Apocryphicity

This was it. Our last month. The plan was to spend one week in Poland and in the other three I would finish my book. Only one of those things was going to happen.

First: Poland. This was one of my wife’s must-haves. She has long been interested in the fate of Warsaw in World War II and in the atrocities that took place in Auschwitz. There was no way we were going to miss an opportunity to get to Poland before we left Europe. We arranged to spend three days in Warsaw and four in Krakow. Fortuitously, my officemate Agata Deptula was a Warsaw native and helped us with our itinerary. One thing she said we absolutely must do: get some Jagodzianki (blueberry buns, currently in season). And we did!

Warsaw was somewhat of a surprise. It has little in the way of “old town,” since much of the city was destroyed by the Nazis. What looks old is due to reconstruction; most of the city is quite modern. The main sites we took in were the POLIN Museum documenting the history of Jews in Poland, the Marie Currie Museum (it was radiant; heh…heh, mmm), and the Nubian exhibit at the National Museum. The exhibit includes wall paintings from the eighth-century Faras Cathedral, displayed in a reconstruction of the cathedral’s original structure. Only one of the paintings, however, had any connection with apocryphal traditions: an image of Mary’s mother Anna, with Mary in her arms, and flanked by two …

Most of our penultimate month in Regensburg was spent outside of the city. At my request, we flew over to Ireland, chiefly to see a favourite band of mine: the Waterboys. Yes, I could probably see them somewhere else (it turns out they will be in Toronto in September) but there’s a certain allure to seeing a band play their hometown (of sorts; singer Mike Scott lives there now and the band’s best years were based there; I don’t think any of the rest of the current bandmembers are even Irish) and it gave us an excuse to go to Ireland. We spent most of our time in Dublin, which, frankly, was uninspiring. I enjoyed seeing Trinity College and the Chester-Beatty papyri, watching a few traditional performers at the Temple Bar district, and grabbing a slice of Victoria Sponge at Marks and Spencer, but otherwise Dublin seemed very much like any other large city. Far more interesting were Belfast, where we took a Cab Tour to see sites connected to the Troubles and a bus to the Giant’s Causeway, and our two bus tours to the Cliffs of Moher and Galway, and to Kilkenny and Glendalough (which included a stop at a sheep farm to watch sheep dog training and cuddle some lambs). The bottom line: we enjoyed our time outside of Dublin much more than Dublin itself.

Our second stop was a visit to Bratislava to visit my friend and sometime collaborator Slavomír Céplö . Slavomír and I actually …

From the start of my interest in the ancient world, I have wanted to see Athens. All I needed to do was wait to be invited to a conference in the area so that I could score free travel and accommodations! Unfortunately, no invitation has come my way, but now that we are in Europe, it is not so expensive nor so time-consuming to travel there for a short visit. We found a decent hotel in the Monastiraki neighbourhood, not far from the acropolis, and checked off the list of typical tourist activities: an early morning visit to the acropolis (beat the crowds and the heat!), then the acropolis museum to see the artifacts on display, the agora, and the Panathenaic Stadium. We also attempted a visit to the Byzantine and Christian Museum but it was closing just as we arrived. Along the way we popped into several churches. The rich iconography of Greek Orthodox churches are quite a change from what we have seen in Bavarian Catholic towns; there was no shortage of apocryphal imagery for me to document. One of the highlights of our trip was a play performed on a rooftop in Plaka with the Parthenon, lit up in the night sky, as its backdrop. And we took our usual bus trip out of the city, this time to see the ancient site of Mycenae, the theatre at Epidaurus, and the port town of Nafplio.

From Athens we flew over to Crete. We stayed in the capital …

For most of this month we stayed close to home, satisfying our wanderlust with some small bus trips to nearby Kallmünz and Donaustauf. The two towns are quite similar: they are built around an acropolis with castle ruins and are surprisingly quiet on a balmy Saturday afternoon. Our time there was spent mostly climbing up to check out the ruins.

Our major destination in April was Dubrovnik (Croatia), a location chosen by my wife as a birthday treat. We stayed in the old city, which was gorgeous and impeccably clean. It reminded me of Mdina in Malta but with things to do! The city was constructed by filling in a horseshoe of rocky area at the base of a mountain. So each side of the city has streets of stairs meeting in the flat centre. One tour guide told us of having to help his cousin with a new fridge, taking it down one side of the town and up the other. They no longer speak. We spent our time in the city visiting museums, churches, and palaces (the usual) and took a few tours: one in kayaks around the city and to a nearby island, one on a boat to three other islands, and one on a bus to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina (not recommended: the town is everything Dubrovnik was not, including interesting, and the wait at the border was interminable). In sum, it was one of the highlights of our time in Europe.

I mentioned in …

This month was bookended by two concerts, one in Munich and the other in Glasgow. I don’t normally mention music here but I am not only a scholar and a traveller, I am also a struggling musician—that is, I struggle to play competently.

The first concert was by Michael Kiwanuka, a British singer-songwriter of Ugandan heritage. Like many British acts, Kiwanuka rarely plays in Canada, so this was our best opportunity to see him live. And he did not disappoint. The concert took place at the Zenith, a converted railway repair shop built in 1918. Going in, I did not have high hopes for the acoustics of the hall but I was surprised to hear that his nine-piece band (with three backup singers and a string duo) sounded crisp and clear.

The concert led into a weekend trip to Switzerland. We stayed three days in Lucerne and two in Zurich (okay, it was a LONG weekend). One of the days in Lucerne incorporated a day trip to Interlaken on a train with panoramic views. Upon arrival, we walked around Interlaken for several hours but somehow could not find the two lakes—so, lots of Inter, no Laken. The highlight of our stay in Lucerne was a journey up Mount Pilatus (if you ask my wife, the highlight was a traditional Swiss cheese fondu dinner). The weather was clear, so we had stunning views and watched some paragliders launch themselves off the peak to a soundtrack provided by two yodellers. According to …

The days are short now in Regensburg, and there is less activity on the streets. The only festivity to break up the routine is the eating of Krapfen (donuts) to celebrate Karneval or Fasching. The surge of sugar makes everything more bearable. But if you need something more to get through the Winter, you can also just . . . escape. So we headed to Malta.

There’s something comforting about Malta. The language is a combination of Arabic and Italian but plenty of English is spoken. The English influence is seen also in the traffic, with driving on the left, the red phone booths and post boxes, and the three-pronged electrical plugs. I felt surprisingly at home there. It is a land of forts, each one telling stories of the battles fought from their high walls. It’s also friendly, lively, and . . . cheap! I know we were there in the off-season, but the cost of our accommodations was a steal—and not because I booked us at an Ibis near the airport (we were quiet close to Valetta in a cosy boutique hotel). A bus ride anywhere on the island is a measly 2 Euro. And I was particularly chuffed at the 1.50 tea in the picturesque Upper Barrakka Gardens. We were delighted also in watching the feral cats taken care of by the city. We first encountered this practice in Cordoba, so it was no big surprise. But we were a bit perplexed about the free range chickens …

At the end of last month’s account of our post-Christmas vacation in Portugal, we were about to board a bus to Seville on New Year’s Day. After our previous two attempts to book transport were cancelled, we were not optimistic that we would be able to get out of Portugal, but we were pleasantly surprised to find the bus waiting for us. Alas, that pleasantness soon dissipated once we met our driver. He barked at all of the passengers, including two young women who were confused about where to stow their luggage and me when I asked about the bathroom (“Sem banheiro!”). With an eight-hour journey ahead of us, my bladder immediately started sending out anxiety signals. Fortunately, we did stop for lunch. Afterward, the driver yelled at my wife and I for eating on board (it wasn’t clear whether he wanted the food off the bus or us). But all of this aggravation was put in the past once we arrived in Seville. Coming into a new town in darkness is not ideal—it’s difficult to get oriented and we didn’t even know if any restaurants would be open. Fortunately, we found a tapas bar and discovered the low cost of alcohol in Spain (less than 30 Euro for dinner and three glasses of wine!). I was in love. We finished the night with a walk around town and enjoyed the bright Christmas lights still hanging in the streets.

Over the next few days we hit a few of the …

December was heavy with work (three presentations) and somewhat light on travelling (only one trip out of the city). Mind you, that’s all because we were in Regensburg for only a couple of weeks before heading home to Canada for the holidays. We also stopped in Lisbon on the way back to Germany.

First, the travelling. Ever since our doomed trip to Vienna in October (where we were “punched in the face,” as my wife likes to say, by torrential rain), we vowed to return to the city in better weather. On that first trip we had tickets to see the Vienna Boys Choir perform at the Theatre im Park but the concert was cancelled (they wear sailor suits, FFS; can’t they take a little rain?). So we booked new tickets for an indoor venue (the Hofburg Chapel). What could go wrong? Well, if my faculties were not ravaged by age, I would have suspected that a Sunday morning concert in a chapel would have meant we were going to mass. Religious rituals give this atheist the heebie-jeebies. Catholic mass in particular triggers my recovered-Catholic PTSD. But worst of all I felt cheated. I thought we would hear heavenly voices singing the songs of the season: “Carol of the Bells” or “All I Want for Christmas is You” or “Fairy Tale of New York” (imagine: 30 pre-pubescent boys belting out “You scumbag, you maggot…”). Instead we got hymns and antiphons. And we didn’t even see the choir. The chapel was …