Salzburger Zeitung - 2013 Edition

Yes it looks like we'll be making it back to Salzburg for the 2013 edition of the Pfingstfestpiele.  Its been a bit touch and go the past few weeks - are we going or are we not?  I won't go into the sordid details except to say that the procedure at the Heart Institute last week determined that I do have a heart and that it is functioning, after a fashion, and should I follow a programme of exercise, diet and medication will for awhile yet. 

Now I'm not sure if the schnitzel at Triangl, Bazartost at Cafe Bazaar or Salzburger Nockerl at Hotel Bristol are on that diet but we shall have to see.  But I'm sure that a climb up the Kapuzinerberg and a stroll through Hellbrun Palace are considered exercises.  And the programme that Cecilia Bartoli has created for this year's festival is sure to be as soothing and healing as any medication a doctor could prescribe.  So I'll just look on this as following the doctor's orders.

Actually this trip was planned almost a year ago - the tickets for the Whitsun Festival go on sale a day or two after the current festival ends.  In a gesture of mad optimism - and let's be serious about this you have to be optimistic to book these things a year in advance at my age - I booked tickets for a rather full Whitsun weekend (more about that later).  As the months progressed the vacation plans became more elaborate with each passing week until we had a full two weeks of traveling in Germany as well as five days in Salzburg.

If things had been going according to plan this morning we would have gone to services at Dresden's Frauenkirche and about now we would be entering the Semperoper for a performance of Halévy's rarely performed La Juive - yes David I know another bloody French grand opera!  And tomorrow we would be boarding a paddle wheeler for lunch at the Meissen Factory.  However the "best planned lays of mice and men" often go up the tubes - to mix and mangle my metaphors.  As it stands now tomorrow evening (Monday) we will be heading to either Frankfurt than onward to Munich or London and onward to anywhere in Germany where we can catch a train to Munich.  Such are the vagaries of travel on airlines passes.

We'll be traveling with our little buddy Sidd and he's been given strict instructions to have me write a bit about our experiences at this year's Festival.  So hopefully at his urging I'll be posting another edition of Salzburger Zeitung.

May 12 - 1754:  Franz Anton Hoffmeister, German composer and publisher of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi and Von Dittersdorf, was born.

Sicilia or Bust

Well after months of anticipation and planning the vacation to Sicilia has come and gone. Its been a busy – at times maybe too busy – 16 days: food, wine, sights and sites. I'm not sure how many kilometres were clocked up on the car but its probably more in that two weeks than have been put on it in four years in Italy. And I'm not sure that even driving in Mexico City, Cairo and Roma had prepared Laurent for the singular style of driving that we encountered in the towns and road of Sicilia. Ah well we're in one piece which says more about him than it does the local drivers.  One thing: I wouldn't have wanted to do it without the help of a GPS – that smarmy British voice telling us to “bear left” may be irritating at times but damned he knows the roads – or a least the ones that haven't been changed and not updated. Note to TomTom – there's an entirely new subdivision on the main road in Gela that nobody told you about!

The overnight crossing (12 hours) from Civittavechia to Palermo was smooth sailing however the good ship Splendid was not - splendid I mean.  Grandi Navi Veloci should either update their website or their fleet.

The first and last legs of the trip were on car ferries – Roma to Palermo/Catania to Napoli. The Grandi NaviVeloci to Sicily was, to put it kindly, an interesting experience. Shabby would be too polite a word. Let's just say that the boat had seen better days and I was afraid of walking barefoot on the carpeting.   The TTT ferry back from Catania to Napoli, though smaller, was clean, cabin at the bow spacious and staff helpful - too bad they don't do the Civettavecchia to Palermo run.

The first part of our travels took us from Palermo along the Tyrrhenian Sea to the West and than eastward along the Mediterranean Coast.

Laurent has written extensively on his blog about the various stops on the itinerary and I'll be posting a few items on thing that caught my fancy as we travelled from Palermo to Trapani, Erice, Marsala, Mazara del Vallo, Agrigento, Ragusa, Siracusa, Noto and Catania. Looking at that list – and a general sense of fatigue at the end of the trip – make me aware that this is a trip that should have broken into two trips; in fact I said only the other day that had we been wise we would have spent a week in a different area of Sicily each year that we were here. But should, would and could are all conditional verbs – and in this case conditional past – so no point in labouring over what we should have done; just sit back and enjoy the memories of what we did.

Continuing on from Agrigento we headed a bit inland to Ragusa and then back eastward to the Ionian coast and the two major seas ports of Siracusa and Catania.

And the memories are varied.  Wonderful music - an emotionally charged performance of A Greek Passion in Palermo; wonderful food - an unexpected lobster fest at a local trattoria in Marsala were the room was filled with groups of men sharing a meal with their friends and only three women in the whole place and no it wasn't a gay restaurant; great wine - quite a few Enoteche but particularly Michelle's in Trapani and Salvatore's in Marsala; over the top baroque churches - the Duomi in Mazara del Vallo takes the prize with Ragusa running a close second; antiquities galore - the Valley of the Temple leading the pack; and friendly, warm, welcoming, if at times slightly suspicious of strangers, people. 

The departure from Catania and the trip up to the Straits of Messina  on TTT's Partenope was a bit on the rough side but once into the Tyrrhenian it was a smooth sail up to Napoli and then on to Roma by road.

The one thing that struck me the first time I went to Palermo and was confirmed on this trip as I saw more of the island is that Sicily may be part of Italy but it isn't really Italian. It shares a common language and some history but the people, the food, the landscape has been molded by the influences of the Mediterranean in a way that makes it a place unto itself.  A succession of occupiers - the Greeks,  the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Normans, the French and the Spanish - have left their mark. As it always is Nature has been both kind and cruel: the sea, earthquakes and volcanoes have formed, enriched and scarred the terrain making it both welcoming and hostile. Religion – Pagan and Christian – has molded the architecture of cities and minds. And a wry sense of survival on the part of the inhabitants has taken all these things – the good and the bad - and created a place that is Sicilia.


24 maggio - Santa Maria Ausiliatrice

Say Cheese!

I’ve never been big on taking pictures when I travel – in fact until I bought my first digital camera in 1998 I very seldom took photos on my extensive travels. I found – and still do – that you spend so much time taking pictures you often miss the sights. That first digital was, as you can see, a rather clunky affair – a Sony that recorded pictures on a floppy disc. The pictures were not the greatest (click on the camera to get an example) and frankly as a photographer I’m no Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Back in January 2003 as I was getting ready to board The Canadian, VIA’s TransCanada service from Winnipeg to Vancouver, I realized that I had forgot to bring my old clunker. I made a quick trip to a Kodak shop in an underground mall – it was January, it was Winnipeg, it was -37c at the corner of Portage and Main – and I bought the first thing I saw that looked reasonable and easy (yeah I know, at the corner of Portage and Main, that would normally be Brandy or Tiffany.) It is what I have been using ever since. Still not the greatest but ….

So why bother to mention it? The past few days I’ve been going through photo files of Venice and a few other trips we took between 1998 and 2003. The photos are not the greatest quality and PhotoShop can only do so much but I thought I might post some of them. I guess this is just a word of warning.

The Carmen What I Saw That Night

I knew that the performance had been recorded for Radio France but was never able to find it. Then la-viola - there it is on YouTube. It was an incredible night - Berganza and Domingo at their peak. Here's my beloved Theresa tearing up the place in Act 2 - and at the end I'm somewhere in that cheering crowd.

Opening Drawers

Where memory is concerned I am a subscriber to the "drawer theory" - that's the one that says memories are kept in drawers in your mind. As you get older a few - okay a lot - of those drawers stick or just won't open. Example: The "I came upstairs/downstairs/into the room to get a ......." drawer which seems to stick more and more these days.

Two nights ago one of my long-shut drawers popped open; CBC Radio news had a feature on Sark, the smallest of the Channel Islands. Apparently there is a democracy movement afoot in what is, in the Western world at least, the last working example of feudalism. As I listened to the report memories of a vacation with my late friend Pierre 27 years ago came tumbling out.

I have always been fortunate in having travelling companions who enjoyed visiting slightly offbeat places. In May, 1980 Pierre and I visited the Channels - Guernsey, Sark and Jersey - as well as St Malo, Mont St Michel and Paris. Granted the later only counts as offbeat if you visited it with Pierre and he had booked three nights at an hourly-rated hotel on the Left Bank!

The next day I poked around in the now opened drawer and shared some of my memories with Pierre's son Carl - who now works with me.

• The almost blinding reflection of the morning sun on the hundreds of greenhouses as we approached Guernesy - dare I use the old diamond metaphor - no I'll spare you that.


• A shrimp coquille and a glass of something red, wet and wonderful on a windy, rainy day in a now forgotten restaurant in St Peter Port. It was so good we went back the next day for seconds.


• Waiting in a waterfront cafe in St Hilier for the bus to the Durrell Preservation Zoo, listening to an Andy Capp-type ranting about the lack of a "decent caf to get a plate of chips" and all those "bloody frog day trippers."


• Hauteville - the oppressive Victor Hugo House in Guernsey - overloaded with the heavy pseudo-Gothic furnishings so beloved of his era. To think that poor Juliette Drouet was so besotted that she not only lived with Hugo in that dreary place but wrote him a love letter every day for 50 years - suggesting a feebleness of spirit if not of mind matched only by one of his heroines.


• After a long trek around the coastline of Sark, a sign in the window of a thatched cottage near the Seigneurie promising a fresh strawberry tea. And delivering scones hot from the oven, dark crimson tart-sweet berries, mounds of clotted cream and good strong stand-your-spoon-up tea from a stout old Brown Betty.


• Honey on the breakfast table in our Sark hotel - the now closed Maison Blanche - straight from the hives out back.


• The large gentleman from Texas, who tired of listening to a description of the nave and choir at Mont St Michel, demanded to know when the "damned choir" was going to start singing!


• Standing in line for five hours at the Opera Comique waiting for a cancellation for the Berganza-Domingo Carmen. Enduring the abuse of the lumpy spun-sugar blond vendeuse at the box office. "Vous-etes fou d'attender" she heckled repeatedly, then magically produced a front row 1st loge seat 2 minutes to curtain time. The abuse was worth it - one of my great evenings at the opera.


• The ride in an un-air conditioned taxi from Mirabel to Ottawa on a humid Ottawa Valley May afternoon with 3 lbs of goat cheese at our feet. Somehow Pierre had smuggled it passed an olfactory-challenged Customs Officer. Even a simple taxi ride could be offbeat with Pierre.

So many wonderful memories from such a creaky old drawer.

Keeping the Faith - Two of Several.

Vietnam is a strange mix – geographically and culturally. Geographically it is three distinct regions with – as I found out when packing – three different climate zones. Culturally it is dominated by the Viet but the influence of China, Cambodia, Thailand and France is strong – understandable given its history. Nowhere is that mix more apparent than in its spiritual life.

If asked most Vietnamese will say they are Buddhists but the majority only has a vague idea of Buddhist doctrines. When it comes to a moral, family or social code they tend to follow Confucianism but then turn to Taoism for an understanding of the universe. That includes the 10% of the population who are Catholics – the highest percentage in Asia outside of the Philippines. And when it comes to the Cao Dai (uniquely Vietnamese and 2 million strong) – well that’s another story.

Our day-trip destination in the Mekong Delta was My Tho – the capital of Tien Gang province – a rather sleepy city on one of the branchs of the Mekong that has not shared in the prosperity of its neighbour Ho Chi Minh. An enormous suspension bridge (right) is under construction and will change the way life is lived in that section of the Delta. And where industry is starting to move in – our nose confirmed that one of the largest manufacturers of Nuoc Mam (fish sauce) is located on the riverbank – it is ruining the waterfront and threatening the river itself. What recommends My Tho is that it is the starting point for river tours to the villages on one of the three islands, the glorious Vinh Trang Pagoda and a very colourful Cao Dai temple.

About 1 km from the city centre Vinh Trang (click to see the photos) is run as a home for orphans, disabled and needy children. The grounds are immaculate and the buildings well-maintained by the monks. We were fascinated by the intricate carvings around the various altars – it’s easy to miss them in the riot of statues, gilt and burning josh sticks.

We weren’t able to get to the Cao Dai Holy See in Tay Ninh – we really did need an extra week or two – but there is a smaller Temple (click to see the photos) on the outskirts of My Tho. Amongst the Saints in this strange conflux of believes are Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Descartes and Winston Churchill. Victor Hugo and Sun Yat Sin are two of the signatories of the covenant between God and Humanity? During their four daily rituals the priests and nuns wear blue, pink and orange pastel robes – a very colourful sight. However they do not like to have their picture taken so we had to be satisfied with shots of the temple itself – a colourful place on its own.

Riding the Star Ferry

On my first Sunday in Hong Kong, back in November 1995, I boarded a Star Ferry from the Tsim Sha Tsui Terminal on the Kowloon side heading to Victoria Island. It wasn’t a very long crossing but it had the romance of years of history behind it. There was something about the wooden seats with their thick coats of brown paint, the red fire buckets, the spray spattered windows and the crew in their church-basement HMS Pinafore sailor suits that caught my fancy, That crossing and the slightly rundown Central Terminal with its harbour-dominating clock tower were uniquely Hong Kong. And the square in front of the terminal filled with hundreds of Phillipina maids on their one day off in seven, chirping away in Tagalog like flocks of released birds, was a sight I knew I would not see anywhere else in the world.

The wooden seats, the fire buckets, the crew and Kowloon terminal haven’t changed in the past 11 years. And this past Christmas Day many of the maids seemed to be enjoying an additional day-off – including one enterprising woman who had set herself up on a bench near St John’s Cathedral doing pedicures for a line of chattering women. Sadly they no longer congregate en masse in front of the Central terminal but are scattered – a certain loss of community – in parks around the area, In a controversial move the Government has boarded up the square, torn down the old terminal, destroyed the Clock Tower – to belated howls of protest – and moved everything to a brand new Disneyfied terminal a good 10 minute walk from Central. Apparently the land is needed for a new highway – just what Central doesn’t need.

Here are few pictures of our trip over to Kowloon on December 26.