Travelogue

Mar. 24th, 2024 07:45 am
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Checked out of our hotel in Madrid, rode two stops on the subway to the southern train station, and took a half-hour high-speed train ride (the overhead monitor said 216 km/h at least once) to Toledo, where even the modern train station is gorgeous Moorish-inspired architecture.


Caught a cab up the hill... and up the hill... and through a maze of twisty little passages from which we could have reached out the cab windows and touched the walls on either side. Old-town Toledo is very much still a medieval city in its construction, with nothing resembling a street grid and few calles (which would be called alleys or footpaths in the US) running farther than 50 m in one direction or by one name.

Our hotel's check-in time wasn't for several hours, so we left our luggage with the desk clerk and walked 100 m to visit the Cathedral, perhaps the biggest tourist attraction in Toledo. There's been a church on this site for about 2000 years, since Bishop Eugenius; it became a Cathedral and the spiritual/political/cultural center of Spain in the 7th century under Bishop Ildefonso, to whom the BVM appeared and gave a rich robe as a sign that this was the place to build a Cathedral; and the current building was constructed (presumably after a period of serving as a mosque) in the 13th-15th centuries, with a few later decorative additions. Pictures to follow.

After a couple of hours in the Cathedral, we returned to the hotel, checked in, and fell asleep. Got up about 6 PM, went out for supper (which was tricky, as most restaurants were closed or closing at this time), visited the (free admission) excavated Roman baths, then found a spot in one of the countless pedestrian plazas to wait for the evening religious procession. It's Holy Week in Spain, so there will be at least one religious procession almost every day up through Easter Sunday, each sponsored by a different church in town. The information booth near the Cathedral has a helpful pamphlet listing the starting times, routes, and dramatis personae of each procession, but it doesn't indicate how long each procession takes; the plaza we picked was about halfway through the route, and the procession reached us about two hours after its starting time. Pictures to follow.


This is the shower fixture in the hotel. From this picture, without manipulating any controls, you can figure out how it works: the left knob is water temperature (with a recommended 38°C highlighted), so the right knob must be water volume, and the pull-knob in the middle is shower/spigot. Temperature and volume are the controls I actually want in a shower -- or a sink for that matter -- not how-much-hot and how-much-cold, much less how-much-and-if-it's-a-lot-it's-hot. Why can't American plumbing manufacturers figure this out?

On the other hand, the "climate control system" in the room has two settings: on and off. I turned it on and got a minute or so of cool air, after which it switched into "heat" mode (presumably because it's March; the climate control system hasn't noticed the heat wave that has covered Spain for the past week). We would have opened the window to get outside air circulation, but the window is actually a door that opens onto the next door neighbor's patio, which feels a little creepy.

Travelogue

Mar. 22nd, 2024 08:02 pm
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Got up not quite as early as yesterday and took the subway to the bus to the town of El Escorial, which surrounds the Royal Monastery of St. Lawrence at El Escorial. See, in 1557 King Philip II won a major military victory on St. Lawrence's Day, and in celebration, he spent twenty years and mind-boggling amounts of money building a combination monastery, basilica, school, library, and Royal palace.


It's not the warm, cuddly sort of royal palace; indeed, it makes most royal palaces look warm and cuddly by comparison, and the guidebooks describe it as resembling a penitentiary from the outside.





And even from the inside.



The library, which connects the monastery side of the building with the school side, is somewhat friendlier.


It boasts a number of 1000+-year-old Arabic, Latin, and Greek texts, and at least four volumes of Alfonso X El Sabio (two versions of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a book on astronomy, and one on the properties of stones).

We squeed over the Cantigas ms out on display in a glass case, then realized it was a facsimile (the same facsimile edition D. had access to when she interned at the Lily Library as a student).




But the real one is probably somewhere in that room, or at least that building.

The Basilica is decorated by top-notch 16th-century artists, such as Titian and Cellini, but again it's designed to be coldly perfect and impressive rather than welcoming.

The school side of the building, I think, still functions as a school and isn't open to the public, while the monastery side appears to serve only as art gallery and office space. It's crammed full of Titians, El Grecos, Tintorettos, Bosch-followers, and lesser lights. Mostly very well done, but this idiom really doesn't do anything for me.... Behind the Basilica are the royal residences, which Philip and his long line of descendants made liveable... and decorated with oil paintings, frescoes, tapestries (with cartoons by Goya), etc. including a lot of paintings of battles. I picked out some that had good pictures of tents.





Some of the walkways inside the complex look like Nine Men's Morris boards:


And the whole place is surrounded by starkly-beautiful mountains:


Had lunch across the street from the Monasterio, then caught a bus back to Madrid. It was only about 4 PM, but we were too fried to go back to the archaeological museum. Next trip, I guess.

Travelogue

Mar. 21st, 2024 09:26 pm
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Spent the day in Segovia, which is an hour or so from Madrid (1/2 hour by high-speed train, then 20 minutes by bus from the train station to the center of town). The part of town we were in obviously centers on tourists, but it was cute anyway. There are about twenty small Romanesque church buildings sprinkled throughout town, most of which have been repurposed for secular ends (schools, theatre companies, etc.) so we couldn't get inside them but walked around the outsides of several.
I think the oldest non-church building in town is a 15th-century house, but a lot of the buildings, even fairly recent ones, have pronounced Mozarabic influences, e.g. overall geometrical patterns in the wall plaster.

The oldest construction in town, of course, is the Roman aqueduct, which is really impressive. The town centers on a steep-walled ridge (like Edinburgh), which was an obvious place to put a military fort, and one problem with building a fort on top of a hill is that the troops need water. So around 100 CE, those wacky Romans found a place a few miles to the east where a fast-flowing river through the mountains was slightly higher than the hilltop, and built a channel at a steady 1% grade all the way to the fort, including a 2500-foot-long, 100-foot-high stone aqueduct (no mortar!) across the valley and through what are now the town walls.
The aqueduct was damaged in the 11th-century Reconquista wars, but repaired around 1500 and still in use into the 20th century.

Anyway, we walked up and down the main drag of the ridge, with side trips down twisty alleys, a fancy mid-day meal of suckling pig (for [personal profile] shalmestere) and asparagus with salmon (for me), and a traditional Segovian dessert of marzipan over custard.

Found a couple of stork's nests

on top of former church (or secular) towers: apparently there were a lot of fortified 15c towers belonging to various powerful families, but Ferdinand and Isabella, in an effort to quell conflict among said families, ordered them all lopped off to a certain maximum height.

Then we toured the Cathedral, which was started in 1525 to replace the Romanesque one that had been badly damaged in a Commoners' Revolt in 1521. The new cathedral took 250 years to build, by which time the Flamboyant Gothic style in which it was started had become terribly old-fashioned, so they finished the top of the nave with a Renaissance dome
while the bell tower at 108 m was the tallest in Spain. Until 1614, when lightning struck the wooden bell tower, whereupon it caught fire and fell onto other parts of the cathedral. They rebuilt in stone, 20 m shorter than before, but still pretty darn tall. We took a guided tour of the bell tower, including the bellringer's apartment halfway up, and our legs are still sore.

At this point it was after 4 PM. We considered going to the Alcázar, which doesn't close until either 6:00 or 8:00, but we were tired enough that we skipped it. It's a 19th-century medievaloid construction, Spain's answer to Neuschwanstein and allegedly an inspiration for the castle at Disney World.


One of the themes of this trip seems to be "expensive mistakes". I made a bunch of reservations for travel and lodging, some with the option to change and some with discounts in exchange for a "no cancellation, no changes" clause. And so far, every thing we've needed to change has been in the latter category. There are so far five (5) nights' hotel stays that we're paying for and not using. And although I thought the train tickets I had bought for today could be changed to an earlier time for free (and to a later time for a fee), this turned out to be wrong, and we had to buy new tickets back to Madrid rather than sit in the Segovia train station for three hours. I spent both too much time and too much money at a Western Union office this morning trying to send money to a musical-instrument-maker (so he can ship the finished instrument to one of the hotels we're staying at later, and we can bring it home ourselves). But at least it's only money: none of these mistakes so far has affected us physically. (Cue the Book of Job....)

Tomorrow we plan to take the bus to El Escorial (home of two Cantigas manuscripts, among other things), come back in the afternoon and get in a few more hours at the Archeological Museum.

Travelogue

Mar. 21st, 2024 08:55 am
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On high-speed train to Segovia. Five minutes after leaving the station, we’re in a steppe land of 2m-high trees as far as the eye can see. Another five minutes, and we can see snow-capped mountains. Reminiscent of Southern California.

Travelogue

Mar. 21st, 2024 07:04 am
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Spent two or three hours yesterday at the Museo Arceológico Nacional, which (like the Museum of London) is organized chronologically. We skipped quickly through the pre-Homo-sapiens stuff, since it's not particularly Spain-specific, but there's a surprising amount known about Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age life in the Iberian peninsula... anyway, we almost got to the arrival of the Romans, with all of the Roman, Visigothic, and Mozarabic periods yet to go. But we had a 2:00 entry time reserved at the Prado, so we left to make that appointment.

Spent six hours at the Prado, getting as far as Bosch, Bruegel, El Greco, Dürer, and friends. (And ran into Mac, of "Mac and Marianne", with some armor-geek buddies.) Had supper at a Chinese noodle place. Bought train tickets for upcoming trips to Segovia, Toledo, and Granada. Went to bed. Up early to catch subway to train to Segovia.

Travelogue

Mar. 19th, 2024 08:55 am
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Spent the weekend at Military Through the Ages, which did a big PR push in advance of its 40th annual show and got something like 5500 visitors in two days (not counting the re-enactors themselves). It was busy and dehydrating and exhausting, but the weather was lovely and a lot of the visitors were seriously interested in what we had to say and demonstrate.

Drove home Sunday night and Monday morning, unpacked the car, then watered plants, paid bills, threw out perishables, and packed suitcases before going to the airport Monday evening for a red-eye flight to Madrid. Landed a little before 10 AM (5 AM NYC time), retrieved our suitcases, tried to figure out how to get to the hotel in downtown Madrid, and discovered that my reservation was for a different hotel with the same name in Toledo. Text-chatted with customer service at Orbitz: they can cancel the wrong reservation, but they need permission from the hotel to refund our money, and the hotel isn't answering its phone. Anyway, I made another reservation at a third hotel that's actually in Madrid, and will try to contact the Toledo hotel myself.

Took a taxi to the hotel in Madrid, arriving around noon. Check-in time is 3 PM, but I guess the guy behind the desk heard my tale of woe and took pity on us, letting us check into our room early. It's on the top floor of an 8-story building; there are only a few rooms on the top floor, as part of the top floor is an outdoor patio and jacuzzi. Which perhaps we'll investigate later on. It took a while to get any of the electrical plugs or lights in the room to work: I called the front desk and was told you have to insert your room key-card into a slot in the wall. (I guess this prevents people from leaving things turned on when they leave the room.) It took a while longer to get the air conditioner to work (it's about 29°C outside): a guy from maintenance came, poked at the thermostat, and demonstrated that "high fan" doesn't work, but "medium fan" works just fine. Anyway, we're siesta-ing now in air conditioned comfort.

Three doors down from our hotel is the building where Don Quijote was first printed. A few blocks away is the museumized home of Lope de Vega. The building where Don Quijote was written has been demolished, but there's a plaque to mark the spot. Also nearby are the Prado art museum and the adjacent Royal Botanical Garden.

Travel!

Mar. 14th, 2024 07:58 am
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I was talking to my manager at work yesterday. He went to Spain a few months ago, and reminded me that some of the biggest attractions are so popular that you need to reserve tickets for them months in advance. Which I sorta knew but hadn't really done anything about.

So last night I checked on tickets to the Alhambra in Granada, and the Alcazar and Cathedral in Sevilla. Unable to find tickets to the Alhambra on either of the two days we're scheduled to be in Granada, but found tickets a few days later, on the day we were planning to go from Cordoba to Sevilla... and Cordoba isn't far from Granada, so I revised the itinerary with another day in Granada and one fewer in Sevilla, where I'd been unable to find tickets to the major Sevilla attractions anyway. Then [personal profile] shalmestere did some more hunting and got tickets to the Alcazar and Cathedral, on the day we had been planning to go from Sevilla to Merida. So that's not too bad. The re-revised itinerary involves a few hours more driving than originally planned, but we're Americans; we can handle that.

Also made lodging reservations for the last two nights: in particular, the last night, we're at an airport hotel a mile from the Madrid airport, the better to make our return flight in the morning.
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We spent the past week in Berkeley, CA at the San Francisco Early Music Society's "Med/Ren Week", a week-long workshop on medieval and Renaissance music. I had three periods a day of shawm; D. had two of shawm and one of vielle. And we both sang in the "all-workshop collegium" concert, which had repertoire running from Machaut to late 15th century. It was exhausting but fun and educational.

Also visited briefly with my half-brother Jeb and his wife Grace, who live a few miles from the workshop venue. They attended Friday night's and Saturday morning's student concerts, then took us out for a delicious brunch, after which we sat around in their living room decompressing and chatting about movies until it was time to catch our flight home.

The flight from Oakland to LAX was delayed only about 15 minutes, and the airline upgraded us to "Comfort Plus" seats in order to make room in coach for some of the people waiting for seat assignments. "Comfort Plus" is the same width as coach, but slightly more leg room; more importantly, it boards earlier so we could get some of our musical instruments into the overhead bin, and deplanes earlier so we could make our connection at LAX. The flight from LAX to JFK left on time, and landed slightly early about 6 AM (3 AM California time), so everything is copacetic except our sleep budgets: we're still jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, but we have 24 hours before either of us has to be at work.

House is still standing, with no obvious damage; car is still parked in front of it, with no obvious damage except bird droppings. Leaving shortly to pick up dogs from dog-sitter.

Travelogue

Jun. 28th, 2022 05:48 pm
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It stopped raining at breakfast yesterday, and was glorious the rest of the day. We actually visited three castles: Dinefwr, Carreg Cennen, and Dryslwyn.



A quarter mile from our B&B was the entrance to Parc Dinefwr, which has at one end a Victorian mansion that we didn't visit,



some lovely woods and meadows in the middle, and at the far end Castell Dinefwr.


When we got to the top of the castle and looked around, we immediately thought "It's the Shire!"


Castell Carreg Cennen is a more high-profile castle, with a visitor's centre, an admission charge, an ice cream shop, and all that. It's quite dramatic from the approach road

as well as from up close

The interior is fairly well preserved, as medieval castles go: this is the second-story "Lord's Chamber"

All those fortifications are scarcely needed, because the landscape provides pretty good protection


A few miles away is the less-touristed, scarcely-even-signed Castell Dryslwyn, on top of a hill

in the middle of a scenic valley


Interestingly, the top of the hill contained a village of 30-some houses outside the walls of the castle; you can still see their outlines in the grass

And such a view!



Drove from the Brecon Beacons into Pembrokeshire, checked into our B&B, and got dinner at a pub around the corner.



This morning I woke up to find the weather foggy but not actively raining, so I went for a walk in the neighborhood,
including some lovely views of the coastline and the harbor, then returned to the B&B, had breakfast, and chatted with another guest and the owner for an hour or so before waking D. We found a shop where we could buy some quiche slices, got into the car, and drove through the rain to



St. David’s, “the smallest city in Britain” at 1852 people (it’s a city because it has a cathedral). It was still raining, so we walked around inside the (still functioning) cathedral, of which


the nave dates to the 12th century and the rest to the 14th, with substantial restoration in the late 19th.


There are still a lot of medieval encaustic tiles in the floor, as well as some 19th-century replacements.


The original shrine of St. David was destroyed by Viking raiders in the 9th century, a new one was built in the 13th or so, it fell into disrepair, and was restored with medieval-style, medieval-materials paintings about fifteen years ago. Geraldus Cambrensis is allegedly buried there, as are the Welsh princes Rhys Gryffydd and Rhys Greg (sp?)

A few steps away from the still-functioning St David's Cathedral are the ruins of the medieval Bishop's Palace, which is your average castle minus the military fortifications: it has a great hall, a kitchen, some private quarters, office space, storage rooms, etc. I was particularly struck by the construction of the tunnels that connect the various storage rooms.






And then it stopped raining, so we walked a third of a mile out of town to the chapel and holy well of St. Non, St. David’s mother. She was apparently caught by the seashore in a thunderstorm when it was time to give birth to him (about CE 500), and at the moment of his birth, a lightning bolt opened a spring of pure water, which is still there (albeit not flowing due to the drought).


It’s down by the seashore cliffs, so we walked a little way along the seashore walk (which IIUC goes all the way around Pembrokeshire). Stunning scenery, glorious weather.


hudebnik: (Default)
In particular, is the number “four” pronounced the same as the preposition “for”?

I ask because the (BBC English) voice navigation system in our rental car consistently pronounces “four” (as in a highway number) as an unaccented “f&schwa;”.

In my experience, the number “four” usually carries substantial meaning and is at least equally long and accented as the syllables before and after it, while the preposition “for” is usually less important, shorter in duration, and less accented than the syllables before and after it.

The voice navigation system also gives numbers in full: “please turn left onto the A f&schwa; thousand eight hundred and nineteen”, as though 4819 were a magnitude. It’s not: four-digit roads are generally smaller then three-digit roads, which are smaller than two-digit roads, but there’s no particular connection between the A4819 and the A4818, which for all I know could be at the other end of the island. A highway number is a point in a discrete topological space; two such numbers are either the same or different, but their digits don’t tell you much more than that, and each digit is equally important.

Google Maps (in US English), by contrast, pronounces the same thing either “four eight one nine” or “forty eight nineteen”.

Travelogue

Jun. 26th, 2022 08:23 pm
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Checked out of the B&B in Merthyr Tydfil and drove (often on two-way, one-lane, twisty roads with tall hedges on both sides and no visibility) to a car park,

then walked 1-1/2 miles up the road


(moderately steep, bleakly scenic, quite windy)

to Llyn y Fan Fach, a glacial cirque lake that now has a small dam controlling its level. The dam is unnecessary at the moment, as Wales has been in what passes for drought conditions for several weeks and the lake was quite low.




But the mountains surrounding it are amazing. We’re tired now.

Sleeping in Llandeilo tonight, visiting two medieval castles tomorrow before driving into Pembrokeshire.

Travelogue

Jun. 25th, 2022 04:54 pm
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Spent Saturday and Sunday at a living history show in Cape May, NJ. Drove home Sunday night.

Spent Monday unpacking, doing laundry, paying bills, and re-packing. Took a cab to JFK for an 8 PM flight to London, which was delayed to 8:30, then 9:00. Another passenger mentioned that there was a transit strike scheduled for the London area. Fortunately, the coach we were to take was from an independent company, unaffected by the strike except for being busier than usual; I made a reservation for the 12:30 coach the next day Meanwhile, the flight was further delayed to 9:30, then 10:00. At 9:45, our plane was actually at the gate, scheduled to leave at 10:45. We boarded around 10:30 and left the gate at 11:45.

Landed at Heathrow around 11:45 AM Tuesday. Missed the 12:30 coach, but managed to get seats on the 1:30 coach to Cardiff. Walked a few blocks to B&B, checked in, got doner & chips for dinner, and collapsed.

Mid-day Wednesday we picked up a rental car and drove the few miles to Caerphilly, where where we had lunch, toured the castle,
and D twisted her ankle. Which puts a crimp in walking plans for the rest of the trip…




Returned to hotel, got take-out Thai, bought a bag of ice, and she iced her foot in a mop-bucket. In the course of the day, we noticed a poster about an open-air theatre festival, whose first show was “Blackadder Goes Forth”, opening Thursday night.

Thursday morning we drove a bit farther, to Tintern Abbey



and Chepstow Castle. The latter is originally Norman, having been started in 1067.




200 years later William the Marshal acquired it along with his wife, Pembrokeshire, and Leinster; he expanded it using the latest techniques from France, such as round towers and

the oldest surviving wooden doors in Wales, tree-ring-dated to 1297, the year William and Isabel were married. William’s grandson expanded the castle again, with luxury apartments. Etc.

We’ve had a difficult time getting net access other than wi-fi through the B&B. On landing in England, we each got a text message from Verizon offering us a $10/day roaming plan, which we accepted. But it didn’t actually work. I spent a fair amount of Wednesday and Thursday trying to talk to somebody at Verizon and find out what was wrong. Eventually I learned that there was also a $100/month roaming plan, so we both switched to that, and it worked… for my phone, not for D’s. But I was able to reserve two seats for the theatre, which conveniently was a few blocks’ walk from our B&B. As we sat down, I finally managed to get through to a tech support person at Verizon, who had some useful suggestions.

We’re mostly navigating using the car’s built-in voice navigation system, which is not as good as Google Maps (although I’m biased). It always describes roads by their highway number, e.g. “A4519”, even if all the signs refer to it by a street name instead. It told us to “turn right to stay on the A-465”, when the street signs said clearly that the A-465 went straight ahead (and we discovered later that we should have turned right to take the A-470 instead). It told us to turn right at an intersection where we actually needed to go straight across, which was very slightly to the right. It told us to turn left on a street that was a pedestrian zone. And so on.




Friday morning we checked out of the B&B in Cardiff and drove north. I had planned to do a 4-mile mountain hike, but with D’s ankle dubious, we tried a less strenuous “four waterfalls” walk. (Click photo to enlarge.)
At least, the first mile was level and non-strenuous; then it got steep. We got to the first of the four waterfalls, the Sgŵd Clun-Gwyn, then walked back to the car and drove to the next B&B outside Merthyr Tudful.





Saturday we visited two more scenic waterfalls (click photos to enlarge).




Currently recuperating in room.
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So the plan was

  • leave the dogs at a boarding kennel today,

  • drive to the Washington, DC area tonight,

  • participate in a living-history show at Catholic University tomorrow (including a half-hour main-stage musical performance by [personal profile] shalmestere and me),

  • attend a concert by the Folger Consort tomorrow (music from the early 14th-century Roman de Fauvel),

  • attend our adult niece's confirmation Sunday, and

  • drive home Sunday afternoon.



In particular, for the Catholic University demo we were preparing a set presenting the four seasons through 14th-15th-century English music -- none of that French, German, Flemish, or Italian stuff. This is tricky because an awful lot of written music (and other written material) in England got burned in successive waves of violence and looting: the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the English Civil War, etc. And it used to be taught that England was the musical backwater of Europe until Dowland in the late 16th century. But we now know, by extrapolating from surviving tables of contents and textual references to English songs, that a lot of music was happening in medieval England. So the set list includes well-known English pieces that survive with music, such as "Miri It Is" and "Sumer Is Icumen In", as well as musical pieces that survive with only an English incipit such as "Wynter", instrumental pieces in sources with medieval English provenance, and English lyrics that survive without music but which [personal profile] shalmestere has re-set to tunes known in medieval England.

But on Tuesday, while walking the dogs, [personal profile] shalmestere twisted her ankle on some broken and uneven sidewalk: her ankle is now swollen and discolored, she can barely walk, and she's spent much of the past three days elevating and icing it. So we've called off the trip to DC for the weekend.

It was good to have a deadline forcing us to prepare this ambitious musical set, and it's disappointing to not perform that set tomorrow, but I'm sure we'll find an opportunity to do it somewhere.

Da Weekend

Mar. 21st, 2022 10:21 pm
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We spent Saturday and Sunday with La Belle Compagnie at Military Through the Ages, an annual timeline living-history show at historic Jamestown, VA that this year hosted dozens of re-enactment clubs ranging from a 500 BCE Greek phalanx to today's National Guard.

It's a long drive to Jamestown/Williamsburg, but COVID has cancelled so many things in the past two years that we have lots of unspent vacation time, so we took Friday and Monday off work so we could drive there and back without being totally fried. So now we're home, with the car unpacked and the refrigerator restocked, having driven only about six hours today. Totally worth the vacation time.

The weather at this show is usually cold and wet, so [personal profile] shalmestere had made me a lovely new gown of snuggly, warm blue wool, finishing just in time to get a weather forecast with highs around 80F on Saturday. So I wore an older, lighter-weight wool gown on Saturday, and the new blue one on Sunday when the high temperature was in the 60's. There was no rain (yay, taking down and packing dry tents!), and every few minutes we caught a glimpse of the pair of ospreys that nest in the bell tower overlooking the site.

La Belle had a quite respectable twenty or so people this weekend, divided among nine "stations": gentry weapons and armor, music, spinning and dyeing, games, medicine, cooking, medieval "fast food", the upholder/fripperer/used-clothing-dealer, and the common-born archers with their cheaper weapons and armor. Our schtick at this show, as at most living-history shows, is to lay out a variety of musical instruments on a table and talk to visitors about them, interspersed with demonstrations using musical pieces of the 14th and early 15th centuries. Which went well: our shawm reeds behaved themselves, no strings broke on the citole, the fydel, or the harp, and we didn't play anything really badly. We realized on the way down that one or two of the harp's wooden tuning pegs were splitting and unusable, so we stopped at a Home Depot for an oak dowel and some tools, and I made a new tuning peg in the hotel room Friday night. Replaced a fraying harp string in the hotel room Saturday night. The pirouette/mouthpiece on my shawm suffered a cork malfunction, and I had to rip off some of the cork with my fingernails to get it onto the instrument at all, but it still plays.

At least three different people on Sunday asked basically the same question: "how far back do we have written music that modern people can read?" Which leads into the whole field of early musical notation, which we've been studying for ten years or more, and on which I've taught a number of classes... anyway, we tried to keep the answers under an hour long. On the way home we discussed getting some parchment and making a little book (probably just a single gathering, say 8 pages) with written music in the notations of the time, so we can show people what it looks like rather than just telling them. And, listening to various professional recordings of medieval music in the car, we made lists of other pieces we should memorize for performance at shows.
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A year or so ago, [personal profile] shalmestere ordered a handmade medieval-style recorder from a maker in Germany. A month ago, she was informed that it was ready, and would be shipped upon payment to such-and-such bank account in Germany. Our credit union has an online bill-pay feature, but it only works with 9-digit US bank routing numbers as destinations; I called customer service, sat on hold for an hour or so, and was told that (a) what we need is a wire transfer, and (b) our credit union doesn't send wire transfers (although it's happy to receive them). I told the maker about this, and she suggested using Wise to transfer the money. So I tried that, and Wise's web site got hung in an infinite loop (I had a spinning progress indicator on my screen for twelve hours). I tried again several times over the next few days, with the same result. Wise customer service said the credit union was declining the payment due to lack of funds (which should be impossible, as I was using a credit card with plenty of credit limit). I switched browsers, and instead of an infinite loop I got a message saying the credit union was declining the payment. I switched credit cards, and got another infinite loop. So I tried a debit card instead (making sure there was enough money in that account first), and that finally worked. The recorder is on its way here.

So I looked at the UPS tracking info. Here's an excerpt:

02/18/2022 10:55 P.M. Export Scan Köln, Germany
02/19/2022 4:15 A.M. Departed from Facility Köln, Germany
02/18/2022 11:46 P.M. Cleared Import Customs Your package has cleared customs and is on the way.
02/19/2022 6:46 A.M. Arrived at Facility Newark, NJ, United States

The package cleared import customs in Newark 4-1/2 hours earlier (on the clock) than it left Köln. Köln's time zone is six hours ahead of Newark, so that's 1-1/2 hours later in "absolute" time. How does a package get from Köln to Newark in 1-1/2 hours? The Concorde couldn't do it that fast.

I guess they must do import customs inspections on the plane, and time-stamp them according to the destination time zone, even though they haven't actually gotten there yet. Eight and a half hours from Köln UPS depot to Newark UPS depot (I presume both of them are adjacent to their respective airports) makes more sense.
hudebnik: (Default)
My aunt's funeral is this afternoon, in North Carolina. We had been planning to drive down there to be present in person (driving and camping to avoid excess interaction with other humans along the way), so we scheduled vacation days for Thursday and Friday (so as to take a leisurely drive down and have time to see relatives other than at the funeral) and Monday (so as to take a less-leisurely-but-not-frantic drive home). Then my mother chickened out on account of COVID, so we did the same, and will attend the funeral by Zoom. We unscheduled Thursday's vacation day, but kept Friday and Monday.

So on Friday we drove to the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor modern-sculpture park in the Hudson Valley. It's 500 acres of rolling hills, with pieces of sculpture scattered around everywhere, ranging from pieces the size of a human to towers a hundred feet tall and landscapings hundreds of yards long. 500 acres is rather a lot, really: we got to maybe a third of the sculpture installations before physical exhaustion ([personal profile] shalmestere is extremely sensitive to heat and humidity) sent us home. But it was quite pleasant spending the day surrounded by lovely scenery, with no particular deadlines or goals, seeing the green and feeling the breeze.

Yesterday I had wanted to return to the Hudson Valley for a hike in the mountains with the dogs, such as Anthony's Nose or Storm King. And the weather looked promising for such an endeavor, but there was also a hurricane heading our way, and we didn't want to be caught in it if it arrived a little earlier than predicted.

So we stayed home and did ordinary weekend things like laundry, lawn-mowing, and gardening. I put in a row of bricks along the edge of our front walk, and another along the edge of the walk between our house and the left-hand next-door neighbor, to define the edges more clearly and keep the grass from growing over the walks. And we (mostly [personal profile] shalmestere) cut a bunch of branches off the quince trees in front of the house: we're leaning towards having them removed altogether after this year's crop, if there is a "this year's crop" -- in recent years the squirrels have taken many of the fruit, and the rest have been full of moth-larva poop and not useful for cooking.

The hurricane started making its presence known around 7 PM, when I walked the dogs in a light drizzle. Then went to the grocery store, and by the time I got out the light drizzle had become a downpour. Just at the moment it's not raining, so I'd better walk the dogs before it starts again.

sick again

Feb. 6th, 2020 09:31 pm
hudebnik: (Default)
So, I started coughing around Dec. 14, and spent a good deal of every night coughing until about Jan. 22. Then I had a blessed two weeks without coughing, although in the past few days I've had general muscle aches and felt physically tireder than I should for the amount of exertion. And yesterday I started coughing again. And last night. And today. And I definitely have muscle aches, and I get tired walking across a room. If this lasts as long as the previous one, I should stop coughing around the time we leave for Shawm Camp in March. Which doesn't bode well for, say, practicing before Shawm Camp....

ETA: doctor says it's "a mild bronchitis", and prescribes antibiotics, steroids, and cough syrup. And "lie low this weekend": not a lot of partying, drinking, and carousing. Which weren't very likely at the best of times, and less likely when I'm coughing and achy. But we are scheduled to go to a concert Friday night, a four-hour music class Saturday, a two-hour music class on Sunday, and another concert Sunday. We're skipping the concerts; not sure about the classes, whose teachers are counting on a specific number of people attending.
hudebnik: (Default)
A picture of the Creation pageant wagon, some time on the first day: there's a firmament, and the ocean, and the land, but not much else yet. The sun and moon came later, not to mention the flowering and fruiting trees, the fishes and whales in the seas (one of which spouted at the audience), and the beasts of the fields, which were all cool effects using technology available in the 14th century.

There were eleven plays in this year's sequence, which was performed in a four-stage pipeline at four performing venues around the city. We got to see the first two or three at the first venue before going to join the Abraham-and-Isaac pageant wagon (#7), which we then accompanied on its journey. We also got to see the Repentance of Judas (#6) several times, as it was rather long and just ahead of Abraham-and-Isaac in the pipeline. After we performed for Abraham-and-Isaac for the last time, we were asked to return to the second venue where the Harrowing of Hell (#10) was nearly finished, but the Last Judgment (#11) was running behind at the first venue, so they needed ten or fifteen minutes of music to fill in the gap. (It seems that pipeline bubbles are an ancient problem.)

I've tried embedding these as IMG tags, and they appear broken, but they seem to work as hot-links. Anybody know how to get embedded images to work better in Dreamwidth?

Da Weekend

Jul. 9th, 2017 09:18 pm
hudebnik: (Default)
So Friday evening we flew to Roanoke, VA, the nearest airport to the farm where my brother [profile] mankoeponymous was getting married. The wedding had a "burning" theme: part Burning Man, part fire-dancers (which has been a good deal of my brother's social circle for the past ten years or more), and since [personal profile] shalmestere and I are old fuddy-duddies who have never been to Burning Man OR (intentionally) danced while carrying or wearing anything that was on fire, we were a little dubious. But everybody was very welcoming, and it was a good chance to see a bunch of my family: my mother, two aunts, an uncle, my step-sister, a step-nephew, my half-brother, and my father. My mother and father, I gather, were halfway through introductions before they recognized one another; I guess they hadn't seen one another since my wedding, exactly 22 years before.

The bride had been in a pep band in college, so a marching band playing Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" accompanied the bride and groom to the space where the ceremony was to take place. (I played pipe-and-tabor, while [personal profile] shalmestere played sopranino recorder; I don't think anybody heard either of us. There was some confusion over what key to play the piece in: my brother sent out sheet music, but it was band score in which all the instruments are in different transpositions. Anyway, it was very spirited and peppy.) The vows were largely about recognizing that both parties are fallible human beings, that it's better to argue fairly and constructively than to not argue at all, that the only certainty in life is that things won't go exactly according to plan, etc. etc. During dinner, about a dozen twenty-and-thirty-somethings testified, passionately, in alternation about how wonderful the bride and the groom are. After dinner, we bid farewell to a bunch of relatives, watched a slide show of alternating kiddie pictures of the bride and the groom, and returned to our hotel before it got dark enough for fire-dancing (see "old fuddy-duddies", above).

Between Saturday morning and Sunday morning, we got to drink some good milkshakes, eat some good barbecue and Southern biscuits-and-gravy, and visit the Roanoke city zoo, which is on top of the mountain in the middle of the city (nice views of the other mountains that surround the city on all sides). It's a small zoo, where one can see pretty much everything in an hour, so it fit nicely between brunch with my mother, step-sister, and step-nephew and our afternoon flight home.

A bizarre but enjoyable weekend.

Da Weekend

Nov. 3rd, 2015 06:35 am
hudebnik: (devil duck)
Friday afternoon [livejournal.com profile] shalmestere rented a car for the weekend, ours being MIA for a week and a half. We know it was ticketed for being in a no-parking zone; we suspect a "predatory tow company" that's legally authorized to tow vehicles that have tickets on the windshield, but which illegally towed it to a chop shop rather than to the NYPD tow pound. Anyway, we then drove to [livejournal.com profile] isabeau_lark's house to rehearse for Saturday's performance.

Saturday we drove to the Philadelphia area for Will McLean's funeral. Funerals are a place where all the different "boxes" of a person's life intersect: we knew a fair number of the people in the "SCA and living history" box (although some we had never seen in suits before), had met a few of the people in the "family" box, and have no idea what the other boxes were. Anyway, the funeral was held in the chapel (the original church building) of an Episcopal church, and we (i.e. me, [livejournal.com profile] shalmestere, [livejournal.com profile] isabeau_lark, and Beth/Deonna) had contracted to provide some music during the service. After the Old Testament reading we played F. Andris's deploration on the death of Guillaume de Machaut, "Armes, amours", on recorders, and as a recessional we did a mash-up of Josquin's and Morton's takes on "L'Homme Armee", on shawms. Both pieces went reasonably well, considering we had one rehearsal with all personnel, and I think they contributed to the atmosphere.

We took advantage of having a car to do some grocery shopping and to eat out, thus getting home after most of the trick-or-treaters (whom we really weren't prepared to entertain, having not planned to be home this weekend at all).

Sunday was spent on household maintenance and more car-based shopping.

Next big commitment: Musicians' Day, which promises to have a bunch of good music classes, good food, and good socializing at a site overlooking a beautiful forest-girded lake. Be there or be square-note!

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