top of the postage, create your own stamps. 

I love the stamp of the Aurora Borealis on the above postcard but perhaps that's also because seeing the Aurora Borealis is on my bucket list. [I did see it once from the window of a plane flying over the pole from San Francisco to London, but I'm not sure that totally counts.] Other beautiful Finnish stamps can be found on-line for purchase but examples are stamps of fairies, and a booklet of stamps featuring sculptures in Finland.  [In looking at these stamps, I at first thought "Suomi" was a Finnish artist who had created the sculptures.  Turns out "Suomi" is "Finland" in Finnish.]

Finland is also a bucket list place for me for a couple reasons: 

1)  My husband is 50% Finnish, which makes my kids part Finnish.  Seems like we should all visit there at some point, just to feel it. 

2)  The Finnish language is one of only a few languages in the world (Basque being one of the others) that were originally considered to be  unrelated to any other language in the world.  This is known as a "language isolate".   At least I remember hearing that about Finnish when I studied linguistics in the 1970s; in looking up the term, either the current thinking has changed or I've been mistaken all these years.  (The shock!)  Turns out Finnish is classified as "... the eponymous member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages".  [How's that for a mouthful on a Sunday morning?]  In any case, I've always been curious about the language, and would like to hear it in its own location.

Madrid

We were pretty jetlagged when we were in Madrid, and probably didn't get quite as much out of this fabulous city as we might have.  But I loved Madrid - the food was incredible, the plazas vast, clean and entertaining, and the Prado was a delight. 

We had tapas one night with some friends living in Madrid, visiting their two favorite neighborhood places, and every plate was better than the last.  We visited the Mercado de San Miguel for appetizers one evening (where we bought just a bite of caviar at one booth, a couple bite size pieces of different types of cheese at another, and a few paper thin slices of jamon at a third) and had breakfast there again the next morning because we liked it so much.

Perhaps costumed street performers with the express purpose of "surprising" and then posing with tourists for pictures is found throughout Europe these days, but until I wandered the plazas of Madrid (Plaza Mayor, Plaza del Sol or Puerto del Sol) I hadn't seen a table set up with three heads, only one of them real, and/or three men dressed like Neanderthals, all waiting to grab the attention of unsuspecting tourists with movement or loud noises or bad jokes. 

Finally, I am not always a fan of huge museums but I am glad I didn't let that stop me from visiting the Prado.  We didn't explore every room, but made a point of seeking out the Goyas, the El Grecos,  and the Velazquez, especially "Las Meninas", considered by some to be the most perfect painting ever painted.  It was also very cool to see Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" live, after having seen posters and pictures and a variety of other reproductions of it  more than enough times.

Madrid is fantastic, and I hope to go back some day.  Bucket list!

El Rocio, Spain

Spain is a country of festivals and pilgrimages, including "La Tomatina" (the massive, annual, late August ripe tomato fight in Bunol near Valencia - Bucket List!) to the "Camino de Santiago de Compostela" (an on-going pilgrimage route running through the northern part of the country, a postcard of which was posted previously in this blog).

One pilgrimage you may not have heard of is "La Romeria de El Rocio", occurring in the province of Huelva, in the southwesternmost part of the country. It occurs every Pentecost , seven Sundays after Easter.

 While we were not there during the pilgrimage, we did visit the town. What a surprise, after the cobblestone streets and narrow lanes of the Spanish white hill towns.

For most of the year, El Rocio is an empty village, described as "a strange outpost of the Wild West, with wide, sandy streets lined with houses complete with broad verandahs and wooden rails for tying up horses". There might be less than 1000 people living there, the streets empty and wind blown and better suited for four-wheel drive than a compact rental car. However, during the pilgrimage the population swells to 1,000,000 (that's one MILLION) every year.  

It was wild to be there when the town was empty and try to imagine it filled with people.

The pilgrims in groups of "hermandades" or Catholic brotherhoods, travel for up to seven days to reach El Rocio on horseback, in ox-drawn carts, in four-wheel drive vehicles, and dress in the typical dress of historic Andalucia - the men in wide hats and cropped jackets; the women in flamenco dresses, or at least flounced skirts.

It is a huge moveable party, with flamenco singing and dancing, and much wine and frivolity.  When they reach the town, they gather around the chapels of each "hermandade" , and sing and dance and party all night long. While there are streets lines with little houses, there is not even close to enough room for everybody, and mattresses are strewn around the streets, with people sleeping anywhere they can.

The culmination of the celebration is the veneration of the Virgin of El Rocio or La Paloma Blanca ("white dove").  The hermandade which considers itself the protectors of La Paloma Blanca remove her from the church, and parade  her through the streets.  Much commotion ensues as each hermandade grapples to bring the Virgin to their chapel, and other try simply to touch her.  Eventually, she visits all the chapels, is returned to the church and the revelry continues.

By Monday night, the pilgrims are beginning their return voyages home.

Music and Musicians, II

What is there to say, but "all hail the King!"

Well, okay, I can't resist making a couple of comments about these Elvis Presley cards. 

On the back of th card with the bronze Elvis statue it says  "This impressive bronze statue of Elvis standing 9-1/2 fee tall, is located in 'Elvis Presley Plaza' on Beale Street, downtown, Memphis.  Memphis is proud of this magnificient memorial to the unforgetable 'King of Rock and Roll'.  We hope it will stand as a testament of our love and appreciation for Elvis".

And of course, Graceland, Tennessee has to be on any rock and roll fan's bucket list.  I almost got to go there once, when we had focus groups scheduled for Memphis.  At the last minute, my trip was cancelled but the art director and copywriter did attend the groups, had a field trip to Graceland, and brought me back not only a picture of Elvis' final resting place but also some "Love Me Tender" hair conditioner.  I had that bottle for years, until I decided it belonged in my neighbor's "Homage to Elvis" bathroom, where it now lives, along with an Elvis clock, an Elvis costume (Las Vegas period, as seen in the postcard lower left), Elvis pictures, and a plethora of other Elvis paraphernalia. 

My favorite Elvis song is "A Little Less Conversation." especially the JXL remix from 2002.  (Lyrics here.)  Anybody care to share theirs?

It's Good Friday, and you know what that means.  Non-religiously speaking anyways.  It's Postcard Friendship Friday - check it out.