Category: Travel

Like a Wheel Within a Wheel

Now we get to the trip inside the trip, like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own. We arrived in Zaragoza late Friday night. The train station was sparsely peopled, and we wandered down, thru the concourse, up the other side to exit on the correct side. From there is was was a long pedestrian bridge arcing above a wide highway, whose reticulated walking surface made our luggage rattle out a rhythm as it rolled along. It was colder and windier here than by the seaside, very bracing. Zaragoza is in the desert and the mountains, although often strongly foggy.

The hotel was one building past the conference center. The whole neighborhood was built for some kind of Expo about twelve years ago, and it had that kind of vibe, all modernist right angles. The hotel was nice, stark yet cozy, modern and European. There were some friendly faces in the lobby, our the conference organizers and our hosts. I knew a few of them who had been to origami conventions in the states, and everyone was warm and friendly.

Next day up bright and early for breakfast. I met a few fellow folders including Robert Lang, David Brill and Jared Needle and Matt Green. More bacon and eggs and croissants and cappuccinos. Yum!

Over at the conference center I set up my exhibit. This was first international exhibit, most of ’em here had never seen my work before. I brought a box a small suitcase as carry-on luggage, about fifteen models. The idea was sort of a greatest hits collection.

The evening before our flight to Spain I went around the house and picked out my favorite models and set them on the table to see how they went together. There’s some air and space ships, a set of single-sheet polyhedra, a series of big animals and one of small animals. The big animals include my Elephant and Dragon, but they were a bit too small for the others in that series, the Oliphaunt and Moose.

So I started folding a new one of each. I ended spending most of the next day folding Dragons and Elephants, and my exhibit was the last thing I packed, just before leaving for the airport. It was totally worth it, both models turned out great. For the Elephant i found a 12″ square of scrapbook paper, mainly white with bright paint splatter design, evoking a circus. I didn’t know how well the paper would fold but it ended up being perfect for the model, not too thin, not too thick, not too soft and not too stiff. It came out quite well, nicely sculptured, and was one of my most admired models in the exhibit.

For the dragon I used so-called shiny paper from the Origami Shop, which is an excellent paper, thin an crisp, and sort of sparkly on one side. I started folding a blue dragon from a 16″ square, but once I got the base finished it was clear it would not be bit enough. I went up to a 24″ green square. Probably a 20″ square would have been perfect, but I didn’t have one. Still it worked well at that size, and was compatible with the Oliphaunt, just a slightly more ancient dragon than I had in mind.

Once my stuff was set up I took a look around. There was tons of fantastic stuff there. The exhibit space was nice, bright and well-lit, and got a good amount of traffic over the weekend, not just from the convention but from the public at large.

I knew about half the artists there. There was so much great origami, and (unlike OUSA where I see many of the same people every year) alot of it was new to me. It’s impossible to try and describe it all, you’ll have to wait for the pictures. One thing I’ll say is there was alot of interesting stuff with tessellations. I had kinda thought tessellations were pretty much played out, but here was alot of new, expressive work. One artist named Roman particularly caught my eye with a 2-d interpretation of a 4-d Torus. Wow.

The conference opened with remarks by Ilan, the conference chair. The organizers were mostly French, Spanish and Israeli. The format was much like a Monday at OUSA, with seminars and discussion, no teaching models and not alot of actual folding. Everybody there was a world-class origami artist because CFC2, a.k.a The Conference for Creators, was invitation only. It was an honor to have been invited, and It was really amazing to be among such high-level artists. I missed the first CFC, in Lyon, France in the summer of 2017 because I was ill. So making it to this one was extra special for me.

The topics included aspects of the creative process, hand vs. computer diagraming, photography and photo diagramming, spontaneous public origami exhibits, preparing papers for exhibiting, traditional handmade papers, how to social media, and connections between origami and other creative disciplines. There were also several roundtable discussions. Very inspirational.

The pacing was pretty leisurely. There was breakfast, a couple talks, coffee break, another talk or two, another break, more talks, then dinner and/or evening activities. It stretched out so dinner wasn’t until 8 or 9 o’clock. This left lots of time for socializing and hanging out. The attendees included Spaniards, French, Americans, Brits, Germans, a couple from Poland and another from Austria, a few Italians, a few Israelis, a friendly guy from Denmark, and another sharp friendly guy and from Belarus whose English was so good at first I thought he was Scottish, a lady from Switzerland, and several people from South America. Maybe seventy or eighty people total.

I re-struck relationships with people I hadn’t seen in years and made some new friends. I was happy to discover alot of people were familiar with my work and hold it in high regard. Some cited my models as points of inspiration or reference for their own work. That’s a huge compliment from artists you admire.

The French people were telling us to come the French convention next year, the Spanish said to come to the Spanish convention, and the Germans said to come to the German one. This last one sounds pretty tempting cuz it’s one of the larger conventions in Europe, and I seemed to hit it off comfortably with the Germans and Austrians. But everyone said: you gotta go to the Italian convention, it’s a great time and a huge party.

Zaragoza has a very active folding community and many of them are connected with IMOZ (Escuela Museo Origami Zaragoza), the world’s largest permanent museum for origami. Spain has it’s own origami tradition independent of Japan’s, dating back to the 7th century when paper was introduced to the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors. We took a tour there the first evening. It’s quite impressive and includes quite a few works by Yoshizawa and Erik Joisel, and a variety of other stuff, historical and modern, Spanish and international.

We walked around the old downtown for a while, to eventually arrive a restaurant for the convention banquet, which was mainly standing like a cocktail hour, as were the lunches, to promote mingling. The other nights’ dinner was at the hotel, and seated. One night Jeannie and I sat a table full of Germans and Austrians, the other was Spaniards and an Argentinean. More socializing, ham, seafood and fine red wine.

Sunday was the last day of the conference and in the evening, after the official end, were more tourist activities. We went to a place called the Tower of Water, built for the Expo. It was a funny building, a glass and scaffold skyscraper maybe twenty stories high, enclosing a large interior space in which hung a giant sculpture of a splashing water droplet frozen in time. We took an elevator up then spiraled around a continuously ramping balcony back to the lobby. The building had no current use, but at working electricity. One of our hosts had a key to get in.

We wandered thru the Expo grounds, which was broad pedestrian avenues, curvy concrete bridges, and the aforementioned cubist buildings. Parts of the complex, like the conference center (the Etopia Center for Arts and Technology) and the hotel were in active use. Some of the buildings seemed to be offices or apartments. But alot of it was just empty. Not run down or abandoned, just unused. Kinda reminded me of planet Miranda in the movie Serenity, but, you know, not all creepifying. Apparently there was a plan to convert the buildings to other purposes after the Expo, but then the housing bust happened and the money vanished. We ended up at the Aquarium, which was pretty cool. The focus was on the major rivers of the world, so they had alot of fish and reptiles that you don’t normally see.

Bit by bit, over the course of the weekend, people started to get out packs of paper and do some actual folding. I’ve been working on a Human Figure base, derived from my Astronaut, since my nephew Matthew asked me at Christmastime if I could design a Golem. So I folded lots and lots of variations, looking for expressive possibilities, and for different way to approach the neck and shoulders, which is the key to any animal model, human figures included.

Finally Sunday night was the inevitable late-night folding. A bunch of us, under the direction of one of the EMOZ curators, folded a giant corrugation, about three meters square. We didn’t get much sleep that night, but still got up before sunrise to take the train back to Barcelona and on to Montserrat.

There’s lots more happening in the origami world these days, but that will have to wait for another post.

Well I Never Been to Spain, Parts I & III

I just got back from a fantastic trip to Spain to attend an origami conference, the CFC or Conference for Creators in Zaragoza. I took Jeannie with me, and along the way we spend a few days in Barcelona, a beautiful city.

We flew out on the redeye Tuesday night and landed in Barcelona Wednesday morning. The first thing we wanted to see was the famous Basílica de la Sagrada Família designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí. It was a nice walk from our hotel.

La Sagrada Família is well nigh indescribable. It’s been under construction for over 130 years and still not finished. Giant, ambitious, architecture as high art, at once deeply traditional and fiercely, playfully radical. Completely mind blowing. I mean, we’ve seen some of great European cathedrals, and I get to whole thing with the totality of symbolism, faith and grace made stone. But this takes it to whole ‘nuther level. For one thing it’s huge. When it’s finished it will be the tallest building in the city and the tallest church in the world. The outside is a riot of sculpture and symbolism and crazy spires and multiple, conflicting styles. So busy it almost makes you queasy. Inside is a maybe the largest room I’ve ever been in, and even though there’s alot going on visually it’s minimalistic compared to the façades, grandly ordered and strangely tranquil, like being a forest of giant redwoods made of stone. I could go on but words really do not convey the experience.

We walked down to the marina district near our hotel, where lots of yachts were parked, and got our first close up look at the Mediterranean Sea. There was a sort of boardwalk there where lots of people came to jog and bike and just hang out. We watched the sun go down and then headed back to the hotel for dinner of yummy Spanish food.

Next day we got up and had breakfast in the hotel. It seems Spain is big on thinly sliced smoked ham and thick sliced meaty bacon, and also lots of fish and seafood. And I gotta say the bacon, with farm fresh eggs, is totally awesome for breakfast. Also local cheeses and of course cappuccino and croissants.

Our first destination Thursday was the Picasso Museum. On the walk over we passed thru a really cool park full of gardens and fountains and statues and a sort of grand structure like an open air art deco temple. I also noticed they have giant ducks in Spain that we don’t have at home.

The Picasso Museum itself was really cool. It’s in a old neighborhood of winding street too narrow for cars, although that doesn’t stop all of them. The building used to be some sort of old palace or mansion for some noble; parts of it are hundreds of years old and it’s been modified at least a few time over the centuries. The bottom level is full of interlocking courtyards and long, vaulted concourses. The galleries are all upstairs. Most of it was plain white walls, but one room was kept in it’s original (?) condition, so ornately rococo it looked like it belonged in Schloss Schönbrunn.

Picasso went to art school in Barcelona, and the museum has alot of his early work. He was a master of the realist style and did quite a few landscapes and portraits, and dabbled in a few different takes on surrealism before he really came into the style he’s famous for. So it was cool to see that development unfold. I also noticed in some photographs he had a crooked nose, and I wonder if his whole style grew out of an inability to be at peace with that. His antigeometric faces began with just a bit of asymmetry around the nose and eyes, and took off from there.

We wandered around the city some more, and made our way to the beach, which was not too far. I stuck my hand in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, and Jeannie got her feet wet.

There was a tram nearby the went over the harbor and up to Montjuïc, a hill in the heart of the city and a meter higher than the Gaudi basilica. Up on top was nice views of the city and place for lunch, chicken croquets and local beer. Lots of food prepared with tomatoes too. Jeannie had a memory the the Olympic diving pool from the ’92 games was up there somewhere so we hiked around to try and find it, but didn’t know exactly were to look.

Later on, back at the beach we had dinner at at Barcelona’s idea of an American style beach bar. I had a burger that of course had bacon and fried egg on top. Jeannie got a seafood dish, a plate of fried whole prawns, heads and all. Maybe it was just the drink menu that was American style, with things like Long Island Iced Tea and Cosmopolitans.

In the evening we got on the train to take us to the origami conference in Zaragoza. It’s about 4 hours away by car, but the train goes 300 km/hr, so it’s only about an hour and half.

…

Monday morning were on the train again, coming back from Zaragoza, and on to a monastery called Montserrat, in the mountains outside of town. The train to Montserrat was part of the local subway system, although it was mostly above ground once it got out of the city center. At the base of the mountain we transferred to a cog railroad that took us halfway up the mountain to where the monastery is.

The mountains themselves are really weird looking, all puffy and cartoonish with lots of bizarre peaks and mounds, cliff faces and deeply cleft valleys. Close up the stone is unusual, soft sandstone full of rocks ranging from pebbles to good sized stones, so it almost looks like concrete. The range is not long, but it’s pretty high, a dramatic local upthrust.

The monastery is nestled right in the side of the mountain. There’s a whole complex there with a beautiful gothic church, a courtyard, shops and restaurants, an art museum with some really cool stuff including a bunch of medieval religious art, presumably from the monastery’s past, and alot of famous painters and sculptors, spanning from classical to modern, mostly Spanish but also French, Italian, Dutch and others.

From there you can take the funicular up to the top of the mountain. We hiked along the trails to the various peaks. To the south you can see Barcelona and the sea. To the north the snow-capped Pyrenees near the French border. To the east it’s hills and to the west high plains and desert. There’s even a shrine to Sant Joan up there.

There’s also some interesting plants and birds. There’s a very distinctive black and white bird I’ve never seen before. About the size of a crow, but much prettier. There’s also a variety of cyprus tree that grows around there, tall and thin and very dense so it looks like it’s been pruned. They tend to grow in clumps or rows. Almost certainly the inspiration for Guidi’s Nativity Façade. There’s also palm trees (not so much on the mountaintop, but all over town), and pine trees and cacti and other succulents. In fact it’s alot like California. Even the weather is similar, very mild and often foggy.

Then we caught the same set of trains in reverse order and were back in Barcelona. Our hotel the first leg of the trip was out near the beach, but this time were in the middle of downtown, right near one of the main train stations. We were pretty tired by the time we got back to the hotel, but luckily there was a row of restaurants right across the street. We found a great Lebanese place that serves shawarma and things like that.

I didn’t have a problem with the language. I didn’t really study up on Spanish like I did with German and Hungarian for the last trip. Still I was able to read the signs and understand a bit of conversation. Alot of people spoke english, but when they didn’t I found I could still communicate well enough to order food and that kind of thing. However I found myself wanting to say “danke” instead of “gracias” all the time.

Tuesday was the last day of the trip. We spent the morning walking around the neighborhood. Right next to our hotel was another funky park, and past that another picturesque old neighborhood. We made our way to Montjuïc from the opposite side, happened upon some castle, and past that the big Catalonia art museum. Spain seems to have alot of great artists and holds them in high regard. Although we didn’t have time to go inside, the grounds around it were pretty impressive, as was the architecture.

Then it was back the airport and home. Cold and rainy New York City.

Holiday Cheer

It’s been a busy holidays so far. Our jazz gig last week went really well. The place was packed and the audience included Jeannie and the girls, as well as a whole bunch of friends of our piano player Rich. The place is normally a lunch café, but they did a special five-course dinner. The food looked really great. I had some cake and it was delish.

Musically, we did a bunch of new material including Ornithology and some other standards, as well as some Christmas songs. Probably my favorite was our version of We Three Kings in the style of John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. All in all a great time. I wish we’d recorded it.

Lots of family and visiting and cooking and baking. The day after the gig we went out to Long Island for a party for Jeannie’s extended family. Then we had a bunch of people over for Christmas Day from Jeannie’s side, and we have another bunch coming for New Year’s. Mostly I’ve just been enjoying slowing down for a little while.

We went upstate to visit my parents after Xmas. My Dad just turned ninety years old, so my Mum had a party for him with lots of great food. They’re both still going strong in mind and body and soul. Wow, just fantastic.

My brother Jim and his family were in town for the occasion. That was really nice because they live in New Mexico and we don’t get to see them that often. My nephew Will has really grown. He’s now fifteen and comfortable hanging and conversing with the grownups.

Martin and his family were there too. His oldest, Charlie, is now eleven and is into origami and folding at a solid intermediate level. He’s also learning saxophone. He and Martin played a few Christmas songs as duets for us, with Charlie on alto and Martin on tenor. He’s sounding really good. Charlie also got a really cool Hot Wheels Mario Cart racing toy/game from Santa and brought it over a set it up.

Some of my uncles and aunts were over from Canada too, whom I haven’t seen in a long time. Good to catch up. I printed out a few copies of a picture to give to my brothers. I took it Hungary and it was a snapshot of a picture that my dad’s cousin Rózsi had. The original picture was of me and my brothers as little kids; I was about five. Rózsi had a whole pile of pictures my grandmother had sent her over the years.

Lizzy came from school the week before Xmas. She has a trial month of Disney Plus, so as part of our program of slacking off we’ve been working our way thru the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe cannon. I’d seen maybe a third of them, and my general impression is that they’re mostly pretty entertaining, particularly the ones with Thor, but kinda silly and overly full of explosions and CG set pieces, and that while any given movie plot is pretty predicable, the overall story arc is nevertheless disjointed and full of plot holes. And of course the obvious problem that they make so many of these movies and they have such huge budgets, that there’s lots of other potentially amazing non-franchise movies out there that never get made. Ah well. If you keep in mind that they’re adaptations of comic books it’s easier to enjoy them on their own terms, including the multi-story sprawl that’s been going on for well over fifty years. And seeing the movies in order makes much more sense.

European Vacation Fotoz, Part IV

Here’s the fourth and final installment of pictures from our vacation to Europe over the summer. Includes the rest of Budapest and Mór, plus a bonus album of pics from Jeannie’s phone. Whew, that was a whole lot of pictures to go thru. Now it’s time to start thinking about our next trip. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/fotooz/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2019/2019-10/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2019/2019-11/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2019/2019-12/

The Devil Is in the Details

We had a great weekend in Boston and OrigaMIT. We went up a day early, on Friday to take in the sights in downtown Boston. Michelle had never been there and it had been a long time for Jeannie and me. We started with the famous historical sailing ship U.S.S. Constitution, A.K.A. “Old Ironsides”. I’d never seen it before and it was pretty cool. Turns out in addition to famously surviving numerous battles on the high seas in the early to mid 19th century, the ship was actually the first vessel built by or for the United States Navy, one of six for America’s freshman fleet, back in the 1790’s in the Washington administration. As you’d expect the ship was full of lots of cannons and sailing rigging, technology from another era. And predictably ceilings and doorways were low, and got lower the further belowdecks you went.

One cool thing was the ship is still on active duty after 222 years. The museum is in fact an active Navy Yard, and the tour guides on the boat were sailors serving as the ship’s crew. They kept on referring to events from hundreds of years ago in the second person, as in “We won that battle…” At first this reminded me of sports fans rooting for their team, but I realized as American Navy Sailors they’re perfectly entitled to talk that way because the the continuity is real.

We had lunch in a nearby pub that was built in the 1700’s, where Paul Revere used to hang out. The food was great, enjoyed the chowdah. After lunch we walked over the bridge where Magnus Chase got killed and sent to Valhalla and into the old historic town. It was pretty cold and windy, below freezing, actually, for the first time after a mild fall so far. We saw the Old North Church, the slightly-less-old Catholic North Church, Paul Revere’s House and Quincy Market. We ended up taking a ferry across the harbor back to our starting point as the sun was setting. All in all a very nice day.

OrigaMIT, a.k.a the M.I.T Origami convention, itself was great. I always feel like I don’t have enough new stuff in my exhibit, and I hadn’t really done much folding since June, but in the last week or so I managed to jam out a few longstanding unfinished projects.

First was Two Intersecting Tetrahedra (a.k.a. Stellated Octahedron) w/ Color Change. This was a subject I had tackled several times in the past but was never satisfied with the result. So ended up going with a someone else’s idea. Beth Johnson has a model of this shape and was kind enough to send me her CP. Beth is not generally known for her single-sheet color-change complex polyhedra but her approach is great, with a clever twist fold to form the pyramids that augment the primary faces along with a hexagonal layout to accomplish the color change reasonably efficiently. I can’t help but think there’s a more efficient layout out there, maybe from a square, but so far I haven’t been able to improve on her design. Folding from the CP it was a bit of a puzzle, but once you understand it goes together nicely. Like alot of models of this ilk it tends to spring apart, but wetfolded out of the right paper it holds together quite well. I’m pleased I was a able to fold an exhibit quality model. Thank you Beth!

Next up, my Oliphaunt. This is one of my most complex models, barely foldable at all. You need to pick the right paper cuz it can get really thick, and you need to start with a large (50cm or more) sheet. A while back I found a really nice piece of paper, perfect for the subject. Only problem was that it was kind of soft, so I laminated to a sheet of gold foil for a stiffer backing. I got ninety percent of the way finished for OUSA last June. But it turned out the foil was not stiff enough to overcome the softness of the paper, and it was not wetfoldable either. So I had to set it aside.

Now alot of guys who do supercomplex models (everyone from Robert Lang, Brian Chan and Jason Ku on down) put glue and tape and metal armatures inside their models all the time. I’ve always resisted this even for common problems like countering the tendency for the legs to splay out (the issue with my Oliphaunt) or making a bird or other biped balance on two legs. I’ve always preferred to try and fix the issue in the design. But you know, sometimes you need a little help to get by. I ended up making a simple inverted U-shaped armature of out of an old handle for a Chinese food box, and taped it inside, and it was just the thing.

While I was at it, I had a nearly complete rendition of my American Turkey hanging around that suffered from the same problem. I taped a wire inside that and had another excellent exhibit-quality model.

So suddenly I had three great new models. Woo-hoo!

And, I almost forgot to mention I made a Giant Squid for the OUSA Holiday Tree at the Museum of Natural History. I made it from a semi-glossy sheet of dark red paper with a silvery backing. It looks perfect. The finished model is over a foot long. Talo says he’s gone set it up fighting a blue whale.

I taught two classes this year, teaching three of my models. Two of the models were new: my Catamaran and Speedboat. I designed the Catamaran last February at Origami Heaven after returning from a sailing trip in the Bahamas. I designed the speedboat sometime around OUSA in June. For this convention I diagrammed both. I had thought of them as both high intermediate cuz they only take 10 or 20 minutes each to fold, but the repertoire of folds and the 3D-ness probably lands them in the complex realm. In any event the class was full and went quite well, although it’s apparent that the Speedboat is not quite perfected: finishing it so it holds together is fussier that it ought to be. So there will another round of diagrams for that one in the offing.

The other class I taught was my Medieval Dragon III. This is a very old model. In fact, the original version of it was my first truly successful original design and dates back to the 1980’s. The base is half blintzed bird base and half blintzed frog base with a little preliminary base grafted onto one corner, borrowed from John Montroll’s Pegasus from his Origami for the Enthusiast book. Sometime in the early 2000’s I revisited it and enlarged the graft to allow for improved detail in the head and claws on the wings. Even though the folding style is dated, it has a great, classic look and is lots of fun to hold. To this day it’s one of the better dragons out there. The class was two hours and it was quite popular and everyone in it finished the model and did a great job.

In between teaching was alot of hanging out with origami friends: Adrianne, Robby, Anne, Michael and Richard, Talo, Brian, Jason, Robert, Mark and some new faces. All in all a long, exhausting but very fun weekend.

Next up: pictures!!!

European Vacation Fotoz, Part I

Here’s the first installment of pictures from our vacation to Europe last month. The first part of the trip was in the Alps: Zürich Switzerland and Innsbruck Austria, and the surrounding environs. As usual, these galleries are protected, so ping me if you need login credentials. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/fotooz/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2019/2019-01/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2019/2019-02/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2019/2019-03/

Endless Summer Slacking

We get the nicest days this time of year. It’s getting on a month since we got back from our trip, and for the most part it’s been just beautiful and great to spend time outdoors, although it’s starting to get dark noticeably earlier.

I’ve gotten back into biking and skating.

I took my mountain bike out three times now, to a place near my house called Nature Study Woods. It’s mostly pretty flat but the hilly parts also tend to be the stoniest trails, which is unfortunate. First time out it felt pretty difficult. I was thinking of getting a new mountain bike since mine is from the ’90’s and doesn’t have any shock absorbers like modern bikes have. But then it got easier next time out. Still it might help with pulling up a really stony hill.

Last time out I saw a fox, which is cool, and there was a tree down across the trail, which was not so cool. It had become so overgrown with vines that the weight of the vines caused the tree to collapse. So to get by I had to hack out a tunnel thru the wreckage with my bare hands.

As for skating, I haven’t gotten off my block yet. Three times so far I put on my skates and rolled up and down my street and to the dead end around the corner for a half hour or so. My skates are old and pretty shot too, and the pavement around here is old and bumpy. I used to go all over the place and it never bothered me, hills and all. But I’m thinking of getting new skates too, and also finding a place where the pavement is nice and smooth.

I told my friend Brandon at work I was thinking of new skates. Like me he’s a half-Canadian former hockey player. He said, “those are words I haven’t heard in a long time.” It’s question whether it’s worth it, if I’m likely to keep on skating thru the fall and again next spring. As luck would have it, they paved part of my street last week, up near the dead and, so I have a nice smooth place nearby now. I’m gonna test it out next time I go out and then decide.

We also managed to do a camping trip this summer, over Labor Day weekend. Jeannie and I went up to Mongaup Pond in the Catskills, where we met Martin and his family. It was a great campout, best I’ve had in years. We used to go for many years when our kids were little and it was a whole lot of families. Now our kids are older and not into camping, but Martin’s are at the age where they really enjoy it. So we did some hiking an built some fires and cooked lots of meat over flame, stayed up late talking, even rented a couple canoes and paddled around the lake. It was actually really cold at night, and I’m glad we brought lots of warn stuff to bundle up in. All in all very relaxing, and perfect break before the new school year and all that.

Last fall Jeannie and I went for a few hikes, and this weekend we started up again. We went to a nearby place this morning called Saxon Woods. The hike was about three miles of moderately hilly trails, nothing too taxing, very pleasant. We have a whole list of places to check out but many are further afield, so it’s good to explore what’s close by too.

Now all the fall stuff is back and happening. Michelle is in school, Jeannie is working five days a week, my jazz group is rehearsing again and has some gigs coming up (more on that soon). My new rock band looks like it’s getting off the ground; everyone is in and down with the plan. Now we’re picking tunes and lining up the date for the first rehearsal. Meanwhile I’ve recorded all the sax parts for my song Sun of the Son, and it’s sounding great, including a shredding solo. Next is to fill out the keyboard parts and go back and tweak the drums, then on to mixing.

At work we seem to have finally won the epic marathon battle against bugs. It’s been my primary focus off and on the last year, as well as lot of other developers and management and the company as a whole. My team has gone from hundreds and hundreds of open bugs to just a couple dozen and still dwindling. Along the way we’ve made substantial improvements to the code quality at every level from architecture to formatting.

In other news I’ve been putting alot of time on the Global Jukebox. We’ve been making an educational section called Find Your Musical Roots, for use in New York City School classrooms. It’s been a big effort and there’s still a way to go. We have a major check-in tomorrow. It ought to be ready to go live sometime this fall.

A Journey to the East, Part VI

The next day was Sunday, the last full day of our trip. We rented a car – a black Mercedes sedan, very slick – and drove out into the countryside to the town of Mör, where my father was born and grew up. This was a very special part of the trip for me personally because I still have family there and so we visited them for the day.

My dad left Hungary as a teenager along with my grandparents and my Uncle Steve amid the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. They lived in Germany for a year and then emigrated to Canada. He did not go back to visit until after the the Soviet Union collapsed and Hungary was under democratic government, in the 1990’s.

My grandparent’s house in Mör was bombed and destroyed during the war. My grandmother’s sister was their next-door neighbor and the two families shared a yard. That house stayed in the family. Apparently my father kept in touch with his cousin Rosszi, who lives there now. So they invited us to visit. In addition to Rosszi was her daughter Zsuzsi and husband Laci, and their son, also Laci. They are the nicest, warmest people you could ever hope to meet, especially as we’d never been there before and they’d never met us. They invited us in and treated us like, well, family.

My dad must have kept in touch with Rosszi because she had lots of pictures from over the years and knew exactly who we were: photos of Jeannie and me from our wedding day, of my Mum and Dad visiting when we’d just bought our house and Lizzy was a baby, and going further back of me and my brothers when we were kids, of my parents looking young and glamorous in the early 1960’s, and then of my dad and uncle as youths in Hungary, and my grandparents when they were young. Some of these I haven’t seen in a long, long time, many I’d never seen.

Zsuzsi speaks some English, and young Laci is fluent, so he acted as translator. His English is excellent, with an accent halfway between proper received British and hollywood American; he reminds me of a cross between a blonde Harry Potter and my brother Martin when he was that age, particularly his sense of humor. Laci is studying computer science at Budapest University. Alot of engineers and computer scientists in my family, especially on my dad’s side. And Hungary is of course known for its mathematicians, physicists and that sort of thing, so it’s good to see someone of the younger generation carrying on in that tradition.

Meanwhile I’d been boning up on my Hungarian language skills, so I understood a fair amount, but as with German, if I have to string more than an few words together it’s hard to do in real time. As it turns out, most of the Hungarian words I know are for food, so that was useful. My most used word was probably köszönöm.

So they took us around and we saw the church where my grandparents were married and my dad was baptized, we saw the school they attended as kids. There’s a local landmark called Lamberg-kastély, the former home of a local noble family, that is now a library and a museum of the area’s history. The town is small and this was all a short walk from their home. After a tour there, which included some surprise origami, we went to lunch at a local German restaurant that had Hungarian food too. We started with húsleves with csiga tészta for everyone, and uborkasaláta, then wienerschinzel with mushrooms, potatoes with a fried egg on top, and things like that. All very good. We saw the local cemetery where my great grandparents, the common ancestors of us and Rosszi’s family, are resting in peace. For my kids this was connecting back five generations, across three centuries, which is pretty amazing when you stop to think about it.

Mör is a famous wine making region, and when the Szingers lived in Hungary they had a farm and vineyards and made wine from the grapes they grew and sold it mainly to hotels and taverns, and that was the family business. Apparently this goes back to the time when they came down the Danube from Germany in the 1700’s. Our family’s land was collectivized long ago, but winemaking lives on, so we saw the vineyards up the hillsides on the south-facing slopes, alot like Napa Valley in California. We saw the presshouses at the bottom of the hill. These have large tunnels going into the mountainside to serve as cellars to keep the wine cool. I’m told the Szinger’s one was uses as a shelter during the war.

When we got back to the house, Laci senior, who is a carpenter, showed us his workshop. It was connected to a building that was also used in winemaking and contains an old, old wine press. The thing was the size of a truck and probably 100 years old. My dad had built a model of the traditional wine press they used, so I had and idea of what it was and how it operated. Still the size of the thing was impressive. The main arm was made of a tree trunk well over a foot thick and probably twenty feet long. Although it hadn’t been used in a long time it was still in working order. Interesting to ponder what might have been if history had not intervened.

…

Back in Budapest that night it was our last fancy Hungarian meal, again at the Italian/Hungarian place next door to our hotel. I accidentally ordered three orders of the desert plate with three kinds of strüdel! All in all not a bad mistake to have made.

We were up bright and early to catch a cab to the airport. The first part of the trip was nice and relaxed. We even had time to pick up some palinka and at the duty-free shop in Budapest Airport. We had a connection to make in Amsterdam (county number six). There was almost an hour to catch the next flight after we landed, but for some reason the gate wasn’t available for our plane, so we sat on the tarmac for a half hour or so, until the situation became a bit desperate. It led to a mad dash thru Amsterdam airport, which is huge. Then Michelle got caught in some security station because the machine wouldn’t recognize her as the person in her passport photo! We made it to the gate just in time. Then that plan sat there for another half hour. Ah well I was in business class and they immediately offered me a cold beer. Coming west we lost six hours and so even though it was a seven hour flight we landed in the afternoon, an hour after we took off.

We got back home and all’s week that ends well. That was two weeks ago already and we’re back into the day to day routine here. We’re still figuring out were some of the souvenirs should go, and of course I have thousands of pictures to look thru and organize, but that’s a project for this fall. It was as great trip and a fantastic experience, and wonderful to get a sense of the geography, culture, architecture, history, language, music, all that great food, and to connect with family and learn something about my own heritage, and to be able to share it all with Jeanne and the girls. I hope I get a chance to back to that part of the world again some day.