Nasledujúca zastávka: Portland!

Portland, Oregon, 13 February 2016

As the Bratislava trams and buses depart from a stop, a pleasant alto voice comes on the intercom to announce the next stop: Nasledujúca zastávka ... name of the stop. So as we boarded the final leg of our 21 hour sequence of flights, I could not resist looking at Suzanne and intoning, in as pleasant an alto as I could muster: Nasledujúca zastávka ... Portland!

Our last day in Göteborg was pleasant. We delivered the car to Volvo at 10am. As in all of our other visits they were most accommodating. They not only arranged a car to take us back to the hotel, but also paid for a car to drive us (and six suitcase and two large backpacks) from the hotel to the airport on Thursday morning. Their factory delivery center is a first-class operation in every way!

The last day before traveling is always stressful for me. I am impatient to get on the way and sometimes drive myself crazy trying to find things to do to kill time. So we arranged a bunch of activities for Wednesday afternoon and evening to keep us busy. After lunch we walked down the street to the Göteborg City Museum, located in the old East India Company building near the river. After spending so much time in Central Europe it requires a brief reorientation being in a city that was not destroyed by two world wars. It would be interesting to compare the survival rate of historical buildings in places like Sweden to that in places that had more war-time destruction. I suppose that someone has done this, but from our brief observation the survival rate looked similar.

The City Museum was an exploration of ancient and more recent Scandinavian artifacts and culture, featuring the remains (a few very decayed timbers) of an actual Viking ship dug up out of the mud some years ago. Growing up in Minnesota, we were somewhat aware of the Viking explorers and their history. It was interesting to fill in some of the details and see some of the artifacts from as long as 12,000 years ago.

Remains of the Äskekärrsskeppet

The City Museum has some fine examples of old statuary depicting Norse gods. But compared to the ornate statues being produced in the Mediterranean in similar periods, these statues just scream: Ikea! Maybe the Ikea aesthetic goes back millennia...

Dutch planners helped lay out Göteborg, and there are canals weaving through the older parts of the city. This one runs past the museum (and past our hotel), lined with many old buildings and a few newer ones.

After a quick dinner at a vegetarian buffet---a lot of the vegetarian restaurants in Europe seem to be buffets, either all you can eat for a fixed price or pay by the gram with a scale at the cash register---we headed off to our final European musical event: Figaros Bröllop (Marriage of Figaro) at the Göteborg Opera. The Opera House in Göteborg is a beautiful modern structure erected right on the riverfront. It is designed inside and out with a vaguely ship-oriented motif.

The production was interesting, with costumes and sets reflecting the early 20th century setting rather than the rather older setting normally seen. The singers and the orchestra were generally very good, although after some of the amazing musical events we have seen this year it is easy to be critical when an aria doesn't quite come off, when a singer's words get lost under the orchestra, or when everyone isn't quite 100% in sync. A very enjoyable, if very long at 3.5 hours, last evening in Europe.

It is interesting that the two operas we saw on the road home were both Mozart. This was not intentional, just an coincidence of program scheduling and our travel plans. But it evoked in me a realization that my musical tastes have evolved over my lifetime. In the broad spectrum of classical music, Mozart has never been a favorite of mine. I know that this is heresy! But I've always leaned more toward emotionally heavy romantic composers from Beethoven to Brahms to Mahler and Berlioz. Mozart was always kind of "vanilla." I even found Bach and other earlier composers somehow more interesting than Mozart.

But the experience of hearing two of his wonderful operas in a week has opened my eyes. Or maybe I'm just old enough that vanilla tastes really good after decades of blasting my taste buds with exotic flavors. This week I found the simple, usually predicable cadences to be rapturously satisfying in their purity and perfection. Apparently I'm going into a "Mozart phase" at age 62. Better late than never!

Flying home was never going to be fun. Add in the last stages of a cold that I've been fighting for a week, and it was destined to be a long slog. Up at 5:30 CET to catch a 7:00 car to the airport with six suitcases and two backpacks, a 9:40 flight from Göteborg to Copenhagen, a two-hour wait in the airport there, an 11-hour flight to San Francisco, an hour to get through the frustratingly inefficient customs/immigration/getting checked bags/rechecking bags/walking several miles in the terminal/going back through security process, a four-hour wait for the Portland flight, then finally home at 9:00 PST, 24+ hours after we awakened in Sweden. And it was all daylight until San Francisco, so I got less sleep than usual on the flights. The long flight took an extreme polar route (more so than the eastbound trip), going well north of Iceland, over the center of Greenland, and up over Baffin Island before coming down past Edmonton and almost over Portland before landing at SFO. Not much to see on this route, but the views of the sun rising/setting/just being there on the horizon at noon over Baffin Island were amazing. It's just fitting that after all the wonderful sunrises and sunsets we have seen, the last picture on the blog is a red-tinted sky.

So now we're home, moving back into our house that was well maintained by our house sitters. Any time someone else lives in your house, there are always questions like: Hmm, I wonder where this is? We have that twice over because we stored a lot of our stuff to  make room for them, so we not only have to find things that they might have put in a different place than we are used to, but we also have to remember where we ourselves put items in August. I guess that's what the first week back is for, along with doing endless loads of laundry (with a dryer!!!).

So this closes the book on Blogaslava.

When I started this blog---my first ever---I promised, not quite convincingly, to try to post about once a week. My real expectation up front was that I would make about five posts and have maybe 20 page views, with the whole enterprise petering out by October. I've been amazed that I've managed to post 42 times during 6 months, and even more so that readers have viewed pages over 4,000 times. For me, the blog has been excellent therapy, giving me an opportunity to reflect on our many and varied activities and an excuse sometimes to rant or extol. I hope that those of you who have followed my postings regularly have enjoyed sharing the ups and downs---and there have been many of both---of our adventures. (Suzanne and I recently queried each other about the best and worst of the trip. Immediate agreement: our visit to Beaune was the best and the experience with the Slovak Foreign Police was the worst.)

Will there be another blog? I doubt that I will have anything to say from Portland that anyone would want to read. My interests are so eclectic---music, wine, food, (real, not American) football, baseball, economics, higher education, etc.---that I doubt that there would be a theme to my posts that would prove consistently interesting to anyone. And surely no one (except maybe Suzanne) is interested enough in me to read anything just because I posted it; I'm not a celebrity!

If I change my mind, I'll post a link to the new blog here, but for now I'm signing off. Thanks for reading!