Ptolemy's Oceania "Marina" cruise, etc., September 25-October 16, 2012

September 26, 2012, Wednesday

Barcelona:

We arrived at our hotel, the Royal Ramblas, on the Ramblas in the heart of the city at about 8 a.m.  only to be told that we could not check in until about 2:30.  Nothing to do but stagger around for a few hours trying to keep from losing something or, in my case, getting my pocket picked.  We found our way to the famous Mercata de la Boqueria, the public market about 200 yards down the street, for breakfast – a pastry and surprisingly delicious coffee.  Meats, seafood, vegetables and especially fruits were stunningly displayed in the stalls.

Flashback:  On my first visit to Barcelona in April of 1957, on leave from my U.S. Army post in Mannheim, the Ramblas was a poor affair.  The now substantial center strip was then an unpaved and dusty with scraggly shrub along the sides.

Next,  a stroll through the old town to the Cathedral (see photo).  Light and colorful two styles of gothic with that Catalonian flair for color and design.  The altar niches around the perimeter were filled with paintings, and at two magnificent altars were resplendent in wall-to-wall gold leaf.  Thought:  This was the excellent painting that Picasso absorbed as a child.

Next stop was the magnificent Palau de Musica (Music Palace), a riotous, gaudy art-deco concert hall that we had toured in January of 2006.  We could only peer in from the adjacent new concert hall that has been built next to the old.  This is a unique venue, a superb and beautiful building, studded with surprising nooks and crannies.

Then we walked - to the expansive Catalonia Square, the hub of the modern city, amid large crowds that seemed to be half tourist.  Our destination was the sleek, they’re-all-the-same, chrome and glass, filled-with-barely-post-puberty sales personnel Apple Store to buy a European electrical connector for recharging our two iPhones, two iPads and my 11 inch Macbook Air.  In the store we found that the iPhone5 would not become public or be on sale until Friday.  No one had ye seen this electronic Moby Dick.  Whereupon I succeeded in flashing my own bright-spanking-shiny-gleaming-jewel-like iPhone5 under the noses of the startled several store personnel.  “Take a look at this!” I trumpeted with a barely restrained bellow.  I was gratified by the ensuing oohs and ahs of wonderment and admiration from the adoring youngsters.

After lunch, check-in and a short nap we walked much farther than we had remembered to the magnificent Sagrada Familia church of Gaudi – the one with the pockmarked towers.  Funny how something that seemed impossibly modern during college years now seemed familiar, almost cozy.  In 2006 much of the interior was obscured by scaffolding, but now the entire expanse is open, and even on a dark, cloudy afternoon the light streamed in through the polychrome window.  Lofty and inspiring.  All of Catalonia appears jewel-studded.  The details of architecture and decoration are astounding, and the warm colors create a celebratory, tending to carnival-like atmosphere.

Dinner that evening was at an old restaurant, dating from perhaps the 1830’s, the Seven Doors down near the waterfront.  The waiters wore white jackets, and the food was good, but the clientele were 90% tourists, 70% of those Asian, and the dress code has declined there as it had in most of the European restaurants we have been privileged to frequent in the past few years.  Why can’t young people live up to the standards of their elders?  We were compensated when we received the final bill, which stated “At your table dined Ava Gardner, Actress, USA (1922-1990.”  The paella may have been B-, but the table was A+.

Flashback:  According to my unfailing memory, the paella was a lot tastier and better prepared the first time that my friend Harold Lee and I enjoyed it at an outdoor lunch on the Barcelona waterfront in 1957.  Our main goal that day was to find the Telephone Exchange, where the embattled, ragged Republican soldiers had held out courageously for weeks against the Franco forces in 1937, as Orwell told the story in “A Homage to Catalonia,” one of the bibles of our youth.  We found it.  Alas I doubt if the pockmarked building still stands.

September 27, 2012, Thursday:

Barcelona

Breakfast again at the Boqueria.  Then a brisk walk through the Cathedral area to the Picasso Museum.   A huge line of painfully philistine tourists blocked our way.  Looking  up I saw him standing ten feet away, good old redoubtable Bill Barr, a classmate from Yale Law School, Class of 1960 – went to work for the FAA after graduation - with his comely spouse Bonnie.  Third marriage for both – they had originally met in high school - although as Bill later explained, “I haven’t had three marriages; I’ve had two successful divorces.”  Bill bargained their way through a ticket office away from the mob, mumbling something to the effect that “We’re seniors,” and we gratefully attached ourselves.  A grand and surprised meeting with Bill, whom I was constrained to remark hadn’t changed a whit since law school, with reminiscenses of our 50th reunion in New Haven in 2010.  Bonnie had to remind him twice not to slouch his tall frame when she photographed us, and I kept forgetting to tuck in my gut while Dare hid her mild displeasure at the sight.

The museum is glorious.  It features early Barcelona naturalistic portraits (the man could draw), fashion sketches from Paris in 1902 that could vivify a runway today, and later paintings, including Picasso’s amazing 1957 riff on Velasquez’s “Las Meninas,” (1656) which depicted the characters in the original painting in varying moods and looks that Velasquez would not dared to have portrayed when the original painting was made.

We checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to the ship, the magnificent Marina of Oceania Cruises (photo attached).  We checked in in a procedure that reminded me of the day I was drafted into the Army, but slick and professional.  We found our cabin, and that evening met our good old Marin friends, Joanne and Dick Spotswood, and our new friends, also from rarified Mill Valley, Sara and Andy Barnes.   We dined at one of the ship’s specialty restaurants, Jacques, and all went well until I was served roast lamb, pistachio farcie en croute, only to find that the “croute” was a thick greenish, deadened substance resembling the crusts of my happy days in starred French restaurants long ago when I could still afford to do that only in the demented imagination of some chef from Sri Lanka laboring in the bowels of the vessel.  Then, having forgotten my glasses, I was stung with the check for a bottle of Pommard Merlot that set me back three times what I had ever paid for a bottle of wine in my life.

We managed to stay awake through the meal in spire of ongoing jet lag thanks to the sparkling conversation and, amazingly, found our way back through the labyrinthine maze that is the modern cruise ship to our humble stateroom.

September 28, 2012, Friday:

Ibiza:

All I knew about this island was its reputation as the world’s dance capital.  You know – dance.  Not ballet, fox-trot or flamenco.  Dance, as in BPM.  Ibiza is pleasant.  Mostly tourist shops by day, with barely visible signs disguised to the uninitiated that for $40 you could find just the right disco caves that evening.  I saw a street lamp poster advertising a Carl Cox gig.  (World reknown DJ.)

The center of attraction is the citadel section rising above the harbor.  I didn’t look it up, but my guess is that the ramparts provided defense from the deprivations of pirate attacks.  The appeared to be a Mediterranean-flavored version of, say, Nantucket, with homes for the permanent population, the cold-weather-in-Europe visitors and the casual vacationers.  Some nice apartments amongst average shops and cafes.  It’s a somewhat steep climb to the top taking 20 minutes or so, not bad if you are in shape.   Fine views from the top.  We slugged down and had a nice chat with the Spotswoods in a cafe most of the way down.   That was followed by a fifteen minute walk to the shuttle bus for the ride back to the Marina.

All in all, “If you won’t dance, don’t make me,” there’s nothing special here.

September 29, 2012, Saturday:

“At sea”:

The entire population of the Marina, some 1100 passengers and 900 crew, spent the day on the ship as we made our way westward.  Napping, dining, people watching.  The ladies began to show important evening fashion, while the men continued to show that their best days were behind them.

I got my hair cut at 8 a.m. by a South African male barber, Dimitri, of one-half Greek origin, who explained that he was on the ship because his business had failed and his wife had left him.  He convinced me that it was all the fault of the ANC, whose leader now has six wives, legally.  I hit the bike in the gym for the second day and performed 100 perfunctory crunches on the large rubber ball.  The gym is very well equipped.  I had been on the cusp of thumbs-up or thumbs-down on this cruise business, but the excellence of the spa, carrying the tradename “Canyon Spa,” which has to be a major force somewhere in the rejuvenation business, pushed me solidly into the thumbs-up column.

At 4 p.m. we attended a lecture by a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer that began with the Christian atrocities of the First Crusade and wound its way through Saladin, the founding of the Knights of St. John (I had always had them referred to as the Hospitallers), the Knights’ withdrawals to Rhodes and Malta and finally the horrific siege of Malta by the Turks in 1565, the defeat of which saved the West for Roman Catholicism.  There was a brief reference to the heroic British defense of Malta against German invaders in 1942.

Dare and I were served enormous portions of prime rib that evening in the second of the four specialty restaurants on the ship, the “Polo Grill,” and we came perilously close to eating the whole thing.

September 30, 2012, Sunday:

Malta:

The sailing into the harbor at 10 a.m. was almost as wondrous as advertised.  Valetta and environs appear to be one tan fortress sprinkled with churches after the other.  It’s vast.

The first thing we did after a long walk after the gangplank through a customs immigration duty-free area was make another one of many mistakes we have made so far on this trip.  We could have boarded a typical on-off bus for almost nothing but opted instead for a 60 Euro ride in the oldest taxi on the island (410,000 population) driven by an overweight gentleman with a tubercular cough.

      The first stop through mostly urbanized areas was Mosta, site of a circular, all-dome Church of St. Mary, also known as the Rotunda of Mosta, dating from 1833.  A few observations:  we were in the church as mass was ending and noted a high degree of seriousness in the worship.  The people are all sizes, heights, shapes and coloring (north African to northern European) to evidence the crazy-quilt composition of the gene pool after of centuries of invasions and occupations.  The language appears to have been concocted by someone who failed composition in Arabic and Italian and had a fondness for Basque “x’s.”  The rotunda was obviously modeled after the Pantheon in Rome and, at perhaps only 20% of the volume, still an impressive building.  We needed a coffee at a cafe nearby.
   
      The next stop was Mdina, also known as the “Old City.”  This is the high rent district of Malta on a height at the center of the island.  It is home to the bishop’s “co-cathedral,” together with the Cathedral of St. John in Valetta, and various palaces and mansions.  No cars permitted.  It is very nice.  Alas the sun began to beat down so we shuffled back to the hack and were driven the 10 kilometers or so back to the edge of Valetta beyond which vehicles are not permitted.
   
      Valetta could be very interesting but not on Sunday, when it was mostly closed down.  The ship’s handouts said that the Cathedral was closed for the day, but the Spotswoods and the Barneses were keen enough to get into the cathedral for 11 a.m. mass.   They saw the spectacular floor of marble slabs covering the graves of about 400 Knights, but alas the famous Caravaggio “Beheading of John the Baptist,” which is all we wanted to see in the first place was locked up.  We managed to miss the Palace of the Grand Masters but walked a couple of miles in the heat through interesting streets.  Much remains of the British occupation which lasted from 1942 or so through 1972.  The massive fortifications and deep moats surrounding the city are being refurbished, and months from now Valetta will no doubt be the foremost historical/military site anywhere in Europe and the Levant.  If you haven’t been to Malta, two days’ stay would suffice.
   
In the evening I found crabs legs that had been surgically sawed through length-wise, sushi and key lime pie in the food line of the Terrace Cafe.  I ate heartily.

October 1, 2012, Monday:

“At sea”:

By this time the regime of non-concentration and relaxation has become tiring, so all welcomed a day with nothing to do.  I did my stint in the gym – bike plus 100 desultory crunches – and mostly succeeded in skipping lunch.  Smoked a fat Dominican Robusto in the smoking area on Deck 12 outside the Canyon Spa area.  Began reading “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia” by Panjak Mishra.  It all began in 1905 when the Japanese sank the Russian fleet off Manchuria.

October 2, 2012, Tuesday: 

Ayios Nikolaos, Crete:

We agreed with the Spotswoods that we would try to see the restored ruins of Knossos (ground and day zero at and of the beginning of the Western World, where Egypt, Phoenicia and what was emerging from the shadows as Greece met) near the capital Herakleion, the palace of Phaistos south of Knossos, also a circa 1700 B.C. site, and the Museum in Herakleion, which for years I have been publicizing as the best art museum in the world per square foot.  We began by agreeing to overpay a taxi driver who, when we asked whether our projected itinerary could be accomplished by 3 p.m., when the Marina was to depart (we asked at about 8:20), replied with more mystery than I was attuned to comprehend that “All things are possible.”

It took over an hour to get to the palace of Knossos through the traffic, and we arrived to find that a number of tour buses had preceded us.  I had visited Knossos first in March of 1955, when of course it was a lonely paradise, and again in the late 70’s and about 15 years ago.  This time one could grasp the essentials of the architectural and engineering marvels accomplished by the Minoans, but all details were obscured by the 500 or 600 tourists, more than half of them Russians, swarming over the site.  The temperature was in the high 80’s by a quarter past ten.  We could not get near the principal room, the queen’s megaron, and the huge modernistic sculpture of bull’s horns has been removed.  Nonetheless the site is so compelling that it was good to be back, and the Spotswoods loved it.  We sat under an arbor at the cafe on the site and enjoyed an ice-cold glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.  The Greeks have a way of getting you calm and refreshed after a crush in the hot sun.

When we asked the driver to proceed to Phaistos and, by the way, to stop in Gortyna, a site with a church dedicated to a group of third century holies martyred by Roman soldiers and with stone tablets inscribed with a legal text in retrograde writing (the first line reads left to right, the second right to left and so on), the driver replied innocently that that would entail another hour and a half’s driving so of course we could not do that and make the ship on time.  Why didn’t I know that?

Instead we drove into Herakleion and disembarked at the Museum.  As is the case probably 70% of the time when one is touring these days, everything is in remodeling and renovation.  The crushingly impressive figurines of snake goddesses, a few Bronze Age, geometric and rather indifferent classic era pots and some busts were on view in a new lower room.  Well done.  In the old, upstairs part of the Museum there was a newly redecorated room filled with mostly Roman sculpture.  Everything else, including most of one of the world’s best pottery collections, was closed and out of sight.  Still, no one felt cheated.  The snake goddesses alone would have been worth the stop in Ayios Nikolaos.

We stopped for ten minutes in the crowded city center area of Herakleion to see my favorite fountain in the whole world, the Venetian lion fountain.   We were delighted to find that it has been sandblasted back to a gleaming white and that the surrounding shops and pedestrian walkways appeared modernized and cheerful since my last visit in about 2000.

We were driven the 65 kilometers back to Ayios Nikolaos (Saint Nicholas of, if you will, Santa Claus) (Flashback:  In 1955, just a poor fishing village with something of a resort for bohemians reputation).  Joanne Spotswood took off for shop hopping, and Dare, Dick and I found a taverna with an outdoor table for a heated-up slice of mousaka chosen from a covered steam table outside the kitchen inside.

Back on the Marina, I eschewed heavy exercise and opted instead for a number of minutes in the luxurious sauna and steam room.  This was followed by a delicious dinner outdoors at the open rear of Deck 12, the Terrace Restaurant: stir-fried veggies and scallops cooked by a whiz Filipino in a stainless steel wok that I garnished with small slices of tuna and salmon sashimi.  Then, of course, I spoiled the whole effect, indeed almost the whole day, by downing a weighty so-so slice of apple crumble garnished with a scoop of ultra-rich vanilla ice cream.  Some guys never learn.  To make matters worse, I repaired to the smoking area and absorbed another Robusto.  I had to take an Ambien generic after that.

October 3, 2012, Wednesday: 

Antalya, Turkey:

Ashore shortly after 8 a.m., we met up with the Barneses and Spotswoods and found the roomy Mercedes van and driver that Sara Barnes had engaged for us through the new guy in our lives, an Istanbul travel agent known by the nickname “Kaz.”  We were driven to the massive Roman amphitheater built c. 136 A.D. at Aspendos, about an hour plus and 45 kilometers east of Antalya.  (Flashback:  In 1990, Dare had helped lead a group of 30 or so worthies from the Peninsula, under the auspices of the Stanford Committee for Art, to this very spot and environs of Antalya, which at that time had all the appearances of a large fishing village.  Today the population is over 1,000,000 people, the buildings are solid and new, and it’s very rich.)  The theater is massive.  It was rebuilt in the 1300’s by the then ruling Seljuks.  We all climbed the 60 or 70 feet of steps to the top, and I got suckered into buying a couple of Roman coins by a ragged villager who was selling them illegally through an iron grating in the top row of the theater.

We returned to Antalya to find – surprise – that there is nothing Turkish about this port city.  The place could be in the Netherlands or Bavaria.   The Archaeological Museum turned out to be a prize – beautifully laid out and rich in decor.  The highlights were two salons of Roman sculptures and busts, some massive and elaborate sarcophagi and a few icons and mosaics from a nearby, excavated Byzantine church of St. Nicholas.  Well worth the hour we devoted to the museum.

      We finally found a restaurant in what’s left of an “old town” for lunch, and there was nothing Turkish on the menu.  Dare and I had small slices of broiled steak cut up on to a bed of greens with a minimum of dressing.  I came to Turkey for Bay Area dietary?  Very pleasant surroundings in a hotel garden and a spirited lunchtime conversations with the Barneses.   The obligatory pictures of grandchildren were dutifully displayed.  I am certain that the “old town” and the classic Turkish cooking that used to be served there are nearly gone, mostly forgotten and doubtlessly unrepented.
   
We were poking along but finally found our van, that took us back to the ship.  We embarked about five minutes before the crew pulled up the gangway.

October 4, 2012, Thursday:

Ashdod to Jerusalem:

The Spotswoods and we came ashore about one p.m. in bright sun and mostly dry but uncomfortable heat.  Division of labor:  Dick went off to find shekels, and Joanne was assigned to haggle with any taxi driver that would listen for a ride for the four of us plus carry-ons and small bags to Jerusalem.  The brothers in the line had set a minimum of (U.S.) $150, and Joanne started the bidding at $80.  The commotion in the brotherhood was heated.  By the time Dick returned from an ATM I had stepped in and broken the impasse at 400 shekels, slighty less than $100 for the four.  It’s about 30 miles of four-lane highway, and our driver spent about 45 minutes speeding, lane changing and careening.

It rapidly became clear to me that the Israel I had seen around 1970-71 has mushroomed into an imposing concrete and stone megalopolis.  We approached Jerusalem to find it straddling miles of hills, one high rise after another.  There is an impression of tremendous strength and energy, and the roadway and buildings seem so new.  Everything IS new.  We were fully ten minutes before we reached one of the centers of the city.   The cab dropped us off at the entrance to a mall, the Mamilla,  that seemed to be as large and rich as a goodly portion of the Stanford Shipping Center.  The first shop sign I saw said “Rolex,” and as we walked through toward the Old City each shop seemed more opulent than the last.  I was trying to orient myself and, indeed, like many a newly minted IOS6 slave I was cursing the day that Apple dropped Google Maps from the iPhone.  Alas, by iPhone5 appeared useless.

We managed to find New Gate in the walls of the Old City, constructed in the middle of the 16th century by Suleiman the Magnificent in the days when the city was part of the Ottoman Empire.  The Spotswoods’ hotel, the Knights Palace, a beautiful small hotel that functions as a kind of hostel for the Catholic Patriarchate, was nearby, so they peeled off.  Dare and I had to walk another mile or more along the walls by a road way named for said Magnificent One up to the Herod Gate to our hotel, the Holy Land, in the heat and obnoxious traffic, and all the while I had to pee.  I was not happy.  We checked in, freshened up a teeny and took off across the avenue, dodging cars, and entered the Old City through the Herod Gate.

I will not repeat this in later entries.  There is no doubt in Dare’s and my mind that the Old City of Jerusalem exceeds, in color, interest, history, variety, exoticism, architecture and what have you any other venue we have toured, including but not limited to Cairo, Alexandria, Istanbul and Marrakesh.  The place teems with people of every color, size, culture, faith, costume and purpose you can imagine.  Christian faithful from Brazil to Kerala were singing hymns and praying in the streets.  Of course, as people who class themselves as religious we would tend to give Jerusalem the edge in any event.  The Spotswoods are observant Roman Catholics (Dick is a big deal in the Knights of St John, see above), and they agree.

We ambled in a dazed kind of way in the lowering sunset light (for some reason Israel maintains the same time zone as Paris and Rome, where as the hour in Greece and Turkey would be one hour later) through throngs of people and shops and some rather empty narrow lanes of residences as well.  We came out a half-mile west or so at the Damascus Gate.  To say half a mile is misleading.  It’s like walking along London’s Regent Street or New York’s Soho in a time of heavy shopping.  Every step is an effort.  It was dark when we crossed the traffic again and found a food stand that was serving what looked like pork or lamb gyro but was probably mostly chicken.  The pita gyro had a strange taste, probably due as I learned later to the local proclivity to smother the pita, and anything else handy, with humus, which I guess is basically crushed fava beans and olive oil.  Dining was not classy; we were outside at an intersection, lights were very low, the main commerce were two cellphone stands selling “Big Talk.com” cellphone service.  The area of the restaurant was littered with trash (which does get picked up finally after closing time, whenever that is) and enough cats to clean up a bit.  This is the Near East, folks, a poor area of East Jerusalem.  People litter with abandon.  Napkins are unknown.  We had missed lunch, so we didn’t care.  There are no trash cans anywhere, so after a quick take we left our trash, the greasy paper that the pits had been wrapped in, on the next metal table-top where a crew-cut European with a laptop had just finished eating.

The 10 minute walk to our hotel was not particularly reassuring, although we were perfectly safe in a religious neighborhood, probably more Moslem than Christian.  We  sat in the lobby bar for a good hour and a half.  Dare had boldly ordered a glass of arak (a/k/a ouzo or raki) on ice, and I had an Israeli beer.  Suddenly we found ourselves in the sitting area next to a group of 25 or so German Christian pilgrims who were staying in the hotel.  All the pilgrims were mute.  I immediately stopped complaining to myself about any and all inconveniences and fatigue that had appeared to hinder me all day.  The idea of pilgrims in the Holy City assumed new color and sonority.

October 5, 2012, Friday: 

Jerusalem:

We decided to leave the Holy Land to the assorted Christian pilgrim clientele, packed up and took a taxi a half-mile west to the New Gate to move into the Knights Palace.  The intent was to be literally next door to the Spotswoods, notwithstanding my trepidation and my prejudice inculcated from childhood against patronizing an institution that was part of the apparatus of the wicked Latin West.  Our room, at $170 versus $140 per night was fabulous, notwithstanding that one must navigate through red Maltese crosses and crusader coats of armor at every turn among the gothic architecture and decor to get there.

We then moved on to the main site of the side trip, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the tomb of Jesus originally in the time of Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine, and destroyed an re-built two or three times since.  The present structure is mostly from Crusader times and largely under the control of the Good Guys, the Greek Orthodox hierarchy and lots of black-clad, stove-pipe hatted, hirsute Greek monks.  Part of the church falls to the Armenians, and the Ethiopian Copts have jurisdiction over part of the roof.  We hooked up with an elderly, skinny gentleman, who had been blond and who styled himself as “Marvin.”  I learned later from another guide to my embarrassment that Marvin is a Moslem and the last person in the world I would have hired as a guide to the holiest place in Christendom.  Marvin showed us the stone at the entrance upon which Jesus was flagellated.  Pilgrims were prostrating themselves on the slab of reddish stone and kissing it.  Later we saw the stub of the column to which Jesus had been tied to be flagellated.  Marvin was pretty good at identifying old columns that remained from the original building by Saint Helen.  There was no chance of bucking the line in less than an hour to stand next to the rock where Jesus had been laid dead upon the deposition from the cross, but we did climb the stairs into a high second-story of the church that was represented as the site of Calvary.  The swashbuckling British general of the 1870’s, “Chinese” Gordon, fresh from subduing the Sudan disagreed, but that’s another story.  There are so many icons and relics abounding that the mind is dizzy in minutes after entering the church.  Not recommended for faint-hearted North American Protestants, secular Jews or anyone lapsed from anything.

We then walked in that particular mode that is pushing one’s way through the narrow lanes (the streets are rarely more than 10 feet or so wide) of the Old City, learning soon enough to get out of the way upon hearing the rumble of an approaching motorcycle or small garbage-collection truck so as not to become joined at the hip with an antique, tee shirt or ladies braided gown, until we reached the so-called Western Wall (“Wailing Wall” as I remember it used to be called).   We passed security by tossing our stuff onto the metal detectors and joined the multitudes from all over the world who had come to pray at Judaism’s holy shrine.  We were in the midst of the Succoth celebration, and the Hassidic and Orthodox were all around us.  They have lots of children, and the opportunities for baby-watching abounded.  We walked out through the Dung Gate exit and had another kebab meal nearby.

      The afternoon was once again spent in endless wandering through the markets.  By the end of the day we were by the Jaffa Gate, which was the natural outlet to our Knights Palace Hotel and also the site of a venerable old hotel, the Imperial, that has been in all of the guidebooks since it was built circa 1886.  We decided to go in and look around.  The reception is up an impossibly dimly lit stone stairway on the second floor.  Near the lobby in another dim room three or four young people who looked like students were busy at their laptops, one young woman Skype videoing with friends who were who knows where.  The main attraction of the rabbit warren common area was the old, yellowing photos on the walls, pictures the Jerusalem of long ago, plus signed portraits of mainly Orthodox higher officials.   Everything was moldy and slightly disintegrating.  The rooms are about $65 per night.  This might be one of the last places in the world where one can re-create in one’s imagination the world of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine or even Agatha Christie’s Orient Express fantasies.
   
      For dinner we joined the Spotwoods at an Armenian restaurant nearby that was recommended by Sarah, the young woman Armenian desk clerk at the hotel.  The food was tasty, and the $15 dollar bottle of local white wine was exceptional, but we reflected afterwards that little by little the younger generation is losing the arts of the older cuisine, and items that had once been delicacies were merely good but ordinary and not special cooking.

October 6, 2012, Saturday: 

Jerusalem/Bethlehem:

We met the Spotswoods for breakfast, trundled downhill to the Jaffa Gate and thence across the divided thoroughfare, still busy even on a Sabbath morning, through the Mamilla Shopping center to the King David Citadel Hotel.  We waited in the lobby for our van pickup for the morning’s adventure in Bethlehem.  The Hotel is one of those blocks of marble and granite wonders, all gleaming in shades of tan.  The High Holidays being over, there was no one in the lobby.  I managed to take my first ride in a Sabbath elevator, one that stops on every floor so that an observant rider never has to violate his orders by actively punching a button for a particular floor.  I was on my journey to a men’s room fit for a king or a Knesset worthy.  The van arrived, and we swooped up to the Mount Scopas Hotel, where we were pooled with the correct tourists into another van that drove us to the shadow/real West Bank border.

The border complex reminds one of the bad old Checkpoint Charlie days, but it is so dilapidated, so grungy and unpainted, so tacky, so put together of tired sheetrock and rusted metal paneling, so poorly administered that a proper Prussian Vopo would have an attack of something were he to confront it.  Like the Berlin passage, this one is forlorn and depressing.   The Palestinians don’t care who they let in and explain since they have no sovereignty they could not exclude anyone legally if they wanted to.

Flashback:  On Christmas Eve, 1954, the last time I was in this area, driving down the Mount of Olives to the Garden of Gethsemane at the bottom of the hill and then on up to the Temple Mount, the entire area from the Mount of Olives into Old Jerusalem was virtually open space.  Now it is a maze of wall-to-wall buildings and roads.  The intervening development has not been propitious.

The ride from the border to the Manger Square was long, dusty and crowded.  The stores and apartment buildings appeared to be choking in dust.  Finally the van parked near the Church of the Nativity, built over the site of the stables where Jesus was born in about 330 A.D. by St. Helen.  We were as early as we could have been but the parking spaces were jammed.  The interior of the church was jammed.  The Tower of Babel descends every day on the pilgrim multitude in punishment of who knows what.  Again we have a split jurisdiction situation, where the central aisle and altar area of the basilica is controlled by the Greek Orthodox, the aisle on the right by Syrian Orthodox, the left aisle and another area to the left of the altar by the Armenian Orthodox.   Flashback:  Christmas Eve 1954 monks of their respective orders were busy sweeping the three naves, and if a Greek wandered innocently over into the nave of the Syrians, he was immediately met with three broom-wielding Syrian brothers who surrounded the Greek like hockey defensemen until the latter retreated back into his own nave, his furtive attempt at an adverse possession seizure having failed once again.  Our guide told us that all these Holy Land divisions of territories within the churches were settled by treaties entered into as early as the 17th century among the various denominations.

      There was an impossible line to descend to the “stables” under the floor of the church under the iconostasis.  This is the stable area, and it is under the control of the Roman Catholics, and so our guides, no doubt members of a secret brotherhood with the guards, pushed us through the exit door two by two.  Once below we had to lean precariously over supine bodies kneeling or lying so that their heads were inside a 3 by 7 foot opening to the small grotto-like place where Mary had given birth.  All I had to do was stick my camera over the backsides of the pilgrims and take a flash shot of the slab on which Jesus had lain in swaddling clothes.  As of this date I have not looked at my photos lest my camera either misfired or some gremlin or avenging demon appear in the photograph.

We were then driven to another nearby location to a stone chapel built over a grotto.  The story, not in the Bible – we were admonished by our Arab Christian guide, as if we needed to hear it, that not everything is in the Bible – is that this is the spot where Mary and Joseph hid with the baby Jesus after Herod issued his order to slaughter the innocents but before the Holy Family left for Egypt.  Mary was nursing the baby, and some of her milk dripped on to a stone.  Ever thereafter this place has been one where women desiring or desperate to bear a child have come to pray.  The guide assured us that he knew a woman who had wanted a child, had been barren for 20 years and then conceived after coming to this chapel to pray.  I have read that many of the consecrated places in the Near East that are now churches, mosques or synagogues began as fertility prayer sites.

Following the obligatory stop at a Christian souvenir shop, “Johnny’s,” where the high prices were justified as being in part donations to support the needy Christians in the West Bank, we were driven back to the Jaffa Gate.   Dare and I stopped for lunch in a pizza by the slice snack bar that distinguished itself by allowing me to take my pizza slices and drinks to Dare at a table outside and come back at the end of the meal to pay the 75 shekel check (about $18) when we had finished lunch.

Next we bought 3 shekel tickets and climbed up long stone steps to the top of Suleiman’s ramparts for the mile or so walk on top of the walls to the Damascus Gate.  The walk afforded only a few unique views of the Old City, but it increased our feel for the topography and the jammed-together diversity of architectural styles and historical periods.  At the Damascus Gate we rested for an hour or so doing our e-mail with free Wi-Fi, all for the low price of two glasses of cold and delicious freshly squeezed orange juice.  When I paid the check, the owner suggested two things:  (1) that the U.S. withdraw now unilaterally from any involvement in the Near East because none of the population there was worth it and (2) that that whole part of the world was going to hell because America had abandoned its rightful claim to moral and technological prominence and left the benighted peoples to drift helplessly into one calamity after another without America’s much needed leadership.  Inconsistent, ominous in many respects and not exactly on the mark, but heartfelt.

After more wandering through the markets we returned to the Knights Palace for a hot shower and a beer.   That evening the Spotswoods and we hit the jackpot with one of the great dinners of recent memory at a restaurant within walking distance of the Jaffa Gate called Eucalyptus.   It advertised “Old Testament cooking.”  So or not so, the restaurant was first class.  When I asked a young server whether we had eaten the same cuisine as King David had, she said probably not.  We thought it all romantically close enough.

October 7, 2012, Sunday: 

Jerusalem/Haifa:

The next morning Joanne decided to go her own way, and Dare, Dick and I  agreed that it was now or never for a visit to the Temple Mount and the famous mosque, the Dome of the Rock.  The site of the brilliantly colored tiled mosque is Mount Moriah, where Abraham climbed to sacrifice his young son Isaac but was stopped by an angel of the Lord.  The “mountain” passed through various guises but has been Islamic since the first Arab invasions in the eighth century.   We had to go through the same security checkpoint that we all had to go through two days before to get to the prayer area of the Western Wall, and then we climbed up a 200 yard long elevated path, which was a kind of tube seemingly made up of sticks, to the height above that is the Temple Mount.  When we looked down on the Western Wall on this Sunday, the prayerful were 10 or 20 deep along the section of the wall allotted to men, much more crowded that the preceding Friday when I was there.

      In Jewish thought this “mountain” (its elevation is not great) is where creation began.  My primitive understanding of the history of the area holds that the first and second Temples were there.  When Mohammed died, he ascended into heaven from there, thus its sacredness to Islam.  Fragments of old temples, gates and shrines stand all over the large area, which was blindingly bright in the sunlight.  There is simply no greenery or any other color to break the monotony or the tan monotone, so sunglasses are mandatory.

We tried to insinuate ourselves into the multicolor tiled Dome itself, but a Moslem guard at the door blocked our way, saying that we could not enter for “political” reasons.  The political reasons, he said, had nothing to do with religion or nationality.  It was a prohibition against allowing tourists to enter.  The whole temple area closed down at 10 a.m.   We had been up there for the last 20 minutes of the morning tourist segment of the day.  This 20 minutes clinched it for me.  In every respect, Jerusalem rules.

We came down intending to find the Church of Saint Anne, Mary’s mother, but we fumbled away and couldn’t make it through the maze.  At a wrong turn, a 13-year-old Arab boy pointed us to a narrow stone doorway and urged us to enter.   That turned out to be the beginning of a stone stairway up to the rooftops of all of the adjoining buildings.  Dick had been there the day before from another entrance.  The construction of the Old City buildings is such that the rooftops act as a collective, open-air second story.  Many landmark churches could be seen from there.  We found an exit and descended to a market street below.

When we came down we decided to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the last time.  We entered the courtyard, this time seeking another hard to find stairway onto a roof area of the church that is under the jurisdiction of Ethiopian Copts.  We found the area as a kind of second floor to the west of the main part of the church.  We wandered about and meekly paid our respects to two grey-haired, old, black clad, longhaired Ethiopian monks who were on duty at the entrance.  These men in another life could have been following Louis Armstrong and other saints down the street with trombones.  Then we descended for one last look at the columns, icons, chandeliers, mosaics and what have you inside the church.  We realized that it would take multiple visits over several months to absorb it all.  The entire effect is perhaps as overwhelming as Saint Peters in perhaps 10% of the height and floor space.   There is an intensity in the richness of the decor.

We returned to the hotel, checked out and took a taxi to the Jerusalem central railroad station.  Dick is a railroad buff, having owned more than one club rail car in his collector career.  The train left about 1:30 and, with a stop in Tel Aviv, arrived in Haifa about 3:30 at a terminal so close to where the Marina was docked that we walked on to the ship within ten minutes after we got off the train.  Best of all we had avoided another tough negotiation with one or more Israeli taxi drivers.

Once on the ship it was sauna and steam room time, relaxation, followed by a drink and another preposterously delicious dinner on the warm, open rear deck of our cruise liner.

October 8, 2012, Monday: 

Limassol, Cyprus:

A hazy day to get off the ship in a new country, Cyprus.  We met the Spotswoods and Sara Barnes at the gangway – Andy being under the weather and unable to join us.  After interrogations of arch to officious taxi chauffeurs at the dock we concluded that our driver, Dmitri, must be waiting outside through the customs gates.  I had e-mailed Christos Spanos, my Cypriot pen-pal (more below), and asked him to retain a van and driver for our sightseeing on the southern coast of the island, as it turned out west of Limassol.  Dmitri emerged with a comfortable Mercedes van, and he proved to be an expert driver.

First I had to overcome my shock at seeing Limassol as it is today.  I had stopped briefly with my then Oxford friend, the “other” Rotary Fellow based in Athens, Hugh Sacket, on a fateful day (no time for a flashback here, although the story should be told) about December 20, 1954, in the course of our ship voyage from Piraeus to Beirut and subsequent Near East adventure.  Limassol was then a pinched and dusty colonial town with a small harbor under British rule.  Today Limassol appears to be a very large metropolitan area spread over hill and mountain, hell and gone, with multi-story apartment and office buildings, and the harbor is large, modern and filled with cargo vessels from all over the world.

      My shock quickly subsiding (after all, why should Limassol differ from Ayios Nikolaos, Herakleion, Antalya, or Haifa, the new coastal metropolises), we were driven first to the site of a 13th r 14th century fortification standing in a field, the Castle of Kolossi of the Knights Templar, who, like the Hospitallers/Knights of St. John, had been driven from the Holy Land by the Moslem Arabs.   [Flashback:  Hugh and I, near the end of our trip about January 18, 1955, visited Tortosa, on the coast of northern Syria near Latakia, the last stronghold of the Templars in the Levantine coast.]  The castle has a square, floor plan, perhaps 40 by 40 feet, and is three stories high.  It is plain inside without any furnishings and with fireplaces in every room, but the barrel vaulted ceilings and the open-to-the-air windows show quite well what a military fortification in later medieval times was like.  There were openings in the battlements through which the occupiers could pour boiling water onto the heads of attackers below.  We all concentrated on keeping from slipping on the smooth, narrow and steep stone circular staircases and making sure we did not hit our heads on the low door lintels on the way up.  Personally, this was about my 799th abandoned medieval castle, but I was entertained nonetheless.
   
      Our next stop was a “darling little chapel,” as the ladies referred to it, not far away.   Alas, the chapel of St. Ermogeion was locked up tight.  It has the shape of a steamer trunk that has been blown up to 30 times the volume, standing about 14 feet high and twenty-two feet long and made of large, tan, hewn stones.  There were inscriptions.  The Saint is buried inside and has been since the early 17th century.  The nearby open air cafe was closed, so we could not get a key to get in.  The ground within 20 feet all around the chapel was littered with brightly colored pieces of plastic and paper confetti.  There must have been a wedding or a baptism the day before.
   
      Sightseeing concluded with a visit to the archaeological site of Kourion, an area of several hundred acres on a hill high above the beach and five or so miles away studded with excavated ancient sites.  Kourion is also home to a legacy Royal Air Force base nearby.  The most prominent ancient site is an amphitheater dating from the second century B.C., and this provided more evidence if any is needed that the old Greeks sure could situate a theater with a breathtaking view, whatever the quality of the dramatic productions enacted there.  The other somewhat surprising site is the floors and truncated walls of a very large private peristyle villa, the House of Eustolius, dating from the first century A.D. and later expanded in the fourth under the reign of the third or so Byzantine Emperor, Theodosius in the fourth century.  The surprise is the size and what must have been the luxuriousness of the estate.  Motifs of the floor mosaics indicate that the occupiers were in transition from pagan to Christian beliefs.
   
      Finally we were driven to a beachfront location near the center of the city to the restaurant where we were to meet my new friend, Christos, with whom I had only exchanged e-mails over the past three months or so, after I had read one of his international financial analysis articles posted in a service I read every morning on the Internet called “Seeking Alpha.”  The restaurant was called, unsurprisingly, “La Mer.”  What else?
   
      We were about a half hour early, so Dare, Sara and I waited at a cafe on the beach across the street from the restaurant that must be a copy of two, three or ten thousand such establishments from Beirut to Essaouria, Morocco – coffee, ice cream, juices, colorful logoed umbrellas, sand and all.  Sara had a Turkish coffee, which she professed was excellent, and Dare and I liked our fresh-squeezed orange juice.  Dick returned from trying unsuccessfully to buy an International Herald Tribune down the beach, and we met Joanne as she was crossing the road carefully to the beach after she had been in the restaurant checking her e-mail.  Joanne was crossing carefully because in Cyprus cars drive on the left side from British colonial times – Cyprus did not become an independent nation until 1960).  Look right.  Look left.  Or die.
   
      Christos arrived, and we found him to be tall, pleasant, slender as a blade with a shaved head, in black, fluent in English (he had his university training in the U.K.), open and affable.  We immediately set about questioning him on all matters from his business as an officer of a company that does financial advising mostly to Eastern Europeans and Greeks (but never U.S. citizens to avoid killer IRS red tape) as agents for Swiss banks, which of course hold all the assets in Switzerland, to the prospects for Syria and an Israeli attack on Iran (high probability in the near but not determinate future), to the future or the Turkish economy, to Erdogan’s gradual Islamification – in short everything we could think of.  Since Christos is newly married, of course to Nadia, of a Cypriot family but raised in England and the sister of a woman Christos went to university with, we had to know about the role of Cypriot husbands today and, by the way, do the women work?  Turns out that Cypriot husbands are in about the same shape as American or German husbands, and all women work, with the result that Christos thinks every Cypriot child is being raised by a Filipino nanny.
   
      The lunch was superb, as was the Cypriot beer that went along with it.  For lunch we had (thanks to Christos for this recapitulation: Barbounia - Red mullet which was the small fried red fish; Skaros - This is called parrot fish in English. Most cultures do not eat it! But off course the Cypriots do.  (This was the the fish that was served un-scaled and not gutted.  Asprovlachos – this was the large grilled fish that we had at the end. It is a type of grouper.

When the cross examinations finally ended about 2:30, we bade farewell to Christos and were driven to the ship in about a 20 minute ride.  Limassol is big.

October 9, 2012, Tuesday: 

Rhodes, Greece:

Everyone was on his own this morning after the modest regimentation enjoyed in Limassol.   Dare and I inched carefully down the gangway (or gangplank) at about 8:20 a.m. and into that nest of pressurized vipers known as the Rhodian taxi squadron.   A number of fast talkers, both in and out of queue, tried to sell us a ride to the ancient site of Lindos, halfway down the east side of the island, about 25 to 30 mile trip one way [Flashback:  Dare and I officially met in Lindos under extraordinarily heady circumstances in April of 1955].  We decided the taxi would be too expensive and that there was plenty to see and do in the old city, the part surrounded by the walls built by the various international contingents of Crusaders who found refuge on the island starting in the late 1200’s.

We struck out at random through the wall at a point that brought us to the neighborhood on the west side of the old city.  The streets are very narrow and the doorways shoddy.  Very old people sitting on rickety chairs outside their homes.  All the earmarks of poverty but not hopelessness.  We passed a number of old chapels and a mosque, and as the shops began to open stopped for a coffee outdoors under leafy trees.

I needed a chain for a small silver “Jerusalem” cross (in the old days they were called Crusader crucifixes – they have a cross in each quadrant of the even-armed Greek cross, the five crosses in all symbolizing the five wounds inflicted on Jesus in the crucifixion.  Now I have surmised that it is popular for local Christians to say they and the local Moslems fought together against the Crusaders), so we stopped in a jewelry shop.  We found a chain, and then Dare sprang for an extravagant looking but not expensive ring.  You will notice it if you see it, a combination of small sheets of silver and gold that look as though the wind were blowing them, all on the surface of a small, unique ring.

Then came the treat of the Archaeological Museum, which has at least doubled in size since we toured it six or seven years ago.  Marvelous pottery and sculpture housed in what had been the major hospital in the time of the Knights, a two story building of heavy blocks of the ubiquitous tan rock.  We spent over an hour and a half.  One culmination is a five foot high statue of what was called in the past the “Marine Venus,” which was found in the sea off Rhodes.  Gems of small gardens and greenery are found throughout the grounds.

Time to climb the hill up the 250-yard or so Street of the Knights, paved with shiny paving stones, to the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John at the top of the 25 foot wide street.  This palace, another huge stone two-story structure was rebuilt at the command of Mussolini during the inter-War Italian occupation under which all rural villages were repainted and a modern town of futurist modern architecture was laid out and built outside the walls of the old city.  The story is that Mussolini and King Victor Emanuel planned to live in this Palace and govern what they projected through 1939 to be the coming Italian Empire and Protectorate through the eastern Mediterranean.  They thought of themselves as the successors of the medieval Knights, even though at one point Mussolini had applied for membership in the Knights of St. John and had been rejected.  The Palace is replete with beautiful carved cabinets, old furniture and fabulous Roman era mosaics, most taken from the island of Kos and other isles of the Dodecanese, which were under Italian mandate.

We had lunch in an arbored restaurant which was shaded away from the greater tumult and allowed welcome rest while we were serenaded somewhat awkwardly by a Barry White CD.  After lunch we split up to do some shopping and exploring.

I decided to walk uphill through the mostly tourist shops to the southern walls of the old city and cross through to the modern city laid out by Mussolini’s planners in the 1920’s.  I walked along and on top of some old walls and finally found a gate through the wall and 100 foot wide moat and out the other side.   There I found buildings resembling those in and around Tempelhof or E.U.R. in Rome, as well a tall pines, jogging paths and a snack bar that could have been in a Roman suburb.  In fact, a prosperous looking gentleman who was jogging directed me to another gate in the walls a quarter of a mile or so away, so I was able to re-enter the old city, take a long hike down to the harbor and finally emerge where the Marina was docked.  All in all Rhodes was a cheerful, upbeat experience, and we hope to return soon.

October 10, 2012, Wednesday: 

Ephesus, Turkey

Today it was the turn of the Barneses to arrange our day, and they came through beautifully.  We connected with our lady guide at the gate in Kusadasi.  Sachel is a graduate of archaeological guides school and is licensed as a tour guide by the national government.   Independent guides are illegal.  She is smart, knowledgeable and attractive.  She quickly noted that three large cruise ships were in the harbor, and that meant that the antiquities at Ephesus would be overrun with tourists, that dreaded and despised breed.  We opted instead to drive up a considerable mountain to a village that in olden times – before 1922 – was a Greek settlement and carried the title of “Ugly Village.”  The village had its name changed to Sirince, or “Pretty Village,” and is now all Turkish.  Until a few years ago the population subsisted on farming, but it is now solidly in the tourist shop ranks, even up to the upper reaches of its farthest, elevated and narrowest lanes.  There is a vacated but intact church dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist and a fount at its entrance.  That was our venue for a strong Turkish coffee each, followed by a stroll back down to the main plaza.

Next we joined throngs of pilgrims at a hilltop venue that has been venerated for about 200 years as the last home of Mary.  The Gospel of John relates that Jesus entrusted his mother to John’s care after the crucifixion, and for centuries legend had it that John brought her to Ephesus.  In the late 18th century a German nun had visions that pictured Mary’s home on this hilltop, and there were subsequent excavations that furnished substantial corroboration to the nun’s dreams.  Now the spot is a small Lourdes.   There must have been 500 to a thousand pilgrims there where we stood in line to file through the building.  The fervor of the pilgrims was the important part of our visit.

The piece de resistance for the day was of course the vast excavations at Ephesus, where Paul had preached.  The excavated and propped up ruins are only a B minus or C plus as ruins go, but their vastness blew us away.  We were able to go through the relatively recently excavated terrace houses, which were very large three-story buildings with each level receding further back into the hill.  The building we toured had been divided into what we would call today contiguous townhouses.  We were overwhelmed with what kind of wealth for that day these houses and the surrounding library, odeon, temples and amphitheater that holds thousands represented.

We were all very tired and very ready for a lunch in a local barbecue equivalent restaurant where we ate meatballs, stuffed peppers, salads and all the best in Turkish country cooking.

Once on the ship, I had to lie down and fret about the pains in my knees, but I was up after an hour of dawdling and Solitaire on my iPad and betook myself to the gym for a short spate on the bike, my crunches routine and five minutes each of sauna and steam.  Back in the cabin, I shaved, wrote the blog for a couple of hours, and then we descended from Deck 7 to Deck 6 for the formal dining room.  Dare had delicious squab, but I ordered Beef Wellington.  Bad mistake.  No fat or even any marbling whatsoever in the beef – like eating a red synthetic that tasted like beef – and an amalgamation that I supposed stood for the erstwhile layers of pate’ and croute.  I swear – the younger generation has forgotten everything Europe ever knew about classic continental cuisine, and PC health-consciousness has pushed us all over a cliff.  I am mildly disgusted.  I was ready for more good Turkish food on the morrow in Istanbul where our cruise would end Friday morning.

October 11, 2012, Thursday: 

Istanbul, Turkey:

The passage through the Sea of Marmara and the docking on the Pera side of the Golden Horn afforded fascinating views of the city and an understanding of the topography that we had never experienced before.  We had the afternoon at our leisure in Istanbul with one more night to spend on the ship.  We disembarked after one o’clock and found our way to the Findikli station of the tramline that runs over the Galata Bridge to the main railroad station, Sirkeci, and up the hill to Ayia Sophia.  Over the next four days we could conclude that the tram represented as advanced a transit system as we have seen anywhere.  We got off at Eminonu station at the south end of the bridge and made our way to the “New Mosque,” new in 1690 when the mosque on that site burned down.

We have become adept at the requisite shoe removal at the entrance, and we were soon inside the mosque to view the vast open space and to view the male worshipers from the area allotted to tourists.  Ladies have their own space in a mosque, usually far from the eastern wall, but there they sit or kneel as prayerful as the men.

After that it was the push and crawl through the famous Spice Bazaar, where all the candies, candied fruits and nuts and piles of vividly colored spices are displayed in the stalls.  Dare saw a sign for “Iranian saffron,” reputed to be the best in the world, and we bought two vacuum packed containers from an English-speaking salesman who assured us that we were making a great bargain.

Once outside we were back with the throngs in that hackneyed sea of humanity, but incontrovertibly there were thousands of people walking about in this one area of the city on a fine and sunny late afternoon.  We found the excellent smaller mosque known as Rustem Pasha, and we were rewarded with more superb décor and architecture.  We continued for nearly an hour through the congested, narrow market streets outside the Spice Bazaar where everything one can imagine is on sale.  Throughout our four days in Istanbul we were continually impressed with the crowds of generally upbeat people.  Times are said to be good in Turkey, and from what we saw they are.

We returned to the ship by the tram for more time on the bike and in the sauna and steam, and I wrote another two days’ worth of the trip blog.  This day was our 54th wedding anniversary, and we could only wonder what we might have thought on that hallowed beautiful fall day in New Haven so long ago if we had been told that on the same date in 2012 we would be touring the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul.  We certainly would not have believed it, on many grounds.

We celebrated with dinner for two in one of the four specialty restaurants on the Marina, in this case Red Ginger, where we enjoyed a tasty Asian dinner and were treated to our own Happy Anniversary cake, replete with candles and a modified Happy Birthday song from the dining room staff.

October 12, 2012, Friday: 

Istanbul, Turkey:

The fateful end of the cruise had arrived.  We checked out, disembarked, picked up our bags in the passenger terminal, cleared immigration and proceeded to hire the crookedest cab driver east of Athens to take us to our hotel, the Orient Express near the railroad station.  Our driver must have taken us five miles out of the way at an outrageous fare, pleading as they all do that they were innocent victims of difficult and wide-ranging one-way streets.  The hotel proved to be somewhat plain but clean and efficient.  We were able to check in early and then take off for our favorite site in Istanbul, the church of St. Savior in Chora, or the Kariye Camii (now the Kariye Muzesi) as it is known to the Turks.

Unfortunately we became victims of trying to speak English with a cab driver who could manipulate his level of understanding of English, as well as your perception of whatever that level might be.  The driver gave us to understand that the Galata Bridge was what in fact was the far away Attaturk Bridge, and so we slogged a long way for seemingly a half an hour in some heat to the latter bridge before realizing that we were still a daunting distance from the Kariye Museum.  We arrived at one of our five most favorite sites where either of us has ever traveled only to find that it, too, was overrun with tourists, but after a brief time out for a Fanta in we went.  The Christian name for the monument was, before the forced deconsecration sometime after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, the Church of St. Savior of Chora.  Roughly speaking, Chora means space, and the space in question was the womb of Mary.  The chief inscription in a now hard to find arch above a door of the outer narthex, and it shows the dedication of the church to the womb in a classic way that only the Byzantines, as successors to the ancient philosophers, could have formulated:  “To the container of the uncontainable.”  There are superb and heavily-laden-with-meaning mosaics and frescoes inside, with the usual iconic portrayals and a life cycle of Mary as well.  This is a remarkable and must-see landmark.  This was perhaps my fourth visit, the first in 1955 when all of the mosaics and frescoes were not yet uncovered, and the impact is as strong as ever.

Too tired to think about what we used to do, i.e., walk three miles or so back to Ayia Sophia via the Suleymaniye Mosque, we hopped a cab, which again took us on a wild and expensive goose chase, to the Grand Bazaar.  Once inside and bedazzled by the richness and variety of the various stalls selling jewelry, clothes, spices and every tourist item imaginable, we found our favorite Istanbul lunch venue with a combination of intuition, instinct and memory after only a couple of turns through the crowded aisles – the Havuzlu Restaurant.  Our lunch was pulled lamb covered by a rich topping of mashed potatoes and bechamel sauce.   It was as good as expected.

Emerging from the bazaar (we call it a suk – long “u” – as a habit from mutual old days), we found ourselves in the unique book bazaar.  Yes, the Turks still read books on paper.  That bazaar abuts the Beyazit Mosque, which alas was closed for renovation.  The walk to our next stop, the Suleymaniye Mosque took us through the extensive grounds of the Istanbul University.  That all appeared big, fresh, well kept and dozens of students who didn’t appear Islamist in the slightest.  The recently re-opened Mosque once again struck us as one of the most beautiful structures ever built, the handiwork of the famous early 17th century architect Sinan.  There are relatively few chandeliers and other decorations, leaving the stark lines of the inner dope and arches to bemuse us.  The whole effect reminded me of a German cathedral such as that in Speyer which had become and remain plain, unadorned, Protestant and unaffected by later Counter-Reformation or baroque influences.

This was followed by a fascinating walk down the hill a half-mile or so to the shore of the Golden Horn through narrow streets and old houses, many barely standing and some condemned to make room for a new underground station.  The most striking sight was that of several women kneeling around a “Persian” rug that was laid out in the street and that they were cleaning on their knees with a vigorous attack with stiff brushes held in both hands and soap and water, all to incessant chatter.

Once at the bottom of the hill we walked eastward toward the south end of the Galata Bridge and the New Mosque along a long and bustling market street.  The density increased the closer we came to the New Mosque and the Spice Bazaar.  We were lucky to stumble upon the lesser-known site, the Rustem Pasha Mosque – a small, secluded and elegant gem of architectural elegance.  The graceful curves and arches of this mosque were no different geometrically than those of the Sultan Ahmet (Blue) and Suleymaniye Mosques, but because smaller the effect is of being in another key and intimate, almost chapel-like.  A few hundred – five thousand? - more bodies to swim through on the crowded streets and we were in the open square between the waters of the Golden Horn and the New Mosque.  Dare and I split up, she to shop responsibly for our granddaughters and I to take another swing through the Spice Bazaar.  Retail is in my blood.

Dinner that evening was an unexpectedly pleasant surprise.  The rooftop, open-air restaurant at our hotel, eight stories high, presented an excellent view of the city and first-class cuisine as well.

October 13, 2012, Saturday: 

Istanbul, Turkey:

Breakfast at the hotel was OK and nothing special, but it gave us a look at the clientele of the hotel, and we found our fellow partakers to be a varied and attractive bunch.  Stepping outside, we started walking uphill along the tram tracks toward the Sultan Ahmet area and Ayia Sophia.  We saw a left turn with a sign for the Archaeological Museum.  We took that turn because we had missed the museum on our last visit in May of 2009.  We were amply rewarded.  Turkish archaeology had begun in the 1870’s and covered unexpected places like Sidon on the Lebanese coast that, after all, was then part of the Ottoman Empire.  If you like sarcophagi and Roman busts, you will go nuts here.  The museum is elegant, spacious and professionally done.  We roamed for two hours.  Our visit was marred only by our becoming separated after one of my rest stops, necessitating re-connection via cellphone at a cost of at least $20, while I was on the second floor and Dare was waiting patiently on the ground floor by the coffee bar.  She ordered me to report there forthwith.  Joyfully re-united, to proceeded to an ancillary building across a beautiful court to see some heavy and formal Hittite sculptures, and the morning was complete.

We had a good tourist lunch within view of Ayia Sophia and spent the afternoon in that most remarkable of structures and later at the Sultan Ahmet (Blue) Mosque.  These visits are simply obligatory but just as good as ever.

We met Joanne and Dick Spotswood that evening for a drink on the rooftop of their hotel and a dinner at a tourist restaurant nearby.  This was the farewell dinner, as the Spotswood had a 6 a.m. flight home the next morning.  Joanne entertained us with an account of her Turkish massage earlier that day.  She had been brusquely but not unpleasingly manhandled by a large, male masseur.  Notwithstanding, we all agreed that the cruise and Barcelona and Istanbul visits had been nothing short of fabulous.

October 14, 2012, Sunday: 

Istanbul, Turkey:

Energy saving being key words of the day, we eschewed hiking through crowds, albeit diminished on Sunday morning, and over rough pavements and took a taxi to the Fener District.  Fener lies on the southern shore of the Golden Horn, which divides the Old City from “Pera” and new Istanbul, about half the distance from its western edge to its mouth on the south end of the Bosporus.  “Fener” is another one of those Turkish corruptions/badly-done adaptations from the Greek, in this case “Phanar,” which means lantern.  “Istanbul” itself is alleged by Greeks to be a corruption of “Eis (pronounced “ees”) ten (pronounced “teen”) poli (the “I” is pronounced as a long “e” and means city), or “to the city” as that phrase might have been used in Byzantine times.

In the post Ottoman conquest heyday of the late 19th century, the Phanar was the center of Greek life in the city.  All the rich Greek merchants, doctors and lawyers lived there.  Generally speaking, at that time only the Greeks, Jews and Armenians practiced professions, pursuits deemed unmanly in the Ottoman culture, which esteemed only agriculture and the military as suitable for men.  The Phanar was, and it is said still is, the site of an extraordinary boys’ school up the hillside, the Phanar Greek Orthodox College (Turkish: Özel Fener Rum Lisesi), known in Greek as the Great School of the Nation.  The school building is sometimes referred to as the fifth largest castle in Europe because of its imposing size and shape and is built of vivid red brick.  Downhill is the Church of St. George, which has been the site of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, i.e., the seat of the Patriarch of Constantinople, since 1600.  Today the Greeks of Istanbul number only about 2,000, and the area of the Patriarchate is a neighborhood of modest, drab houses.

We attended Sunday “Divine Liturgy” in the smallish, dark Church and were rewarded with a seat about 30 feet across the nave from Patriarch Bartholomew, the Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch.  Thus is Bartholomew ensconced as the "first among equals" in the Eastern Orthodox Communion (and the Roman Catholic Communion as well as far as most Orthodox are concerned, the Pope being just another bishop of the Church).  Notwithstanding his awesome churchly stature, the Patriarch is about five foot two, though a clear-eyed, hearty and robust fellow.  The train of his black robes as he enters the church and climbs into his enclosure at the right side of the nave must be 30 feet long.  The service is elaborate in process beyond anything in the Christian West.  The liturgy is mostly sung by male cantors who moan and groan deep in the bass clef as though carrying the full weight of the centuries of misfortune of the Great Church since the Patriarchate was deposed from Santa Sophia on that most fateful day of Christendom, May 29, 1453, the date of Sultan Mehmet’s conquest of Constantinople.  The singing/chanting makes “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen” sound like Ella Fitzgerald’s 1938 hit, “A-Tisket a-Tasket,” in comparison.  There were perhaps 200 worshipers in the church, perhaps half of them startlingly blond until one remembers that they are Russians, Ukrainians or Serbs, the same constituency that we had observed at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai in 2009.  The Russians now have money, and they travel.

Forty-five minutes of chanting and the reading of the Gospel having duly used up our lame worship limit for the morning, we retired to the narthex, where I followed the Orthodox procedure of lighting a candle, crossing myself right to left and kissing the glass-fronted icon of the Virgin.  Dare lit a candle, crossed herself left to right but stuck with her stubborn and misguided policy of never putting her lips to anything that two or three hundred Turks and Russians had kissed within the hour, notwithstanding my protestations that sacred icons kill germs on contact.

We wandered about the neighborhood a bit, had an orange Fanta and then did something brave – we took a public bus that appeared to promise to take us back to the Galata Bridge/Sirkeci railroad station area via the Taksim Square, as noted the center of the modern city.  Once in Taksim, however, the route of the bus became troublingly uncertain, so we hopped off.  The disorganized square appears to be about a quarter of a mile on each side, interrupted by monuments and small buildings, and roads and streets shoot off in all directions.  We asked the route of descent downhill to the Galata Bridge area, having totally forgotten in the intervening three years since we had last taken that route how far that was, along one of the most celebrated streets of Istanbul, the Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Street), a landmark well worth looking up in Wikipedia.  First stop was a cheap lunch in a kind of cafeteria and then a walk downhill along the avenue among a myriad of shops and hip young people.  It reached a summation at a large shopping mall on one side of the street known as the Demirören ?stiklal Alı?veri? Merkezi of the Beyo?lu district, which looked to us almost as large as the Westfield Center in downtown San Francisco and alike in spirit and décor to similar sites on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.  The men’s room appeared to be a copy of that in the Arkaden shopping center in the Potsdamer Platz – there is no higher praise.

I was itching to find the newly remodeled Pera Palace Hotel.  I had walked into the lobby and bar of the venerable old hotel three or four times in the past.  Reputedly celebrities like Pierre Loti, Ernest Hemingway, King Edward VIII, the Emperor Franz Joseph, Greta Garbo and Pierre Loti had stayed there, and Agatha Christie is said to have written “Murder on the Orient Express” while a guest.  It was the watering place for Kemal Attaturk, and the bar featured a black and white photo of Kemal and my hero Steven Runciman riding in the back seat of a twenty-foot long open touring car, now in a “museum room.”   I remembered that its most famous feature was a gleaming brass rococo elevator in the lobby that lifted movie stars and pashas to the mysterious upper floors.  We left the Istiklal and were immediately lost among a vast maze of middling to upscale streets more or less wending down to the Golden Horn, but we soon found that no one had heard of the Pera Palace in this day and age, and new and bewildering construction had sprouted up everywhere.

It took a half hour of wandering to find the hotel, and then came the sobering realization that it must have been massively transformed by its recent remodeling and, as the sign on the door indicated, its new Arab hotel chain ownership.  We entered wearing our scruffy tourist clothes – in my case a work-out synthetic tee shirt and ill-fitting North Face khaki shorts - into a sedate and refined lobby of white-jacketed hospitality personnel.  All was elegant but largely empty and dull.  The hotel did feature a sedan chair upholstered in something silk-like that was used in the old days to carry guests up the hill for over a mile from the Sirkeci railroad station.  Alas, the brass elevator was not to be found.  As it turns out my memory was not reliable in that respect.  Now, off but not in the lobby depressingly stands what might or might not be the original open-structure elevator, but it is in coal black steel, and I could not see the richly finished wood behind the metal framing.  Woefully, I think I shall never fulfill a goal of over fifty years to stay at the Pera Palace.  Even worse, the Istanbul of the twenties and the memory of the now vanished, daunting, garden-surrounded Park Hotel a few yards away that had been Gestapo headquarters during World War II have been lost, and the new generations reign in their native affluence.

It was a long walk down to the Galata Bridge.  The only venue of interest was the central synagogue, where we had the good fortune to arrive as the richly dressed and quite formal congregation was coming on the street at the end of a service.  Chauffeurs were picking up some of the worshipers in the street, which was blocked off to general traffic.  One can't be too careful.

Fatigue led to a long rest and dinner that evening once again in the excellent rooftop restaurant of our hotel.


October 15, 2012, Monday: 

Istanbul, Turkey:

What to do on our last day?  Of course - take an art friend’s advice and take a boat out to Buyuk Adar, the largest of the Princess Islands just off the Asian shore out in the Sea of Marmara.  I had been there as a student, and remembered a charming, empty, forested island.  We took the tram to the end of the line at the Kabata pier (these places have to be looked up in Google Maps), bought tickets that cost about three dollars each one-way, waited over coffee for an hour or so in a café and boarded the ferry – launched in 1974 and of dubious seaworthiness - for about a 90 minute ride.  It was on this ride that I took my now somewhat infamous picture of a husband and wife, most likely Saudi tourists in Istanbul, the guy in a gross tee shirt and the lady in an elegant all black burqa with the face-veil attached and only a slit for her eyes and a gold watch and bracelets showing.  I snapped the iPhone photo as I was falling off my passenger bench when I saw the lady texting with her smartphone.  I did not notice that her husband was scowling suspiciously as I took the picture.  Later, I asked to take another photo of the lady with my Canon 60D zoom lens, but the husband waved me off with a flick of his hand.

The normal thing is to take a horse-driven carriage for a 90 minute spin around the periphery of the island.  We walked about and had lunch in a plain café first.  As I excused myself for my WC break, another presumably Saudi young lady in full, head-to-toe black burqa with face-veil approached Dare and, to Dare’s shock, asked if Dare would pose with her for a photo that her husband would take.  This led to photos and camera trading all around, and everyone was happy.  O Islam, when will you yield your new secrets?  When will we possibly begin to understand thee?

The town is charming, notwithstanding the plethora of tourist shops, and is situated on the watered side of the island.  After lunch – I had eggplant kebab - we hired our carriage.  As we left the center of the town we passed a long stretch of summer villas, and I could have been looking at the houses on the shores of the Wannsee at Potsdam.  The German influence is all over Istanbul but never more starkly than here.  The other side of the island proved to be dry and pine-covered, but the sea views were very good.

Back in town, it was a minor hassle to find the correct terminal for the ride back to Istanbul.  The ferry on the ride home carried a large number of Greek tourists – all of whom, and I as well, always have the same thoughts, i.e., “This is our country; why are these Turks here?”  I sat next to a good-looking, very tall, cultivated and well dressed lady in her early fifties who passed the time in earnest and quiet conversation with a tall and slender gentleman, probably ten years older, surely not her husband urban (and what were they doing together?), a certain Evangelis, who was clad in the fine casual clothing of the Mediterranean upper classes.  The gentleman was eyeing me and appeared to suspect that while I was clearly an American I was eavesdropping and that I could understand what they were saying.  My poor hearing prevented that.  I wanted to insert myself into the conversation, to introduce myself as a Greek-speaking American and to ask where they were from and what in their pasts had brought them to the Princess Islands.  A class-consciousness intervened.  I lost my nerve, and I will never know.

Once back at the ferry terminal, we took the tram once again.  I got off at the New Mosque, and Dare went on three stops to the hotel for shopping.  I wandered a bit through the crowds and, when I had done enough walking for the day, sat on the grey stone steps of one of the entrances to the New Mosque.  The sun was setting.  I pondered how often my grandfather and other forebears on my mother’s side might have walked through this square and these very market places in the days before 1922, when only horse-drawn carriages passed by and before our family was forced to leave Turkey.

That evening we indulged once again in a fine meal in the rooftop restaurant of our Orient Express Hotel.

October 15, 2012, Tuesday: 

Istanbul, Turkey, to London Heathrow, to San Francisco:

My iPhone rang at 4:30 a.m.  John Erickson was calling, no doubt wanting to talk about Giants tickets and assuming I was home.  I tapped on “At Bat 2012" on the iPhone and received the pleasant news that the Giants had just scored four runs in the night NLDS playoff game in Cincinnati.

At 5:30 the alarm sounded, we checked out and waited patiently for the shuttle.  The shuttle was an agitated stop and start ride of half an hour that climbed all over the hill of the Old City, stopping at ten or so hotels to pick up passengers.  At five Euros fare for each of us, that was still a bargain.  The wonders and variety of the city showed themselves again as we drove around the Ayia Sophia/Sultan Ahmet area and down to the freeway on the shore that took us to Attaturk International Airport.

The walk to the airlines lounge at Heathrow was too long, and the stop at the third and finally the right lounge was too short, but we boarded finally.  The ride home was cramped and painful in economy, but somehow it was worth it.  We had done and seen a lot in three weeks.

Greece and Germany: It Took Two to Tango

The Popular Statement of the Issues:

Michael Lewis in his recent book has written that in Greece, cheap credit from “the banks” led the government to put everyone and their brother - or so it seemed - on the public payroll. It didn't matter if none of them actually worked. Since few in Greece admit to paying taxes, the public debt quickly exceeded the government's ability to repay. As a result, Greece is now prepared to go where few believed a sovereign state could ever travel - into insolvency.

Which are “the banks” that Lewis refers to? Surprise: They are not only Greek banks, but also the banks, major and minor, and bond trading firms of northern Europe and to a lesser extent of the United States. From this point we take a step back and take a broader and slightly deeper look at the matter.

History and Culture:

Greece: What are some of the salient features of Greek history and culture and concomitant traits of the Greeks that should be taken into account in examining the Greek sovereign debt matter?

1. The legacy of Ottoman/Moslem occupation:

a. “Western minds and Eastern emotions” is a phrase I heard over and over again in my student days in the mid-‘50’s at the University of Athens. Greeks equate intelligence in Thomas Edison’s terms with “genius,” i.e., acuteness and quickness, but have relatively less tolerance for “perspiration” or the virtues of deliberation and application over the long haul.

b. The predominance of family and local loyalties over loyalties to the state or to the society as a whole. Notwithstanding, the Greeks are ferociously tribal and united when the nation is attacked, for instance by Mussolini in 1940 or by allegedly technocratic EU statisticians sent in to measure the “true deficit,” but they tend to revert to clan and family loyalties when the pressure is reduced.

c. The difficulty of forging national loyalties manifests itself in an inability or unwillingness to think in terms of national economic development or the focusing of the economy of the entire country into strategic enterprises or business lines, such as computers and software or other high tech areas. Why did Greece never become the “California of Europe

d. The Sultan in Constantinople and the local pasha were the enemies of the Greeks for four centuries. Any governmental entity above the village level today is the successor enemy of individual liberty. The Greeks avoided taxes owed to the Ottoman Sultan. No self-respecting Greek since Greece became independent in 1835 has seen any reason to change that view of the government since. They have never paid taxes, and there is a serious question whether the great majority of them see any reason to start doing so now. Everyone who bought the Greek bonds that are now at issue knew at the time they lent Greece the money that tax laws were poorly enforced. This has not been news for 600 years. As friends recently told us, “Greece is a very rich country. It is only the government that is poor.”

2. The lack of natural resources, including the dearth of arable land. It has always been understood that for a Greek to make his fortune, he must leave Greece. For example, Onassis and the now legendary ship-owners.

3. The aftermath of German occupation during World War II and subsequent Communist civil wars

a. A phrase I heard repeated again and again when I was a student in Athens: “We build up our lives and wealth only to have them torn down again and again.” This referred to decades of successive economic downturns and wars.

b. The Greek civil war against Soviet aided insurgents was not ended until 1950, leaving Greece with a five or ten year late start relative to the rest of Europe in rebuilding the economy after World War II.

c. Urban/rural mutual distrust has remained strong over the years. The junta dictatorship of 1967 through 1974 can be viewed as an anti-urban reaction.

4. Twenty or more years under the European Union:

a. The EU can be viewed as the instrument for the forging of a bland type of European from the fiery Zorba of the past (both extreme stereotypes) and the undermining of Greek nationalism and traditions. The Greek has been taught to forget the virtues of the War of Independence from the Ottomans of 1821 and to become a compliant, socialized European. Greeks today have all of the passion of a cold café au lait.

b. A new, largely urban generation has arisen that regards itself as international, that has had access to educational opportunities anywhere within Europe and that has never lived under the Drachma or what they regard as the old, “oriental” ways.

Germany:

All of Europe, Americans and Japanese bought Greek bonds, but today it falls to the Germans to be the focus of all that is good and bad about Europe, what can and should be done to cure the debt crises of southern Europe and what has gone wrong with the unified currency system.

1. Culture and psychology:

a. The Germans are reasonably intelligent and more or less well educated. They are deliberate but not quick. They are comfortable in groups and not individualistic. As among Europeans and Americans, and at least until twenty or thirty years ago, the Germans had one outstanding virtue – they worked harder than anyone else. Notwithstanding, one might oversimplify and say that by themselves the Germans have never gotten much done. In the mid-eighteenth century, King Friedrich Wilhelm I had to import Dutch craftsmen into Potsdam to build the city because the local peasantry was ham-handed and inept. One wonders if Germany would have developed much beyond agriculture, Bach or Kant and Hegel without Jewish and Huguenot immigration.

b. In my student days in Europe in the 1950’s the only good universities were Oxford, Cambridge and any university in France. German universities were coming out of the Nazi years and the devastation of the war and were considered lax havens for lazy young adults to avoid working for as many years as possible. Literature, art and music were essentially on hold for 25 years after World War II. Germany was an isolated cocoon because the Nazis forbade circulation of any ideas or trends from the outside.

c. The Germans, for no reason necessarily apparent to an outsider, have often in the past felt inferior to the French and the British cultures, and residues of this inferiority persist to this day. Forget what you were taught about how beastly the Germans were to the French from 1870 on. Germany could occupy and destroy France five times over and still not match the destruction caused to Germany by Napoleon. This was remembered at least through the first half of the twentieth century. The British were superior because of empire and riches

d. The Germans caused death and destruction in Europe and Russia during World War II and they perpetrated the Holocaust. What could the Germans of today do to expurgate the guilt of their grandfathers? Could one answer be to submit to the discipline of the Euro?

f. The Germans of the early nineteenth century invented the concept of ancient Greece and the worship of what they configured almost out of thin air as classical civilization. Every German student memorized the first few lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey. How could the Greeks be excluded from the European Union when Greece had founded Europe and its civilization? Certainly the irregular balance sheet and tax collection practices of this tiny state could be overlooked in the face of the indebtedness of Europe to ancient Hellas.


The Worldwide Debt Meltdown of 2008

The Greek debt crisis has not occurred in a vacuum. Other nations and large financial institutions from Spain, Italy, Lehman Brothers and Bear, Stearns have taken the spotlight from time to time in the last five years. The Germans, supposedly fortified by a culture of austerity, thrift, risk avoidance, frugality and non-attraction to luxury or a sybaritic life style theoretically should have been spared any grief from the worldwide credit paralyses, but they were not. True to form, they have not borrowed beyond their means. They have, however, suffered horrendous losses as lenders to deadbeats far beyond what anyone could have predicted as recently as five years ago.

The Germans, for example, were strong buyer of U.S. securities backed by so-called sub-par mortgages. Michael Lewis in the September 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, gave an account of one German banker who directed large-scale purchases of such securities. Lewis also interviewed American bankers on the other side of the loans. Seemingly with no regard to their traditions and practices of skepticism and prudence, the German banks saw US triple A rated bonds with a yield that exceeded their own costs of money and poured billions into the program. Individual German bankers are quoted as saying they found it impossible to doubt the triple A rankings regularly bestowed by infallible rating agencies or to take issue with the reputations for probity and effectiveness of American bankers or the SEC and other U.S. regulatory bodies. The poorly compensated bankers in their high-rise Frankfurt fortresses tried to emulate American bankers, and they were no good at it. The Germans continued to buy bonds backed by sub-par mortgages mindlessly and according to formula even after the first defaults by Bear, Stearns and Lehman occurred. One response was to take all the rules of investment banking as then understood literally, a characteristic of the German character. “If I tick off all the boxes, then there is no risk.” No German banker would make a risky loan internally, but loans to foreign borrowers carried no risk.

In New York, the Americans allegedly routinely described the German bankers as gullible “muppets” who would buy any package put before them. The Germans had gotten rich and were on a roll. They and many other international bankers had been taught by Walter Wriston and his successors one lesson for over forty years: A sovereign cannot default.

How and Why Did Greece Come to Grief?

Here we find ourselves in some confusion. On the one hand, I have read that total levels of private and sovereign debt in the Eurozone are lower than in the UK, the US, and far lower than in Japan. One article continues: “Greece’s debt levels are around 250pc of GDP, at the lower end of the developed world. The reported numbers vary considerably. Spain’s sovereign debt is admirably modest at around 65pc. Italy’s household debt level is the envy of the rich world. It has a primary budget surplus. Italy has many problems, but the budget deficit is not one of them.”

Notwithstanding all of that, it is conceded that Greece has been living beyond its means since even before it joined the euro. After it adopted the euro, public spending soared and public sector wages practically doubled.
By the middle of 2009, as a result of a combination of international the world financial crisis and ‘uncontrolled’ government spending, the Greek bubble popped. It was revealed that successive Greek governments had consistently and deliberately been misreporting the country's official economic statistics to keep within the monetary union guidelines. The annual deficit was not 6% but over 13%. Alleged underreporting had enabled Greek governments to spend beyond their means, while hiding the actual deficit from the EU overseers. It was explained that the deficit numbers reported by the Conservative government were not false so much as based on a loose methodology – involving something we know about in the United States – off-balance sheet financing of various quasi-governmental entities. Nonetheless, the figures came as a shock, and the damage was done. Pimco, Mohamen El Erian’s bond trading firm in Newport Beach, immediately sold their entire portfolios of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish bonds. From there, contagion took hold, and borrowing costs for the southern tier and Ireland have been continually increasing.
Is Europe Undergoing a Classic Liquidity Crisis?
So what was going wrong outside of Greece?

The recession coincident with the so-called credit crisis of 2008 has been largely treated as a liquidity crisis afflicting the European banks by government officials, bankers and journalists. In over-simplified terms, this apparent lack of liquidity and concomitant valuations of banks as under-capitalized has been caused by falling valuations of the banks’ holdings of sovereign debt and by write-downs due to the business slowdown. The IMF and others continue to insist that the banks must increase capital and thus be able to lend more into the economy to get business moving again.

Bear in mind that when the EU was formed, the Greeks were led to believe that the European nations were now one for all and all for one, i.e., that any nation would be aided by the others if it got into financial trouble. In contrast, the Germans were promised two things: There would never be any bailouts of defaulting nations, and the European Central Bank would operate as conservatively as the German Central Bank, the Bundesbank. Instead, the ECB has just been a heavy participant in the latest Greek bailout, and it has been printing money as fast as it can – on a par with its brothers at the Federal Reserve. The Germans are afflicted with a racial memory of the catastrophes of hyperinflation. They don’t want to go back there.

The “Structural Imbalances” Within the European Union

An increasing number of commentators, however, now say that bank liquidity is a secondary issue. The real problem in Europe is the structure of the EU itself and the imposition at the outset (of course it was a welcome acceptance at first) of a single currency on all the member states. Germany itself at the beginning appeared to take one for the team when it accepted an exchange rate between the Deutsch Mark and the Euro that undervalued the Mark. Of course what that really did was to devalue German currency and increase its export capability within and outside the EU. Countries like Greece gained advantages at the beginning – witness Cretan peaches, for example – but in the long run it has made both Greece’s imports and exports too expensive.

The argument continues: The EU is fatally beset by structural imbalances that from the start doomed the union to failure. One writer estimates that there is a 30 percent gap in competitiveness between North and South. From the adoption of the Euro, low interest rates (negative real interest rates) were set by the ECB to serve German exports. This fueled over-consumption in southern Europe – another way to state the Greek deficit problem. All member states other than about five in the north became less able to withstand recession effects. Deficits increased greatly. The Germans, not surprisingly, have refused to reflate (i.e., increase domestic demand so that southern Europe can export to Germany.)

What has happened, let’s say in the past five years? In shorthand, the Greeks, Spanish and Portuguese got hooked on German cars. The Greeks borrowed money at 3% to buy the cars, and the Germans lent it to them as fast as they could so they could continue to keep their production up and their unemployment down. Trade imbalances mushroomed. Then in Greece, things really turned sour. With the Greek conservative and socialist parties running neck and neck in the elections and the polls, each succeeding Greek administration would borrow more money and spend it on newly created, non-productive government jobs just to get votes for the next election. The 2008 recession was the coup de grace.
Today we have bitterness and recriminations on all sides. The Germans say that the Greeks are not being quick enough to impose “structural reforms,” i.e., collecting taxes and reducing government employment - but, argues Michael Lewis, really just not becoming German fast enough. The Greeks say that the Germans are trying to keep their profligate banks solvent on the backs of the poor Greeks, who have no hope of producing enough to pay their debts whether they impose more austerity within the EU (they cannot reflate because they cannot control their own currency) or leave the EU and try to get whole by devaluing the drachma.

Because they are inside the Eurozone, the governments of the southern tier cannot rely on their central bank - the ECB - to lend them the money. Nor can they devalue their currencies to regain a competitive edge. Note, however, that the Spanish central bank has recently begun to create Euros on its own, while Germans bankers are somewhat disingenuously being said to be surprised.

Meanwhile, these southern tier countries are being pressured to push through very painful spending cuts and tax rises to get their borrowing under control, even as some analysts argue this is just pushing their economies into recession and reducing tax revenues.

What Are the Social and Political Effects of the Greek Near-Default Within Greece Itself?

Stratfor Intelligence argues as follows: Greece is entering its fifth year of recession with approximately 25 percent unemployment. The unemployment among young people may be as great as 50%, and nothing saps the morale of a population more that seeing its youth unemployed. Allegedly, the benefits of avoiding default and remaining within the Eurozone are becoming less obvious to the average Greek, as are the long-term benefits of increased austerity.

Is there increasing alienation between the political elite and the “people?” Television coverage of riots and destruction would argue yes, but I have never spoken with any Athenian who did not insist that television coverage was overblown and highly inaccurate. The Greek Prime Minister stated on Monday that his polls showed a 70 or 80% support among the public for whatever measures are required to make Greece more competitive. I believe that the gentleman is whistling, but I don’t think it’s in the dark.

There is anecdotal evidence of significant population shifts within Greece. After several decades, there appears to be a reversal of urbanization as people leave Athens and return to the provinces. The FT last Monday reported an exodus of Portuguese from recession-bound Portugal back to Mozambique. We read accounts daily of the increasing popularity of far left parties. Can revivals of far right parties be far behind? There appears to be a significant economic migration of the educated class to foreign countries. Great numbers of foreign students are not returning from their studies abroad.

Pressure is increasing from around Europe for tighter immigration controls, although it has been an open secret for years that Greece has been the landing spot for illegal immigration. Athens has suffered its own Koran burning incidents.

Yet, for many Greeks under 40, as I have noted earlier, leaving Europe and returning to the Drachma is unthinkable. They are Europeans. Victor Davis Hanson wrote in his blog on March 18:


The alternative of default and a return to the drachma would destroy contemporary Greece as we know it. Bankruptcy would lead to political isolation, a scarcity of fuel and medicines, exorbitantly expensive imported consumer goods, the inability to purchase key military hardware, and a virtual cessation of overseas travel — in other words, a return to the impoverished Greece of the 1960s.

A Tentative and Strained Conclusion:

Going forward, the only thing certain in my mind is that both the German and the Greek taxpayer/worker has taken a substantial hit without being told that what was happening or why and that Greece will once again become the poor country it always was, probably going back to the fourth century.