Travelogue 544 – January 30
Kazimir and the Cloak Room

It feels like the big city now. Going to Amsterdam, it's not the quaint and historical that I see. I see the crowds and the dirt. I stand impatiently at the tram stops, eye on my watch. On the train, I'm seeing the long strips of corporate parks, and I'm seeing the factories on the horizon, the smoke stacks across the Ij River.

I have business in the big city. Specifically, I need a notary for US-based paperwork. My research into notaries in Rotterdam hasn't turned up much. The few that I find are charging over a hundred for one signature. My only option seems to be the US consulate in Amsterdam. Even with a train ticket, the price is better than anything local.

There's one thing you should know about visiting the US consulate in Amsterdam. They don't allow mobile phones. No, don't just nod and dismiss this one. They really don't allow mobile phones into the facility. At all. Like, you're standing outside on the sidewalk, in the cold, if you are carrying a mobile phone.

Now, I have the advantage going into this of years of experience abroad, dealing with bureaucrats who wear every stripe of stupid. I saw something about their mobile policy on the website, and there was a spark in the back of my mind. They might just be that stupid. In Addis, they will also refuse mobile phones into the embassy, but the guards at reception will kindly let you check them in.

I arrive early at the consulate, and the minute I see the angry faces of people standing outside, shuffling their feet in the old, I know the score. I ask in any case, and I am scolded in a stern police voice. I tell the guard I'll be back.

The consulate is located on the Museumplein, the open park between the Rijksmuseum and the Concertgebouw. There are a few other museums situated alongside this park, including the Van Gogh Musuem. I toss the backpack over my shoulder and start running across the park. The closest museum turns out to be the Stedelijk. I stand in line and buy a ticket. I enter and go straight to the cloak room to check everything in but my paperwork.

The notary process goes fine afterward. I raise my right hand for the notary, and he examines me skeptically. There is something about government service that arouses the worst instincts in people. Can one be on the people's payroll without hating them, I wonder?

So the lemonade to this story of lemons is that I get to know a new museum and a new artist. The museum is the Municipal Museum, (now privatized,) devoted to modern and contemporary art and design. It opened in 1895, a scheme hatched between an heiress, Sophia Adriana de Bruyn, and the city as part of a 'modernization project' dreamed up by the good citizens of Amsterdam as early as 1850. The original building, which one still sees streetside, behind the flashy new addition from the last decade, is typical Amsterdam for its era. 'Dutch Neo-Renaissance style' they call it, high brick walls rising in stripes of red and yellow, set with modest towers.

The new artist is Kazimir Malevich, a big star among the Russian moderns. That I hadn't become acquainted with him before is only a measure of my relationship with modern art, which has always been tense. I resented her pretensions, and she sneered at my ignorance. I used to think that abstraction was an affection – or affectation – of the young. I've come to think differently, and my suspicions are only confirmed by a quick study of the crowd that Kazimir has attracted – and it is no small crowd. The average age is well above mine, I would say, and the old-timers are very engaged. By contrast, the teens brought in on buses are slack-jawed and stunned by boredom.

Mr. Malevich was prolific, producing theories of art almost as manically as he did pieces of art. The theory he settled on in 1915, and the one he is best known for, he called 'Suprematism', and as far as I can understand, was a call for complete and perfect abstraction. The 'grammar' of the Suprematists, according to Mr. Malevich, was to be geometric form. His most famous work seems to have been a black square.

But his collected work displays a much wider accomplishment, rooted in early experiments with realism and Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism. My favorite is the 1913 opera, 'Victory Over the Sun', for which he designed the sets and costume. In one room we get to view a production of the opera, and it is hilarious, as only the dated avant-garde can be, a kind of sci-fi Wizard of Oz cum Ubu Roi.

Sadly, the savage and humorless new roi of Communism, Mr. Stalin, ruled that abstraction was bourgeois and had Mr. Malevich arrested and held briefly. Mr. Malevich was forced to return to representational art for the remainder of his life, but he carried on heroically nonetheless, until his death in 1935.

I am thus enlightened by the abstruse machinations of bureaucrats. I collect my bag, stowing away safely my stamped papers, and I return to my century.

Travelogue 543 – January 23
Cats at Play

People are faceless shadows at this time of the morning, in this weather. The sun hasn't risen. The city is a play among headlights and the blue and the grey reflected from the clouds. Shards of yellow from the street lights play in the puddles. People are shadows. They run to shelter. They sail along on bicycles, in capes and glistening rain gear. Their faces are cloaked. They move with heads down, hooded eyes set on the road beneath them. There is no speech. They cough.

For the rain it raineth every day. It might be that late January has its own lessons. Knowledge is a thing hard won. Can one know rain without spending a winter close to the North Sea? I can't imagine I ever knew it before. I could describe it. I could watch it. I could taste it. What is knowledge?

The swans do not run for cover. Their white forms drift among the waters to the right of the bike path. My ten-speed flies along this stretch of smooth path. Water is thrown back at the sky from the spinning back tire. It will paint me a stripe along my back. But, being a citizen of rain, I have made provision. Below my backpack, below the line of my windbreaker, I have tucked a plastic bag into my belt line. The spray will still reach the hard-working hamstrings, but in a diffuse and ineffective pattern. At the end of the journey, the bag will serve to protect the bike's leather seat. Rain people love plastic.

What is knowledge? It's in the skin and the teeth and under the fingernails. It emerges in one's sweat. Hey, ho, the wind and the rain. It will stain one white as a swan, and then it will mask one in shadows. The night stands high on rotting timbers.

Mildly as the gentle rain, one defies it. We dressed up for a night on the town. We unlocked the cycles, and we braved the perpetual mists. I rode behind Menna, watching her cut her way through the dusk and the weather on her little brown Batavus bike, heels on the pedals, her blue Jackie O wool coat, the red cap on top of her wild Ethiopian curls; intrepidly she advances into teeth of the lamps and the sky tears. This is her impetuous strength in sum, and I have to follow.

We are looking for the jazz club. The roads weave in and around the train tracks just east of the station. We test many alleyways looking for the club, passing under the tracks in a pedestrian passage luridly lit. Finally we find it behind some muddy construction. The band is sound testing as we shiver, the door admitting the cold with each person.

If one could portray knowledge as a cat, one that excites a lot of talk by its colors, then the season leads to a riddle. If cats don't like water, how well could they know the rain? Those are different matters, the answer goes. It could be very well.

Travelogue 542 – January 13
Muhammadan Sun

My trip to Ethiopia is going to be a short one. Too short for twos. Troubles come in pairs this month. Since arriving in Ethiopia, I've been sick twice, twice in one week laid low by some stomach bug. One time is pasta, one time is meat. Twice I'm up most of the night with stomach cramps and nausea, spending intimate time with the toilet.

Twice I've been visited by religious holidays, cosmic birthdays. Last week it was Christmas. Today it's Muhammad's turn. The cannons go off at sunrise, as they always do on a Muslim holiday, sounding like a boy kicking a football against the cement wall of my room, a boy with a very regular stroke. The cannons are a celebration. Or maybe they are confirmation that, yes, the holiday is today. Some Muslim holidays are contingent on a sage spotting the moon. I kind of like the corollary ethos that holidays should be heralded by clear nights. But isn't this insistence on blue skies kind of redundant in Arabia? A Dutch religion demanding cloudless skies for sacred occasions makes sense. In any case, we can say there's a big-sky appreciation for the astronomical, which I like. Does that hark back to the pre-Muslim sun and moon religions? I tend to think these are beautiful little features to religion, like the decorations on a Christmas tree.

Not everyone likes these speculations. Do they merit beheading? I'm not sure I've understood well the logic to the beheadings. Is there an index somewhere of sins punishable by beheading? It might be good to publish that. There are plenty of us with good intentions and sentimental attachments to our heads. We don't mean to offend. I work in education. I think education might be a good way to avoid these messy misunderstandings. We like healthy, functioning heads in my field.

In any case, the holy day comes, as it does every year. Every lunar year, I might add. That means about eleven or twelve days earlier than in the last Christian year. This time, it puts Mawlid a week behind Christmas. Next year, it will upstage, coming a few days earlier. Meaning, if my math is correct, that in the European solar year of 2015, the prophet will be born twice. Born again … and so the twain shall meet.

These calendars upon calendars seem to describe time so much better than any one of them by itself, describing disjointed movement, grinding one against another, like gears failing out of alignment. Calendars are an attempt to bring order, and as such, a noble enterprise, but the proliferation of decimal points as we strive and strive for accuracy should make Allah's point very poignantly. 'My ways are inscrutable.' Add here a Buddha smile.

It seems that current archaeology pinpoints the first calendar in Scotland, where the moon may be sighted roughly once a quarter. Aren't calendars more properly the concern of people who need instruments to fly? It's cold and the days are short; therefore, we know it's winter. But damn if we know which day it is. We haven't seen the sun or stars in weeks. Let's dig some pits oriented to the stars. We will set up stones. We will count.

The days are long. They start at six. When I leave the house, there is sun on my shoulders. I stand a moment in the courtyard relishing the warmth, enjoying the blue sky. I lock the door, twice. It seems that our landlord is a petty thief in her spare time. She hasn't transferred the TV to her house yet, but it's a matter of time. Menna's sister has modified the door so it will accommodate two big padlocks.

The days are sealed from the ones that came before by one day in airports and airplane, breathing the conditioned atmosphere, mixed with sedatives and depressants. The day stretches like drug-induced sleep, stretching calendar days out of proportion. By the time I have arrived, the day has become a week, and the departure point has receded into mists.

Oddly, illness has the same effect. Hours in bed contemplating one's misery has a similar power to warp calendar time. Scottish clouds gather, and one loses track. I'm missing my wife and my home, and it could be that I've only been gone a few days. The clouds won't tell me. It has been a long time. I know it. And so long since I've tasted food.

I think about food. Rice is made from sunlight. Dark bread is made from moonlight. Fruit is fresh water. I am hungry. It's a hunger like love. In my delirium, I see quite clearly how life is made from love.

I think about the prophet's strictures about food. Actually, I don't know what those strictures may have been, in all their wisdom, in all their complexity, but I know about Ramadan, which could be a boon to either glutton or anorexic, depending on whether one is centered in the long, hot day or the plenty of sundown. The only constant is food. I dream about sweet dates.

In the morning I stand outside my front door, soaking up the sunshine. My legs are trembling with the effort. It's surprising how quickly the lack of the food debilitates. I take my time in the healing sun, only hefting the backpack onto my back when I've forgotten the chill of the sick bed. I open the compound gate to the bright eyes of passing neighbors. I step into the lane, the sloping road made of rocks, and I step into a new year. I make my way toward food.

Travelogue 541 – January 7
Christmas Again

I'm listening to Christmas music again. It's my second Christmas this season, a season of doubles. I'm thinking of how I had to close daylight savings time twice this fall. Apparently there is a lag of one week between the change back to standard time in the US versus the Netherlands, and I crossed the Atlantic during that week. I've always had a hard time comprehending daylight savings time. We were saving daylight somehow. But it's still not completely light in Holland until nine in the morning, and it's dark by five. It seems as though we're putting a lot of it in the bank now.

Since the solstice, I've been tracking the time of sunrise and sunset, counting the minutes as they are peeled back from the dominion of winter night.

Last night I saw the sun go down in Khartoum as the plane sat on the tarmac at the airport, refueling, allowing on new passengers. I'm looking at my watch, still set at Holland time, and I'm thinking, this is when the sun is going down in Holland. But I'm two time zones east now. I'm very confused. It's all about latitude, as though there were a cone of light, wide here in the south and constrained there in the north. But here I am, faraway and experiencing sunset at the same time as I would have at home.

I slept in today, until seven. When I awake, the sun is up. That is a change from Holland. The landlord's family is bustling in the yard. I peek out the window. The sky is blue. There are no clouds. That is a change.

I've just arrived, and I have the day off. It's Christmas today, according to the Orthodox Christian calendar. It's just as well. I'm feeling sluggish. I had Menna's sister Mimi take me to the Airport Motel last night. The food on the flight was spare, and I had been forced to start my travel day at five. I was hungry. They make a good, spicy spaghetti at the Airport Motel. I wash it down with just a touch of gin, and I watch Italian football, while Mimi and I catch up on family news and family plans.

What are we left with, after all, but rough meditations about cycles in cycles? It was January the first time I came to Ethiopia, ten years ago. I was coming here to meet family, to grieve with family. This time I celebrate Christmas with Menna's family in her stead. I celebrate the cycle in itself.

The same sunshine greets me as I leave the house, as greeted me ten years ago. I'm setting out with no special purpose. Family time won't be until afternoon and evening. I climb the hill, on the road made with stones. Children are excited to see a faranj, and they run to have a chance to shake my hand. 'I'm fine, thank you, and how are you?' they recite, and run away laughing.

Shimeles is waiting in his taxi at the top of the hill, at the asphalt. We set out. The town is quiet, but never too quiet. We speed along the relatively free roads. Around Urael, the streets are chopped up. This year, the road work is about a rapid transit train system being constructed. Roads that I watched being installed for years are now being torn apart for the train. Traffic in the city is more jammed up than ever. Electricity and water are still as spotty as they were ten years ago. The improvement projects themselves are now the excuse, for the span of an entire generation, it would seem.

The people on the street don't seem to be troubled about it. They gather and they sit, and they amble along as I remember them ever doing, as though Time were as content and anonymous on the street as all the rest, satiated by its raids into the realms of the private. Here on the street we're safe, among all the same people.

Shimeles and I are happy to see each other, though we don't have much to say. I have lost so much Amharic, it's as though I have reverted to the state of my first arrival. I brought with me then only a beginner's knowledge of the fidel, the alphabet, and some phrases.

But I didn't know Shimeles back then. I didn't know his little Lada, its shuddering accelerations, and the clicking of its gears. I didn't know this hill, sloping down from Shiro Meda to Arat Kilo, and didn't know just about every shop front along the way. I didn't know the sounds and smells of morning. I didn't know the quality of the sunlight in the morning, as I do now, and the shadows it casts. That's the slip in the circle, memory becoming knowledge.

Travelogue 540 – January 2
Explain the Señor

It's 10ºC and the sun hasn't risen yet. The clouds are tentative. They have made way for the beginnings of light, allowing us a primitive shade of blue. I'm riding the bike into town, for the moment riding toward the point of dawn.

I've been in a mood. New Year's is for setting the clock anew, but I've been thinking too much, and thinking evokes the past.

That layer of dark blue is like a fog on the eastern horizon. It represents a new day. But I've got too many old days behind me. One thing reminds me of another, kicking off odd chains of association.

This shade of blue reminds me of Señor Dali. It must be a shade he favors, because it often brings him to mind. I spent some time only a few days ago with the grand Señor, at the Boijmans. But the work of his that comes to mind is housed in Glasgow, at the Kelvingrove Museum. I saw it in May. That piece is the so Spanish, so solemn 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross', in which the viewer's perspective is from above the Savior on the cross.

The shoulders of the crucified man are powerfully drawn – Dalí hires a famous stuntman to hang from a gantry, – powerfully lit by an eastern sun, though not the sun rising over the scene below, which is a lake among bare Spanish hills. The suns, the sources of light, are at variance. Christ's sky is black space, and below are the shades of sunrise. The angles are odd, as though the cross may be flying over the land, foot first.

I see I have made some tactical errors in approaching New Year's, one of them being the visit to the museum. Another might be my decision that we should watch 'Donne Darko' on New Year's Eve. Menna hated it, and it spooked the both of us. Outside, Rotterdam was going mad with fireworks, like a kind of war in the city streets.

I'd seen the film before and enjoyed it. I enjoyed it again. But it doesn't inspire the brightest and most hopeful thoughts. There's something primal that moves inside the production, something I'm not sure the writer-director had in mind. The writer's plot is something fantastical and complex, parallel universes sparking against each other, and so on, but what is really happening seems much simpler and more primitive, a struggle against death, even after the fact.

Can we posit that an artist might succeed unconsciously in delivering an unintended message that is nonetheless powerfully felt by all or most of his/her audience in a common way, even if not entirely comprehended?

Perhaps I have just paraphrased the mission of the Surrealists? Shall we ask the Señor? Some would object if we consult with him. Wasn't he drummed out of the club in the late 30s for being too much of a keener, for being too fond of the spotlight, maybe even for an unhealthy willingness to be decipherable?

It was bright and early in the Freudian day then. And maybe the unconscious seemed like a delightful treasure trove. But it occurs to me that, by definition, the unconscious is an entity that we cannot reference. We cannot choose to speak from it or to it. And it certainly seems to me that, say, Mr. Magritte reveals absolutely nothing about the unconscious when he paints a blue sky in the place of a human face. One can only accidentally give voice to the unconscious. Even once it's done, one feels helpless before it.

Dali's painting was inspired by a drawing made more than three hundred years earlier by St. John of the Cross. The monk had drawn it from a vision in a dream. It's just a change of angle. We are seeing from above. There is something compelling; we can't say why.

As the film opens, Donnie wakes. He has a problem with sleep-walking. He's waking up further and further from home. Here he is in the Hollywood hills, or maybe the Spanish hills, lying in the middle of the curving road, his bicycle beside him. His fate, which has already been fulfilled, is to die in bed. He lies undisturbed in the middle of the road.

I pedal forward into the dawn. The color shifts very subtly. Quickly, I pass beyond the vantage of the long canal and into the city, where buildings block my view of the sunrise. I don't see the colors anymore, except in reflection. It's refreshing to pedal in the cold air. My body knows which way to go.

Travelogue 539 – December 28
Living in The Dorp
Part Two

And so I'm clocking aesthetic avarice as she turns circles in the room, as she is blown through the door and into the next room, where she turns new circles. She wields her iPad. She dances a dance of Shiva and she captures all.

I am reminded of our Christmas Day excursion. Menna and I took the afternoon on Christmas to cycle around the quiet old town, watching folks on their strolls toward church or toward family, family strolls undertaken simply to enjoy the fine weather, our mutual good fortune this holy day. Menna and I have found a Turkish cafe, the only cafe open, and we have indulged in warmth and in coffee. Then we have cycled across the river to the Lantaren theatre for an afternoon film. What has seemed appropriate on the day that Jesus finds his way into form yet again is a film called 'Samsara'.

Samsara, the cycle of rebirth, the soul's fancy for illusion, is the putative theme of the film, and we must be treated with images of Tibet right away in order to be properly oriented in mente. The director renounces all subtlety, and it is good. We see message well before it arrives and are free to enjoy the stunning imagery, which was the correct labor for the man behind the camera, something that consumed him for five years and carried him from prospect to prospect around the world – much like my greedy camera bug at the museum.

On Versailles silver, the director treats us to panorama beauty and panorama ugly. He brings the faces of ancient mummified children, and be brings the stilled countenance of the deceased young man on his day of interment. He is lying in a coffin built in the shape of a revolver. Nobody laughs. We are treated to sandblasted and abandoned homes in some disaster zone. We are treated to Shanghai pauvre and to Dubai riche. We visit a vast disassembly plant, where animals are taken apart along conveyor belts.

Salvador Dali likes to trade in body parts. In the second room of his exhibit, there are sketches of all sorts of strange contortions of form. Humanity is a playground. So are the fundamentals of the household. In display cases we see a variety of divine experiments, including the lobster phone. There are experiments in photography, variations on Dali's theme of flying people, flying objects, and Dali himself arching his satyr's eyebrows.

I'm missing my shutter girl. She brings to us vitality, doesn't she, with her twitching youthfulness and stunning detachment? Her unconsciousness inspires a giddy disorientation, perfect for contemplation of the moderns. How to signify without her?

As we move into rooms deeper inside the museum, we move back in time. In the nineteenth century, we have discovered the painters of the Hague School, who had themselves re-discovered the Dutch Masters of the Golden Age, and then applied a Parisian filter. They had re-discovered the Dutch landscape, and its Impressionistic possibilities, and set about capturing images that we jaded come-afters find hard to see without shades of cliché: the polders, the canals cutting through their fields, the spotted cows, the windmills.

How do we learn to see again? Do we need the belabored intensity of Samsara, making things grand on super 70? Or do we take a lesson from shutter girl, that strange indirection, the glib mediation? The iPad collects, and we trust that the sorting systems inside the machine will assign meaning. The hard drive is ours to possess. It has a mapping mechanisms that make it like a museum. The hallways lined with art from the ages are like text to be scanned and then produced on demand. But what is the demand? Implicit is the faith in the cue. There will be a moment when the images will be produced, the validating moment, when shutter girl is a good and smart girl. Or maybe the moment never comes, and perhaps that is even better, a relief.

We return to the dorp after every journey, a place of significance. The photos will prove it. The goose – a pretty picture – stands ready to bite – a funny picture – beside the canal – a pretty picture – and we were there – group shot – in the dorp – proof in the picture – where people live – blurry picture – people who live in different houses – see here – and speak funny – see the signs. What a big, big, crazy world! It's all right here – scrolling, scrolling.

Travelogue 538 – December 27
Living in The Dorp
Part One

I have a few neighbors. They live in the little park beside the Schie River. This park is only a few meters of grass along the riverside. But it suffices for these two geese. They are a couple, I would say, though I can't tell which is the male, which is the female, or if it's that kind of couple. Either way, they are always together. One is brown and mottled, and one is white. They are like any other neighbor, hanging out, minding their own business, picking at the grass. They exhibit something like my attitude toward neighbors, hissing when they get too close, threatening to bite, waddling at them in attack position.

I pass them in the morning, coasting by on my bicycle. Before the sun has risen they are already awake and standing at the kerb, as though waiting for a bus. The park occupies a corner at the intersection of waterways, the Schie and one of the canals that connects it to the Maas River. It's nothing more than some grass and park benches facing the Schie.

A sculpture has been erected by the water, perhaps to honor the faithful goose couple. It's a kind of bench or love seat made of wrought iron curled and tangled like thick wire, painted cherry red, shaped into a canopy in the shape of a heart. There's a stand a few meters away, made of the same stuff, for couples to place their cameras, set it on auto, and capture themselves in the heart, with downtown spires in the background. Couples have attached padlocks to the sculpture.

The canal beside the park runs underneath the road to my flat. On the other side, it bypasses historic Delfshaven, leads past the windmill that is almost three hundred years old. There's a parallel canal some several hundred meters west that dissects the historic district. Old schooners anchor along the sides, sails stown away.

It's still a village, after all, still the dorp. The geese serve as a reminder. The village may have become urban, or been swallowed by the urgent necessities of sprawl, but still it is a village.

I've had occasion to watch tourist encounters with the geese. These are tourists to the neighborhood. They may be from abroad; they may be from across town. The geese charm them with their misanthropy. I hear laughter as I approach the group. I see the flash of cameras at work. Dad has pulled up a pant leg, and he's rubbing the spot where the goose has struck. He guffaws into the camera.

It's what we do when we visit the dorp. We take pictures. We can sense something different. Is it a sense that we are encountered with something to be preserved? Is that the reflex that reaches for the camera?

I'm wondering about that impulse to preserve. I'm watching her. She embodies it, reflex without thought. She makes a circuit of the small room. She has her iPad deployed, the cover folded back, the tablet held at the ready. At each station she stops to raise it and click. It matters little if there is anyone there first. She takes a moment's position right next to him or her and clicks. She keeps going. I'm taking a break from my original purpose just to watch her. She might be an exhibit herself.

Menna and I have finally made time to visit the Boijmans, the city's art museum. We have entered through the modern first, making our way through a series of small exhibit rooms devoted to twentieth-century art, two rooms for Surrealism because Dali is in town, a room for oddball pre-war realism, then rooms organized primarily by donated collection, bits of Kandinsky, bits of Mondrian, prints from Picasso, and assorted contemporaries.

Then there is herself, the flesh-and-blood tribute to the raw impulse to collect, mobile and restless, never stopping to admire but only to document on her deadly little tablet. I'm fascinated. I could imagine a chuckling and fey Salvador Dali writing this script. Though it would be so much better if some of the bystanders had no faces, or if the walls would melt.

There is nothing melting in this exhibit. The Dali paintings in this exhibit are as melancholy as I've seen the master. There are landscapes of his native, war-torn Spain, dry and desolate, with figures that emerge in mysterious and incomplete forms. Or there are uncomfortable groupings of distorted beings in midnight blue, a tearful or frightened face introduced as one more strange object, but also as extracted comment on it all.

Click! It is captured. And nothing cheers me more than the thought of its future home among unlit circuits, finding more peace there than ever in three dimensions, secure among thousands of images, not only of artistic peers from all ages, but among thousands more from budget beaches in Portugal or Croatia, where not this boyfriend but the one before, or maybe it was two before, passed out with sand in his eyebrows, remember that, and wasn't that hilarious when we painted his cheeks and his lips and then he came to and OMG he was so stoned and disoriented, we practically had to carry him, and God he was so stupid, and God he made me cry.

Travelogue 537 – December 21
The White Bear

I didn't expect the statue. I expected a lot from this town, but not the celebration of this illustrious figure so close to my heart, memorialized here larger than life, standing in costume period and pose heroic.

We have become confused among the winding, cobble-stone streets of this burg, and ended up in this pretty square, not one so unique in this town acknowledged as the prettiest in this part of Europe. The square occupies an unusually open space among the medieval alleys of the town, looking east over a stately canal running away toward its appointment with another canal. Mr. Van Eyck, with a nineteenth-century vigor, granted to him by his nineteenth-century sculptor, has turned his back toward the canal, and turned toward the life and bustle of the town, in particular toward the building that now houses an academy of fine art. Off his right shoulder, across the boulevard that runs alongside his square, is the medieval toll house, built in 1477.

We're standing in middle of the pretty square, and the rain is coming down steadily. It falls steadily but it may not strike steadily, as the raindrops are tossed around by gusts of chilly wind. Our umbrella doesn't serve us very well in winds like these. We stand regarding the Toll House, and next to it, the Poortersloge, or Burgher's Lodge.

The fifteenth century seems to have been the height of prosperity here in Bruges. The town had flourished for a few centuries already, the busy port and markets paying for these lovely buildings we enjoy, for the churches and the guild halls, and for the art that drew the commissions for names like Van Eyck.

The well-to-do citizens assembled in the Burgher's Lodge. The emblem of their jousting association still adorns the facade of the structure. The emblem portrays a bear holding the Bruges coat of arms. The bear is a symbol of Bruges. They say that the first count of Flanders, a congenial chap by the name of Baldwin with the Iron Arm, first visited the site of Bruges in the 800s, he encountered a brown bear. Of course, Lord Baldwin engaged with the bear, and after a long struggle, managed to kill it. This explains the small stone bear standing a niche in the facade of the lodge. This bear is white, and he's harmless. They dress him up for special occasions.

All this Menna and I contemplate as we stand quietly in the rain. 'So pretty,' we're thinking. Menna is shivering. My wife is cold. I have to take action. I urge her forward and onward.

It's surprisingly difficult to find quiet little places to sit in Belgian towns. We walk along the canal behind Mr. Van Eyck's back. Even in this emergency, I cannot help but admire the scenic streets, lined by quirky gables and the occasional stone trinket, erected by cheerful medieval landlords in a time of colorful caps and banners, a time when God still cherished us.

We finally come upon a pub. Inside, we hang dripping coats on the backs of chairs. We shiver at the wooden table as a waiter brings us strong Belgian beer, sweet-tasting and heady, shining the color of summer fields of grain, shining even when there is no sun. I am rubbing the tips of Menna's fingers.

Travelogue 536 – December 14
Do Not Disturb My Circles

And what would old Archimedes have thought, arriving from Syracuse, perhaps on a freighter shaped like a huge bathtub, a kind of iron village set afloat, a ship that has steered its mass into the mouth of the Maas River? What words, what cry would suffice for this discovery?

The shores of the river open into port after port, the length of the waterway lined with the mechanics of freight. Etched into the white northern sky are the sober, metallic outlines of machine after machine, cranes, cranks, chains, and the frames of giant swings. It's a vast outdoor physics lab.

'The simple machine changes the direction of a force ... increasing effect …,' he mutters, standing at the helm, as though he were standing before his students.

The Greeks identified six simple machines. The Renaissance scholars, keen students, multiplied these into the hundreds, combining them into compound machines, into thousands of applications. Their Protestant great-grandchildren turned these into profit, into whole cities of steel.

Would this river cruise be a delight for old Archimedes, or would it be an assault of insight, deadly to consciousness, a cacophony of thought, two thousand years in a tidal rush? We are a busy species, always building. There is a lot to see at the end of 2013.

In this town of cranks and gears and pulleys, this modernist enclave of commerce as industry, jewel in the crown of a country of problem-solvers, I indulge in a jog beside the River Maas, the color of steel. It's a day one is forced call sunny at this latitude, though in fact the sun in its ten degrees of glory only lights the dome of the sky with a tinny silver sheen.

I've discovered an esplanade riverside hidden from the road, a spread of concrete located behind a series of housing projects. This bit of river extends west from my usual runs, pushing toward the watery border between the wedge of little Delfshaven and Schiedam.

I like this stretch of unexceptional asphalt, set with squares of dispirited grass, set with odd sculptures looking like big paper hats, but folded in iron, standing on legs like hobby horses. They are painted in colours that just aspire to the scale of cheerful, but achieve only curiosity. I like this place for its air of abandonment. I like it for the prospect of the western ports of the city, miles of industrial age landscape, horizon of machinery changing force, water resuming and resuming again its nature, its peace, among the churning commerce.

I've been marking our progress toward the solstice, marking with interest the inching forward of frosts and shadow. We seem to have been granted a yuletide break from the incessant rains, a time to emerge into the dusk and contemplate. I'm thinking about poor Archimedes, wandering the Rhine delta, looking for that final proof he was working on before the Roman soldier cut him down, harmless old man playing with circles. His ghost is now thinking of other matters, questioning himself in the face of what the industrial age hath wrought. He is captured by wonder, which is no less than what one hopes for for old ghosts.

I turn at the furthest point, where another small haven, or harbor, interrupts the path, and I jog back the way I have come. I discover that a barge has parked' beside the esplanade. One man stands on land while two others stand on the deck of the barge, chatting with him, operating the shipboard crane, which is set just at the bow. If I were Archimedes I might wonder how a boat supports great amounts of weight not from the center, but at the extremity of the bow. About ten meters above the man onshore hangs suspended his car. The man's shift on the barge is over. It's time to go home. He'll take his auto with him.

Travelogue 535 – December 7
Darkness

So we engage in the struggle against darkness. It's December. We have slid northward, away from light, and under a polar cap of dense cloud. We know we must push forward, as into a headwind, heads down and hands protected. The mornings are dark until eight, the light coming in a slow and diffuse way difficult to describe as dawn. It takes so long to become day, and one can't be quite sure, under cover of mist, when the ambient illumination has achieved full daylight.

Yesterday we saw our first snow, or something like it. Something, in fact, icy. What falls are small white hailstones. They start coming down while I'm out on a run. They bounce off the sidewalk, and they roll in the cold wind. They sting against my cheek.

The winds have been formidable. Menna walks her bicycle home from the Metro station. I return home from my run with numb fingers. Because the still-air temps are still above freezing, I haven't started wearing the black tights yet. Instead, I come home with thighs and knees bright red and raw.

Yesterday we hear that Mandela has died. The news is a sign bittersweet: a life lived well, lived in principle and with virtue; and an era passing, for better or worse. The times of father and son in only my family have witnessed since the ravages of the Depression genocide in Europe and apartheid in Africa. Hitler made his rage and hatred into an international crisis. Mandela made his fight an international matter of conscience.

The esteemed Paul Theroux writes in a recent article that our work in Africa is more or less ineffectual, mere 'telescopic philanthropy', a phrase he borrows from Charles Dickens. What's more it has all been done before. Of course, I too am a huge fan of the author of Ecclesiastes, who wrote 'there is nothing new under the sun' a few millennia before Mr. Theroux felt the sun of Malawi on his shoulders. Like Solomon, Mr. Theroux has been there, and so why should anyone else?

It's popular to debunk NGO work these days, and God knows it deserves a bit of the old debunk, but every generation does the best it can. Shall we feel foolish now because we're helping people in a faraway place? I find myself peering again into the shadowed minds of the secret paternalists of our time who say that one type of person cannot know how to, or have the right to, help another type (word from wise, developed-world sage). It's an odd viewpoint, that geographical distance and culture invalidate the fundamental human instinct to help.

And our embarrassment should be based on logic like this: people are poorer than ever in Africa; therefore, aid work has failed. As a show of thoroughness, let's support with one example, from the thousands of agencies working across the continent: Jeffrey Sachs. Yes, that is a case that cuts right to the heart of my work. I feel exposed.

After declaring general failure, Mr. Theroux offers a few radical tips, should we care to continue with our futile work: 'Seek input from locals. Demand responsible management.' Here is the soul of innovation. Quite right that he should take to the soap box with gems like this. We dast not shade a light like that.

But this is the standard of critique these days, laying down the fifth ace: your work is immoral, but I know how to do it better. But wasn't it immoral? No, not if you're innovative. Ah, like demanding responsible management. That is deep innovation. I've got another one for you: look both ways before crossing the street. Now you've got it. But one question: how innovative is poverty? We have never 'won' against poverty. Ergo, we have 'failed'. The work is failing, and must stop. Astounding.

No, here's the news today: we're not going to solve poverty. We're human and we're going to try. We go where we feel we can make a difference. Someone will always know better, and will say so. We get up every morning and we try harder.

Today's news, the day after the day. It's winter. We will buckle down, and we will go out the door when it's time to work, even though the sun doesn't seem to have stirred. These are the times during the year when the primeval within us wonders whether God has forsaken us. We shiver to consider what is asked of us, even if it is only logging a few miles in the ice of a long night. We still do it.

Travelogue 534 – November 28
Loods 24

In 1930, there were more than ten thousand Jews in Rotterdam, a healthy percentage of them recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who took a stretch break on their way to America and decided to stay. The Jewish community here dates back to 1610, when the first came from Portugal to settle and trade. Current population levels seem to hang at a few hundred.

There are few memories of the larger Jewish community left. What there are are memorials. What we might call living memories were wiped out by the Germans. That holds true in several senses, of course, pertaining to the people themselves, as well as to their buildings, flattened along with those of the purest Aryans during the bombardment in 1940.

Starting in July, 1942, the Jews themselves were sent away. The deportation took one year. Jews were gathered in the harbor, at Loods 24 (Shed 24). By 1945 and the end of the war, about 87% of those had been murdered in Nazi death camps.

Today, the site is an urban park, set among high rise housing and office buildings, just a few blocks from the river, and a few more blocks from the booming Wilhelmina Pier. Beside the river is a small plaza, site to a monument to the 686 children sent off to their death.

I've been reading Hannah Arendt's book about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, a famous little volume, the one that gave us the phrase the 'banality of evil'. It's the perfect subtitle to the book, less a theory than a modest aside to the reader.

Adolph Eichmann was the rather bland S.S. functionary in charge of the Jewish question. He was something closer to a middle manager and civil servant than a policy man. He never killed anyone, but he arranged all the trains.

In Arendt's portrayal, he appears to be rather dim-witted, and moved more by duty and advancement than by personal morality. He found the extermination policy distasteful, but took his cues from those around him. Everyone else seemed fine with it. And he worked for the Führer. 'The man,' he said, 'was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million. … His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.'

The Stadhius, or City Hall, is one of the few buildings that survived the bombardment. It was finished in 1920. At the center of the large building, dividing front wing from back, is a garden, very peaceful, very Victorian, with its statuary and trimmed design. At the entrance to the garden is a small monument to the Jews of Rotterdam, placed there in 1981, and consisting of small bronzes set along the brick wall. Each year of the war is the subject of one piece, each suggesting the mounting horrors of the extermination effort. The art is easily missed among the shadows of a covered walkway, and overwhelmed by the pretty park, but the pieces show a restrained pathos, portray a quiet suffering, perhaps one that continues.

In small ways, one must suffer to contemplate it. One has to grieve for the human heart. One is tempted by despair.

In America, it is Thanksgiving. I may be an American in the Old World, but my little neighborhood was home to the Pilgrims before they set out for America. Their church stands along the route of my daily walk. It's old, looks no different to the old around it, but it reads as a sign of the new. New has history, as everything must.

Travelogue 533 – November 20
Holding Course

Daddy of the World War II memorials in Rotterdam would be the one set beside the Maas River, almost in the afternoon shadow of the great Swan Bridge, the tower that could be an obelisk, though one with one angled side and an eye-of-the-needle hole in the top. But at close quarters, you see it is an not smooth white stone at all, but curving sides plated with steel like a ship's hull. It is a memorial dedicated to the merchant ships and sailors lost in the war. This ship's keel passes through green waves of pebbled concrete. And hanging from its side is a bronze of men held by rope to the anchor. The texture of the sculpture suggests waist down submersion in water. 'They held course' the monument says.

This may be the most visible of memorials, but in fact there are small mementos of the war all over town, this town devastated by the war. One of my favorites seems only incidentally a record of the war, maybe more a record of time and caprice.

The Delftse Poort was a gate to the city. The first northern gate was built in the middle of the fourteenth century, approved by the count of Holland, Aelbrecht van Beieren, and called simply the Noorderpoort. It was rebuilt in 1545, a project which apparently nearly bankrupted the city, and then rebuilt again, another two centuries later, in 1764, following a design by Pieter de Swart, a design that remained the face of the city to travelers from the north for almost two more centuries. Somewhere along the way, it became known as the Delftse Poort, named for the next town of significance on the road toward the capital of Den Haag.

As with all things temporal, there came a time when the great stone gate, monument to the past, was judged to be in the way, much as Hitler would decide that Holland was an inconvenience, and at pretty much the same time. In 1939, the city voted to move the gate and began the job of dismantling it. In 1940, the Germans completed the job in a day, reducing the gate and most of the city center to rubble.

Maybe there is nothing so precious as something you are slowly letting go and then is ripped from your hands. The loss of the city symbol was felt keenly. Fragments of the stonework were kept as treasures. Some were incorporated into new buildings in the town center.

It wasn't until fifty years later that a monument was built, commissioned to a local artist, Cor Kraat, who erected a skeletal steel reconstruction of the old gateway, painted Dutch orange, and housing inside some of the fragments of the stonework as haunting pieces of memory. The monument has been moved from the Hofplein, where the gate stood in the middle of the city's traffic and commerce, to a quiet side street. Here it sits silently, and entering it, one enters a meditation.

One is forgiven for wondering, during the bustle and the mundane, what is the purpose of monuments, perhaps even resenting them their stasis, the space they take, the judgements they seem to make. But I think I understand now, they await for each their moment of discovery, and the waiting is quiet, and the space is dedicated, like the hours of deep night during the daily cycle, to reflection and rejuvenation.

Travelogue 532 – November 16
Excelsior!

No goal is scored. The nets remain untested. The full voices of the children remain untested. It's halftime. Ato Moges says he is not enjoying the game, and we should leave. He tells the guard outside the game is saai, or boring, and the guard laughs.

It's my first football game in Holland. Ato Moges has free tickets. He works at a school, and the school has given him extra tickets. If I had thought about that proposition beforehand, I would have realized that I would spend the evening being kicked in the back, climbed over, and being unmanned by high-pitched, shrieking calls for the home team in my ear. I long to be in the 'Robin van Persie Tribune', across a corner of the pitch from us, behind the goal, where the rowdies are singing songs and swaying. Ato Moges says that's where the 'hooligans' sit. But their feet are on the ground, and they've outgrown the dog-whistle in their voices.

Robin van Persie played for this team as a youth player a dozen years ago. This is Excelsior, one of three teams for Rotterdam. The team's big brother, and more famous team, is Feyenoord. The third team is Sparta, which houses itself near to our home neighborhood, in Delfshaven, and which is third in the Eerste Divisie now. Excelsior is seventh. Though Eerste Divisie, means 'First Division', it's actually the second. On top of football in Holland is the Eredivisie, which is where Feyenoord plays. Both smaller clubs have had their runs in the Eredivisie, Sparta more than Excelsior. That only seems fitting, since Sparta holds the distinction of being the oldest professional team in the Netherlands.

The stadium is tiny. The pitch is fine, but the stands are very modest. It could be an American high school. There are seats for about 3,500 people. Tonight we are playing Venlo VVV, which apparently is not an exciting match-up. Venlo is a small town near the German border. They wear blue against our team's red and black. I don't find the game boring at all, but I'm wondering if boring might be Ato Moges's code for cold. It's about 5°C. It's been misty all day. The damp cold is penetrating. Menna is showing me her fingertip, which is discolored. She's scared that she has frostbite. I'm thinking it has to be freezing for anything to freeze. The approaching winter is unnerving for her.

We exit at halftime. The gates to the stadium are locked, and there is nobody manning them. We go look for the guard. He is surprised we're leaving. Ato Moges tells him the game is saai. It's only a few steps under the bright floodlights to the tram station. We'll catch the twenty-four back to the center of town. Excelsior is the team for the east side of town. Just east of the stadium is the Woudestein campus of Erasmus University, and the campus of Menna's business program. We feel divided, with the Sparta stadium so close to home, on the west side of town, and Excelsior's close to campus. Tonight, I suppose we lean east.

The next day I read that an Excelsior player gets a red card and is thrown out of the game one minute after half time. Venlo wins 1-0. I'm sure the children were howling.

Travelogue 531 – November 10
Dutch Winter

Because it's Sunday, I get up late. Because I get up late, there is daylight illuminating the white drapes above our bed. On weekdays, those drapes are dark still when we start our day. I will part the drapes just an inch to look over the still street. The occasional early starter breezes by on a cycle, all bundled up. In half an hour, someone will watch me pedal by.

Today the street is just as still, though it's late. It is Zondag. I glance up at the clouds above the flats across the street. They seem to be breaking. I catch a rare sight of blue sky. I check the ground. It looks to be dry.

At the front door, I'm struggling with Menna's bike. We bring both the bikes inside at night because we've had two stolen already. Because hers is the heaviest, we set it in the narrow entry way, front tire tilted against the fourth or fifth step in our steep staircase, the back tire against the door. I have to lift it with one hand away from the doorway while wrestling with the heavy wooden door, which likes to get stuck in its frame, especially in damp weather. Damp weather in Holland: that means all the time.

Outside, I lock the bike up next to the bike path. I go up for my own cycle, which rests in the hallway upstairs. I carry that down on my shoulder. This life keeps me limber.

I'm no sooner on my bike and moving than it starts to rain. There is one dark cloud mass just above, distinct in its wet lines, and it will drop some of its mass on the neighborhood. This is the way it is in Holland. One either steps out into a sudden shower, or steps into the street just as it stops. One might develop a complex, always feeling either the lamb or the goat.

The path glistens in the new rain. I feel the cold drops soaking into the thighs of my jeans. I see it stand in beads on the sleeves of my jacket. Passing cars hiss in the road's moisture. There is a damp freshness to the air. And it's getting chilly. I will have to pull out the gloves.

The cafe never has croissants on Sunday, which I find slightly dispiriting. But I soldier on, investing in an unwholesome cake to complement my ristretto. I climb the steep Dutch stairs to the second floor set with rows of tables. I have a routine, as all cafe regulars must. I stop at the first table by the stairs. I set up the computer. My view extends beyond the balcony and over the lobby and cashiers, through the top of the arching window to the plein.

There is a curious sculpture in the square, a huge bronze of a fat and bearded Santa holding a bell in one hand and in the other something that looks like an ice cream cone. Apparently the latter reminds the Dutch of something more obscene, and thence the statue's nickname which I won't repeat here, in this family blog. Some families don't mind. They pose next to it for photos. There is plenty of public sculpture in Rotterdam, including a Rodin only a few hundred meters away, but it's the massive gnome that weasels his way into family photos.

The windows to my right look out over the brick alley that is the Oude Binnenweg. The Nieuwe Binnenweg picks up across the busy crossing street, a bustling thoroughfare of its own, with a tram line that heads outs toward my neighborhood. I look out at the alley, and I see that they've put up lights in anticipation of the holidays. They will be a consolation in the season of long nights.

Travelogue 530 – November 6
First Snow

Yesterday is a day haunted by its weather report. Local media in Minnesota persists in its commentary on the approaching storm. It's the first winter storm. Is it anticipation in their voices? Wes's nine year-old daughter is gently hopping with impatience to see snow on the ground. This is Minnesota. Life would be a blank map without snow.

We're out at the Town Hall Tap when the snow comes. It's a family outing, though I'm outside fielding a phone call, escaping the sound track. A drizzle has arrived a while ago, as the leading edge of the storm. The call is not a short one. I'm pacing outside. Glancing up into the jaundiced light of the street lamps, I see that the rain has taken on mass. When the drops hit the pavement, they don't disappear right away, but remain for the slightest interval as small, melting lumps. The winter has arrived. The breathless radio and television announcers had predicted midnight. It has come early.

Inside the restaurant, Isabella is bouncing in her seat happily as she looks out the tavern's window, watching the snow gathering force in the lights from the street. It is a dramatic sight, and one that Minnesotans find comforting somehow. I reflect that I have grown away from the Minnesotan compass, finding my first sight of snow this season more dispiriting than exalting, especially coming the night before a flight. I'm picturing the ploughs describing their long furrows at the airport.

The flight is not delayed. When I wake up in the morning, the sun is shining. The snow has not accumulated much beyond an inch or so on the cold lawns. I run out in my bare feet to capture a few photos of the sudden winter for my wife, who is facing her first winter under the less impetuous skies of Europe. This is what it looks like. I run back inside with stinging toes.

It will be my fingers stinging next, as I have to scrape the ice from the rental car. Afterward, I sit inside while the car warm up. The defrost is turned up to its maximum. The winter has caught me. I've come to Minnesota for one week in early November, and the winter has caught me. I'll be driving to the airport latter. I'll be turning the car in. I'll be boarding another transatlantic.

My luck is consistent on this trip. The Russian man next to me doesn't fit into his seat. He sleeps restlessly the whole of the overnight flight, tossing and turning and shoving against me while I struggle with the plane's video technology to get one movie in. For some reason I have chosen the Exorcist, and I am watching it thirty seconds at a time, until the screen goes blank. Then I have to pause, play, rewind, play, and watch until it stalls again. It adds a dimension to the story, having to manage the demented machinery.

The sun hasn't risen yet in Amsterdam. There is a yellow glow over the city among the low-lying clouds. By the time I make it to the lobby, there is a dim light in the sky. I stand in line for an espresso. My train leaves on track five.

Travelogue 529 – November 3
Walking the Dog

They make a comic couple, the soft double-chinned boy in his black uniform, leading with his belly, and his little beagle straining in its harness. The boy hides behind his fine eyelashes. He won't look anyone in the eye as he weaves among the people standing in line. He only has eyes for his little dog, who is busy sniffing among the luggage and the shoes and the pants legs he discovers. The crowd arrayed for passport control is giggling.

This is my first impression of my quirky, neurotic homeland. Well, that and the assortment of my countrymen on the plane, including the Arizona man leaning into me the whole way home, drinking glass after glass of red wine and dozing. He is returning from Madagascar after three months of volunteer service. They are clumsy; they are genial. They don't fit in their seats. The man behind me can't help digging his knee through the seat and into my back.

It's a long way. I have time for a few movies played out on the seat back ahead of me. In between each movie, I pull out my notebook, and I jot notes about work, and about the coming board meetings in Minnesota. And we haven't even reached Greenland yet. Another movie, and we're over the blank expanses of Labrador.

We descend into clouds. We land before we've spotted land. It feels like something has hit the plane, and I look out the window to see that we're rolling down the runway, grass beside us, grass disappearing into the grey fog only twenty or thirty meters away. I think that's a first: hitting terra firma before sighting it.

The officer walks his dog. I'm wondering why everything American has to be vaguely silly. Or menacing. Do the man and his beagle think they belong to the latter category?

It is the Halloween season. Minneapolis is resplendent in its fall colors. The maple leaves are a fiery red. Lawns are decorated with scenes of horror, scarecrows and skeletons and mutilated bodies. The skies are silent and, once the fog lifts, are laced with high clouds that suggest winter. There are tall corn stalks bundled beside Wes's door. He has massive pumpkin standing in his living room. I think it's fake, it's so big. I knock on it and put my ear to its orange, ribbed side.

In the morning, I am up before the sun. Jet lag will have its way with me. I shower as quickly and quietly as I can manage, not wanting to wake the family. And I'm outside, where I'm greeted by a serious chill, and by a starless field of black above. I stop at the gas station, and I walk among the short aisles lined with plastic packages of snack foods. In the refrigerator case, I find my plastic bottles of water. At the end of the cashier's counter there is a basket with bananas. Above us circulates a stream of stale music. The selection is like a distress call from a war settled long ago, a code that can't be shut off and will repeat forever.

Travelogue 528 – October 25
The Round in London

The meetings are over. This morning all I have to do is make my way to Heathrow. But I have some time. And I have a light hangover that needs some attention. That's standard after meetings with the Brits.

I close up Graham's place. He is in New York visiting his daughters, and he was kind enough to allow me to stay at his place two nights. It was such a peaceful place to stay. He stays in a flat inside a large house in Holland Park. The place is one room plus a bathroom. It has white walls and white carpet. The bed is covered in white. I move very cautiously, afraid to leave a mark.

White is the theme of the neighborhood. Holland Park is a collection of quiet streets around this mild hill in west London. It's a rich area; the houses are large, and most of them are white. Or maybe that is cream. There are a few painted in a pastel Haight-Ashbury theme, but most remain white. They stand mute, stoically secure in their neo-classical lines, as though each were stamped in plaster. I feel as though I must whisper here.

I take my hangover to Portobello Road, which is only a ten-minute walk from the house. Those San Francisco colors must have bled through from here. It's a road famous for its street market, which is setting up as I arrive, vendors of hats and vegetables leisurely arranging their tables. There's one table I'm fond of, selling vintage sports equipment, old boxing gloves, old soccer balls, old rugby balls, all looking as though cut from the same cow seventy-five years ago.

The shop fronts along Portobello Road are small and functional. They are many per block, and they run side by side for miles, a few chain names, but most small locals: antiques and Oxfam, coffee and clothes. Walk a few more feet and see another. Small's the theme. Graham has recommended the Coffee Plant, where I take the hangover for treatment this morning. The coffee is very good. So is the croissant, very light and flaky. The clientele has the same consistency. It's a true neighborhood place, where one learns to despise human nature all over again. The place is cramped and the people are too comfortable. They crowd and they shout, and my head rings. Children are screeching from their strollers.

The evening before, I am across town in the Borough with the boys. This is where Pete's office is, among the maze of single-story brick and raised railway tracks of the Borough. We have devoted most of the afternoon to our proceedings, and the boys have been very patient. So now I must pay the piper.

Tonight's pub is another small London space, two rooms not much bigger than the Coffee Plant, the Charles Dickens on Union Street. The bar makes a square in the corner of the first room. There are tables below the window. There is a black supporting pillar in the center of the room. It has a circular shelf fitted to it, where a lively group stands and tells stories to each other.

There is a table in the other corner in back, near the archway into the second room, and that is where we sit, below the TV screen, where Tottenham is struggling with a Moldovan team for advancement in the Europa League. Jonathan orders the ale that advertises American hops. He and I are the Americans on the UK board. Pete is game for the American hops. Thomas orders some very tall lager. 'Cheers.' There are a few more rounds. Tottenham wins, and the boys feel as though they have won, too. We are proud of ourselves, the meetings leading to genuine progress, an elusive quality in most strategic discussion. We happy few have missed each other, and we have a store of laughs to catch up on.

And so it goes. Merry times dissolve into night. It's morning and I walk delicately down Portobello Road, passing all the cute places, on my way to the Tube Station. I'll spend an hour on the metro, an hour on the plane, and an hour on the buses in Rotterdam. The town will seem small after London. I'll arrive home in time for a restorative dinner. My wife and I will spend a quiet night at home.

Travelogue 527 – October 24
The Astral

I've managed to lose my way, and in short order. It's only been twenty minutes or so since I took my leave of Mark on the south bank of the river, just under the Westminster Bridge. I've crossed the Thames, weaving among tourists, stopping to allow for a dozen photos, swinging well around the father snapping children, or the children snapping father.

I've stopped once or twice for my own moments with the bridge's prospect of London on a sunny and blustery fall day. The river sparkles below. South is the Eye, north is the gilded tower of Ben and the yellow cloisters of Parliament,

I've stopped at the Abbey, so much more modest than the Dom of Köln, but so inviting, and I've assessed the damage of the price of a ticket inside to pay my respects to Mr. Shakespeare. At eighteen pounds sterling, the damage is enough to dissuade me and send me back into the streets of Westminster.

I've returned to London to wrap up some strategy sessions with the board. The American organization has been all-consuming for the last few years. I've neglected our British colleagues, so my summer project this year has been to catch up with affairs on the island, meet with the UK organization, evaluate and update its role. We've had a few conferences with the American Fulbright scholars, who volunteered to sit in on strategic reviews. During this trip, the full board meets to wrap up the strategy work and set the agenda for 2014.

I have the morning free. I've met with Mark, who I saw only a few weeks ago in Ethiopia. He's back in England a few weeks to make some dosh. Today he's down to three pounds, and he's still waiting for work. I buy him a beverage, and we contemplate our view of the Thames, and we contemplate our view of gentle Time flowing by. Little Yig is thirteen now, and not so little. 'I knew that runt when he was four,' I say. A brisk breeze makes the fall leaves scuttle along the pavement, under the feet of the tourists.

Beyond the Abbey, I'm improvising. I know this part of city in broad strokes only. I'm passing into a district of Greats, Great Peter and Great Smith. I've passed the Home Office, a humble box dressed in colored panes of glass among buildings much older and more fun, Victorian beauties in red stone, curving beside the curving streets, red double-decker buses swinging by, looking like they should tip.

I'd like to make my way to Green Park, and I know it's north, but I've forgotten that the river twists toward the south here, and I'm delving deeper into old Westminster. I'm a few minutes from the highest offices of the land, and the neighborhoods are becoming quiet and quaint. I finally catch sight of the tower of Victoria Cathedral, and I correct course, arriving in due course at Horseferry Road, a harried avenue that careens through the district at a cocksure angle. Carefully I cross. I see a small dive called the Astral. It looks like a right greasy den. I'm hungry.

Inside, there's barely room to stand as you order. There is bustle; there are the heavy aromas of meat and sauces. People are lined up to the door. There are three cooks manning the kitchen, which takes up most of the space in the first room, and one woman with ample hips running among the tables and shouting . There are tables in a dark room in the back, but those are occupied, mostly by road workers.

I sit at a counter in front, looking out the window at an alleyway, where the occasional taxi parks while the driver comes in for a coffee. I order a full English. The ham is dry; the potatoes served in compact patties, but nonetheless the breakfast hits the spot. And I'm paying less than five pounds. A couple blokes cram in at the counter next to me, speaking in the broadest of working class London accents. And I'm happy. This close to the grandest London, the humblest, and I'm savoring my runny eggs.

Travelogue 526 – October 13
A Round in Köln

Köln is the fourth largest city in Germany. It's less than seventy years since the city was bombed to the edge of extinction – I'm reading that the bombing 'reduced' the population by 95%'. Reduced!

But Köln was always a major spot on the map, since its founding by a mass of humorless Romans in the middle of the century that saw Jesus walk the earth. It was given the pithy name Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. It became capital of this bit of frontier, and the proud city never looked back.

For the Romans, the Rhine was the line in the sand, beyond which lived scary people with painted faces and strange fashions. After the dust had cleared on that half-millennium tug of war, the Germans firmly in charge of the fifth-century European Union, the Rhine began its life as an artery of trade. The Colonia, or Köln, became queen of this little stretch of river, jewel of the Rhineland.

Proud Kölners were the force behind one of the messiest battles of the Middle Ages, that of Worringen in 1288, in which the citizens of the city threw in with one side in a messy dynastic squabble, one in which they would normally have no interest, because it so happened that John of Brabant was fighting against the Archbishop of Köln. The archbishop was lord of those parts, and the city wanted independence. The rule of the archbishop dates back to the reign of great Otto I, who appointed his brother as archbishop and then created the Electorate of Cologne in the tenth century, as part of an ongoing effort to undermine the power of the landed aristocracy.

A few thousand left dead on the fields outside Worringen, the city of Köln was granted its independence. It was a free city, and would be until Napoleon came along.

And then the (American) planes came ...

In any case, Köln is back in the game, modern and crowded. My impression, strolling among the busy streets radiating out from the Dom and orienting themselves by the mighty Rhine, among the streets of shopping and the streets of business, buildings rising stolidly and with precious little reference to Romans or archbishops, Otto or Adolph, my impression is of Chicago. I've made the mistake of booking a hotel on the far side of the train station. That means at least twice a day pushing our way through the choking hallways of the station, and being pushed. Abandoning National Socialism does not mean the Germans have softened any of their edges.

Lodging beyond the station also means walking the gauntlet of the sleazy, narrow street leading to the hotel, past fast food and gambling and bars. Passers-by give us the big city stare, and we lower our heads to soldier on. The hotel lobby smells of cigarette smoke. The entire hotel, one dim and steep moaning staircase leading up to a few rooms per floor, stinks of cigarettes. A couple regulars sit in the dining room, papered in the colors of a post-apocalyptic sunset. They stare and they smoke.

These two grey men must be the ones who arrive back at the hotel at 1:30am, shouting as they slowly mount the stairs. One night, they are laughing at a story that mysteriously revolves around repeated shouts of 'Filippo!' The laughing dissolves into coughing. They stomp as they walk. Then suddenly they are quiet, as though they vanish. There is only the moon over the jumbled tile roofs of the neighborhood. The corner of one nearly penetrates our window.

Menna gets her first taste of winter in Köln. Her fingertips ache as we negotiate our way across the city center. Her brows contract in real anxiety, as she buries her cheeks into the collar of her new fleece coat. We stroll with Scottie by the river, among chill winds. We find Old Town, and stroll among the jolly high house fronts around the Heumarkt. We discover the Great Saint Martin church, with its dash of nineteenth century Romance in the high square tower, with its own dash of Rome underneath its floor, in piles of old brick that used to be a bath, used to be warehouses. And through it all Menna holds herself tightly inside the fleece, looking at the world through worried eyes.

I have come to Köln, inflicting this weather on Menna, in order to run a race. On Sunday morning, she and I have to throw back the bed covers and welcome the pre-dawn cold. We have to rush out of doors and down Sleazy Street to the station. We have to catch the Metro. This we rehearsed yesterday. This well-oiled German race has a start and finish on opposite sides of the river, and on Sunday morning there are no reliable trains directly across the river. We have to travel by means of two Metro lines, describing a lengthy U south and then back n the other side.

The first train sis at one station overlong. The second train is ten minutes coming. I have to start stripping off layers on the train. Just off the train we encounter the back of the long line of runners, a crowd stretching toward the river and out of sight. Menna jogs with me beside the crowds. Someone with a loudspeaker announces the start, and the crowd stirs, starts jogging in place, but it goes nowhere. It will be a few minutes until the start reaches this far. Menna and I kiss and part. I slip past one of the barriers and into the crowd. I join in the tribal dances, shaking my hands and shifting from foot to foot. This one is for the free city.

Travelogue 525 – October 12
A Clown in Köln

There are four clowns in front of the cathedral in Cologne. They stand on boxes at intervals in front of the facade of the great structure, some thirty meters from the doorway. It's early enough in the day that the plaza is not crowded, and there is an informal, cocky manner to the clowns. I'm judging they are French, as I try to listen in to their comments to each other. They are dressed and painted in white or in silver, hooded like ghosts or wigged like seventeenth-century burghers. When they are in role they wave to tourists, or they bend at the waist and beckon to them in inviting and in comical style.

I watch the people invited, and they seem powerless before the attention. They look away, look down, or they decline the invitation with a shake of the head. The clowning has a chilling effect on the tourists at this hour. Afternoon and evening tourists are a different breed. If nothing else, they have the support of greater crowds around them.

We make movies about scary clowns. We have a word for fear of clowns: coulrophobia. Interestingly, since the ancient Greeks had no clowns, the coiners of terms, who so love Greek, had to borrow from a word for stilt-walkers.

These are no American sad-hobo clowns. These are mischief and mime clowns. Cologne has a reputation as the Karneval town in the Rhineland. These clowns have a pedigree. But face paint is still a mask, and there is a menace to masks, even if the menace is Fun. We mortals feel impotent in the face of rampant Fun, as much as we make of our fun-loving, wild-child personae.

The best satire is ambiguous. The jester cringes before the king even as he mocks. So are the clowns in their seventeenth-century wigs paying tribute to history or mocking it? Are we to be welcomed or jeered at, having come to admire this heritage site? Both.

Cologne's Cathedral, or the Kölner Dom, officially the Hohe Domkirche St. Petrus, is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe. It has the second-tallest spires and the largest façade of any church in the world. Construction started in 1248, inspired by the acquisition in 1164 of the relics of the Three Kings, taken from a church in Milan as spoils of war by Frederick Barbarossa. Church leaders knew the relics were going to be a big pilgrim attraction, so the cathedral needed to be suitable, needed to be a monument to the city's greatness.

The foundation stone was laid the Archbishop, one Konrad von Hochstaden, and work continued on for over two hundred years. Why the work was halted I don't know, but the spires were left unfinished, and a massive crane left in place over the south tower as adornment for centuries.

Scottie says he learned on his city tour that Kölners passed along, generation to generation, the superstition that if ever the work on the cathedral were finished, the world would end. So I suppose the crane was a symbol of the city's tender-hearted compassion for mortals around the world.

Eventually the romantic nineteenth century rolled around, with its fetish for the Gothic and with its no-nonsense commitment to engineering, and work was initiated again, tempting fate and apocalypse. In 1880, the work was complete, and everyone held their breath. The sun still rose the next morning, and the next, illuminating two towers 157 meters tall.

In the front plaza, beyond the station of the clowns, there is a replica of the finial that caps each tower, set at ground level for the tourists to gape at, wondering how the laborers, in a horse-and-buggy age, managed to lift this mass of stone 157 meters into the air and plant it like the star on a Christmas tree, one on each height.

The clowns see this every day. They don't look to the heights. They don't show any regard for the works of man, the precision and the wonder thereof. They prefer the quirks of God, the two-legged measures of imprecision, and they mug and they smirk and they call us out. 'You!' they seem to shout, in their silent derision. 'You! You are in Köln. That's right, you are in my city. Kiss the ring. These are my times.'