ST. PETERSBURG June 21, 2008

This Russian city is full of grand Italianate buildings made grandiose twice over with the Russian’s love of excessive ornamentation. This is the city of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and Dostoevsky in the stone, so to speak.

Took the bus on the street outside the port. (Cost: 20 rubles, or less than a dollar).

Magnificent buildings everywhere in all states of grandeur and decay.

The bus took me to a place with a great triumphal arch with an odd blue-green color. I puzzled out that this was the Narvskaya square, the arch commemorated some Russian victory on some European foe, and a building across the street that looked like an opera house was actually the metro station. Found myself standing in line for a subway ticket, again 20 rubles. Magnificent escalator that went down down down. They had to dig deep below the Neva river. Same as the Washington subway system. Fast trains, five minutes apart. It wasn’t hard figuring out where to go since I can read a bit of Cyrillic (similar to Greek ). Not as extensive as New York’s,perhaps, but beautifully decorated stations, art deco and all that, still with the hammer and sickle signs. Got a connecting train to Nevsky Prospect.

Nevsky Prospect square: grand street full of tour touts. I succumbed and bought a bus tour to Peterhof, Peter the Great’s summer palace 25 miles from town. We were just ten in the group: an Indian family of five, three Canadians (one man, 2 women), a Japanese couple from New York and me. Guide’s name: Larissa. Petite, dirty blonde, with bad skin. Very impersonal, aloof and businesslike announcing the sights along the way. She seemed bored. Course, she had to do this everyday, maybe, or perhaps she’s a moonlighting philosophy professor? Passable English. Bus stuffy. Air-conditioning broke down yesterday, said Larissa, interpreting for the driver, without apologies. Countryside: green, industrialized, sometimes edifying architecture, sometimes depressing. A shiny modern building that looked like a shoe about to kick a giant glass globe. A deserted theme park with Viking boat and Russian wooden buildings. Many villas/dachas along the way. Factoid: during soviet socialist times, ordinary people were given apartments and little plots of land in the countryside whereon they built little dachas. Finally: Peterhof. Lots and lots of tour buses. Lots and lots of people. Lots and lots of souvenir shops. A veritable Russian Disneyland.

Necessary being in a tour group, as ingress into the palace was controlled. Had to wear plastic covering over shoes. They actually served to buff the floors. Floors were of precious wood parquet. Room after extravagantly decorated room. The Czars and their consorts knew how to live. Off the backs of the Russian people, that is. Judging from all this, there had to be a revolution here. The gold gilding could have weighed tons. Apropos, our guide Larissa drily remarked: “ The Russian rulers had everything gilded in gold in order to show the rest of Europe how wealthy they were. Some say this kind of decoration was more like a rich businessman trying to impress others in a vulgar manner.” Fact:  most of what one sees in Peterhof are reconstructions. Most of the original building, furnishings, art were either looted and destroyed by the Germans in WWII and some art remains buried underground, no one knows  or remembers where.

Peterhof fountains: incredible. Fed by spring water, powered by gravity. Very extensive grounds and extensive gardens. Fountain sculptures were grand, and yes, gilded in gold.

Got back to Petersburg at 5:30. Took a taxi back to the ship. Extortionate sum of 1000 rubles but I was already in panic of either missing the ship or being fined for not coming back in the shuttle bus, neither of which happened. Was easily stamped through Russian immigration. Very quirky immigration system here. You have to have your passport stamped through and back and you must possess a shuttle bus ticket. In the other countries like UK, France, Holland, you got through by just showing your laminex.

All in all, a somewhat expensive day, but this is St. Petersburg of today, an expensive and expansive European City.

JUNE 22, 2008 SUNDAY STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

The beautiful city of Stockholm.

Had no idea where to begin till I saw the hop-on hop-off bus. Bought a ticket for 30 euros.

I visited the Vasa museum, where the 16th century warship “Vasa” is housed. Splendidly restored wreck. Multilevel showing gallery. Item: talking against the captain/admiral was punishable by “hauling the keel”: the sailor was thrown overboard below the keel, secured with a rope. He could drown before being hauled up, since the keel kept him down. Ship was of black oak, adorned with wooden carved figures. Magnificent and huge.

 

Took the bus to the Royal Palace. No longer used by the Royals. Many museums inside, but you have to buy a ticket to see each. I bought a ticket to visit the treasury: (10 kroner). Went out to the great courtyard and saw people standing, waiting expectantly behind a roped off area. I guessed: changing of the guard.

Magnificent ceremony, great band. Talked to a lady beside me who had a bandaged hand. She was from Chicago. A man beside her was visiting family in the middle of Sweden. The lady is a teacher and travels a lot with students.

I walked down beside the water where the statue of Gustavus III stood.

 

Saw a gaunt-looking young man with slight mustache and unkempt hair gently caressing the face of a sad-looking woman against the backdrop of Gamla San -- old Stockholm.

An Ingmar Bergman moment, full of silence and deep sadness.

I can imagine the film direction on this scene:
He touches and caresses her cheek.

She looks back at him with a sad expression on her face.

“ I’m sorry I sold your Manolo Blahniks for a couple of toots.”

She continues to regard him with a tragic expression on her face.

AS THE CAMERA PANS OUT TO REVEAL THE STOCKHOLM SKYLINE


Caught the bus to the City Hall, where the Nobel Prize banquet is held. Next guided tour was 3:00 PM --too late for me. Took the hop-on bus back to the theater district in front of the Swedish National Theater. Got a taxi back ( 15 euros). The driver was an Assyrian from Iraq. He said he was going back one day when all the Muslims had killed each other. He was Christian Catholic.

Expensive day, but not as expensive if I had eaten and stayed in a hotel in the city!

ST. PETERSBURG, JUNE 24, 2008

Another day in Petersburg.

Sunshine in the morning.

Went through the passport-stamping process in the dockside floating immigration/customs terminal. Unattractive, middle aged lady officer. Looked at my passport, looked at my face. Officious, still bureaucratic/communistic. No hello, no “nashdaroviya”, welcome to St. petersburg stuff.

Same ridiculous, mafia-type shuttle protocol.

Walked to town instead with a Filipino waiter and Andrew Toy, band drummer. A thirty minute walk to St. Isaac’s cathedral and thence to Nevsky Prospect.
Took some rubles out from an ATM machine near the Admiralty building, one with the golden spire. Seems all the spires and domes in Petersburg are painted in gold!

Visited the phantasmagoric Church of the Redeemer of the Spilled Blood. So-called because it was built to commemorate the assassination of Alexander II. He emancipated Russian serfs, brought lots of ill-will from nobles. This church is based on St. Basil’s in Moscow. Colorful, candy-colored turrets, as if the architect/s was on heavenly acid. Inside: walls and ceilings clad in brilliant mosaics. Not as grand or old as St. Mark’s in Venice, but looks new, and at first glance, painted. Was used as a warehouse in the communist 1920’s. Recently restored and still being worked on.
Outside, rain started to fall, a cold unwelcoming rain. Andrew lent me his plastic parka. We walked along Nevsky Prospect. Took a swing into a music store. Music sheets and classical music CD’s inside.Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Prokofiev , Miaskovsky.... Couldn’t figure out how to take CD’s off display, and nobody spoke English so didn’t buy any. Parted company with Andrew who went off to meet up with Jim (band guitarist) near St. Isaac’s square.
I went and searched in circles for the Pushkin museum and found it on a square one street down from the Church of the Redeemer. Closed for renovations. Visited the adjacent Russian Ethnographic Museum. Because the front of the building was being repaired, I had to go through the back way, past a guardhouse and an unkempt lawn.

Bought a ticket, deposited my backpack in the cloakroom. Attending babushka, Russian matron, gave me a haughty look. As if I was an intruder. No smiles, just like that immigration official.

Museum featured mannequins and tableaus featuring peoples of Russia and their costumes, customs, traditions. All about were young people doing paintings, copying costumes and details : maybe a field trip of an art or fashion class. One girl sat on a floor talking to an older woman. Her jeans slipped to reveal a thong and a suntan line.

Exhibits showed objects of daily use by natives from Siberia to Karelia: canoes, tepees, dresses, carved beams of old wooden houses. Not grandiose, but very interesting because so human and humble.

Went to fetch my backpack from the babushka.
Same babushka with the haughty look. There was no curiosity in her regard, just a sort of mean-spiritedness. Maybe she’s a retired schoolteacher, unwilling to accept the fact that she’s a coat-checker? I've been told that many of them are retired people, trying to earn extra money. Or maybe she thinks I’m Chechen?

Found a Japanese restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt. Waitress gave me two bowls of miso soup for the price of one, a plate of sushi, a nice carrot cake, & two espressos for the price of one. Friendly staff, and the sushi chef was Japanese, or at least he looked Oriental, not white Russian. Food was good and authentic. Clientele: mainly young attractive Russian girls in revealing clothes. Is there a picture here I don’t see?

Hauled myself off to St. Isaac’s Square to catch the 6:15 shuttle bus to the ship: no shuttle bus. Waited for the 6:45 one. Neither. Walked in the rain back to the ship, at Schmidt’s wharf, a good forty minutes away.

At the Leytenanta Schmidta Most (aka Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge), rain eased off, sun shone, and a triple rainbow appeared over St. Petersburg. Picturesque.

Checked in with the mousy immigration officer.

Did you take the shuttle?

Yes.

She stamped my passport.

(What if I had said no?)

My bass player Miroslav told me:

Russians say they are democracy, but actually, Russia is still communist nation and Putin new king.

Miroslav never goes out to visit St. Petersburg. He’s Polish.

July 26, 2008/ St. Petersburg
Catherine’s Palace

After being stamped out by a Russian woman immigration officer who was a younger and more good looking than previous ones, I walked over to Nevsky Prospekt to get a bus tour to Catherine’s Palace in the town named after Alexander Pushkin -- Pushkina. I had given up waiting to be given a tour by the ship’s tour office. When I turned into Nevsky Prospekt beside the Church of Kazan, I saw a dirty cloud hanging over Nevsky Prospekt. I thought: fire. No. A long section of the street was closed off to traffic. An armada of diesel-belching bulldozers were compacting freshly-laid asphalt. The tour buses were in another section . I bought a ticket on a Russian tour because it started at 11 am and would be back at 4 in the afternoon, plenty of time to get back to the ship, which was sailing at 9 PM. Ticket cost: 1700 rubles (or at 23.30 rubles to the dollar, roughly $70, cheaper by half than what the ship charged.)

Catherine’s Palace is inland (Peterhof was smack beside the Baltic), located on a low plateau above the plains of Petersburg. There are no mountains in these lowlands, just gently rising earth. St. Petersburg’s suburban highrises rose in the distance, one hour away but still visible from the road going to the Pushkina, the town where Catherine's Palace is located. There was no traffic going into the palace area. There were people already there, but not as numerous and jostling as in Peterhof. At the entrance to the palace, I bought an illustrated guidebook in English so I could understand what happened where by whom, because the tour was in incomprehensible Russian. The guide was a big-bossomed grandmotherly type, about 50 , no make-up, overweight, sweaty and with a somewhat harried look on her face but more friendly than the previous guide I had in Peterhof. She was solicitous of me, and directed me to where I should meet with the group, where to meet afterwards, where the cloakroom and the w.c. was that sort of stuff. My guidebook took care of the rest.

Catherine’s Palace: a confection by the Italian architect Rastrelli similar to the Winter palace, but in white and blue and gold and equally extravagant. We went in, donned the obligatory shoe-wraps, and were guided by a different woman. She was handome,tall, slender as a ballet dancer (maybe she was), her hair swept back tightly, like, yes a ballet-dancer’s. She held herself with an aristocratic air. She spoke Russian with what seemed a little more finesse than my friendly hausfrau bus guide.

I came to Catherine’s Palace to see the Amber Room, the so-called 8th wonder of the world.

After a procession of the usual gilded receiving rooms, ballrooms, and a large ceremonial room that seemed to have been patterned after the one in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, we were ushered into the Amber Room.

A hush fell on the group. For me, it was something of a letdown. Yes, the walls of the room had all this amber stuck on them. Pictures made of Florentine pietra dura (stone mosaic) were the centerpieces of all these AMBER. A red velvet rope cordoned off the walls to prevent people touching the stones. But amber looks so much like clear yellow plastic that it is hard to appreciate how expensively wrought this restored room was. The original panels having been lost during the war, stolen by the Germans, we are left to ponder the question: would it have been better to leave this room bare, like those empty canvases in the Isabella Stewart-Gardiner museum in Boston, to remind us of what was lost and tantalize us with their absence? Here all I see are a quantity of amber in a high-ceilinged medium sized room that did not hear or witness palace intrigues. It’s a modern concoction based on photographs of historical treasures ( funded, by the way, by the Germans). Only one piece in the ensemble was ever recovered, a pietra dura picture entitled “The Senses of Touch, Taste and Smell.” After a minute or two, we had to leave as another group that was waiting to come in and gape at the 8th wonder of the world.

The Palace grounds were a different matter.

 They were beautifully laid out. In the middle of the park was a large artificial lake with an artificial island in the middle on which was a Palladian-style folly and a tall column raised to commemorate some Russian victory or ther. Everywhere there were statues, bronze copies of Greco-Roman masterpieces now patinated verdigris with age and the elements. Various buildings were strewn about . One looked like a Greek temple: Cameron’s Gallery. Another was called Petite Hermitage, because the queen liked to sit here and do her correspondence. The Chinese pavilion was wrapped Christo-like: it was being restored. There were various garden ensembles and tree alleés, as in Peterhof.

I could stay in this place for a week or two, just ambling around or painting.

Waiting in the park outside for the bus, in front of the Pushkin statue, I see some people from my tour sitting on benches. A woman was cutting a paper profile of the girl beside her. A distracted-looking teenager sat at a bench looking at the ground, completely lost in his own thoughts and paying no attention to people around him. One bench was occupied by a man making and selling portraits engraved on small buttons. Like that Chinese guy who draws portraits on grains of rice.

Before we went, I managed to buy a matriushka doll and two lacquer boxes, one depicting a youth plucking a feather from the firebird, the other of St. George slaying the dragon. Back in Petersburg, at the shuttle stand before St. Isaac’s, I bought an additional large wooden egg with a picture of a hero (Ivan) slaying the dragon, cheaper b ecause it was made, not in Palekh, but in St. Petersburg.





Catherine's Palace



Amsterdam on a sunny summer’s day is a delight.

I went out as soon as the ship docked in the terminal next to downtown. At 10:00 AM, people sat at cafes sipping coffee and reading newspapers. Shops were opening.

Having already visited the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museums on two previous visits, I decided not to visit any museum today. This was going to be a strolling-aimlessly-around-Amsterdam day.

I passed by a grand doorway that proclaimed the building as the archaeological museum of the University of Amsterdam. I went into the foyer. Two gigantic marble statues (presumably Roman) flanked a low staircase. I took a photo of marble heads stacked on one wall. I left. No museum today, and I was sticking to it.

Cobblestones. Coffeshops, pastry shops everywhere. From time to time, the unmistakable aroma of cannabis sativa wafting on the warm, humid air. People were smoking marijuana openly on the sidewalks. Shops selling paraphernalia for growing and smoking weed. Everywhere, on walls, shirts, through glass windows, the weed-leaf insignia. Narrow winding streets flanked by Asian restaurants, tapas bars, wine caves, and Dutch cafes open into bridges spanning tree-lined canals. I found a quiet spot by a canal and did a watercolor of the scene I saw opposite me: narrow Dutch houses, chestnut trees brushing against them, on the right hand side a bridge and peering up above the tops of the trees, the roof of a large flag-waving red tower .

Feeling peckish, I dip into a pastry shop. Intoxicating warm buttery aromas greet me. I choose a slice of spinach quiche, a slice of an apple cake (large bits of the eponymous fruit imbedded in the rich-looking dough), and a plastic cup of mango juice. I ate the quiche outside by the bridge overlooking the canal.

A revelation, a really tasty quiche, a buttery pie crust filled with spinach and crumbly feta cheese bound together effortlessly by the essence of egg yolks. The mango juice: an apt tangy counterpoint to the quiche, tasting, surprisingly, not of canned, but of really fresh-pressed mangoes. Afterwards, when I had dug into the apple cake, I felt I was in cake heaven: the cake rich and eggy, and the slices of  tart apples baked to perfection. Never have I tasted a cake like this ! I should have ordered a whole one! I should get the recipe! I should live in Amsterdam!

A swan swiftly paddled towards me. It lingered on the waters below me, neck elegantly arched. It looked like it was admiring its reflection on the brown canal water but in reality it was angling for a crumb. I had nothing to throw at it because I had consumed the quiche and I was reserving the scrumptious-looking apple cake for later. Besides, haven’t I read somewhere that swans are selfish, quarrelsome fowl? Shame on them! No crumb for this bird.

I walked some more.

A flea-market. Here were stalls that sold secondhand shoes, secondhand jackets and backpacks, bric-a brac. A man sold mineral and fossil stones. Another offered books, antique and modern. Still another, stamps of all kinds. There were sellers of colorful Indian saris and fabrics. Mannequin legs each fitted with different kinds of hoses hung in a row, looking discomfittingly like hams or a serial killer’s project. Crystals. Amethysts. Chipped Delft tiles. Prints of long-ago vacations and ships. Old carpets. Cast-offs.

I walked on.

Found myself in Dam Square, with all the grand buildings there (the Neue Kirche, some kind of a palace), and a priapic looking monument on the opposite square. Amsterdam’s Picadilly Circus! Loads of tourists here. So many backpack-lugging young people from all around the world. Students on the European summer jaunt. I heard Italian, Spanish, Russian, English, Chinese, Indonesian, even Filipino. Many looked tired. They sat on steps, lay on park benches.

I heard music by the side of the church. Carousel music. A carousel on a cart with marionettes jerking in place to oompahpah tunes. A man was shaking a can of coins in time, offering it out to passersby for tips. He did not have many takers.

I went on, past a Russian shop selling Russian souvenirs, turned down another alley and found more restaurants. I decided to sit down at an Indonesian restaurant and order their rice noodle meatball soup. Had a nonalcoholic Amstel beer. Passable, though not earth-shaking food. On the table in front of me were two women and two children eating satay. They cast furtive glances at me. An Indonesian man behind me was on his cellphone yakking nonstop through his nasi goreng.

I went back to Dam Square, encountered two crew members, the Aussie photographer Will and a Bulgarian petty officer. They pointed me back to the ship’s direction as I had lost orientation.

The rolling carousel was gone, replaced by a young man playing the accordion.

I turned left at the main Straat. Here were more shops selling everything from cannabis to cameras to fake Delftware. In every souvenir shop I saw the goods were made in China.

On the way back to the ship, I passed by a Chinese restaurant. Caramel-colored roast duck and ruby pork hung from the rafter behind glass windows. I went in and ordered half a roast duck -to- go. At another shop I bought two meat buns.

Pausing by a small tree-shaded square near the Centraal Station, I see on the outside wall of a hotel a plaque with a relief of a man playing the trumpet. It read: Trumpet player and singer Chet Baker died here on May 13th, 1988. He will live on in his music for anyone willing to listen and feel.

I look up at the four- storey building. Chet fell down (or was pushed) from one of those windows. There is man at one of them. He has opened the curtain slightly and is peering down at me. A tacky looking Statue of Liberty rears up above the hotel entrance beside the plaque. I move on.

On my way back to the ship terminal I pass by hundreds of parked bicycles. Amsterdam is a bicyclist’s heaven. There are dedicated bicycle lanes everywhere. Collisions between bicycles and clueless or careless tourists are common.

From the road that ramps up to the cruiseshipterminal, I see the nondescript Stedlijk temporary museum, the rounded hump of the Nemo museum, the attractive glass-swathed rectangle of the New Jazz Concert Hall, and the spires of other historical buildings in this teeming city of canals. I have no time to visit them all. I didn’t make any particular effort to visit Anne Frank’s house, even though I’d read and was moved by her diary back in my high school days. Neither did I get to see the shopping windows of the Red Light district with their beckoning denizens. Because Amsterdam is well below sea-level, its surrounding dams could burst and inundate it New Orleans-style, and then I would kick myself for not visiting this or that museum (would I really miss seeing the Edam cheese market?) But you can only see and do so much on a few day’s visit. Fatigue and sensory overload can render a person sick of seeing one more painting or one more historical building. This is true for anyone visiting any big city like Rome, Paris, Venice, London, New York, St. Petersburg.

Later that evening, the guitarist of the band told me that  at the moment that I discovered the hotel where Chet Baker met his demise, he was in the selfsame hotel two rooms away from the Chet Baker room having a torrid conversation with his girlfriend who met him for the day.

I told him about the man peering down at me.

It could have been me, he said.

Or, I thought, it could have been Chet Baker’s ghost.



Dover, July 31, 2008, Thursday

Yesterday I was in Amsterdam. Now I’m in Dover, or more precisely, on the path leading to the gates of Dover castle, that complex of gray battlements that loom above Dover town. After many a call to Dover, I finally decide to visit the castle. A bus brings me there straight from the ship. Before going in, I walk the opposite way, towards the White Cliffs walk.

The terrain is hilly and places demands on my legs. Loaded with a backpack filled with art materials, a large bottle of water, a lunch of roast duck and ban pao, I feel like I’m going on a bivouac. Reminds me of the time I spent doing the torturous Inca trail back in February.

Though the sky is cloudy, it is warm and humid. I begin to perspire heavily.

The English countryside is a riot of wildflowers. The predominant color is yellow-green to gold, but there is a lot or greenery and color as well. Thorny wild roses crawl every which way. Queen Anne’s lace sprout among the grass, and wild fennel thrust out yellow flowers begging to be crushed between the tips of one’s fingers thus to liberate their pungent anise fragrance. Ivy and holly curl around trunks and limbs of trees and bushes. There are purple bottlebrush and magenta flowers whose names I don’t know. Yellow and white daisies peep out from wavy sedge. Bees, butterflies and insolent flies flit and dart about the herbiage. Cars whizz by on the asphalt country road, making out like dragsters. British people drive like mad in the countryside. I can hear the incessant zipping and moaning of cars on the highways which, thankfully, are completely hidden by the foliage.
I came to a rise from where there was a splendid view of Dover Castle. A pathway that branched to the right had a sign saying: : Road for Private Residents only. I followed this road, and then immediately turned right onto a clearing that was hidden from the road but offered a full view of the castle as well as a place to lay a picnic down.

I sat down on the grass, being careful not to sit on spiny weeds, and made short work of the roast duck and curry-meat dumpling. A perfect picnic with a view to die for.

After lunch, I did a watercolor of the scene before me. As I reach for a brush that had fallen to the ground, I accidentally pricked myself on a thorn. A small prick, but it felt like an electric shock. For a moment I thought I had been stung by a scorpion. Blood rushed out and formed a tiny bright red globe on my small finger. I wiped off the blood on the grass. My finger did not swell and the pain subsided.

I make my way back down to the castle gate.

The price of admission is 8 pounds.

The castle walls are gray. Few tourists were in evidence, although that would change as the day wore on. The views from the battlements are stupendous. This castle had been under siege before , but was never captured. I notice black obsidian stones embedded in the ramparts.These make the walls extra durable, capable of withstanding bombardments. Most of Dover is chalk. Did these stones come from this area, or were they carted here from somewhere else?

The walls are old, sections were built up and added to at different times, but none were as old as the Roman lighthouse, the remains of which has been turned into a belltower for the adjacent Anglo-saxon Church, the Church of St. Mary-in-the-Castle (or Castro). St. Mary’s is the garrison church. I peer inside the Roman lighthouse. It is Roman all right, all red brick and stone, shaped like a large, square paddle. Or think of a giant flue made of red bricks. A fine-mesh netting had been strung out inside the tower. The remains of three birds and a moth lay entangled in the web. It is cool inside, and eerie. In the wind I hear, and feel antiquity. The tower, they say, is still haunted by the ghost of a Roman centurion.

I go into the church. It is of the same red brick as the roman tower. In fact, it is believed that the bricks were taken from a previous roman building, now no longer existing. It is Anglo-saxon, this Church: pre-Norman-invasion. It is a restored version of the original one, which fell into disuse and disrepair after Henry VIII’s vengeful depradations.

I visited the dungeons below the medieval section of the castle. A dank dimly lighted tunnel bore down almost perpendicularly into the lower level of the donjon. When I reached a spot where short-snouted cannons looked down past grilled openings on the walls, I learned that the tunnel went deeper into the earth. I decided not to proceed any further, and went back up the tunnel into the outside.

Later, with these exertions provoking hunger pangs, I dove into a fried chicken meal in downtown Dover. Tourists and locals had materialized in droves, sitting out in the sun and having coffee and beer in sidewalk cafes. The sun had come out in force on this Thursday afternoon. Above the town the castle walls rose majestically, proud of its position and reputation as the castle that was never taken in any war, including the last great one. Castle Dover, in Kent, England.


Fatima, Portugal
August 4, 2008

A florid-faced, fat Caucasian tourist muttered as he passed me by.

True, Fatima has a white-marble cathedral presiding over a tarmac-sized plaza. The simple building housing the chapel of the apparition is just that, simple and unassuming. On this hot summer day in August, there were no crowds, which to me was a relief. Outside the shrine, souvenir shops and restaurants abounded. One can be forgiven to think that maybe, just maybe, Lucia, Jacinta and Francesco invented the story of Mary’s apparition to create income opportunities for this once poverty-stricken part of Portugal, where a hardscrabble existence was, until recently, a destiny that local inhabitants were resigned to.

Fatima is a shrine, not a tourist destination.

I lingered mostly at the chapel of the apparitions, with its simple statue of the Virgin of Fatima. Born a Catholic, and, despite having studied for the priesthood, not a very devout one, I was drawn to sit and gaze at the simple statue of the virgin - no baroque, cherub encrusted lady, she This place touched me because it reminded me of home, the smell of candles in my local church, the sweet smell of lilies and roses, the murmured prayers in fractured latin. And though the chapel was open to the plaza, the people sitting and kneeling on benches here were quiet and prayerful.
Our Lady of Fatima had always been a big part of Filipino devotionals.  I remember the practice, still being done to this day, of having a statue of the Virgin of Fatima  deposited in our house for a week, and we’d all kneel before this image and pray the rosary and ask the Virgin to intercede for us to Our Father in heaven. Ora Pro Nobis, Mater Dei.