Sunday, December 25, 2022

Not Even Not Zen 284: A Response on Hobbies in Buddhism

 “No Wood Chopping,” via Wikimedia Commons 
A Response on Hobbies in Buddhism

In a Buddhism discussion forum, one of the questioners addressed the subject of desire. Specifically, the concern expressed was about hobbies. They could be seen as distractions from mindfulness or as attachments to the substance of samsara. 

Some Buddhist monks disdain hobbies because they are vehicles for attachment. Other monks allow themselves helpful pastimes despite how this seems spiritually dangerous.

The central question about attachment seems to be: can you detach yourself immediately and easily? It is important to practice this sort of detachment. It's not only central to Buddhism but to Stoicism and other vital philosophies. Everyone needs to walk away from their hobbies from time to time. It's a practical measure. It tests your spirit and therefore gives you better awareness of yourself. If you participate with intent in the world, you need to keep your spiritual muscles in good shape. To do otherwise, especially with regard to attachments, is to fail in one of the core tenets of Buddhism. 

The questioner had another issue of concern, one of mindfulness. This isn't as serious as the problem of non-attachment, as many pastimes are practiced to promote mindfulness. The current emphasis on mindfulness is unfortunate in a practical sense anyway. Currently, more people need to practice non-attachment.

My Attachments

The problem of my hobbies is one to which I devote fairly constant attention. 

When I deliberately re-attached to aspects of life many years ago, I knew there would be consequences. I didn't foresee everything but I knew the initial danger was - and still is - my friendships. They are my greatest lure into samsara. I took the hook of them willingly. I was and still am caught by love. Nearly everyone is.

Yet all activities are part of engagement with the world, including acts of kindness. Conscious of my attachment to friends, I have been willing to let go of them when appropriate. I do my best to remain mindful of their many needs but also of the need everyone has to let go and move on.

Denis Wallez commented: If you get 'lost' in your hobby, then it's unwholesome. If you get irritated whenever someone interrupts you during your hobby, then it's unwholesome. If it can create envy, anger, habituate the mind to violence, then it's unwholesome.

It's easier with hobbies. However, in some cases hobbies are intertwined with friendships. The key for all of us is our intentions in taking up these activities. Personally, I write as a hobby to help people laugh, smile, cry, or have insights. I sing for the same reasons. These small deeds and others like them are aimed at having beneficial effects for people around me - the world, large and small.  

I've trained myself to be interrupted during these activities. Mostly, that goes well.

Attachment to everything is a constant issue. It always will be. But I don’t think the purpose of Stoicism or Buddhism is to completely remove oneself from society. That would be selfish. Monks and nuns who don't risk engagement for the sake of helping others are committing this over-selfishness. If an interpretation of Buddhism doesn’t result in kind actions, I would say something is generally wrong that interpretation.

As others pointed out, though, people can get lost in their hobbies, their books, and their games. Even momentary attachment can be a slippery slope. I'm willing to stand on the slope. In fact, I don't think there's any other way. You are on the slope now. 

Note: the central question above was posted by Khristopher Morgan. I responded not only to the original question but to some points raised by Denis Wallez in the discussion forum. 

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Not Even Not Zen 283: Tucker Mythology - How Not to Plan a Rafting Trip

Tucker Mythology
How Not to Plan a Rafting Trip

When I was twenty, a man of experience with adult tasks according to my peers, I invited a bunch of friends to go rafting.

I'd organized rafting trips on the Youghiogheny river five times before. We always took at least two cars, one to park at the launch site and another to park where we would leave the river. We rolled out of my driveway at about seven in the morning because it was a four hour drive from Darnestown to Ohiopyle, where we could rent the rafting equipment and launch. When our caravan drivers were fast enough, we could cut the trip to three and a half hours. Once, I'd gotten onto the river as early as 10:15.

In June 1983, though, not enough of my friends would commit to making the trip. In particular, we had no one as the second driver. We absolutely had to have two cars at a minimum. In a way, it was a relief. I knew this year was supposed to be different.

On my last trip during the summer before, the Ohiopyle Outfitter company told me that I could no longer drive up and get on the river without calling ahead. In fact, I was already supposed to have done it.

"You have to reserve a spot on the river?" I said to the young man at the register of the sales kiosk. That seemed preposterous. It was a public river, after all.

"It's a state park service rule."

"The river is run by the park service?" I put my left hand on my head as I tried to understand.

"It's always been in their control, man." The young man shifted his feet. He nodded, which made his blonde, curly hair bounce. His body was the thin but strong type. He pointed to one of the river maps. Sure enough, at the top it said Ohiopyle State Park. I'd been looking at it for years without really reading it. "I'm gonna let you go on the river this time. But you gotta know. The river banks are part of the park. Ten years ago, the park service started charging everyone. Before that, we all just went."

"Yeah, I paid their fee before." I'd hardly noticed it. When he reminded me, though, the park population controls made some sense. There had always been a charge for entering the river at Ohiopyle. I had always paid it separately from the rafting equipment rentals. And in a literal sense, there had to be a limit to the number of people who could use the park at the same time. I would have liked to double the traffic for my own selfish reasons but the park service disagreed.

"Well, now they say you have to make a reservation. We've been putting too many people on the river. They're cutting us back."

"Shit. What if you reserve your time and it turns out to be during a thunderstorm?"

"Yeah." He raised an eyebrow as if he hadn't thought of that situation. "It's going to be a problem."

That's where I'd left it the summer before. This time, even though I couldn't get enough people to go with me, I gave Ohiopyle a call to see if I could make a reservation and cancel. That would let me hop on at the last minute if things changed.

"You can't," said the woman at the other end of the line, a park employee.

"You mean I can't get my money back? I have to pay up front?"

"No," she explained. "You can't make a reservation. The river is full up."

"How about the next Saturday?"

"Saturdays are the worst," she said. "You can't get on the river on a Saturday until ... hmm, the middle of August."

"But it's barely June!"

"Like I said, going on a Saturday is the worst."

"At least all my friends are cancelling."

"Do you want to make a reservation for August?"

"Yeah." It wouldn't do me any good. "I guess?"

Despite my misgivings, I let her sign me up for eight paddlers. I had to pay per individual but I knew I wouldn't have to follow through. The park service only charged for getting onto the river, so I wasn't committing any money, just saving a few spots I wouldn't use. Once we reached the second half of August, it would be too difficult to get friends to come along. Plus the river would be too low. It always was at that time of year. And we would come up against late summer thunderstorms.
 
A couple weeks went by without me doing any more trip planning. I was taking it easy, working day to day, and hanging out with an old girlfriend. Sometimes, a group of us would hit an arcade. Adam or Tucker or someone else in our circle of friends would want to play minigolf, see a movie, or hang out in a bar.

"Hey, Eric," Tucker said when he got me on the phone after work. "Are we still going rafting?"

"Can't see how. We never got enough people."

"Well, Liz wants to go rafting."

"She does?"

"You've got to put that trip together on the weekend after next." 

"Hah." I knew there was no chance.

"That's the date you told me, man."

I had said it. Now, with Adam, Tucker, and a couple more friends saying yes a bit too late, we had nearly enough to go. But we had no reservation with the park service.

Later that evening as I avoided thinking about apologizing to everyone, I got another call. An old lifeguarding friend, Beth, launched into a description of her rafting trip needs and wants, including how she wanted to bring her sister Jennifer on the trip.

"You're saying yes to the rafting trip," I said, sitting up. With a thrill of anxiety, I realized I had never phoned Beth to cancel. A few others, yes, but not her.

"So yeah," she continued. "My sister and my boyfriend, too."

"We don't have a second car," I announced with a feeling of relief. That meant we couldn't do it and I could close this all down with a bare minimum of grace. At this point, it was looking like Chevy-Chase-falling-down-the-stairs grace but okay, I'd still be fine.

"Oh, I'll drive," Beth said.

"Oh." Shit.

"You'll have to take another passenger," I told her. "Maybe two."

"I thought we were only bringing eight."

"Jeez." I did the math. "Now it's ten."

"Eh." She gave me a cheery laugh. "We'll squeeze in. We're friendly. Now, do I have to tell you not to make passes at my sister?"

"No, ma'am." I was thrown by the change of subject.

"And don't drive as fast as last time."

"All right, sure."

She told me the rest of her expectations and conditions. Then she hung up. As I stood by the phone, I realized that with friends like Adam, my brother Dylan, and our new additions to the guest list, we had a trip. What's more, we had a date and a promise. What we didn't have was a corresponding set of reservations on the river according to the state park.

There was no way to get that. I doodled notes to myself. I'd created a rafting trip that shouldn't exist. After a while, I picked up the phone again. I called to make equipment reservations. Those wouldn't get us on the river but we needed them if we got on. They committed our money, for sure.

How many reservations did visitors cancel each day? Could I count on the park service or someone else letting us onto the river without designated spots? They sounded a lot tougher on the phone than they'd been the year before.

I looked at my guest list some more. I wasn't going to tell everyone this was impossible. Instead, I started to form a plan.

It was a simple plan.
 
The park logs would show I'd made a trip and canceled. The staff would guess there had been some mistake. We would have driven a couple hundred miles. They would feel obligated to let us on the river, wouldn't they? Someone else who had made plans for that day would have canceled to leave an open spot. Or not. We had to lay some guilt on the staff. I couldn't do it myself because I was the guilty one and I knew it. I'd never manage it. Someone else had to talk them into letting us launch.

"We're ready," Tucker announced on the morning of the trip day.

"Why don't you take shotgun?" I said. That was part of the plan.

I put my best friend up front with me for a reason. Over the course of a few hours with a cup of coffee usually in hand, we talked about everything under the sun, as usual, and I made sure we agreed on the plan once we got to Ohiopyle.

At a pit stop for gas, I made sure Beth understood, too.

"At this rate, we'll get there just in time," I said. Beth and her boyfriend had strolled over while they made her sister pump their gas. "Everyone needs to get everything out of the cars pretty fast. Then I need Beth to follow me. I've got the bigger car. I'll drive it down to the take-out point. That means we'll cram in like crazy for the drive back. But it's only two miles."

"Or we can make a couple trips."

"Or that," I agreed, knowing it never happened that way.

"Meanwhile ..." I gestured to Tucker.

"While you do that," Tucker said, "I grab all the tickets and equipment rentals."

"So we have to give Tucker the cash." I pointed everyone in Tucker's direction. He held out open hands. I'd already had my money out and ready for him, so I put it in his palm to show everyone a good example. 

"Wait," Beth laughed. She turned on Tucker. "We're going to give you our money? Really?"

"Well, I won't lose it between here and the park office." He sounded slightly aggrieved.

"Hah."

This was an important part of the plan. Tucker had agreed to take his girlfriend, Liz, with him to the state park desk. I knew she was the right person to make the guilt trip work on the staff there. Meanwhile, I thought Beth was too sharp and, mostly, too honest. If she were there, she'd rightly blame me. I needed to have her trail me to the pick-up site. That put the right personalities in the right places. 

The only last-second change came when Beth asked her boyfriend to ride along with her. I hadn't figured him for helping with the park staff anyway, so his absence would have no effect. 

As I left, the remaining people in our party were handing over their money to Tucker and Liz. We were all young and poor and some of our rafters felt reluctant to part with their twenty bucks. It took a while. 

"Make sure he takes care of the details," I told Liz as I got into my car.

"Oh, I will," she replied.

With a suppressed flash of guilt, I moved the stickshift into gear. I hadn't known Liz for long. Nevertheless, I'd seen her cry half a dozen times. She was someone who got teary-eyed whenever she saw a sad puppy. Now I was using that aspect of her personality. Her emotional, empathetic traits were going to combine with Tucker's rational, talkative, persuasive qualities to get us onto the river. 

The drive to the take-out point was a long one flanked by young birch trees and raggedy-looking spruce. Although it was only a few miles, the speed limit was fifteen and, unlike on most roads, the limit was sort of an ideal that you couldn't achieve for long without spinning from the gravel into a tree. At times when I thought of gunning it on a straightaway I glanced back to Beth and her boyfriend. Leaving them behind was something I couldn't do unless I wanted to walk back. 

On the return drive, Beth and her boyfriend talked about rafting, camping, hot tubs, and more. Their devotion to the topics drove away my worries. I started looking forward to hot-tubbing. When we reappeared in the main parking lot, I was as surprised as anyone about how quickly Tucker and the others approached.

"Dude, they canceled your reservation." Tucker said. He fumbled through a small stack of papers. He found what he was looking for. He handed me a set of tickets. "It was really a pain in the ass."

"But we're getting on the river, right?" One of my tickets said Ohiopyle State Park. We were in.

"Yeah. They couldn't find you in their database at all. Well, not at first. Then they did, sort of. But it was all messed up. They said we couldn't go. We drove four hours and everything."

"You told them that?"

"When I did, geez, Liz broke down and cried." He glanced to his girlfriend, who was describing her ordeal to Beth. "I mean, she was really bawling. So they let us on."

"Wow." I shrugged, feeling sort of guilty, sort of impressed.

"I kind of think they did it just to get her out of the office."

"Well done," I replied. Tucker gave me side-eye for a second. I hadn't sounded very surprised. 

#

There will never be enough time to talk about all the sketchy things I did but a lot of them were like this one. Even as a teen, I could see the patterns in people's lives and often how things converged. Little flashes of insight would come in and I'd see the moving forms, sometimes near, sometimes distant, as if they were parts in a changing puzzle, a work of art morphing into another work of art. Life was and is a landscape of relative motion, changes cascading into other changes. In those patterns as a teen, I saw room for my plans. I took advantage of the general directions of things. 

Sometimes I could walk over to where good stuff was going to happen and let it happen to me. Sometimes I could grab a friend by the elbow and march us away from where the police would be in a moment. Sometimes I moved a girlfriend aside from a fight before it started. Several times I stepped into a fight so I would get hit on the first swing and have an excuse to take a few swings for my side. 

Everybody does this sort of thing to some extent, I know. When these sorts of insights were new to me, starting sometime just after puberty, I was maybe a little too ruthless about them. I couldn't settle down to a "best ends for everyone" rule until I'd messed about for a few years trying to figure out what the best ends really meant. There's a little of that still going on, of course. Always will be.



Sunday, December 11, 2022

Not Even Not Traveling: Barcelona, 2022

Barcelona, 2022

Barcelona 1, On Bikes  - You may get closer to pedestrians and other vehicles than you like. Still recommended.

Barcelona 2, On Segways, On Food, and On Our Own  - Segways are fantastic. So is Disfrutar. 

Barcelona 3, On Gaudi and Can Sole  - Fun problems. The walking tour needs adjustment. The eating at Can Sole is great but unlike other places you'll need your Spanish ready.

Barcelona 4, On a Mountain  - You should take the hike. You should resist the cheese.

Barcelona X, On Supermercats in Barcelona  - Okay, not a brilliant observation.

Barcelona 5, On Archaeology, On Travel  - An unexpected find, wonderful if you like getting down into history at a personal level.

Barcelona Z, On Systems Analysis and People  - Systems can be complicated and wonderful. People are better. 


Saturday, December 10, 2022

Not Even Not Traveling 24: On Systems Analysis and People

You Have Been Pulled Aside

Here's the aside: I studied systems analysis in grad school and I loved it. It brings powerful set of tools to teamwork jobs. Making and fixing systems can do great things. But compared to the value of good people, it's still nothing. 

People make systems work. My run through Heathrow airport in Great Britain was an example. At the airport, it was the staff, not the system designed by high level functionaries and consultants, who handed us off from team to team, from place to place. Those staff realized from the start that my group had forty minutes to catch our connecting flight and we weren't going to make it.

That is, we couldn't make it unless the staff adjusted the system to ensure we got on. 

“These four,” said a medium-height black woman in a smart blue Heathrow uniform as we exited the plane. 

She used the walkie-talkie in her hand to point from us to the next person with an airport uniform. I concentrated on keeping up with the group. Meanwhile, without me thinking about much more than following directions, the next staff member moved us to the front of a line. I obeyed.

The next woman sent us through an exit queue. We dashed from there to what seemed to be our gate. We waited in line there. Someone in an airport uniform marched up. He seemed to recognize us. He pulled aside a guard rope.

"This way," he said as he moved us off to one side. 

We passed through a documents check, walked more, and passed into a security queue. Jenn and Diane, since they were alert, adapted themselves to the new security procedure.

"You can't have liquids in that bag. They have to be in this," said one of the inspectors.

Jenn and Diane moved things in and out of bags in the way prescribed by our host country. The bags passed the checks. The security crew pulled Norm and I aside for extra checking. Their equipment broke down on me. The staff seemed to expect it end switched to hand scanning. They were fast. We re-gathered ourselves and headed for customs.

At customs, we waited in another queue. A staff member walked up. He identified us and created a new customs queue for us. We moved almost to the front of that line. After getting our passports stamped, we ran to another line. 

This time, I noticed an airport staff member walking part of the way with us. That person disappeared. Another greeted us at the next checkpoint, the British Airways flight desk. The flight had closed. The staff rushed us through regardless so we could catch up to the back of the line of boarding passengers.

"You've still got time," the woman at the desk said.

That is precisely when the system pulled me aside specifically, of course. It had flagged my name. Even then, the staff kept an eye on the flight departure time. They had to check my papers because the system mandated it. They went through their standard procedures. But they had no intention of making me miss the flight.

"Don't worry," one man said as he looked through my documentation. "We'll get you through this."

All along the steps of a terrible system, the Heathrow staff took extra care to make their system work. They really did speed us through. That could lead someone at the top of their airport infrastructure to think that it was reasonably well designed process instead of incompetent one. But the good airport staff make the originally-bad system work just well enough.

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Not Even Not Traveling 23: Barcelona 5, On Archaeology, On Travel


Barcelona, 2022

The Archaeology Tour at Born CCM

On our first tour in Barcelona, we came across an outdoor mall excavated to reveal seventeenth century ruins beneath. In last tour in the city, we scheduled a walk through those ruins.

Right away, I could see why the Europeans of the time considered Americans to be unsophisticated bumpkins. These were ordinary city houses we were strolling through. They'd been carelessly, almost randomly buried and excavated. But they had plumbing, bridges, wood-fired stoves, stables, workbenches, and more all built in, all in stone. In contrast, Americans were just discovering log cabins and mostly still used dried mud as mortar.

During the war of Spanish succession, the families of Barcelona were tied by trade to the English and Dutch. Nevertheless, they supported the more local candidate, Philip of Anjou. The forces of Archduke Charles, backed by the English and Dutch, sailed into the harbor and bombed Barcelona into submission. The locals switched their support to Charles, as required.

For eight years, Barcelona survived in that arrangement as the most significant city in semi-independent Catalonia. The French-Spanish forces led by Philip weren't strong enough to recapture it. In the end, though, Philip's army and navy surrounded the city and bombed it until it surrendered. The defeat was the end of Catalonian independence.

When Barcelona lost for good, about a fifth of the city was flattened. It didn't happen in the fighting but as part of the conditions of peace. Philip wanted to make sure Barcelona couldn't rebel again. He had a fort built over the demolished neighborhoods. 

A hundred fifty years later, locals knocked down the fort and replaced it with a park. A century later, they paved over the park to create an open-air market. Finally, the market went out of business. The city decided to build a library on the same spot. A library building is heavy. It needs supports in the ground underneath. So the construction crew started digging. They found a section of the old city that was once assumed to be destroyed. However, the old city ground had been so low and so near Philip's proposed fort that the engineers building the fort had filled in the area with dirt. 

That's how the foundations of the old Barcelona neighborhood escaped. Everywhere else in the demolished fifth of the city, each house owner had been required to take apart their house stone by stone and transport it to the site of the fort to be used in its construction. Here in the low-lying area, the bottom floors had been allowed to remain.
 
Although the ruins come from the 17th century, many of the underlying stones date back to the 13th century. That's the way it is with old structures. We walked among the houses, along the ancient streets, and put our hands on the masonry. In the narrow avenues lay ballast rocks, former window-frame stones, and even mill stones. Every type of medieval stone that could get thoroughly used and discarded became part of the pavement.

That afternoon, we took our last dinner in Barcelona. By Spanish standards, we were early enough for a late lunch. But we had a plane to catch the next day and the departure time determined our schedule. For our meal, we had mostly vermut and sangria. Well, we also stopped at two different places for tapas. We had lots of calamari, shrimp, tripe, beef, and vegetables. 

Delay in Barcelona

We rose the next morning at four and made it to the airport with plenty of time before our flight. Once we boarded, however, the pilot announced a water valve wasn't working.

Planes aren't allowed to fly without water. So we had to wait until the valve got fixed. But it didn't get fixed. We waited some more until British Airways bought the legal amount of containerized water necessary for the trip to London. The delay meant we would have only forty minutes to get to our connecting flight.


Delay in London

We had plenty of time between flights. It wasn't enough. 

The staff in Heathrow noticed we weren't going to make it. They pushed us through the process of re-demonstrating our security and checking bags through customs. The systems still weren't fast enough. Jenn received a notice on her phone that our flight had closed. 

Heathrow staff kept pushing us through. We got to the flight counter at our gate and they continued to expedite us. The closed flight was still boarding. We could see the line. We hopped on at the end.

Then the airport staff pulled me out of line. My ticket had been flagged.

While I watched everyone else board, I passed through a physical inspection. This used to happen to me a lot because my name is the same as someone who was at the table during the peace talks between the British government and the IRA. It does sort of make sense that my name would get flagged in Britain. The Heathrow staff seemed to understand, too. They watched my wife ease herself out of the boarding line to wait for me. They assured me I was going to make it. 

They wanted to look at me extra and they did but I have to say, they were efficient. They delayed me until I was the last person on board but they got me in my seat. 


Rainbow Connection 

As our flight ascended, I glanced down at the clouds between the plane and the ground. There, I noticed the shadow of the plane surrounded by the perfect circle of a rainbow. The artistic arrangement was all moving together at hundreds of miles an hour, of course, and in unison. I'd never seen anything quite like it. As a spectacle, the shadow in the center of the rainbow was sensible. I'm sure others have witnessed the same phenomenon. The luck of witnessing the natural perfection made me grateful anyway. I watched the rainbow circle wink out as we passed over blanks in the cloud cover, then reappear with the clouds. 

For a minute, the phenomenon kept reappearing every time there were wisps of clouds below us to provide a canvas for the plane shadow and its surrounding rainbow circle.

"Oh," I said, as I leaned back down. "I should have taken a picture."

"What?" Diane asked. 

"Nothing." I'd been so entranced, I hadn't mentioned it. 

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Not Even Not Traveling 22: On Supermercats in Barcelona


Barcelona 2022

For No Good Reason

While in the city, we kept seeing these places:


They are convenience stores advertised, perhaps a little oddly to Americans, as if they are related to the supermarkets devised in the United States to offer something of everything and perhaps a bit too much of most things. At low costs and low values. But these places are just using the Spanish generic term for convenience store as far as I could tell.

I didn't think of supermarkets or package stores whenever I saw one, really. Although I mostly shut up, I kept making this joke in my head: 


Unfortunately, this sort of thinking very likely only makes sense to people who speak some English, speak some Spanish, watch nature shows, read biology texts, read comic books, and drink a lot of sangria. 

So it seems like a very small crossover audience. I made this little illustration for you anyway.

Friday, December 2, 2022

Not Even Not Traveling 21: Barcelona 4, On a Mountain


Barcelona, 2022

Montserrat

For this trip, we had to rise early. We knew we had to be on time for our bus though we were in Spain, which is comparatively relaxed. Montserrat is a mountain, after all, and it's reasonably far from downtown. We knew timeliness was important. Unfortunately, we also needed to understand the transportation system. We almost did. We wandered astray a little, enough to make for some tension about whether we'd get to the bus before our deadline. We didn't make it, actually, but we were close enough, only a minute or two late. Another group trailed in behind us a few minutes after. 

Assembled in our seats, we listened to the tour lecture. A few minutes into it, I started to nap. The drive to Montserrat took the driver about an hour. He had to steer us uphill over a lot of switchbacks. There's no escaping them short of owning a helicopter, not if you want to visit the monastery. But does anyone want to visit a monastery? I do, myself, but I think most folks don't because the tour included a wine tasting. On our agenda was a walk through a local vineyard, a meal, and a beverage sampling at the end. 

But first, we had to observe the monastery grounds. They're nice, as our guide Gus pointed out.

Gus walked us around the place (but not through the actual monastery halls, to my disappointment) and his explanations of the area included the basilica. Gus was proving to be a fun guy; he grew up in Venezuela and came to Barcelona as a musician looking for a place to play. He started his own studio and played in gigs for other musicians around Barcelona. Plus, of course, he was our guide. 

"There's a choir?" I asked about something Gus said.

"World famous," he reiterated. He implied I should know more than I did, really. Based on Gus's descriptions I was interested in hearing the choir sing. There was a scheduled performance in the chapel later that day. Moreover, Gus pointed out a museum on the grounds. It displayed Picasso paintings, Monet, Rembrandt, Dali, and more. What is a museum doing on the top of the mountain? I wondered. It made me curious.  

When the walk through the monastery basilica was finished, Gus told us to do our own thing for a couple hours.

There were wine shops, cheese vendors, the museum, and a scheduled choir concert. I was fairly interested in all of them. First, though, I wanted to hike across the mountain.  

It's a good thing Diane is patient with my pace. She stayed by my side as we traversed the southern path, which was mostly paved with bricks and cobblestones. The view was as inspiring as you might expect from a mountaintop. Lots of other visitors thought so, too. There were plenty of folks on the trail taking pictures. We didn't see anyone who looked like a bottom-to-top hiker, though. That is always possibility. There are paths to hike from the base of Montserrat to the peak, plus there are open-air lifts and other methods. 

We hiked to the southeast cross and back. After our return downhill to the shops, we located Norm and Jenn. They had bought us tickets for the museum and choir. There wasn't a lot of time for the museum. But as prestigious as the art on the walls may be, the place wasn't so large that we couldn't see most of it before rushing back to the basilica. If you've ever witnessed sightseers speed-glancing at paintings, that was us. 

You can't speed-listen to a concert, though. We had to hold still in the pews. 


The choir was ordinary for a while, although with greater voices than most and traditional European church music. At times, the chords of their arrangements spread out and took on unusual, beautiful shapes. The quality of sound in the basilica was superb, of course. 

"Should we buy cheese?" we asked one another as we headed for the bus depot at the foot of the town that surrounds the monastery. Our guide had encouraged us to do so, as it supported the local farmers, who were also the cheese producers. 

"Let's look," someone said. We all nodded. 

I told myself we would positively not buy any local cheese. We couldn't eat it all and we had no good way to carry it back home. So we got cheese. (We shipped it back on the airplane in a checked bag.)

The walking tour at the winery was limited. We didn't get to walk around the grounds. Apparently, we weren't trusted not to touch the grape vines. We did climb up to the top tower of what used to be the castle, though. (In Spain, you couldn't have walls around your house, no matter how rich you were, unless you got ennobled. One of the family did, in fact, get knighted during a war. So the household of potters and farmers was allowed to put walls around their estate and turn it into an official castle. He and the rest of the family had already been turning it into a winery at the time. They had wide fields of clay soils as the basis for their pots and the same slopes could be used to grow vines.)


We heard the family name for the estate only one or fourteen times, so I don't remember it. Apparently I didn't read any of the wine bottles, either. I'm sure they're moderately famous and very nice. 

We did hear about the wine blight, though, and how that was America's fault. It was enlightening to hear the Spanish view of it. Even in that version, the evil American grape vines saved the European vines in the end by becoming the roots for all European grape crops. The splicing onto American vine roots to grow European grapes continues. Right now, there's no other way. 

In the midst of the blight, the local black grape variety grown around Montserrat was lost. However, the vineyard owners discovered leftover roots and made a successful graft decades later to save the variety. Spanish black grapes are a wine staple again. We drank a few wines based on them. They didn't compare well to the vermut and sangria we'd been sampling all over Barcelona, though.

After we got back to Barcelona, we sampled more vermut.


Thursday, December 1, 2022

Not Even Not Traveling 20: Barcelona 3, On Gaudi and Can Sole


Barcelona, 2022

The Gaudi Architecture Walking Tour

Our tour guide, Meit (given name: Victoria) proved to be knowledgeable and friendly. She chatted with us informally from the start. Although my pace was slow, we somehow made pretty good time on the tour. Maybe it was due to how much we talked along the way. Instead of hiking, then listening, we held a discussion almost constantly about not only the sites on our tour but all aspects of Spain.

Meit waited for me patiently when it was necessary, often talking to the others. Her enthusiasm for Gaudi architecture shone through. She had smiles and broad gestures for those works. She said she liked languages in general, spoke a handful of Romantic and Germanic tongues, and she enjoyed good architecture. We got the benefit of her enthusiasms.

Meit grew up in Argentina. She came to Spain to follow her family, really, many of whom had moved to Madrid or Barcelona ahead of her. She'd had chances to see a lot of Europe before settling in Barcelona. She expressed her admiration for Berlin and Budapest as other cities to visit or perhaps to live. 

Near noontime, our walking tour reached Gaudí's Casa Batlló, which is, aside from Sagrada Familia, the most famous building in Barcelona. The house is decorated with aquatic motifs and skull mask balconies. It's simultaneously full of ocean imagery, particularly on the inside, and dragon imagery that includes a scaled roof with a solitary sword-like tower to signify how Saint George killed the dragon. In this Gaudi rendition, it looks a bit like the dragon sank into the sea as it passed away and lay down in the landscape of a Monet painting filled with water lilies.

Meit's recommendations for lunch proved good as well, tapas at reasonable prices.

Next, however, we ran into problems with the tour.

As scheduled, we took taxis to Park Güell. Yes, it's another Gaudi creation. Although I'd never considered it before, the place looked wonderful, a beautifully thought-out amalgam of architecture and gardens. I'm sure it's one of the best green spaces in Barcelona.
It wasn't intended to be a park, though. The original plan to construct a modern estate modeled on the British garden homes built by Capability Brown and others in England. (Many of these are wonderfully described in the Bill Bryson book, "Home.") 

But Park Guell needs more than 50 minutes to tour. It was obvious right away this was going to be a problem. Also, the place requires a guide to make sense of the features. Maps alone are not enough. And the touring company did not buy a ticket for Meit. So our visit was undercut by the lack of her advice about what to see and do. In addition, since the tour company forced our guide to abandon us, she wasn't in a position to give advice ahead of time. The tour guides are not regular visitors to the park, so they have no firsthand knowledge. 

Apparently, the Park Guell staff is partly responsible. They don't want to allow the tour guides in. Possibly Park Guell is holding out for a larger cut of the action; I'm not sure. But it made the visit kind of terrible compared to what it could have been.

At the end of our too-rapid hike, we rushed to get to the gate and meet Meit so she could take us to Sagrada Familia.

That site proved to be another with tour problems. The difficulties came strictly from the way the guide company operates. They're not due to Sagrada Familia site itself, which is fine.

When we arrived at the Sagrada Familia building, we had already downloaded the tour apps as instructed. However, our guide gave out the ticket information immediately before our entry into the site. This close timing meant we had no way to download the audio portion of the tour. (When ten thousand people are all trying to use the same cell tower, no one is really using it.) Our solution was to badger the local site staff for wireless access. Fortunately, they gave it to us. Then we downloaded and configured the audio tour app. There is no excuse for the default guide arrangement, though. The walking tour can (and should) be restructured so that the guides give out the Sagrada Familia ticket information during lunch. Tourists like us can run downloads and configure the app then using the restaurant wifi access. The guide can even confirm guest readiness for the final stage of the tour.

That said, once we worked out the the app configuration, the tour got pretty great pretty fast. The app is a fine way to deliver what tourists want. The Sagrada Familia site is beautiful, too, even under construction as it is, even to infidels of the religion and non-believers in architecture, like me. Seriously, it's good. If you like history or creative architecture, it's recommended.













The Long Walk to Can Sole

Weeks earlier, while in Frederick Maryland, Diane and I ate at a tapas restaurant called Isabella’s. When Diane mentioned to the manager that we were going to Spain, he recommended a place called Can Sole. On Sunday afternoon, we started a leisurely walk toward it.

We got as far as the docks before we ran into rows of vendor stalls. We window-shopped through them. Then we stopped at an outdoor café and ordered red vermut and sangria. At the table, we relaxed and watched the boats barely move in the breeze.

After a couple rounds, we marched to a beach on the Mediterranean Sea, where are we played in the water. It was November and the water was brisk.

“I didn’t bring a swimsuit,” I realized as I watched a few hardy swimmers heading out to a buoy.

“Oh, hell no,” someone else said. And that was probably right.

After half an hour, we rolled down our pants legs, wriggled on our shoes, and turned west for the last few blocks to Can Sole. There, we found local diners and native Barcelona staff, not the international tourists and accommodating venues we had been frequenting. This was a fine restaurant but it was truly Spanish and that was a comforting thing.

Even with the language barrier, I felt more relaxed than I had in most of the tourist shops. The food was excellent and the conversation was held over vermut and sangria. 

The theme of the day seemed to be vermut and sangria. Back at the hotel, we spent some time on the rooftop café, playing cards and drinking a bit more.