On the way home

We haven't had the promised internet access several places. We are now in the Zurich airport, changing planes on our way back to Massachusetts. I'm very glad to be going if not home at least back to a familiar place where we spend time every summer.

I wrote a little yesterday:

On the train today from Prague back to Berlin, we talked about a next trip. My mother has made plans for a family gathering in Venice, Italy, after Christmas 2008 to scatter some of my father’s ashes. My father was 80 when he had a massive stroke in the airport in London on the way home from a trip almost two years ago. He had had a minor stroke a few months before that so he had become a bit less capable, but he never acted as old as John acts.

This trip has gone well enough that I feel ok about getting tickets for Venice. We are going to try to arrange to spend five days or so in Rome first, just John and me and our kids. If I’m really lucky I can get frequent flyer tickets going into Rome and out of Venice.

Our daughter loves travel and museums. Our son tires of it faster, but he said today he has really enjoyed this trip. So there are two reasons to travel now—while John still can and while our kids are into traveling with us. I’m learning to be less overstressed by it, though I’m still going to be very glad to be out of all of this togetherness.

Keeping this blog makes me realize how resentful I am, instead of accepting what I face. I'm usually an optimist but this prospect has thrown me.

Getting away from it all

We got away from the crowds yesterday morning, going to the former Convent of St. Agnes to see an amazing museum of medieval art that John particularly wanted to see. Then we went to the ghetto area to see the Jewish cemetery and several of the former synagogues that have exhibits. We didn’t see all the exhibits—the Jewish museum is spread out over 5 or 6 buildings—but I was left with a feeling of sadness, not a feeling of the bustling life that was once there. My sense of that life comes from Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, which I taught this past spring and which has a subplot about the rabbi in the Prague ghetto who made a Golem.

We had lunch at a restaurant and dinner at the apartment. After dinner I suggested that we take the trolley to see Wenceslas Square, just to get a sense of the newer part of the city. Our daughter liked the idea. John first said he wanted to go then after we waited for him for a while he decided it would take too long and he wanted to go down to the mall where there is internet access to check his email. A few minutes after we got home from our trolley trip, he came in, needing the password for my computer (which he has been using since we started this trip). The password for my laptop is a logical but slightly tricky one that the computer service people for my part of the university use. I don’t want to change it because there are several minor problems with the laptop I need them to fix. So I gave it to John and he headed off again. I asked him if it was important, as our daughter wanted to use the computer to write messages to send in the morning, but he was determined.

Looking at the computer, which he didn’t shut down properly, it looks like he had to go someplace else to find internet access but did find it. I do worry about him going off alone in the evening that way with my laptop. I think I’m using the wrong strategy. I’m not making it easy for him (for example by not changing the password on the computer) hoping he will get discouraged. But I think he just gets more determined. When we are home it is good for him to have a routine of things he does on the internet, on his laptop. I just wish he could drop in when we are traveling.

This is a longstanding difference—in the days before the internet it bothered me that he wanted to read the newspaper while on vacation in some exotic place. To me a vacation means leaving that world behind. On the other hand I brought the computer this time (I didn't for one vacation last winter) and have been dealing with a fair number of things that have come up at work.

Defenestration

Yesterday we went to Prague Castle, which was terribly crowded. We decided to go back another day to the cathedral, as there was a long line, but we saw the other main sites. John and I are both historians; he always taught Western Civilization and I did so for many years. So we were particularly interested in seeing the site of the Defenestration of Prague.

A couple of years ago I had gotten our daughter interested in the story as well, on the basis that “defenestration” is a wonderful $10 word (as in “don’t use a $10 word when a 25 cent one will do”). Defenestration means to throw someone out a window. In 1618, two messengers were thrown out the second floor window in the photograph where you can see a cross below, leading to the Thirty Years War. According to the Catholics the messengers survived the fall because they were borne up by angels, according to the Protestants they survived because they landed in a large manure pile.

We stopped at the lovely garden of Valdstejnsky Palace and at yet another Baroque church (St. Nicholas) and then took the trolley back to our apartment. It was only about 4 pm when we got back but we were all very tired and travel-weary. I don’t know why we felt so much more tired unless it was the crowds.

It was nice to be able to have dinner in. I had bought some prepared goulash at the supermarket and we also had leftovers from a large celery root which I had boiled and chopped (partially mashed) the day before. (We had discovered mashed celery root as a low carb replacement for mashed potatoes several years ago, but in the southeast U.S. at least celery root is hard to find and expensive. Here it is clearly a staple.) We had salad with some excellent cherry tomatoes I bought at a fruit and vegetable stand and pasta for the kids and it added up to as good a meal as we would likely have had at a restaurant, for a lot less money.

Prague old city

Yesterday indeed went much better. Instead of making a detailed plan for what we wanted to see, we walked across the Charles Bridge and wandered in the old city, going into some churches. And then we came upon the Klementinum, originally a Jesuit University, and took a tour. An amazing baroque library and also an astronomical observing tower with recreated 18th century observing instruments just a step beyond what Tycho Brahe and Kepler would have used when they worked in Prague. What I had never seen before was the system used in the 19th century to determine noon exactly and provide a signal to the town clocks. We followed our interest in the history of astronomy and went on to another church to see the tomb of Tycho Brahe.

Our daughter wanted to look in stores so she and I walked back the way we had come over the bridge, while John and our son took the subway back. I got mixed stories about how lost they got but they came out of a subway entrance other than the one opposite the trolley stop and had trouble finding the trolley stop. We are beginning to feel confident with the trolley system and so able to get around easily from our apartment. I'm slowly suggesting to our son that he pay more attention, and he likes figuring out public transportation systems.

In the evening we had dinner in our apartment, then went up a funicular (somewhat like the cable cars in San Francisco, but with two cars connected by a cable) to the top of a hill overlooking the city. At the top of the hill there was a smaller version of the Eiffel tower that you could go up for the best view. To take the elevator I had to say John was handicapped—I think the kids felt that. John said it was fine for me to play the handicapped card, he wouldn’t have been able to walk the stairs. It was a wonderful view; the picture below shows the bridge we walked over in the morning.

Prague

The train ride from Dresden to Prague, mostly along the Elbe river, was lovely, as I had heard. We were supposed to be met at the train station but no one was there. I handled figuring out how to call the apartment company, with John mostly looking lost. They didn’t have a record that we had arranged to be met. The guide books talk about many rip-offs in Prague so I was reluctant to take a ride with a driver who wasn’t a licensed taxi, and I wasn’t sure what to do when John thought it a good idea. It turned out fine and a lot cheaper than the transportation we had signed up for.

I miss how safe I came to feel in our Berlin apartment; I was immediately on edge about Prague being a more dangerous place for tourists. Another thing that makes this place feel scary is the language. Our daughter is studying German and I took one year of it in college, but German also has many words that are close to the word in English. Czech is a Slavic language so there are almost no cognates with English. John studied Russian in the army so he picks up an occasional Russian cognate, but not many.

Our apartment is not quite as nice as the Berlin one but still roomy and works for us. The big disappointment is that the internet promised doesn’t work with my computer. It is also further from everything. John and I walked to a supermarket and ended up taking a taxi home—actually there was a convenient trolley, but no convenient place to buy tickets for it. The apartment does have a small front loading washing machine so we have been doing our laundry a little at a time. And it is actually in a beautiful historic area of town, south of the castle and not far west of the Charles Bridge.

We had dinner at our apartment and ended up not trying to do anything. We had talked about going out to a nearby view but none of us really felt up to it. John and the kids did take a short unsuccessful walk looking for icecream. Today we will learn our way around and it will all seem better.

Dresden

I very much wanted to take the train to Prague, though the travel planner who was helping us recommended flying because good fares are available and it would use less of our time. But I found a site with better train fares, and once we had started to plan the train the travel planner suggested we stop off in Dresden, on the way.

I was nervous about getting out of the apartment and getting to the right train station but it worked out so smoothly we were there about an hour and a half early. There was a supermarket in the train station so we bought rye bread and cream cheese and smoked salmon to make a picnic on the train. We were even able to figure out how to get on the right train car for our reserved seats. The ride to Dresden was just over two hours. It ended up much easier than fighting an airport, and I will be more confident on our next leg.

We got to Dresden in plenty of time to walk around the town and see some museums. Our son said he was most interested in the armour musuem, but he and I were done when John and our daughter were only a quarter of the way through, so they suggested we go on. We tried to go to the old treasure collection, but there were no more tickets available this afternoon, so we walked through the two large churches and walked back to the hotel. Old city Dresden is very strange--quite a few historic buildings reconstructed and much more construction going on. One church has blackened stones where the originals could be put back into place and whiter stones where new ones have been used, but in most cases you are looking at a reconstructed historic city. It seems strange to me, particularly seeing it still being built, but then I have never been a believer that healing is going back to what the situation would be if the harm had never happened.

a poem by our daughter

Dad

To watch him walk
With his lopsided gait
Of one foot dragging
With one arm still at his side
Is a constant and jarring reminder
Of how my world has changed

It’s still so easy to get impatient
As though I know it is not by choice
It is still ‘how can he be so slow.’

It isn’t really that many changes,
We have to leave more time for getting places
And he wears a bracelet with identification
But we still talk about the same things
And he is as good of a resource as ever.

My world has changed
But so can I
So it doesn’t really matter.
by EMM, age 15

Moving slowly

Today was somewhat more difficult. I had hoped to find a place where we could drop off our laundry and pick it up the next day, but when I found such a place and succeeded in communicating mostly by pointing I learned that if we dropped off our laundry on Saturday it would be ready on Wednesday. That wouldn’t do, so I got directions at a hotel near our apartment to a laundromat a short subway ride away. That was my first priority this morning. Four people make a lot of laundry—we had a full rolling carryon suitcase and another bag. John offered to help but I didn’t want to wait for him to get ready. My son went with me to the laundromat and my daughter came an hour later to help me carry the laundry back. It took a long time to do—it was around 11 am when we got back.

John wasn’t ready to head out to a museum, though he had gone out to do one errand while we were doing laundry. Once it got to 11:30, I suggested we eat lunch at our apartment before going out. We finally headed out for a museum around 12:30. As we were walking I said to John that I wished that just occasionally when I was late getting back he would be impatiently waiting for me instead of not getting ready until I was there to push him. He said should he not have washed the breakfast dishes? I said that he had lots of time. He said he didn’t get distracted, I wasn’t accepting that things take him longer now.

The German history museum was very well done, though I found the 20th century part too painful. We went back to our apartment with the idea that we would rest for an hour and then go to Checkpoint Charlie, but then John said he didn’t want to go. He was frustrated he hadn’t gotten to check his email (something my daughter and I have been doing at a nearby coffee shop while waiting for him to get ready in the morning).

I’m willing to work around his needs the way I have been doing. But I do get frustrated sometimes and easily get so resentful when I don’t get any appreciation or even acknowledgement for doing the laundry or when John is huffy that it isn’t his turn to do the dishes. I’m not very good at this. At the emotional part, I mean, at having empathy for him.

The picture is a view from our apartment, looking towards the Gendarmenmarkt and the Franzosischer Dom.

When John changed plans on us I suggested that we have a quick dinner at the apartment before the kids and I went to Checkpoint Charlie. I went to the supermarket and got sausages and the local currywurst sauce for them. And then the kids and I walked to Checkpoint Charlie and spent a long time in the museum there. It is a little disappointing not to be able to see anything of the wall, but the stories and pictures of escapes (and actual cars and boxes used) are moving, particularly seeing so many stories at once. I was also taken by the story of an American named John Runnings who made a statement by climbing up onto the wall and walking on top of it for nearly 500 meters in 1986.