Musing: on tourism

A discussion on tourism with a friend:    It seems that different places and the time (year, season, etc) one visits make a difference.  Florence was awash in tourists in 2000 but the city seemed to "rise above it." It seemed comfortable with itself even glorying in all the tourists.    Same with Giverny both times I visited. The gardens seemed to arise above the hoards of us visiting and you could still delight in them.    Amsterdam in 2010 seemed to be itself from what we could tell, even with lots of tourists.  Maybe because we were all in it together dealing with the cold (it was very cold for May) and a humongous garbage strike.   Bruges, however, in 2010, seemed to have sold its soul to tourism.  I almost cried with disappointment at being confronted literally with  shop after shop after shop of lace and chocolate in the main square of the old city...all geared to tourism, as if all you do as tourists is buy stuff.   The same in Delft in the Netherlands...shop after shop just geared to the tourist trade. In a way Las Vegas was different....American...the Strip was built solely for tourist experience from pretty much nothing....like Disneyland.  But I felt that Delft and Bruges had somehow morphed from being real towns to being just tourist centers and not for the better (from my p.o.v.).....though we tourists certainly provided jobs and money by our being in these old places.    The same with some parts of Barcelona...Las Ramblas...was given over almost entirely to tourists except when local folks were celebrating their futbol victories for the Spanish championship. So different from when I lived there many years before.   It may be that B. and I were too fatigued and too cautious to go deeper when we were in Europe.  We will try one more time in Paris in the near future.  It will be our beyond Rick Steves trip and I hope I can do better in French than I did in Italian in 2000.  I am glad you had such a good experience in Costa Rica.  From all I've read it is a very welcoming place. And a beautiful place..un pais muy simpatico.    And you are right...part of it is that you take expectations into the experience.  Because I had lived in Europe for half a year in 1966...in Barcelona with several visits to Paris and one week in Kent with my English friend at her home, I have always have those memories and experiences with me and they have colored the subsequent traveling I have done..that I feel so very fortunate and lucky to have been able to do, thanks mostly to B.

It's my belief that we live in an existential state of incompleteness and imperfection, seeing, hearing, understanding and responding to the flow of life-around-us and life-within-us only partially and sporadically.  Once in awhile we get in sync, but mostly we are in a state of unsteadiness and paradoxically are "saved" when we radically trust we will keep on going even when we teeter on the brink of utter confusion and down-heartedness.

My roasted pepper soup

This is what I did:  I roasted two orange peppers under the broiler (after washing, seeding and quartering them and flattening them.)  I put them on a cookie sheet under the broiler on the second to top rack and left there until they were nicely charred.  Then I put the pepper pieces in a small stainless steel bowl and covered that with Saran wrap so the pepper pieces could steam for about ten minutes), allowing me to remove the charred skins easily. After removing the skins I coarsely chopped the peppers.  While the peppers were either roasting or steaming I finely chopped up about 1/3rd of a medium onion and two cloves of garlic- a small amount of these went into the ranch dressing for salad I also made.  I also boiled a small whole  potato until it was fork-tender, and peeled it, setting it aside.  The first items I cooked were the onions in aboout 3 tablespoons to 1/4th cup of olive oil over very low heat (did not want to burn the onion) until the onion was soft.  Toward the end of cooking the onion I added the garlic, still keeping the temp quite low.  Then I added in the pepper, raising the burner temp at this pointcooking it all for a few more minutes.  I then added a coarsely chopped and seeded small tomato and  8 oz of low sodium chicken broth and brought the mixture up to to a boil.  At this point I added the potato, which I had cut into a dice of about 1/2 inch.  After the mixture had boiled for a couple of minutes, I turned the heat down very low, with the pot psrtially coverd, so the soup could simmer (for 20 to 30 minutes) and added a little salt (a shake or so) and a nice turning of black  pepper.  Every so often I stirred and tasted.  Toward the end of the cooking I about a teaspoon of herbs de Provence, my go-to herb.  Then I blended this mixture in my blender.  At this point I warmed about 1/3rd cup of whole milk in the micro and spooned some of the soup mixture into the milk to temper it (gradually bringing it up to thé soup's température béfore pouring that milk/soup mixture back into the soup, which I heated a little more.   This amount of soup will give you two smallish servings, which can be garnished with several different items...we used shredded Parmesan cheese.  With the soup we had some wonderful puglia  bread (so chewy and nutty-tasting) cold, sliced chicken basil sausage (from last night), and a simple green salad, dressed with home-made ranch dressing.  We cut up strawberries for dessert.  Please feel free to use this "recipe!"

A passing

She had always yearned to live by the water.  She would be piercingly reminded of this when they traveled from Portland to Seattle by train passing for a luxuriant half hour from Olympia to Tacoma on the grey, silent South Sound with McNeil Island, home of an old federal prison, heaving it's black green body out of the stillness of the water. If it was a lucky ride they would pass the whole way with their sight unhindered by a train hurling south, and they would pass by the graceful span of the new Point Defiance Bridge, then through a tunnel and and then pass the Port of Tacoma with its freighters lolling in the waters, its shipping cranes, its inescapable graffiti on the bunches of rail cars and warehouses, and then the train would leave the Sound and her desire for life lived at water's edge would evaporate once again.

Running into Hemingway

I have a correction of one of those maddening typos: I wrote "Hemingway,s going to write" or something like that. It should have been "Hemingway's struggle to write."

Perfect beach

Where else can one experience such splendid happiness than at a perfect beach?

Sleepless on Maui