65 Things to Do When You Retire: Travel

Recently, I was asked to contribute a chapter for a book.  Titled “65 Things to Do When You Retire: Travel”, it was just published in March, 2013, and promptly made the Amazon Best Sellers Rank in the category “Senior Travel”.  In addition, Mark Chimsky, the Editor-in-Chief of Sellers Publishing, wrote about the book on Huffington Post  and has even mentioned the gist of my philosophy on travel (and the title of my contributing article) “There is no such thing as taking a wrong turn”. If you purchase the book (list price $16.95), you are also doing a good deed as all royalties from the sale will be donated to nonprofit organizations dedicated to cancer research and prevention.

The contents of the book range from glamping (camping in style and comfort); taking a “golden gap year”, which I suppose I did with my 257 day-long trip around the world; to voluntourism, which is a rapidly growing trend for all age groups – not only visiting a country but actively contributing in some way – archeological digs, teaching, etc. – and thus getting to know its culture and people in a much more meaningful way. And then there is house-sitting as a way of traveling and seeing the world in-depth.  This has intrigued me for a long time… and something I would definitely consider doing. Or author George Taber, who starts his chapter with a definitive “They don’t make wine in ugly places”.

“65 Things to Do When You Retire: Travel” has turned out a very positive and encouraging book and I am very proud to have been given the opportunity to contribute to it.

It is the two-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Japan today.  We all know that it was not only the quake and the tsunami that followed that caused such devastating destruction, but also the damage to the atomic reactors in Fukushima.  Before March 11, 2011, I dare say that no one knew about Fukushima.  After that date, it became a household word, unfortunately with the most negative of connotations.

Two years ago, I was in Nagasaki, Japan and, while what happened in Fukushima was of a totally different nature and took place under totally different circumstances, it does show up a common denominator:  the consequences of what can happen when the use of atomic power goes wrong.

Of course, I visited the Atomic Bomb Museum.  In fact, I sat on the very spot where, on a similarly bright and sunny day, also at 11:02 a.m., on August 9, 1945, the atomic bomb hit Nagasaki.  A blinding white flash, all the clocks stopped and devastation hit the city and killed about 74,000 instantly and another 75,000 as a direct result, let alone the tens of thousands that suffered injuries.

The museum is a large complex and I spent a good three hours there. There are  technical, political and historical exhibits.  For me, the most emotionally charged exhibits were the every-day items that have survived in some shape or other, that had belonged to every-day people.  The tags gave just enough identifying information, letting the items themselves speak of their history – the melted rosary (Nagasaki had a Catholic cathedral), the school-girl’s lunch box with charred rice, the photo of the dazed young mother with the dying infant at her breast.... I sat down several times on the benches provided in the half darkness of the exhibits and simply let the involuntary tears run down my cheeks. I noticed I was not the only one. Other visitors, young and old, Japanese and foreigners, male and female, had the same reaction.  We were united in our grief and I am sure that all were thinking the same thought – we cannot allow this to happen again.

Nowadays, you find elaborate settings with the imperial couple and as many attendants of the court as possible.  These are set upon multi-tiered, red-carpet covered stands (maybe this is the origin of the red-carpet for celebrities, ubiquitious at important events today?).  The Emperor and Empress, in full regalia, are always on the top tier, with the rest of the court arranged in as many as five to seven lower tiers. As with so many things Japanese, the level of intricate detailing and elaborate dress and décor is astonishing.

Of course, there are also traditional dishes marking this festival, including pastel-colored sweet rice crackers (Hina Arare), a special, sweet and non-alcoholic sake so children can also drink it (Shirozake), and a special sushi dish (Chirashizushi = scattered sushi), known for its colorful ingredients over a bowl of sushi rice. All in all a very merry celebration!

The visitor experiences the art in spacious galleries, spaces that allow the art to breathe and allow interaction.  This is especially true of the “Swimming Pool” by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, where a swimming pool is “hollowed-out” and covered by a layer of water contained between sheets of glass. The visitor can walk in below and cavort freely, much to the delight of the viewers above, outside the pool looking in.

Another great sensory experience is the room designed by James Turrell with a large rectangular space cut out of the ceiling.  The open sky is the framed artwork, with its moving clouds and changing light. As you sit on the bench along the wall looking up, your perception and awareness of the sky subtly changes. A perfect place for quiet meditation.

Or the walk-in sculpture by Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic master of light: Oversized, curved and brightly colored panels of glass change the viewer’s experience of the outside world, depending on where he stands.

I could go on and on … whoever chose or commissioned these works is to be highly commended. Contemporary art made accessible and palatable to all visitors!

Put a few flakes in tea and transform an ordinary “cuppa” into a drink of luxury.  There are even those pundits who claim that eating gold is good for you.  Well, a teensy amount of pure gold certainly won’t do any harm.  It has been used as an edible ingredient over centuries.

And where does the best gold leaf come from?  Kanazawa, one of my favorite cities in Japan.  There is even a gold leaf museum, showing the laborious process by which a coin of about the size of a quarter/Euro/10 -yen piece is rolled out and pounded evenly to about the size of a tatami mat (90 x 180 cm or 35” x 70”) with a thickness of only 0.0004 mm without losing its brightness.

(Gold leaf can also be used to make a gold thread, by applying it to a paper backing and winding it on a silk core.  Needless to say, this real gold thread is extremely rare and extremely precious.  Most all thread that we see today that is golden, even if it is centuries old, is not real gold, even though it may look like it.)

Whether you drink it, eat it, or just hold an object adorned (decorated is just too plebeian a word in this case) with gold leaf, it will make you feel more special.

The Maeda’s were a powerful dynasty who, once their military dominance of the region was secure by  the 16^th century, made their fortune with rice and trade.  And while they were amassing their fortune, they also encouraged the best artists to come and live in Kanazawa.  The result, which can be seen even today, is that over 99% of the Japanese fine gold-leafing industry is based in Kanazawa, as well as a strong community of potters, painters, weavers and lacquerware artists. It is no wonder that, since 2009, this city of just half a million inhabitants has been become a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network and official City of Crafts and Folk Arts.

I was so enchanted with this lovely town, off the beaten track for Western tourists, that I extended my stay and could have easily added another week.  The hop-on hop-off vintage bus is a good way to get around.  From its various stops, it is usually an easy walk to not only one but various points of interest.

„When you visit, you find what you want“ is the motto of the Tokyu Hands department store in Japan.  And so it is:  whether you are looking for sushi making gadgets; shoe insoles made of anything from fur to cork to leather with and without magnets; cookie stamping forms; stickers, ribbons or anything crazy to do with making cards; lunch box accessories (the art of making appealing lunch boxes for little kids is an art in Japan); gift boxes in all shapes and sizes, etc., etc. It is the sheer quantity and selection that makes this department store so memorable. Note: Don’t come if you are looking for Valentino gowns or Hermes scarves, these you will find elsewhere.  But for anything to do with home decoration, housewares, luggage and the like – Tokyu Hands in its 20 locations across Japan, including the flagship store in Tokyo-Shibuya,  is heaven!  And a great place to find out-of-the-ordinary souvenirs and gifts to take back home. Be prepared to spend at least an hour or two to browse at leisure – I spent a good three hours there!

When you consider, that every one of these trees is wrapped and strapped by hand twice a year - putting them “to bed” in the Fall and "undressing" them in the Spring – you realize just how much the Japanese people treasure their nature.

We are not just talking about specimen trees in botanical gardens or public parks. The artistry of straw wrapping is seen everywhere where there is a caring gardener, protective of his azalea bushes or pine trees, be it in a private garden or alongside a public building. The azaleas get wrapped horizontally, so the snow does not crush them asunder. Sometimes they get an additional top layer of woven straw mat. The major branches of the pine trees are held at a strategic point by rope and this rope is then strapped to a central pole.

And in order to force the bloom of early peonies, little huts are built around the plants, oriented to catch the early Spring sun while protecting them from chilly winds.

Nowadays, visitors can enjoy the splendid Rector’s Palace while listening to a concert in its beautiful atrium, or walk along the top of the city walls with gorgeous panoramic views over the sea and little islands ... but please, do yourself a favour and do not come during the Summer months.  This is when approx. 8,000 and more cruise-ship tourists per day (!) tromp through – think of rush hour at Grand Central Station in New York or the Ginza in Tokyo – in easily 30+ degree blazing sunshine and you get the idea.

Dubrovnik’s fascinating history goes hand in hand with the ebb and flow of the sea and the many peoples who wanted to control the natural port. Illyrians, Ostrogoths, Turks, Venetians – even Napoleon wanted to own this strategic location. But it has kept its own identity over the ages.

Dubrovnik was an independet republic – called Ragusa at the time - since the 13^th century.  It codified Roman laws and local customs and was considered very advanced for its time: it introduced medical services for its population in 1301, established a pharmacy (still in operation to this day) in 1317, abolished slavery in 1418 and built a 20 kilometer water supply system in 1436.  Through its strong fleet, diplomatic ties and apt trading, Ragusa was one of the richest city states of the Adriatic.

More recently, in the mid 1990s, during the Homeland wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia, the siege of Dubrovnik by the Serbs has left many wounds that have not yet fully healed.  The new red-tiled roofs over most of Dubrovnik attest to the vast damage of the attacks.  But it is easier to put on a new roof than to heal a heart.  Thus it is to be seen as a gesture of reconciliation through music and culture that the Belgrade Philharmonic, under the baton of the world famous conductor Zubin Mehta, will perform for the first time in Croatia since those belligerent times on August 27, 2011, as guests of the Julian Rachlin & Friends Festival. Surely it is not a coincidence that Mo. Mehta chose the lovely duett “La ci darem la mano” – “Give me your hand” - from Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni” to mark this occasion, to be performed by a Croatian soprano and Serbian baritone.

As part of this year’s European Capital of Culture program, I was especially intrigued with the “Gateways – Art & Network Culture” exhibit (until September 15, 2011, with the support of the Goethe-Institut).  But I had no idea I would be frightened by some of the exhibits I saw:  Not frightened in the sense of fear of my life, but in the sense of being met face to face with digital realities of today.  Of course I use the internet, can’t think of life without it.  Of course I am “careful” and think that I adhere to safety and privacy rules, but after seeing these exhibits, I realized that privacy as we knew it back in the 70s or even 80s is long gone.  Big Brother is here to stay. Let me explain by describing the one “artwork” that really did it for me, and I quote its creator and artist, the Estonian Timo Toots:

“Memopol-II (click on the link for a virtual tour) is a social machine that maps the visitor’s information field. By inserting an identification document such as a national ID card or EU passport into the machine, it starts collecting information about the visitor from (inter)national databases and the Internet. The data is then visualized on a large‐scale custom display. The collection panel also shows the portraits of the visitors from their ID card.

The Cyrillic spelling of the installation’s name refers to George Orwell's concept of Big Brother from his 1949 dystopian novel 1984. Over the past decades, technological means have transformed the surveillance of society. When surfing on the Internet, paying with an ATM card, or using an ID card, people leave their digital traces everywhere. Internet and social networks gather and provide a great deal of personal information, and a person’s profile is no longer constituted by his or her physical being alone, but also by the person’s digital information, over which he or she sometimes has little control. Background checks through Internet search engines and social network sites have become routine when we meet somebody new or apply for a job. Memopol-II enables us to make a thorough background check of ourselves, mirroring back to us all the data about us that is accessible via the Internet.

Estonia is well ahead of other countries in governmental data collecting, storing citizen information online and making it accessible to different degrees to an individual person and to government agencies. It is a convenient means for electronic identification and for making various transactions by inserting it in to the different ID‐card readers. The harmless looking electronic card readers seldom bring to mind thoughts about malevolent third parties who might have unauthorized access to the protected information. By means of Memopol-II, Timo Toots tests either our trust or paranoia toward the machines that read the information.”  A German friend of mine introduced his German driver’s licence into the Memopol.  While not all the fields came up with information, it was astonishing that his Facebook connections and University records came up, along with basic information such as age, address, etc.  Most surprising and disturbing:  his projected date of death (using statistical averages for males of his age and country of origin).  He was not pleased – he had 23 years to beat the odds.

Moving right along, there was the lovely digital Miss Maya Brush, a “homo virtualis”, a digital sculpture, right down to her virtual DNA, born February 4, 2011, the product of German artist Kirsten Geisler.  Her pose and features are reminiscent of Botticelli’s Venus. Maya has a Facebook page and, to date, almost 900 fans:  a fictional character who has stepped out of her digital world to interact with the media.

The artists Spanish Clara Boj and Diego Diaz have created the installation “Observatorio”, which visualizes the increasing density of wireless networks in urban spaces. In this case, wireless networks are registered within a ten-kilometer radius around the Kumu Art Museum and will be realized as a real-time projection in the museum. The otherwise invisible stream of communication is made visible.  And it turns out to be very dense.  Just because we don’t see something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

On the lighter side, there is “Real Snail Mail”, where real snails are outfitted with an RFID chip containing a message.  Should the snail come close to an RFID reader, the message is sent.  It is up to chance and to the appetite of the snail if it wants to eat the salad leaf on the reader and thus have the mail sent.  A subtle bit of whimsy by the British group boredomresearch.

A visit to KUMU is always worth it, you never know what you may find.  And if for no other reason, a visit to the room with the “chatting heads” is always fun!