Wishful Thinking

Today we checked out of Room 13 at Victoria’s Mansion Guest House and into Room 2009 at the Chelsea Hotel.  No bad luck at either place, fortunately.

This adventure is a bucket list trip for me. I have long wanted, longingly wanted to travel to New England in the autumn. Starting off in Canada sounded like a good idea.

I knew how to pack for this trip. A savvy traveler plans on wearing layers, adding and subtracting as suits changing weather conditions. So my bag is filled with long sleeve tops and turtlenecks over which I can wear a pullover, a sweater that zips, and a leather jacket. For extra insurance I have a thick neck scarf.

Hah.  I spent the first day after autumn equinox in New York City, temperature 90 degrees. When we flew north to Toronto, the driver who took us to our hotel told us that the temperature hovered around 35 degrees. I would have been happy if that had been the temperature in Fahrenheit, however he was talking about Celsius. And in Fahrenheit that was 95 degrees.

I have one short sleeve shirt with me and a couple of long sleeve shirts I can wear with the sleeves rolled up. Slava has seen me in one or another of these every day. Every night I have a sweaty shirt to  wash in the sink.

I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I’m not likely to see a New England forest of reds and yellows. My hope now is to see a tree or two in autumn colors.

This morning we went to a grocery store called Loblaws to get some packets of oatmeal for Slava in the mornings. Breakfast today was at a creperie, and although the food was delicious, Slava wants oatmeal most days for soothing gastrointestinal issues.

Go to a grocery store and buy oatmeal. Ho hum. Why write about it?  You need to know that for me the experience of walking into Loblaws was similar, I’m sure, to what a Soviet child would have experienced walking into a Western supermarket. It was jaw-droppingly awesome. I now have a reason to move to Canada.

Loblaws is massive yet laid out artistically with stage lighting for prominent displays. There are 350 different kinds of cheeses.  The bakery is filled with works of art. I could have spent hours there wandering around, but we had another destination for the day: the Royal Ontario Museum, a.k.a. ROM.

ROM is a museum of art, world culture, and natural history. Imagine several Smithsonians under one roof. The part that was most interesting to me was the First Nations exhibit hall. I have to tell you how one native group dealt with the dangers of hurrricanes.

First you need to know that hurricanes are actually brought by an evil spirit named Dah-Gwa-Noh-Ah-Yen, hereafter known as Flying Head. But Flying Head was tricked one day by Gee-Goh-Sah-Seh, known as the Mother of Nations.

Gee-Goh-Sah-Seh was sitting in her longhouse one day when she realized that Flying Head was watching her, looking down the smoke hole in her roof. She has some sweet chestnuts in the fire, and she casually took them out and ate them one by one. Flying Head said, “If she can eat fire, so can I.”  Flying into the lodge he grabbed some hot coals from the fire and ate them. He screamed in pain and flew away at great speed, never to be seen again.

I’d say that there’s a bit of wishful thinking going on here. It’s a trait I understand.

The Joys of Travel

Travel can be a hassle or it can be great fun. There were a number of good things about travel today.

1.  Paying by thumbprint.
Instead of our spending $5.50 to travel to LaGuardia by subway, I paid for an Uber ride with my thumb. What the thumb did was authorize Apple Pay to charge the credit card $43. That charge will be a tiny percentage of our total travel bill, so the Uber ride feels like it’s practically free. And Uber is fun. It’s still new enough for me that I enjoy seeing the little icon of an Uber car crawling to me on a Google map.

2.  Bungee bag cords.
A month ago I clicked on a Facebook ad and ordered a pair of travelers’ bungee cords. It was the first time in my life that I succumbed to the temptation of a Facebook ad, but I’m glad I did. This well designed item holds a second bag securely on top of a roller bag.  Hassle free. Yay!

3.  Packing cubes.
I understand now why everyone I know who has them loves them. My suitcases looks neat and tidy, things are easy to find, and re-packing on a trip is simple. I won’t mind going from hotel to hotel on this trip now that I have e-Bags.

4.  TSA Precheck.
We flew a Canadian airline called WestJet. Maybe my sterling reputation as a passenger on Delta, Spirit Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest, and American Airlines preceded me. Or maybe it’s because I am a certain age. In any case, WestJet decided I was not a danger to other passengers, and I was allowed to go through security with my shoes on.

Not everyone is having such a good day. As we were going through security a woman ahead of us had a boarding pass she had printed at home. The  security agent said, “Your flight leaves from JFK, not LaGuardia.”  The woman gasped and the agent said, “It happens all the time.”

On our flight I had a cram session in French, reading the bilingual section of the airline magazine. I practiced my pronunciation, concluding that no one would confuse me with Québécoise.

We are now settled in to our room at Victoria’s Mansion Guest House. We are in Room #13. Perhaps our luck is about to change. 

Out and About in New York City

What do you do in New York City on a beautiful Saturday in September when the weather is balmy and the skies are bright blue?  How about spending the morning inside your expensive hotel room?

Notice I didn’t say “inside your nice hotel room.” Any hotel room in New York is expensive.  Not all of them are nice. Ours is not conducive to lounging around, but it does have broadband Internet, and when two travelers have been deprived of Internet for a day, Nature calls.

Our first outing of the day was to Bryant Park on the Avenue of the Americas. It is a green oasis near Times Square, a compact 9 1/2 acres of activities and relaxation known as Manhattan’s Town Square. We missed the juggling lessons at 11 am but saw some still practicing. Lunch at an outpost of ale Pain Quotidian was avocado toast with chia seeds for me, and a quinoa bowl for Slava. (We’re going deeper into healthy eating).

It was with some misgivings that I went with Slava to the matinee of “Miss Saigon.” I had spent the previous week consciously avoiding my DVR recordings of the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War. As a Boomer friend said to me, “I lived through it once. I don’t want to do it again.”

So here I was sitting in a theatre waiting for the start of a musical about the Vietnam War. It didn’t help that “Miss Saigon”is sort of an adaptation/ update of Puccini’s “Madame  Butterfly.”  I’m not an opera lover.

“Miss Saigon”was written by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil. Who are those guys?  Well, they wrote “Les Miserables,” and there are a number of similarities between these two love tragedies set in war time. Notably there’s a funny bad guy in both. In “Les Miz” he’s the delightful innkeeper who’s an amoral low-life. In “Miss Saigon” he is tagged “Engineer,” a man with big dreams and no scruples. The part is so significant that Engineer is the lead character in “Miss Saigon.”

The big dramatic moment in “Miss Saigon” is when the helicopter takes off with the American ambassador leaving Saigon. Those of us who remember that moment find it especially poignant in the play.

  I’m not writing a full review of “Miss Saigon” and will go now directly to the bottom line:  it’s wonderfully worthwhile, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to see it on Broadway. 

New York, New York

My first posting on this trip will be without a photo. This blog is accepting only photos I took in 2015 or before. It does not recognize that I have a new phone. Later on I’ll plead with it and try to get it to accept new photos. But for now I’ll just describe things my favorite way — with words.

Only in New York... The MTA subway makes accommodations for the semi-handicapped. As I was lugging a big suitcase I saw a sign that said “stairs to elevator.” Oh.  As I was standing there a nice New Yorker said, “Would you like me to carry your bag up the stairs?”  Yes indeed.  The bag was one I was taking to a FedEx office. Slava had brought it from Russia and didn’t need it for our vacation trip. While he was in the hotel dealing with jet lag I was on an errand shipping the bag to our next door neighbor. It wasn’t all that heavy, but the nice gentleman that helped me — and others who helped me later — had every reason to be intimidated by the bag’s hefty size.  To that that first guy and to the others:  thank you, and thank you, and thank you...

A reader might ask, “What’s an old lady doing schlepping a big suitcase around New York subways when she could take a taxi or Uber or Lyft?”  The answer starts with the premise, “What’s an old lady doing...” Ah, I don’t feel like an old lady. And although it sometimes takes me a bit longer now to get things done, I still feel I can manage. So going up and down staircases with a big bag is something I felt I could do, bumpity bumpity bumpity. But I’m not so proud as to turn down help.

The FedEx office I chose was within walking distance of my next destination, the Brooklyn office of TKTS.  My intent was to score half price tickets to a Saturday matinee of “Hello Dolly,” but as luck would have it, the understudy was no longer performing the lead role. Bette Midler is back from vacation, and not a seat will be vacant for the rest of the run. We’ll be going instead to a revival of “Miss Saigon,” and seeing a possible future Broadway star (not a current one) in the lead singing role. 

A Day in Scotland

A day in Dumfries was on our itinerary, and that was a little hard to arrange. It required connections with three different train companies. A little online searching revealed that it is w-a-y better, that is, w-a-y cheaper,  to book tickets in advance. But what is the best way to find out what's possible?  Let me put in a plug for one of my favorite new websites, www.rome2rio.com. Just enter the names of two cities or small towns, and within a moment-and-a-half you will find out your travel options. 

So, we travelled from Llandudno, Wales through England to Dumfries, Scotland.  One connection gave us 7 minutes to wait for the next train. We were 4 minutes late and had only 3 minutes for the transfer, but fortunately that was enough. The next connection was missed entirely. The train company was to provide us with another connection within 30 minutes or give us a refund. Instead we got a van ride to our final destination. Nice service!

Our visit to Dumfries was a pilgrimage. Slava wanted to visit the gravesite of Brother Aloysius, who taught him English at the international school he attended as a child in China.  Brother Aloysius not only taught English, he taught possibilities. He had a pivotal role in Slava's life, and had a lingering effect on Slava's thinking as he was growing up in the Soviet Union. Slava never got a chance to see him again, but he heard that Brother Aloysius was buried in Scotland. Where?  With persistent effort he tracked down the final resting place of Brother Aloysius:  the Marist Brothers Cemetery at St. Joseph College, Dumfries, Scotland. Would we be able to find the actual gravesite?  Yes, we did. 

We also visited the gravesite of the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns. I hadn't bothered to do any research on the town of Dumfries, because I had thought we were going for just one reason, that is, to visit the gravesite of Brother Aloysius. But we found out that Dumfries is delightful.  We visited the red sandstone home of Robert Burns and the Dumfries Museum with its amazing "camera obscura," which gave us the same 360 degree enlarged view of the city streets that visitors got 150 years ago.  We had a good dinner, and stayed at a nice B & B, Dumfries Villa. It was within a few hundred yards of the railway station, and I've learned that quiet trains in the U.K. are friendly to neighbors, making the area prosperous and desirable. 

I must provide a picture of Julius, the friendly guard dog who greeted us at Dumfries Villa. Julius looked intimidating, and we hesitated to open the garden gate when we arrived early and saw him on the other side. But I've never seen a ferocious guard dog with a tennis ball in his mouth, wagging his tail in hopes of a game of fetch. 

Leaving Wales Behind

The meaning of this heading is two-fold. I am "leaving Wales behind" with my next posting about Scotland. And here I'm writing about my ancestors who left Wales in the 1840's, never to see it again. 

Although the above photo was taken recently, it is likely to be a good illustration of what Wales looked like in the 1840s. That is when  my father's ancestors emigrated from the west coast of Wales. An emigration officer of the time, Captain Schamberg, said five years later, "A deep ship will very probably, under ordinary circumstances, be very wet and uncomfortable, and the people will live up to their knees in water."  A passenger said, "It wasn't very nice spending four weeks in a large smelly room. Lots of people felt sick  and it could be very dark."

My ancestors came from two Welsh families that emigrated in the 1840s and settled in the farming and coal mining areas of Jackson and Galliard Counties, Ohio. Who were they, and why did they undertake the arduous journey to an unknown land?  I will attempt to answer those questions with a bit of truthiness. Some of the facts will be made up. 

A young man from the coal-mining area of south Wales (or of the farming area of western Wales) married a young girl from the same area and started a family.  Times were hard, both for coal miners and for farmers. If the young man, a Mr. Jones, was a coal miner, he knew it was backbreaking and dangerous work to mine coal, but it was what he knew how to do. There was a Welsh community in the Appalachian region  of south eastern Ohio where miners were better off. It would have sounded good.  If Mr. Jones was instead a farmer in Wales he was working in poor soil and barely surviving. The Enclosure Acts were allocating to private ownership of the gentry land that had once been considered common. The chance to start life anew in the rich soils of Ohio would have sounded attractive. 

Mr. Jones might have married a young lass by the name of Miss Davis or Miss Morgan or Miss Evans or Miss Jones. There are a few other possibilities, but not many. There are not many different surnames in the small country of Wales. I say that to prepare you for the following two paragraphs.  Feel free to go through them quickly. The details are for the genealogical record. To put it more simply, one family from Cardinghamshire named Davis had a son who married into another family named Davis from Cardinghamshire. They produced my maternal ancestors on my father's side. 

John G. Davis (born John G. Davies in Aberyswyth 1805) took his wife and four daughters from Flymonceitho, Llangeitho Parish, across the Atlantic in 1840. After settling in Jackson County, Ohio, he had a son John J. who married a daughter of John K. Davis (born John K. Davies at Coecefnder, near Lanon 1802).  John K. had five daughters born in Wales, but one of them died on the cross-Atlantic voyage in 1842, and another died soon after. Two more daughters were born in the United States, one of whom, Margaret, became my great-great-great grandmother, or something of the sort, when she married John J. Davis.   That's all we know. 

The Welsh American Community Today

It's likely that most people of Welsh descent think of themselves as of British background, which is accurate (British, but not English). There are about 2 million Americans with Welsh ancestry -- and only 3 million people left in Wales itself. Even more interesting, there are nearly 6 million Americans with Welsh surnames -- and many of them are black. It is thought that when slavery ended many freed blacks took the surnames of Welsh Quaker abolitionists, Jones being a particularly common name.  

Jackson County, Ohio calls itself "the little Wales of Ohio,"  and more specifically is known as Little Cardinghamshire. Welsh was spoken there until the 1950's. The central town of Wellstone, Ohio has an annual Coal Mining Festival every year. They don't mine coal any more, but they do something to celebrate it.  

Bring a few Welsh people together and you have a "gymanfa ganu" or an "Eisteddfod." Both are events related to singing. There are over a thousand "gymanfa ganu" held in Wales each year; in the United States, not so many. These are joyous gatherings for hymn singing in four-part harmony, a tradition important to Dissenters or Noncomformists, as Protestant denominations other than the Anglican Church were known in the early days.    And although there were restrictions in public life on Noncomformists for more than two centuries, since the 1850's Noncomformists have been in the majority in Wales. 

One of the most distinctive features of the Welsh is that singing is a community event. The "Eisteddfod" is an assertive singing competition that is almost like a sport. "Our town has a better community chorus than yours." "Oh, yeah?!  Sez who?  Show up next Sunday and we'll see who has the better singing group!"

After listening to a couple of groups in Llandudno I can vouch for the fact that the Welsh aren't necessarily blessed with better voices than other people. What the Welsh do have is greater enthusiasm for participating in singing. 

Let me end by noting that seven American presidents are known to have Welsh ancestry, starting with Thomas Jefferson. So did John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Add to this list James Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, and Richard Nixon. The Welsh also claim a smidge of Barack Obama. 

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Welsh Food

Frankly speaking, the food in Wales can be like food anywhere. Italian food is popular, and there is Chinese takeout. Other dishes are British, common to England and Scotland. A full Welsh breakfast is essentially like what is on the table elsewhere on the island. 

If you order a full Welsh breakfast, Count on getting both bacon and sausage, with the bacon being like the fine fare we call Canadian bacon. The photo above shows what I think are tiny cockles. Delicious. Sometimes there will be baked beans. Of course there will be eggs, and in addition to an egg or two you'll get a broiled tomato, field mushrooms, potatoes and/or toast, and perhaps a bit of black pudding. What's black pudding?  Something that may make you decide to opt for plain porridge. 

Welsh cakes are delightfully different, and they are something like a cookie, and something like a scone.

Not pictured here is an important ingredient in Welsh cooking: the leek. This variant of the onion family is actually taken as a symbol of Wales. On some occasions the leek is even pinned to one's jacket as a show of national pride. Some people more sensibly pin on another symbol -- the daffodil. 

The most famous Welsh dish is Welsh rarebit. The creamy cheddar cheese sauce, poured over toast or used as a hot dip, is seasoned with mustard and Worcestershire sauce, and either a splash of Guinness or simply a bit of  milk. 

There are several theories as to how it got called rarebit. One of them is a put-down to the Welsh, indicating that poor Welsh people couldn't afford rabbit or other meat, and "Welsh rabbit" is cheese.  Oh well.  The Welsh are proud of their cheddar cheese.