Always the same question. What should we drink with the food? One afternoon, when we stopped in the middle of a walk for a quick sandwich, the question bothered us. Neither of us wanted water: it was a hot day, and we’d been drinking a lot of it all day. I decided to have a Darjeeling. The Family spent longer thinking about it, and finally decided on a lemonade. “Nice”, we said to each other, after a sip. We tasted the others’ drink. “Nice”, we nodded. Little did we know that the lemonade had a story behind it.
Tag: Hamburg
Daydreams
As if I don’t get time to sit and daydream! I snorted inwardly as I caught myself slipping off into a daydream while taking a boat full of chattering crowds through Hamburg’s harbour. The sight of a red balloon floating in the immensity of the sky had drawn my eye to that emptiness. Our eyes normally ignore the immensity of the space that we float in. Now the sight of that reducing the vast harbour to a tiny nothing filled me with a sense of lightness.
The remains of my salad days! I caught myself dreaming again as I stared at the plate of salad which I’d just finished. The light glancing off the plate, the slow mixing of the immiscible oil and the juice from tomatoes, had drawn me into a fascinated state of mind.
I’d been letting my coffee cool as I stared into a ghost of a town, manifesting itself in the cafe’s window. What was that? A very odd multiple reflection had created this architectural phantom. What a wonder, I thought.
There are two or three things I must tell you
It is an old axiom, and well said, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (in Molly Bawn, 1878)
Many people believe that the rules of aesthetics were first formulated by the Greek philosopher Plato. Not too wrong. Other theories of aesthetics, the Natyashastra of India and Confucian aesthetics in China, developed around the same time. But there must have been rules of aesthetics in more ancient cultures as well. Whatever. Let’s get back to Plato. As everyone knows, he was a wonderful artist. No? He must have had great taste. No? At least he was quite definite about what he liked. In his book, The Republic, he urged rulers to ban art which “stirred up the wrong emotions.” In modern times Umberto Eco wrote a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, connecting it to the theories of James Joyce. But on second thought, he added a long introduction to the book in which he pointed out that any rigid theory of beauty is clearly contradictory to the subjectivity of liking.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three lefts could.
Anonymous
This week we believe that three is more beautiful than two or five. But how do we count threes? In the featured photo there are clearly three things: the colours green, yellow and purple. I don’t know whether you like it or not, but when I went for a walk with friends through a small village in Germany, flowering meadows like this looked beautiful. In the photo of the Romanesque Herz-Jesu Kirche that you see above, you can see many groups of three: three towers (like Tolkein’s middle book), three windows, and so on. In the photo below, you see three kinds of things: a railing, a gull, and the girders of a bridge. Our sense of whether we like these photos or not is clearly influenced by whether we see these trios.
There are three kinds of people: those who believe this, and those who don’t.
Terry Pratchett
Oh yes, there are three photos in this post, and three quotes. As they say at the end of the famous cartoon shorts, Tom and Jerry and Harry, “That’s all folks!”
Tufted Duck + Birds of the Week Invitation CLXXI
Boldly patterned, small, golden eyed, and commonly found. That’s a tufted duck (Aythya fuligula) for you. I’ve found it swimming in the waters of a small pond in Rajasthan, a reservoir in the plains of Uttarakhand, in the freezing water around Gamla Stan in Stockholm, and, most recently, on the murky waters of the Elbe near Hamburg’s harbour. I’ve generally seen large flocks, but this time, in spring, I saw only a pair. The tuft of the male is pretty noticeable, as you can see in the featured photo. The black back persists in the tuftless brown female. As always, the sexual dimorphism indicates different roles in nesting. The females do the incubation and rear the chicks alone for four to six weeks by the female alone. The unfledged chicks are then left to fend for themselves.
The strangely lopsided and careless pattern of breeding also leaves space for brood parasitism, by other females of the same species, or of another. Typically a clutch has six to eight eggs, but it is not unusual to find nests with a dozen or more eggs. I would guess that the frequency with which these large clutches are found indicate significant chances of brood parasitism. It is a wonder that with this style of nesting the species is far from endangered today. It is not only widespread across most of Eurasia, but also common, with a world population of more than a million. This should have something to do with its adaptability in choosing habitats. It has been found at heights of 2400 meters in the Alps, brackish as well as fresh water, streams, lakes, and even the sea.
This is an invitation to share your post about birds, their photos, or their behaviour. If you post about birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to have a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. Do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post, and remember to visit other people’s posts. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
A chai shop in Hamburg
Over the years I’ve lost my memory of certain important German cultural institutions. One of these is that coffee time is in the afternoon between 3:30 and 5:30. You might get it half an hour earlier or later, but certainly not after 6 PM. Over the last four decades, instead I find that a need for a tea and a cake comes over me at about 6 PM. Too late for a German institution.
Fortunately Turkish çay (pronounced exactly like chai) shops have stepped in to fill this gap. I looked at the reviews of coffee shops near our hotel when we checked in, and found several open. The nearest one was rated high by both locals and tourists from many countries. We stepped out of the hotel, crossed a couple of roads, and found this welcoming gent behind his counter, ready to serve a rather nice çay and baklava.
Mythmaking
Hans Hummel is one of the fond legends of Hamburg. Two decades ago when I visited the city, his statues were everywhere. Now there are only a few. The rest were auctioned off the year after I was there last. Spotting the statue again chimed well with the book that I began reading in that city one evening. This was The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. Undoing the tropes of fairytales, swashbuckling boy’s tales, and Tolkienesque fantasy is a genre that has developed in this century. This book is a very good example.
What does every king want? To stay king.
Alix E. Harrow (in The Everlasting)
“Study fairytales if you want to write,” my high-school English teacher had advised me, handing me a slim volume of Tolkien’s lesser-known stories. That remains true today, I found as I read this book. The story is a time-loop, of the kind that has become very familiar since Groundhog Day brought it into the mainstream. It is a love story between two soldiers, separated by a thousand years, and it is a story about the power fantasy that causes them to meet. In the structure and central theme it is similar to last year’s Hugo prize winner, Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh.
Nevertheless, its narrative structure is unusual. The first two iterations of the time-loop are narrated by different people, once each by one of the principals. So it took a while for me to figure that the two traversals of the loop were going to go slightly differently. The later traversals are written in other registers: for example, one as a fairytale. This is where secondary characters begin to come into their own, further subverting genre conventions. A stylistically interesting aspect was that through a large part of the book the second person narrative is used, but by different people. So the reader is drawn into deconstructing a power fantasy.
Everything I had believed in and fought for – crown and country, the flag and the church, even the past itself- had proved false. What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten: my father’s hand on my hair when I was a boy, ruffling it awkwardly, the brusque press of Sawbridge’s lips on my cheek; your eyes on mine at the very end, full of faith, so certain I would come back for you.
Alix E. Harrow (in The Everlasting)
It is interesting at the end to see the unmaking of Tolkienesque narratives: of anointed royalty, of magical objects, of quests to kill dragons, of jealousy amongst knights, and of the notion of just wars. Instead new narratives are seeded.They seem more like the Hans Hummel story. There are many of these also in Tolkein, but modern media corporations will not fund the making of movies from them. I’m glad that they are being arrived at, and enriched, by new authors.
Brass Band
Hitting the right notes with metronomic precision for jazz and pop standards, the police band attracted a small crowd in front of Hamburg’s town hall. I’ve been subjected before to such rigorous treatment of tunes which are often used for joyous improvisation. So I walked up close to the band to take photos of the instruments.
The Family had never heard Teutonic Jazz before, so she was willing to give it a fair hearing. Fair is not a word I’ll use happily under these circumstances, so I concentrated on the lovely brass instruments that the band used. On this nice and sunny day, there were reflections of the square, the town hall, and the people nearby. The band ended the performance with a medley of tunes by Paul McCartney. That’s joyful enough even if played with the unnatural precision of a marching band.
This is for Egidio’s Lens Artists challenge.
What will poor Robin do?
Winter is a meaningless word where I live, so I will ignore the fact that the climatic extremes which make good photos of this season affects only 40% of the human population. I will post about what this navel-gazing majority expects. Straight. No chasers. Winter is snow and cold, chill and gray. Winter is fir trees covered with snow, and a little chalet below them nearly buried in snowdrifts.
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
Nursery rhyme
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
On a cold and frosty morning!
Or winter is frost that covers branches of trees: looking glorious if the sun is out. But usually it is not. The sky is grey, and the frost on the trees just looks like the killer it can be.
I’m a little snowman, short and fat,
Traditional rhyme
Here’s my scarf!
And here’s my hat!
When I see the snowflakes, hear me shout!
All you children, please come out!
Or winter is frozen fountains, and a time to wear layers of clothes to keep warm. It is certainly not a time to take off your clothes, sit under the open sky and admire yourself in a mirror. No, that way lies rigor mortis. And as the song goes, rigor mortis conturbat me.
Come sing a song of winter, of winter, of winter!
Traditional rhyme
Come sign a song of winter, the cold days are here!
With Winter winds blowing, and cold cheeks a glowing!
Come sing a song of winter, the cold days are here!
Winter is a time to take out your skis and drive up to places where the slopes are good and the snow is that dry powder which you can just brush off. Winter is a time to come down from the slopes after a nice morning, eat a heavy lunch and go back to the slopes. Winter is a time when you can relax with a good drink in the evening after a hot shower.
The north wind doth blow and we will have snow,
Old English song
and what will the poor Robin do then?
He’ll sit in a barn, and keep himself warm,
With his head hid under his wing, poor thing.
Winter is when the north wind blows, birds hide, leaves are long gone, and bare trees poke up into a leaden sky. If you are lucky you can try to build a snowman. Winter is the best of times. Winter is the worst of times. When there is a winter, that is.
Travel is awful
There seems to be no lack of pithy sentences promising you the world if only you travel. One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. The journey is the reward. Travel makes you modest. Focus on the journey, not the destination. Nothing is as tedious as a journey. No two journeys are the same. The beauty of a journey is that it’s unpredictable. If you are 22, I urge you to travel. Wisdom comes with age. Travel teaches tolerance. Travel long enough, and you forget your passwords. Travel stretches the mind. Tourists don’t know where they’ve been. Amazing how much stuff gets done the day before you leave. I have seen more than I remember. To understand a foreign country, smell it. Go see for yourself. There’s no foreign land, it’s the traveller who is foreign.
The truth is travel is tedious, and not always comfortable. You only have to eavesdrop on two backpackers chatting to figure out how expensive, inconvenient, and downright unhealthy travel can be. I’ve found more disconcerting things about my hometown by overhearing conversations between backpackers than by reading newspapers or doomscrolling. If travelling has taught me anything, it is that it is far more comfortable to stay at home, drinking a tea or a beer as the mood takes you, eating food that you like, and generally being in an environment that you have grown used to.
I learnt that on a freezing winter’s day in Hamburg you should not take a ferry ride through the harbour, or take long walks with a camera in hand. Much better to do what locals do, and stay inside a shopping arcade or sit in a warm restaurant. Better still, go to Hamburg in a different season.
Do not look for the telling detail in Rome. Better to step back and take a long shot of the piazza. It would be even better if you just step back into the crowd, find a table to site down at, and order something to drink. i had more fun drinking a coffee and eating a cake at Piazza Navona that I had taking photos of the fountains.
Do not go off the tourist map. Do not follow the white rabbit. There is no wonderland waiting for you in Goa. Remain where the tourists are, in the places marked out for you. Enjoy the inauthenticity of a big tourist destination. Remember that Alice did not have a great time in wonderland. The world is full of people trying to make a living. Most of them do not have the money to travel.
Bhutan may or may not be the happiest country in the world. But it is not the world’s richest. The always photographable gho and kira which people are required to wear in public are not cheap. The result is that most people only have a small number of outfits, and they cannot always dress for work or leisure appropriately. Do not assume that everyone treats work as a such a joyful activity that they dress their best to work.
Life in a small small village is not carefree. It is often boring and pointless, much like our own, no matter where we come from. If you look different, then you are as much of an attraction for them as they are for you. Even better, you give them an opportunity to forgo dangerous travel to broaden their mind. Also, be sure that any local politician worth his salt will tell his constituents that he has worked hard to make sure that the village is the most attractive in the world, which is why people come from far to see it.
It is not travel which broadens the mind, it is thinking about what you have seen. Anthony Bourdain probably never said that, but Mark Twain may have. Maybe travel has taught me that. Intercontinental flights are boring enough that I get a lot of reading done on trips.
Around the world in two hundred days
I woke up dreaming of a trip around the world in container ships. How long would it take? It seems that container ships prefer to travel at speeds of 6 to 8 knots. At this speed they’ll cover about 300 kilometers in a day. If you travel around the equator in such a ship it might take you 110 to 150 days. Add in port calls (the featured photo is of Hamburg port), it might take you about 200 days. I’ve spent half that time sitting at home already. To think that I could easily have gone halfway around the world in this time!
Don't hold your breath 
