The Stars We Do Not See

I am a bit late in the game to be talking about this, but all the way back in December my super amazing wife and I went to go see a travelling exhibit at the National Gallery of Art titled “The Stars We Do Not See.” It comprised of works by indigenous Australians and it was phenomenal.

The style of the works were all so new to me, comprised of motifs we hadn’t seen before coming from a tradition we were unfamiliar with. I think the closest thing they looked like was all the tingatinga art we saw in Tanzania, with repeating designs based in nature. All the dots made for an entrancing way to create the image. It’s not exactly pointillism, and for some of the works each dot (in some cases painted with a brush made of human hair) represented not a portion of an image but a star, all connected throughout the universe.

Wawurritjpal II (the fish) by Wukun Wanambi, 2005.

Really the cultural context probably rendered the art impenetrable, but it was still transfixing. A sign in the exhibition was careful to explain that the works derived from twin concepts of Country and Dreaming. Country is “more than just landscape” it is “the nexus of land, skies, waters, knowledge, bodies, and Law,” and “understood to be closely tied to personal identity.” Dreaming meanwhile is the era before Country, “when Ancestral beings shaped the world, created life, and established the Laws…” More importantly, since the knowledge of Country and Dreaming is sacred and is often secret to outsiders, shared only with community members, the exhibit had to make sure to specify that everything on display was “suitable for public viewing and none of the information described in the labels is culturally restricted.”

The first sets of works were these eucalyptus tree trunks covered in designs. That was such an interesting canvas to use. With the trunks being so tall and thin the motifs stretched up and down and to get a sense of it all you of course had to walk all the way around. Displayed together they created a forest of meaning.

Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent *by Jimmy Njiminjuma, 1993*

The different types of art used a range of different materials. Some focused on all natural materials, with earth pigments painted onto the tree trunks or pieces of eucalyptus bark. The advent of eucalyptus bark as a canvas is a fairly modern invention to allow the pieces to be mobile. Normally the designs would have been painted on rock walls or the like, and so immoveable. It’s in the piece above, Garak, that each dot is a star and each line the connection between the stars and everything else. Other works embraced other available materials, including stretched canvas and artificial pigments.

Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, 1980

The star of the show was probably the above work. The photo doesn’t capture it but it is monumental, stretching across a whole wall. In this one, Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country, the label tells me the “collaborative painting chronicles the artists’ deep connection to the Country while also referencing the dispossession of the Anmatyerre people, whose land was overtaken by the Napperby cattle station in the early 20th century.” What I like about it is although you can’t tell exactly what the whole narrative is, from the line down the middle and the different sections it is clear there is a narrative. Some of the designs have to do with foodways, and some clearly with even more grim topics. It is awe-inspiring in-person.

Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti by Doreen Reid Nakamarra, 2006

Another favorite piece from the exhibit was the above one, Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti. It was displayed horizontally, reflecting, the label says, how the artist Nakamarra painted it on the ground; it has no horizon or top or bottom. It was mesmerizing. Being displayed on the floor meant you could walk around it, and it seemed to change as you did. The rippling peaks on the painting makes it feel like you are flying over the landscape it depicts. It was stunned at how such a simple pattern of peaks could create a whole terrain.

Erub Has a Bitumen Road Now *by Clinton Naina, 2004*

And then finally for this blog post we have Erub Has a Bitumen Road Now, the name referencing the artist discovering that his home town on Erub Island had gotten a tarmac road. The piece does not have the same sort of aesthetic as all the other ones I’ve been going gaga over, but what it does have is a white cross in the lower right corner. According to the label, this symbolizes the event known on Erub as the “Coming of the Light,” which was the arrival of the London Missionary Society on July 1, 1871. I think so much about the LMS and its impact on modern Zambia. In these places, the Christianity espoused by the Society has become the deep-seated and meaningful beliefs of the communities, replacing and displacing, as the label notes, “traditional culture, language, and rituals.” For Naina the linkage he finds most significant is the line between the arrival of the LMS and the environmental and spiritual degradation symbolized by a road designed for cars. And yet that event is still referred to as the “Coming of the Light.” I suppose for all I know the name has become a consciously dark irony, but that juxtaposition is some insight to the Torres Islander version of a question I’ve wondered about in Zambia.

In the end, “The Stars We Do Not See” is a very powerful exhibition with gorgeous art and which leaves one with many things to think about. It has bumped Australia much further up the places I want to visit (though technically I’ve been before) so I can explore more the world of indigenous art there.

Manatee Parks

We are wrapping up our current little sunshine state series with everyone’s favorite Florida fauna, the manatee. In the midst of writing that sentence and trying to remember that “the sunshine state” was Florida’s nickname, I have found out that the legislature has gone to great lengths to gerrymander the state symbols and delineate as many animal constituencies as possible. So although manatees are Florida’s state marine mammal, on that same page you’ll note the dolphin still makes the list as the state saltwater mammal (which in my opinion does not address manatee migration habits), the alligator is titled the state reptile, leaving therefore room in turn for the panther to represent the entire Linnean kingdom as state animal and thus rounding out every animal that anyone is aware lives in Florida. I will note for the sake of my dairy cow-raising father-in-law that we get down to meat of things with the Cracker Cattle being the Florida state cattle, rounded up presumably by cowboys on the state horse, the Florida Cracker horse. Every state is stupid and ridiculous.

But back to why we’re here, manatees. The state is dotted with manatee viewing areas and over the course of our travels we visited two of them on different days. I am not educating any readers here but manatees, like any reasonable living creature, prefer warm water and will therefore concentrate on cold days where the water is warm, specifically the cooling outlets of power plants. The first of these we visited was Tampa Electric’s Manatee Viewing Center next to their Big Bend Power Station.

*Look at all those manatee backs at the Tampa Electric Manatee Viewing Center.*

I had first learned of this viewing area via Atlas Obscura, and I thought it would be kinda hokey. Like not really a destination, but some picnic tables where the locals were aware you could see manatees. We were very surprised therefore when we arrived and turned into the large parking lot dotted with solar panels leading the way to a massive visitor’s center. It is a whole destination. You could spend the afternoon. We only really touched on a part of it because it was so late in the day when we arrived, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten down to the big viewing tower or anything before the trails closed.

But we arrived and proceeded directly to the manatees. And there were tons! It will be an unfair comparison to our next manatee park, because on the day we visited the TECO MVC it had been cold (for Florida) for the few days prior in addition to being a bit nippy right then. So the manatees were huddled for our viewing pleasure right in the little discharge canal. They mostly floated there. It was a lot like watching hippos, in that most of what you see is small patches of the backs of manatees, though every once in a while you see a snort or them swimming around. Manatees fight less than hippos do though. Still, magical to see the majestic manatee in its natural(ish) habitat.

And the visitor center is very nice too. We didn’t poke around the exhibits much, but they had a café and a gift shop. The whole place is set up by the power company to make people feel better about living next to a coal-fired power plant (when I bought a lapel pin in the gift shop the credit card charge was to Tampa Electric), but it’s pretty effective. It seems a great place to take kids, and also very significantly they had an unbranded Mold-a-Rama, which I went gaga for. I love a Mold-a-Rama, and I am now the proud owner of a plastic manatee.

*I love plastic injection molding so much.*

Our next manatee viewing experience some time later was down at the Fort Myers Manatee Park! This again was a nice little way to spend some time in an afternoon. This park is downstream (as seems obvious in hindsight now that I’ve looked it up) of the Fort Myers Power Plant. This one, from my quick Googling, is natural gas- and fuel oil-fired. The biggest thing about this park for us is that it had been warmer when we visited, so there were not so many manatees. They were taking advantage of the nicer weather to go forage in less crowded pastures. But there were a few, and also some big fish and then also some kayakers, one of whom we got to watch capsize. I can’t tell if that was due to the fish, the manatees, or a personalized imbalance.

*Some shadows of Fort Myers manatees, if you can spot ’em.*

The rest of the park here too is a nature park with some short nature trails, and we got to check those out more thoroughly in this location because we had more time. It is always beautiful to be in nature. This location too had a gift shop (though without lapel pins that said something akin to “Fort Myers Manatee Park”) but which supported the local government instead of the local power company. There was no visitor center per se except a few signs about manatees. All in all a nice little local park, with the added bonus of seeing some manatees, and pondering the modern power infrastructure that makes the world work.

*I think the first two signs are redundant.*

Tampa Museum of Art

This post continues of course my current little disjointed Florida series, but it also continues a survey of Tampa-adjacent art museums – I have previously covered on this blog visiting both the Dalí Museum and the Imagine Museum. Both those museums are actually in St. Petersburg, but we won’t split hairs. On this day we were in fact in Tampa visiting the Tampa Museum of Art to give us something intellectual to do on a sunny Florida day in late November.

The most significant part of the experience of going to the Tampa Museum of Art was the fact that we (my super amazing wife and I) went with my mom. As a youth, I do not recall my family going to art museums a whole bunch. This is not my mom’s fault, it is the fault of kids having such a heavy choice in the selection of museums, by which I mean my brother always wanted to go to the Natural History Museum but if I had a say in the matter we would be going over to the Air & Space Museum. I think if dad got to pick we went over to the American History Museum, and mom’s influence was generally being in favor of any museum that would keep either the kids or dad from getting too rowdy. All of which to say that although it’s not like we haven’t taken mom to art museums before (see my first two links), it is always fun!

And the Tampa Museum of Art has quite an eclectic collection. Thinking back, the eclecticness is probably my major recollection. The museum’s website has that habit of particular museums that I am disappointed by, i.e. they have only a tiny portion of their collection viewable online, so it will be hard to show you some of this, as a heads up. The bulk of the museum is up on the second floor, and exiting the elevator we were deposited in a small section of I think recently acquired contemporary works. The first ones I took photos of were by Ya La’Ford and Paul Devoti. The piece my mom particularly liked, which I cannot find online because I did not take the right photos, was a large photographic artwork titled I think “Tod’s Liquors.” This was a I think you would call it a surrealist piece, a photo of the eponymous store but with out front a whole bunch of people designed to exude character. It would be seedy if it weren’t so sunny and my mom liked it a bunch. Maybe that says something about her psyche. This is a swerve for her because while that was up there in her favorites list, her actual favorite was a much less surprising pick by Emile Gruppe titled “Winter Stream.”

Winter Stream by Emile Gruppe, c. 1935-1945

I mean look at that thing, that is much more a mom piece of art. This piece was in the second part of the museum we wandered through in our rectangular journey (the museum is mostly on the one floor, and you go around the perimeter), a long gallery of various impressionists and closely related artists. I feel like I am about to say I didn’t know the earth went around the sun here, but I’m not sure I was aware there were particularly any American impressionists. But there were and they were pretty good. As you walked down the gallery the impressionism came into focus with a number of artworks more in the Hudson School vein. The bits I liked the most though were the most Florida bits, which were paintings of the swamp. There were some really great ones! I feel like capturing say a sunset over a river valley nestled amongst mountains is a difficult skill but a widespread one as you got all these American artists roving the West learning from each other on how to paint that, but how many artists were honing the ability to evoke the particular choking depth of a cypress grove? It seems to me it takes a real light brush for that stuff but some of the artists on display had mastered it.

Untitled (Marshland with Palm) *by Alfred Hair, c. 1958*

Like all conscientious American art museums are doing these days, the museum was also taking a focus on art by Black artists. “Untitled (Marshland with Palm)” above is by Highwayman Alfred Hair, but also they had a small if stunning display of Vodou flags by Haitian artist Myrlande Constant. These were really remarkable. We have a Haitian friend whose house is filled with beautiful art, but these flags were an artform we were entirely unfamiliar with. They are so intricate, using beadwork to form scenes inspired by religious stories.

Ogou Ferrialle by Myrlande Constant, 2004

But I mentioned eclecticness. After all that Very American stuff, then the museum has the real pride of its collection, a whole bunch of mostly Etruscan artifacts. You really gotta change up your perspective as you go from one gallery to the next. Mom wasn’t too interested. The focus on the antiquities comes from an early donor, one Joseph Veach Noble. There is apparently exactly one photo of this guy, and it is fierce. But what to say about these artifacts? They were neat. The Etruscans are mysterious enough that every little glimpse into their lives is a portal into a strange and unknown world. Like a little model of a liver used for divination, that is something I would never do, use a liver to divine the future. And then of course there is also the mundane but beautiful, like a 2300-year-old fish plate with bright colors and fetching wave pattern on the side and a very useful built-in central indentation probably used for holding fish sauce. I would use that today and as always it is so amazing to see the same brushwork that they would have seen as they sat down to an evening meal.

*Liver Model for Divination, ca. 150-50 BCE*

And so yeah that was the museum. A nice place with a lot of cool art and changing exhibitions. It is strongest when focusing on art centered on Florida itself, reaching into the swampy mists to discover a side of the United States not typically part of the American canon. But artifacts are cool too!

Mote SEA

Fresh from our Danube adventure, the next few of posts will comprise something of a Florida series, amalgamating a couple different trips. During one summer when I stayed with my grandparents down in Florida, I read off of their shelf A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith. It remains the source of most of my impressions of the origins of Florida, and to this day I expect there to be a lot more cattle around then I typically wind up seeing when I’m down there. All of which is to say don’t worry, these posts won’t be nearly so long and will also involve a lot more marine life.

On one of our trips on down to Florida we were especially excited to visit Mote SEA. Longtime readers of the blog will recall that my super amazing wife and I (only my super amazing girlfriend at the time of writing the post I’m about to link, oh how times change) are big fans of Mote. I have many fond memories of going as a Youth, and my super amazing wife loves both sharks and Eugenie Clark.

Mote SEA is their new aquarium as of October 2025. We had initially tried to go in November 2025 only to find out all the tickets had sold out well in advance. It is very popular! We finally did manage to go on a subsequent trip a couple months later, but only because this time we had bought our tickets well in advance; it had again sold out the day we visited.

Whereas the previous aquarium, Mote Marine, had been jutting out into Sarasota Bay, perched on one end of Lido Key, the new Mote SEA is well inland (if you don’t count the retention ponds) and behind a mall. Frankly I’m about to come down a bit harshly on the aquarium. And for that I’m sorry. I understand entirely the purpose of the new location. Mote SEA stands for Science Education Aquarium, and the place I think is designed around school field trips to get kids interested in science and marine life and conservation. Which is a very, very noble goal that I support wholeheartedly, but having visited Mote Marine so many times, it just lacks the same charm. At Mote Marine you felt more like you were visiting what it was, which was a marine animal rescue center with an aquarium tacked on. At Mote SEA it seems so much more like just an aquarium. And they didn’t even bring over Molly the Mollusk, though again apparently for good reason, that being she is just too fragile to move. I read online that they are going to re-open Mote Marine to the public in some capacity, but maybe that is just an optimistic rumor.

But enough of that, let’s talk about the good bits. The place is very nicely done! You enter and, if you were hungry like we were, you can duck directly into the café they have on-site. My super amazing wife had a fish sandwich, which I will never tire of pointing out is a bit morbid in an aquarium. Then you take a three-story escalator right to the tippy-top to start looking around. The aquarium of course retains its focus on the sealife of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Up on the top floor in an outside area they have both manatees and the ever-cute otters, so they were both as always entertaining to watch.

As you wander down you get to more fishy-fish, with many tanks of fish. And also penguins! Penguins don’t feature much in Florida generally, but here we happened across a feeding so we got to watch them slurp up some fish. I also liked to watch roundabout here the jellyfish setup they had, which seemed to me to be basically a fish washing machine. I liked to think they had gotten a little bit dirty and needed a freshening up.

*You have to make sure to regularly wash your jellyfish.*

And then of course there was the absolute best bit of the aquarium, which was the shark tank. It is a big tank and if you are descending from the top of the aquarium you first encounter it from above, looking down through the surface at all of the sharks. This is cool and they have going along with it an exhibit on Eugenie Clark, which is great. But then eventually all the way down you get to the tunnel underneath the shark tank, and if the shark tank is the best part of the aquarium, the tunnel is the best part of the shark tank and worth the visit. You get to see the sharks gliding around above and beside you and that alone is worth the visit to the aquarium. Just hang out there for a while watching all the sharks and rays glide past, it is great.

Having gone through the whole aquarium, we realized it hadn’t actually taken that much time, so we went on through again, this time appreciating the tops of the sharks even more now that we had seen the bottom, and getting to see the manatees in a different spot of their tank and munching on different pieces of cabbage. Eventually we exited through the gift shop where we both had been tempted by many things but ultimately resisted. All in all if you’re around you should check out Mote SEA. Now that Mote Marine is closed it has the advantage of being no longer knowable and therefore perfect in my memory, but Mote SEA is very good at what it is trying to do, which is show you that Eugenie Clark was cool because she liked sharks.

Eurotrip: Munich Addendum

*View from the Marienplatz, including the glockenspiel.*

Reading this week:

The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

The title of my last post was “It ends in Regensburg,” which referred to the cruise but not this series of Eurotrip posts, don’t you worry! The thing about Regensburg is that it doesn’t have an international airport, so getting home again was going to require getting to Munich first. To accomplish that, we left the ship pretty early on our final day of the cruise. It’s exactly like a hotel, in that they want you off sometime in the morning so they can prep the cabins for the next round of guests. We had a lovely breakfast and the ship had arranged taxis for us to the airport. My super amazing wife and I head out alongside most of the rest of my family, with our immediate destination as the train station. And from there we caught a train and were on our way!

A brief pause to evaluate whether I would go on a Viking cruise again. I think most definitely someday. My parents paid for this trip as part of the 40^th wedding anniversary, but a quick look at their website reveals this same trip costs about $2700 per person (plus airfare). That does seem worth it. The customer service on the cruise was top notch, with staff remembering your name and preferences and working hard to make sure you have a pleasant time. The food is good and the tours they arrange are indeed pretty interesting and well-run. A Viking cruise suffers only in the same way any cruise does, in that the time is a bit whirlwind, but it was a lot of fun. However, I don’t think we’re going to sign up for another one soon. They do seem to cater to a slightly older crowd who is willing to give themselves over to the steady hand of Viking; mom had wanted to go on a cruise instead of just a generic European vacation specifically so she didn’t have to do any of the planning. My super amazing wife and I are still young and foolish enough to plan overly elaborate vacations on our own, but I could easily see at some point becoming a Viking aficionado. Those world cruises don’t seem like too bad of a deal, really.

But in the meantime and until I save up for that, we were off to Munich. We arrived fairly smoothly at one of the Munich airport hotels, dropped off our stuff, and head on into the city. To get there we took the S-Bahn, which also went smoothly but took a little bit longer than expected. All our trains this day were a bit delayed, which goes very much against stereotypes. Emerging from the train we walked around the Marienplatz admiring everything. On our way back we happened upon a performance of the Rathaus-Glockenspiel which was fortunate timing. Off the Marienplatz we poked a little ways into the Viktualienmarkt (open-air market) and checked out a shop or two, and then got a Munich-appropriate Taiwanese lunch.

This all brought us to our major destination in the city: the Museum Fünf Kontinente! This is an ethnographic museum, and I found it because I was searching for Africa museums in Germany. The website is unassuming, so I didn’t know what to expect, but upon arrival the building is very assuming. It is yet another undeservedly under-trafficked museum. It had a lot of cool stuff.

*Early 14th century Iranian tile fragment.*

Upon arrival we got the “combo” ticket so we could also see the special exhibits. Before getting to those we started off at the Islamic art which was, per usual, gorgeous. Many if not most things had English labels in addition to the German, which was convenient for us. From Islamic art we then went into the exhibit on Oceania which was likewise filled with gorgeous and mesmerizing pieces. One thing I wish I understood better about all the collections was the how or why of it. I suppose it is an ethnographic museum so they filled it with ethnographic stuff, but like, there are some Benin bronzes in there with little reflection of how they were there.

One section did have an explanation, which was an exhibit on Myanmar. It came with a disclaimer that it was curated in 2014 when the prospects for Myanmar are different than they are now. The items in the exhibit came largely from a collecting trip circle 1910 when the museum sent a dude out there to buy a bunch of stuff, which is a dream job if there ever was one. This was followed by an exhibit on Japan celebrating 160 years of German-Japanese relations featuring art by a guy that was on the Perry expedition. The art was apparently from his second, non-Perry visit, whatever that means for its perspective.

I of course liked the sub-Saharan Africa stuff the best. One of the special exhibits we had gotten the combo ticket for was “Merci Maman” all about the Malian art of painting on busses. It included some interesting thoughts on the culture, like the bus boys (conductors) being the “heroes” of the operation, which is not how I experienced it in Zambia. They made some hay of how artists will put both Putin and an American flag on a bus without seeing a contradiction. Based on her experience however my super amazing wife didn’t see a contradiction at all, she figured people just know both groups give the country money.

*Veranda post carved by Olowe of Ise, early 20th century.*

In the non-special-exhibit bit of Africa, one thing they did was mix in contemporary art with the more ancient stuff, which is an interesting comment on both. Some pieces from the DRC included masks and costumes made of Kinshasa trash which is an interesting take. Another claim to fame for the Museum Fünf Kontinente for American visitors is that it houses one of the Yoruba veranda posts carved by Olowe of Ise that inspired the design of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

At this point after a long day we were beginning to lose steam so we kinda zoomed through the North America section. It was interesting to see North America through a German lens. They kinda mashed a lot of stuff together, or more accurately stuff from a particular culture would be spread throughout, despite a sign explaining that “Indians are not all the same!” The final room we perused was full of Peruvian artifacts, including a few textiles that were 2000 years old, which always blows my mind. It really brings you so close to the past.

Stand depicting flowers and birds, likely a border to a larger woven piece. Typical of grave goods in the Nazca region, and came to the museum from an excavation by Heinrich Ubbelohde-Doering. Camelid hair, dyed, 150BC-100AD. Let’s hope Heinrich was a good guy.

Full of the treasure of five continents we made our way back to the hotel via the scenic route through some more shops. And then after a night at the hotel it was off to the airport proper to catch our flight and head on back home, our Eurotrip at its final final end.

Eurotrip: It ends in Regensburg

*The famous Stone Bridge of Regensburg.*

Our Danube River cruise ended in Regensburg. Having seen the river at this point I am surprised that it isn’t the end of the line for everyone. I can’t dig up the quote but I remember reading Mark Twain’s thoughts on what they call rivers out in the western United States; having seen the Mississippi river, it was strange to him that people would refer to tiny little creeks that even disappeared sometimes in the summer as rivers. The Danube isn’t quite that tiny but still, doesn’t seem like there is a lot of room to work with on that thing.

*The Roman remnants of Regensburg, and some bins.*

We spent the first part of the morning on the ship-arranged tour of Regensburg. Our German tour guide this day was less no-nonsense than Daniel but was very nice. She showed us the Roman bits of Regensburg along with several patrician towers, the fanciest way to flex on your neighbors in the 13^th century. There was also the Stone Bridge, Regensburg’s medieval wonder. It is a nice bridge though when I was talking about river navigation in the second paragraph this was more specifically what I was talking about.

*The longest-running restaurant of all time right there.*

We popped over the bridge to admire some of the sights but the real excitement was on the southern side anyway. There was the salt shed that was the heart of Regensburg’s medieval economy and which has a very neat little visitor center inside. There is also more importantly the thing I was most excited for in Regensburg, the Historische Wurstkuchl, i.e. what is probably the oldest continually operating restaurant in the world. They have been slinging meals for 900 years (sausages for only about 200 but boiled meat before that). We got lunch there, with the sausage and sauerkraut raising spirits slightly dampened by the rain.

*The* Ruthof permanently moored on the side of the Danube and home of the Donau Schiffahrtsmuseum.

Tell you what though, the REAL gem of Regensburg is the variously named Donau Schiffahrtsmuseum, or Danube Shipping Museum. This thing was so great. It is not hard to find, it is right on the river there downtown, but it did not seem to be very well-visited. My super amazing wife and I were the only ones onboard when we visited in the middle of the day. The museum actually comprises of several ships, but the flagship is the paddle steamer Ruthof, so you walk across the brow and pay your entrance fee there. That’s all where the very tiny little gift shop was, which delightfully carried lapel pins! (of the stick pin variety)

The ship was so great. It acted as a towboat on the Danube, and so would pull along barges transporting goods. I’m pulling these details from the above-linked website, but it was originally built intra-war, struck a mine during WWII (who knew the Danube was mined), and sat on the bottom for 12 years before being raised and then was in service all the way until 1973. Which is amazing when you consider its heart is a horizontal, double-boiler, double (?) expansion steam engine packing, apparently 800 hp, and again driving paddle wheels. The ship is pretty big too, and must have been a behemoth to navigate on the river with a two of barges behind.

*View of the front end of the engine. Look how well maintained it is.*

But it is not a ship museum but a shipping museum, so the first part has tons of dioramas and ship models and other information about Danube shipping. They have models of shipyard and of the salt fleet we learned about in Passau, and even more fun stuff like schiffmühles or ship mills, a moveable river-powered mill. The museum documents a whole river-bound history and culture I don’t think you’d ever think about if you didn’t look into it on purpose, what with the modern world rending a lot of these things obsolete.

*Looking forward from the starboard bridgewing and heading to the salt shed.*

After the navigation museum the rest of the afternoon wound down with some wandering around Regensburg. I admired the Kepler house from the outside and looked at some more Roman walls and the like and there was some final bit of souvenir shopping to do. Our final dinner on the Viking ship Tor was a nice time to say goodbye to the crewmembers that had treated us so well during our visit, and finally we returned to our rooms to rest for the next day when we would finally strike out on our own once again.

*Part of Regensburg’s Roman walls, now residing in the basement of a parking garage.*

Eurotrip: Passau Ober All

With only a couple days left in the cruise, we awoke this morning having sailed into Passau and therefore our final country of Germany. And it was very quickly evident we were in Germany as we started the walking tour of Passau. Because we had moored outboard of another ship, the tour had to be bumped 15 minutes earlier, representing something of a nightmare scenario for our local tour guide Daniel. Daniel was very German and opened with a small lecture about how, as a German, he believes in being punctual, and that means not late and not early.

I loved Daniel so much, he was great. Unlike our other guides, he didn’t really have patter and didn’t talk while walking. This caused some of the people on our tour to think they had audio problems with their headsets. Daniel did do some funny stuff despite being no nonsense – he is normally a high school teacher, you see. One lady asked him what he meant by “virology” (she had misheard) and he simply said “I did not say that. I do not know that word.” Later my dad told Daniel he (dad) had looked it up and it meant the study of viruses, to which Daniel said flatly “I know.”

We learned a few things on the tour. At St. Stephen’s cathedral, Daniel told us the bulb-shaped domes atop the towers were indicative of the baroque style, so anything with bulbs was built 1600s or later. That’s a handy tip for you architecture-spotters out there. The cathedral had been rebuilt after a fire in the 1600s, and tell you what man there seems to have been a number of fires around that time that favored baroque architects (the same thing had happened at Gottweig Abbey, you see). The cathedral is in the midst of being restored, and so had just been cleaned while we were there, and it was very bright and beautiful. St Stephen’s claim to fame is that their pipe organ is the largest in Europe with something like 18,000 pipes. While we were there it was being restored, so it didn’t have all of its pipes this day. But tell you what, even with 80% or whatever of the pipes missing, it is still a rather large pipe organ. Also interesting is that in the church St. Stephen’s relics have been there since the 1400s or so, Daniel told us.

*When it takes a crane to clean your pipes.*

We then did some more wandering around town, learning things like Passau didn’t get bombed during the war because the Allies didn’t think it was important enough, and admiring the confluence of rivers. Passau is where it is because it is the meeting point of the rivers Inn (meaning “Wild,” according to Daniel), Ilz, and Danube, and it is pretty to see them come together. In our remaining time until lunch my super amazing wife and I wandered Passau, admiring cuckoo clocks and old books and buying Christmas decorations.

*The Inn River, shortly before it joins the Danube.*

After lunch the plan was to go to the Oberhausmuseum. This required some commitment because the ship was actually sailing shortly after lunch but there would be busses you could take to catch up (though if you missed the bus you were stuck in Passau). Plus it had started raining. But we girded ourselves and went and I am very glad we did, the Oberhausmuseum was great!

My records have this down as “Passaw” by Leonhard Abent, copper engraving, 1576. *The Oberhaus is on the hill above the city.* The caption also read “The view of Passau is characteristic of the situation of the residential city in the late 16^th century. The Prince-Bishop (coat of arms) and the citizens determined the fate of the trading city.” But it appears Wikimedia has it recorded differently.

To get there we took a bus up (it’s called the Oberhaus because it’s up on a hill you see) and started touring the castle. It is very big and has a lot of cool exhibits on various aspects of the history of Passau all the way back to Roman times and before. One thing I really liked is that they had a whole bunch of pictures of the castle through the ages because now we were there also in this long long history of the town. I also started noticing boats in the pictures, which soon enough led to the highlight of the Oberhausmuseum, a whole series of displays on the salt trade!

*A salt barge with a load of kufe salt barrels.*

It seems that Passau got wealthy off of salt initially. I think I am messing up some of this history, but my understanding is that salt was mined for centuries and centuries upriver on the Inn. It could then be easily floated down to Passau, but to get it up to Regensburg (farther upriver on the Danube, our next destination) was quite the operation, and this is what the exhibit was about. The Oberhaus itself protected Passau and this salt transshipment monopoly. Since you couldn’t really paddle upriver on the Danube against the current, there were these whole long caravans of salt transport boats, pulled along by teams of up to 50 horses. The salt itself was packed into special small barrels called kufe. I loved reading about ancient systems of trade, it was so good and such a pleasant surprise in the museum.

*Walking down from the Oberhaus in the rain.*

Other great bits about the museum included the views, which overlooked the city of Passau and the confluence of the rivers. Like I said it had started raining, so the town and upriver valleys had a mist-shrouded look to them. Even the bathroom window had a gorgeous overlook. There was also an exhibit on the different craft guilds in the city. One of the most interesting things there is that the guild that made candles and the guild that made gingerbread were in fact the same guild because both candles and gingerbread use the products of bees (wax and honey). But we were rather worn out from a long day of walking around at this point, so we decided to make our way down the hill through the rain, which was very moody and scenic but meant we were soaked through by the time we arrived at the bus rendezvous. We warmed up for a while in a restaurant with a beer and a cheese plate before getting transported back to the ship.

Overall Passau was a surprisingly interesting and beautiful place to visit. We learned a lot about the salt trade and regional dynamics and what it takes to maintain Europe’s largest pipe organ. The evening ended with us sailing up the Danube one last time, my super amazing wife and I leaning out of our French balcony just admiring the peaceful, passing riverbank in the dark.

*Passau from the Oberhaus, the Inn on the left and the Danube on the right.*

Eurotrip: Wachau Cruisin’

*Notice only one of the clocks is real.*

This day was potentially the highlight of the whole river cruise. It was, you see, the day with the most river cruisin’. We woke up cruising and went to sleep cruising. But in the middle there we did go to the extremely lovely Gottweig Abbey.

To get to the Abbey the ship pulled over at Krems and we hopped on some busses. The drive was only a couple of miles but very scenic, over the Danube and then up to the Abbey on the top of the hill. It’s a great spot for an Abbey, it overlooks the surrounding towns and forest valleys. The Abbey is a bit of a throwback, I am to understand, in that they own like 1300 hectares or thereabouts and lease it out to the locals while the monks also attend the parishes. I guess you can be a monk without being a priest but I haven’t looked into it.

Upon arrival at the Abbey we watched a short video about the Abbey’s history while sipping on a welcome glass of sparkling wine. We then met up with our tour guide, who looked and resembled nothing so much as a young but slightly (only slightly) less buff Arnold Schwarzenegger. I can only assume all Austrians are like this and we got a standard one. He was acting as a tour guide while finishing up his degree, I think in hospitality. The Abbey was a very pretty place to walk around, and as we walked I noticed that the church had a painted-on clock along with some fake, painted-on windows (see top photo). These were meant to be temporary cost-savings measures. The Abbey itself isn’t actually even “finished,” with the latest renovation in the 18^th century having envisioned much more square footage. The second clock and painted-on windows were thus only meant to be there long enough until they could install a real clock and keep building the wing, but that never happened. And now the Abbey has a protected status which means they couldn’t install a real clock if they wanted to.

The Abbey’s other claim to fame is the largest Baroque staircase in Austria, topped by a big ole’ mural with Charles VI in the middle. That was nice, we spent some time admiring it. We also spent some time admiring the church. This was also impressive, but less pretty than Mattias church in Budapest I thought. However, what they do have is a skull. More specifically, the head of their founder St. Altmann is in a “precious Baroque shrine” down in the chapel where the monks do their prayers multiple times a day. Metal. The relics in Vienna were top notch with Jesus’ loincloth, but come on. You can see this relic from a bit of a distance, which our young Schwarzenegger was telling us. My dear sweet mother, though, is a bit hard of hearing, and couldn’t understand, and so was asking me what he was saying. So soon enough I was yelling in my mom’s ear about a dead guy in a box right there in the middle of a very peaceful church.

Following the tour we then went off to a dumpling demonstration which we had paid extra for. Besides heads in boxes, the other thing that Gottweig is famous for are their apricots. They like to do a lot with apricots; after this demonstration we also had a tasting of apricot wine which was great. But the dumpling demonstration was all about their special apricot dumpling recipe. I have it somewhere, though this appears to be it online. It’s an old-school boiled dessert and also very delicious with a whole apricot right in the middle. Since going to the demonstration I have just been waiting for apricot season to roll around so I can try making it myself again. Having been both wined and dined at the Abbey, we exited via the gift shop (they have some wonderful stuff) and it was back to the busses and ship for our afternoon of cruising.

And what an afternoon it was! It was us heading on up the Wachau Valley while Paul, our tour director, gave commentary. We enjoyed the tour up on the sun deck in the shade. The valley really is beautiful and cruising through while admiring a book is very nice. Just to run through the highlights, we saw the rabbits of St. Michael’s running along the roof, the Hill of 1000 Buckets (buckets of wine that is, referring to the Hill’s production capacity) apparently dubbed that by Charlemagne, the Ruine Hinterhaus, Willendorf (of Venus fame, so that was an enthralling brush with celebrity), and the Burgruine Aggstein. We were also on the lookout for nude sunbathers, which Paul sternly warned us were a hazard of navigation in these parts, but I’m not sure we saw any. Even without that though, it was simply a great afternoon on a boat in a river admiring the sights, the sort of thing you figure all of a Viking cruise is going to be until they occasionally kick you off to look at a castle.

Right around the time any sunbathers would have been packing up, we eventually head down ourselves for a strudel demonstration hosted by the ship’s pastry chef. This was very entertaining and as an added bonus of course we got to try strudel at the end. There was also tea, and once that was over the lounge cleared out and we spent the rest of the afternoon there lounging of course with our books. This is how every day should go.

*This whole time of course I had also been admiring the other river traffic, like this VERY cute Danube tugboat. Here again the pilot house goes up and down which must be so fun.*

Eurotrip: Charlemagne’s Vienna

Our second day in Vienna was destined to be all about art. We started appropriately with the oldest stuff before moving to the new, and to that end we gathered up the family and went off to visit the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, which I too would have assumed was a sex act illegal within any incorporated U.S. territory, but turns out to be the Imperial Treasury!

That place was absolutely stunning. I guess that you shouldn’t be surprised that the consolidated treasures of a 1000 years of imperial domination would be impressive, but the sheer craftsmanship on display I would not have comprehended until I got there. The place isn’t too large really, but there is room after room of items of exquisite mastery. From a sheer artistry standpoint I think the most impressive items were all the textiles. They had a number of liturgical vestments that used a “needle painting” and embroidery technique to make these portraits out of thread and I just did not know that you could do that. It is amazing that in the span of human history we mastered needle painting and then like 300 years later got around to a flush toilet with an s-bend.

*Rudolph II’s crown (1602), sorry I cut off the shiny gem at the top but this picture showed the repoussé better.*

Like I said the fam was with us on this one, or more accurately we were with them, as this was the chosen destination of my brother. His interest, you see, was in the fact they casually have the Spear of Destiny sitting around in one of their display cases. I am sure it is the real one and has real powers. And since I am sure of that, what was even more impressive was all of the other relics they have just sitting around. Here is a short list of the, again, completely authentic items they have on display:

A thorn from the crown of thorns of Christ
A piece of Christ’s mockingpipe (that’s what Google translate said)
A piece of the True Cross
A piece of the loincloth of Christ
A piece of the tablecloth from the Last Supper (Beatlemania previewed, no?)
A piece of wood from Christ’s manger
A tooth and a piece of a robe of John the Evangelist

That is not an exhaustive list, be assured. Also at the Treasury were crown jewels too, those were shiny. I know the Imperial Crown is what they like to put on their marketing materials, but I liked best the crown of Rudolph II. That sucker is gold and pearls and gem all around, with scenes done in gold repoussé depicting the highlights of his own life, which is definitely a flex. And again, just remarkable craftsmanship. It wasn’t until a few decades later that humanity got around to inventing the corkscrew. Wild.

Emerging from the dim, textile-protecting lighting, my super amazing wife and I split off from the fam to go fortify ourselves with some classic Vienna chocolate cake. From there we wandered around Vienna some, looking at various sights from Atlas Obscura, before making our way to the Albertina Museum. Needing something stronger than just chocolate cake, we also had lunch at the museum café where I spent most of the time jealous of a beautiful little orange tree they had sitting there.

Mediterranean Landscape (1952) by Pablo Picasso

Having lunched, it was into the museum! The museum was smaller than I had thought it would be, but it was nice. On the top floor they had every impressionist you could think of and a whole room of Picasso (I now understand this might have been a special exhibit). I was very impressed with the technique of some of them. Then we went over to the exhibit “Die Wiener Boheme” which is a very funny name. A Bohemian wiener, ha ha! The exhibit was mostly filled with sketches and watercolors this group of dudes did while hanging out in cafés. They are merely sketches but man those guys were so good, it is stunning, representing faces and bodies and whole scenes just in pencil, I can’t imagine how they do it. Some of them were pretty funny too, and several had (from my notes) something resembling an art deco theme.

Autumn. Nowak Feasting *(1893) by Maximilian Lenz*

Wandering off from there we saw a photography exhibit and then some neon works that were better than I thought they would be. One was titled “Email” which is funny (I wrote that down at the time, now I’m wondering what I meant). I also gathered that the Austrian German word for “enamel” is in fact “email,” so back at the Treasury many of the crown jewels and the like were noted as being made of email. At this point, me too buddy. Full of centuries of art we were sated enough to make our way back to the ship for the night.

Eurotrip: Maria Theresa’s Vienna

Reading this week:

Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa by Roland Oliver

The second full day of our river cruise on the mighty Danube I woke up while the ship was still moving, mist-shrouded Austrian-looking buildings sliding past in the quiet morning. Very neat! Right before we entered Vienna we went through another lock. Since it wasn’t our first it was much less exciting, and we experienced it as we ate breakfast, i.e. we watched a concrete wall slowly lower (from our perspective) until we broke out into the sun.

Ship operations continued to fascinate. After breakfast we went up to the sun deck again and enjoyed experiencing the ship cruise underneath low bridges, close enough to jump up and touch. In places the ship’s bridge descended even below the handrail, so we were looking down at the captain as he piloted us through. Then we were entranced by docking, followed by the crew getting the ship’s brow in place. This involved crane operations which was very fun and again I admired how carefully the ship is designed with the brow arranged to go in any direction. Also on ship’s operations one thing I wanted to mention from our initial ship’s brief is that I learned the ships are split up by language. I had wondered how tours would work if you had a whole mix of different people, but that is a straightforward solution, and meant our ship was mostly Americans with a smattering of Brits, Irish, and Australians.

Language was moot for us on this day anyways because my super amazing wife and I skipped the tour. She had spent a week in Vienna the previous year and so was an expert and we had no need of a tour guide. We stepped out into Austria (a whole new country from where we started! Wow! Travel! Very cool!) and made our way to the Vienna highlights. We started of course with the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (do you need some water for that cough), i.e. the State Hall of the National Library!

I have just noticed that its website describes the library as “one of the most important libraries in the world,” which that’s gotta be what every library thinks of itself, right? It is very nice, and older than the United States, like much in Europe is I suppose. And it is very ornate. Gigantic frescoes on the ceiling, gold everywhere, and filled with statues and globes. I enjoyed all the globes that still had California as an island. Oh and books! It’s a library you know. So many old books. At the library I read that all the books are digitized online if you want to read them (a cursory look online did not make obvious where that was) and I wonder how often the books are opened now. Once a century or so? It is not so large a library though. Like, it is a very big room, but doesn’t take too long to poke all around it. My favorite part was probably the not-so-secret secret doorways, where the shelves opened up into other rooms with more shelves and more books. They had a special exhibit on at the time, as they usually do, and after perusing that and fantasizing about more home-appropriate libraries we head out.

We were in Vienna of course, so the day’s itinerary was one sign of imperial power to another. Next up was the proof that we are all mortal, i.e. the Kapuzinergruft! It’s the crypt where they keep not all but a lot of dead Hapsburgs. Interesting place there. You kind of go through a doorway off the street and down the stairs and there is a person who will take your entrance fee and some lockers to store your bag and then you pop in and admire all the sarcophagi. They go up and up in ornateness until you get to Maria Theresa. She commissioned her massive sarcophagus covered in decorations to both signal her temporal power along with the power of life over death and here are tourists coming down to gawk for about $15 a pop. What would she think? I would so love to know.

This finally brought us to the Schönbrunn Palace tour. This tour we arranged via the ship though I think the average Vienna visitor would really be able to manage on their own. We had returned to the ship to get on the bus to the castle. We arrived and like, honestly, not impressed. I mean it is big but it seems like it is in a whatever part of town. It’s not bad there’s just like, a town outside. We did have 30 minutes before the tour started though and so we wandered around the back into the garden and like, okay, that bit really is impressive. We didn’t have too much time but we took some pictures and I think I helped an influencer out by taking pictures for her.

*The garden looked much grander if you faced the other way as this picture but I thought this statue was so very risqué*.

Anyways we went back around the front to begin the tour. Our guide started with some Hapsburg history I wasn’t too into and then we began looking at rooms. Again, for a while there I thought it was pretty dingy. The waiting rooms weren’t much for a palace and I kept comparing it in my head to Spain. But after a while we got into cool, decorated rooms that were really neat. We saw the deathbed of Napoleon’s son and the parade bed of Maria Theresa. I thought the Porcelain room was really nice, and there was another room done in parquet with illustrations cut out decorating the walls, apparently from a book presented by Mongolia. We had some more free time after the tour and so poked around the garden again, but it wasn’t enough time to give it a real good look.

After this it was a return to the ship for a quiet evening reading and admiring a lunar eclipse. The rest of the fam all reported they enjoyed their tours and cafés and chocolate cake and we went to bed excited to spend a whole second day exploring Vienna.

Pat in the World

Paperwork enthusiast seeking new frontiers of paperwork. Former submariner, former Peace Corps Volunteer. Opinions, thoughts, and comments reflect no actual persons, living or in the Navy.