Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival III

This was all the way back in May, but I went to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival along with my super amazing wife and her super amazing mom! This post is titled “III” because it is now I suppose de rigueur that I write about the festival when I go to it. We went back in 2022 and 2023, but hadn’t been able to go in the intervening years because of course we were in Sierra Leone.

As was totally expected, we had a lot of fun going to the festival this year. The most interesting thing is that this year we frankly felt a bit rushed. The previous years it had felt very easy to see everything at the festival and at some point it just felt natural to head on home. This year however we knew we needed to stay until the very end. My super amazing wife you see had entered a sweater into the knitting competition, and the only way to get your entry back was to pick it up at the very end of the festival, after 4:30pm on Sunday. I was foolishly a bit worried what we would do all afternoon while waiting for knitting entry pickup time to roll around.

*That’s not Ted Cruz announcing, that man has earned the hat.*

What the difference was I don’t know. I don’t think the festival had expanded all that much in the intervening years. Maybe we just had more to do. Upon arrival we head on into the gate and of course the first thing we had to do was to see how my super amazing wife faired in the competition. Alas, she did not get a ribbon. This was due to two factors, one being that there were some absolutely amazing entries in all the knitwear and wool-related competitions (they also had like rug-making and art felting and a whole host of things) so it was always going to be tough. The competition area always has stunningly gorgeous pieces that people have created and even though it is kind squirreled away at the far end of the exhibition areas you should always make sure to check it out. The other factor was strategic – she had entered a sweater she was knitting anyways, one that was mostly a solid color with a small ribbing of colorwork around the collar. This unfortunately meant it had to be entered into the colorwork category, going up against sweaters entirely made of colorwork, and so was probably disfavored among its peers. But none of that really matters, she got a thrill out of participating, and it was fun to see her handiwork up there on display.

Another new thing for us we made sure to see was the parade of sheep breeds. This has been going on for the duration of the festival but we hadn’t stopped by before. That was a lot of fun to watch. It is pretty much what it sounds like. In the central show arena the announcer introduces each breed of sheep before it gets trotted out, more or less willingly, and shown around the arena. There are also some fun facts being centered mostly around the breed’s history and the relative qualities of both its wool and its carcass. You know what sheep look like, fluffy things with four legs, and I have seen plenty of sheep breeds at this point, but it was different to see them all lined up with each other. I knew that Shetland sheep were small but you don’t understand how tiny they are until they are standing next to something like a Lincoln Longwool.

One particular sheep breed we learned about at the festival was the Hog Island sheep, pictured above (the top of them anyway). That was exciting for being something of a local breed; turns out modern-day Mt. Vernon got themselves a flock for their closeness to what George Washington would have kept. My super amazing wife got herself some Hog Island sheep wool roving to do some spinning later, which brings us the next major thing we needed to accomplish, which was looking at e-spinners. She wants to get an e-spinner as a more portable version of the slightly more traditional wheel she currently uses (an upright model from Ashford), and so wanted to check out some in person. These, turns out, are very expensive but there were some nice more affordable models. She did not walk out of the festival with a new wheel but she got a feel for some of the relevant features.

Then of course there were the other standard things you have to do at the Sheep & Wool Festival. We saw some of the sheep dog demonstrations, amused as always by watching just how excited the sheep dogs are to sheep dog sheep. All they want in the whole world is to round those suckers up. We also had to have some lunch, the only major decision being exactly what kind of lamb we were going to morbidly eat. We’ll eat fish at an aquarium, and we’ll eat lamb at a Sheep & Wool festival, unafraid to look either animal in the eye afterwards. I went with a lamb Milanesa, my super amazing mother-in-law with a lamb pita, and my super amazing wife with lamb mac n’ cheese, if I am remembering correctly. Then we had to check out all the vendors of which there were very very many. Our collective was only in the market for a bit of yarn this year, but was keeping a keen eye out for other accessories. I got some pewter buttons for the sweater my super amazing wife is going to super amazingly knit for me (even though I have been mostly recently bumped farther down the to-do list in favor of a baby blanket for her best friend). We resisted in the end buying some more sheep cheese.

And after having checked out even more sheep it was all-too-soon time to pick up the sweater from the craft competition and go home. I don’t know the next time we’ll be able to visit this particular festival but no matter where we go my super amazing wife will find a way to visit a sheep & wool or a yarn festival so there will be more fiber content on this blog in the future, don’t worry.

Folger Shakespeare Library

One of the places we were excited to visit upon our return to DC was the Folger Shakespeare Library. Both me and my super amazing wife have a deep connection to Shakespeare and the Folger library, despite neither of us having been able to visit before (it was closed for renovations last time we were living in the area). In college she had participated in Shakespeare festivals and played several of the roles and thought deeply about the plays and their meanings. I, on the other hand, have seen the complete works of Shakespeare (abridged) in middle school, and much later I went out on I think two dates once with a woman I dimly remember working at the Library. We also of course have both been to the Globe.

The Folger Shakespeare Library is really quite an institution to have in DC. If it’s not the top place for scholarly Shakespeare research in all the world it certainly has to be the most substantial. Listing off the superlatives from the Wikipedia page, it has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of Shakespeare including 82 copies of the First Folio (really more than anyone could reasonably need), the world’s third largest collection of English books printed before 1641 (now that I copy that over I wonder who is tracking that), and, among many, many other things, Henry VIII’s childhood copy of Cicero’s De officiis. All somehow nestled behind the Supreme Court instead of you know England or something. And for all that if I wasn’t such a Shakespeare scholar myself I’m not sure I would have known about it.

*A First Folio with writing in it by a girl named Margaret c. 17th century.*

Now that we were back in DC, on a cold December day we went up to Capital Hill to check out this magnificent Library. The public area of the museum is not too terribly large. On the bottom floor there is a museum that talks of course about Shakespeare. They have a big display with a number of their collection of First Folios, and that is neat to see. I mean they got a whole bunch of the things. Around the first folios is a smattering of other artifacts. One thing I hadn’t realized about the library is how they use the First Folios to do a bunch of scholarship on what should be something like a definitive version of each of the plays. The plays have each undergone edits and had transcription errors or changes from edition to edition, but with so many early copies the Library can synthesize these. They have then published really nice editions of each of the plays, and what else is that they are available online. Here’s Macbeth, for example.

*On the left are Ira Aldridge’s lines from* Othello which he hand-wrote and autographed to Dr. Edmund Schebek, c. 1853. On the right is an etching of Aldridge dressed as Othello c. 1854. This display was significant to me mostly because we had previously gone out to see Red Velvet *at the Shakespeare Theater Company.*

We had two actual things bringing us to the Library that day. The first and more minor one was a printing press demonstration, done like they would have done to print up the First Folios (they really like the First Folios at the museum). The most significant thing that my super amazing wife and I learned is that the paper had to be wet. An interesting and important detail, that. Then the big thing we were there for was a talk all about old writing utensils and calligraphy, which was pretty neat. After a talk on various stuff they had pulled out (as expected) old fashioned writing utensils, like fountain pens and silver tips or something along with calligraphy manuals and we all got a close-up look. The biggest thing I was thinking about is how hard it must be to curate the Shakespeare Library, like where do you draw the line at what counts as Shakespeare-related? But that is why the curators are professionals.

A booke containing dieurs sortes of hands : as well the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands by John de Beauchesne, 1602. It contains examples of different handwritings (“hands”) of different scales of fanciness for every occasion.

Other draws of the Folger include the café (called the Quill & Crumb, a great name) and the Library itself. Both are done up like grand Elizabethan halls. Initially I wondered if Folger hadn’t bought up some hall in England and shipped it over, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are beautiful. Having gone to Yale, which itself is all Oxford cosplay, I am always a bit thrown off by 20th century folks pretending like its the 16th but I suppose it keeps the craftspeople employed and that is a good enough reason.

*The Folger Shakespeare Library reading room.*

And that was the Folger Shakespeare Library, or that visit anyway. They have a nice little gift shop and if you are in the area looking for a place for a coffee, it is worth going to the Quill & Crumb. The other thing about the Library is that they have a whole theater. Some months later we went to go see As You Like It and that was fun. The theater itself is a really nice space. It is small and designed to look a bit Elizabethan, maybe something like the Blackfriars Theater would have looked like. We were in probably the worst seats but they were not bad, and the physical chairs themselves felt pretty luxurious after some of the other theater seats we have been in. We also wound up in the action during the play as some of the actors came up right next to us for a part of it. The production itself was good as well, set sorta kinda in DC as opposed to a kingdom and a forest. There was a running gag where the actors would notice the unicorn painted on fabric draped across the ceiling. It is a really great theater for a play and I would look forward to seeing another one there.

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.

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.