Seabourn – Don't Gel Too Soon

Big Birthday Memory #14: Life and Death on the Coast of France

Mont San Michel sized — On the approach to Mont San Michel

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from May 8, 2014.

It doesn’t look at all real – I know that. But it is. It’s also a place I’ve wanted to see for as long as I can remember. And here we are. Here we are! The sweet, formidable beauty of this place is matched only by its astonishing history – as a monastery, a prison and a target, from ancient times to the carnage and suffering of D-Day.

Mt-Saint-Michel has, for more than a thousand years, stood atop the rock upon which is was built. Its timelessness is much of what attracts people, I suspect, along with its ice-castle beauty and the awesome commitment of its inhabitants: the sacrifices made by these men on the mountain top, alone, virtually silent, with nothing to do but pray and take on their assigned chores, meditate and live out their lives in as holy a way as possible

SMEglise ike diorama crop — Ike sends US troops off to the D-Day invasion of Europe that helped win WWII.

Nearby, the small town of Saint-Mère-Élgise and its museum await the summer celebration of the 70th anniversary of D-Day and its remarkable exercise in vision, courage and grit. This diorama of General Eisenhower’s last visit with the men he was sending to fight and die is a moving one. Anyone who has ever seen his 1968 conversation with Walter Cronkite knows how well the General understood that half of those he sent out on D-Day would never return.

SMglise resistance — Resistance Armbands

SMeglise death book crop — Prayers to say if death is near; provided by the military

One group of special heroes and heroines represented at the museum were the Resistance – women and men who parachuted behind enemy lines, worked with local opponents of the Reich to complicate their war and, at great personal risk. transmitted by hidden radios everything they learned about their German enemy.

Aside from their real-life-spying, they also served in special, high-risk, low profile operations, commemorated in history, in films and in novels. I often used the Resistance stories and the children running messages and doing other support work as a way to engage our sons in history when we traveled. The drama and courage, and relevance, was and still is irresistible.

What you see here another of the profoundly moving exhibit items at the museum. Look carefully; it’s a page of prayers to support young soldiers dying in the field. Breathtaking as you stand among the photos of these young men and see how wise it was to offer them this comfort, and wonder if today’s military is inclined, or allowed for that matter, to provide similar comfort.

In all, the life of the monastery and loss that surrounds the beaches of Normandy really are bookends to how we live our lives. Life and faith, war and peace, courage, sacrifice, defeat and victory. It is the greatest gift of travel when these things present themselves and we remember how fragile, and how wondrous, the privilege of being alive and aware really is.

Angkor Wat, Mostly in Photos.

ANKHOR MOAT — The moat surrounding the temple complex

We are at the end of our stop in Hong Kong – such a special time with good friends. But after Angkor Wat I was so exhausted that I never wrote about it. Here is a bit – mostly in pictures.

As you can see above, the approach is stunning. The complex is surrounded by a moat, and because of the heat we arrived very early so it was especially lovely. It’s a mystical place, massive and beautiful. Below is a Buddha guarding a series of hallways. It’s one of the few who still has a head. As you can see in the next photo, many were detached and sold by smugglers. I was surprised to learn, when I asked, that for all the horror they created, the Khymer Rouge never touched one Buddha. I had assumed that they would be like the Taliban or ISIS in their rampant destruction of holy places but oddly, that was not the case.

Finally, at Angkor Thom, the Bayon Temple,studded with Buddhas, and the Ta Phrom Temple, where parts of a Tomb Raider film were shot. That’s us, too!

Vietnam, Its Tragedies — and Ours March 2016

Ho Chi Minh - his image is omnipresent — Ho Chi Minh – his image is omnipresent

We’re leaving Vietnam and I’m still astonished that we were here! I keep remembering the history and the battles and pain and rage and guilt of those years. We had a long discussion with our guide on our Mekong River cruise. His father fought for the South Vietnamese, his uncle for the North. His dad spent 8 years in a prison camp after Saigon fell; to this day he doesn’t speak to his Viet Cong brother. So much pain. So much might have been. So powerful to pass signs that say Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon, Tan Son Nhut Airport, Mekong River, China Beach.

People here are definitely not as poor as those in Cambodia – not nearly, although the South is definitely better off than the North, and there’s a sense of forward motion that isn’t as present in Cambodia.

In both countries, it’s been important to think beyond the history so traumatic to them – and to us – and see them for what they are moving toward today. Just look:

Japanese covered bridge — Japanese Covered Bridge Hoi An, Vietnam

IMG_5597 (1) — Cruising on the Mekong River

flower maket row — Mekong River Floating Market

Lots more to come; Internet troubles right now…

Cambodia, the Buddha and the Past

We weren’t supposed to bomb Cambodia, but we did. I remember the day that the revered Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield first learned of Nixon’s “secret” attack on what seemed to be a gentle, somewhat innocent country for which he held considerable affection. He was almost trembling with rage. I know now that his anger arose from what he knew would happen to Cambodia as a result of this assault on a nation so far not actively involved in the conflict.

Here are the tenets of Buddhism described by our guide YuKu; they inspired gentle Cambodia then and still do today: Neutralism, Tolerance, Compassion and Sympathy; Learn to know, Learn to do, Learn to be, Learn to live together. In many ways, our bombing wiped out the capacity to follow them.

In the years before Richard Nixon ordered the bombings in 1970 (there were, to be fair, Viet Cong racing over the Vietnamese border into Cambodia to avoid US and South Vietnamese troops) Buddhism offered a foundation, and the Cambodian economy was growing well. The bombs put an end to that growth and threw the country into the vicious chaos that brought on the killing fields. In thosse terrible years, the Khymer rouge herded most of the people into the countryside to farm. Those who were were well educated were often executed instead. More than 2 million met torture and death.

For me, the visit to the temple and the rest of our day were haunted by my growing awareness of just what our bombs had retarded or destroyed. Not just temples and Buddhas. Not even just the futures of the educated or political. No.

We destroyed lives.

Cambodia has had to build or rebuild much of its infrastructure from roads to hospitals to schools.

We visited a school. And we met Monica.

We all know poor countries have fewer resources to educate their children but the gap between our worst school and this one is pretty big. The kids go to school free but must buy their books, workbooks and supplies. And the teachers? Their documents and supplies are stored in a dusty filing cabinet in the one-room office. Not a computer in sight.

This is a tiny school that lets tours pass through once in a while. I know it’s a tourist resource but there is no way to fake 41 kids singing to you about hygiene and brushing their teeth. Or to imagine the poverty and determination that surrounds their classroom. They lost so many years — maybe chunks of a generation, in fact, and are still far from recovered from those years.

For the village farmers it is the same. The simplicity of their homes and paucity of resources is shattering.

Part of the reason it is so painful to remember those days, whether here in Cambodia or in the US, where US universities exploded and four students died at Kent State at the hands of the National Guard, is that it doesn’t take long to determine that there is a basic sweetness in the Cambodian people that ill-prepared them to face down what landed upon them once the bombs began to fall.

You can see it in the face of our guide here as he sang to us before we left the bus to fly to Vietnam. I know this post is all over the place but I kept rewriting it and there’s so much more to tell you about that I’m just going to leave it as a meditation on a terrible time. Being in Cambodia and even more in Vietnam (that’s next) has awakened all kinds of things in me. Which is what is travel is for. It doesn’t help Monica and her friends though.

Two Days in Thailand: Bangkok and the Beach (Mostly Pictures)

Temple of the Emerald Buddah

These are pictures from Bangkok’s Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where we spent much of Tuesday. So much beauty and mystery here. Above is part of the multiple-building temple. Below are a couple more scenes. It was really really hot and really really crowded as so many people, both the devout and the tourists, gathered to see the painstaking work that created this beautiful place.

A small closeup of the beautiful work that covers all these buildings — executed, I learned, by both men AND women.

One of a series of panels from the Ramayana that wanders through the Temple complex.

I couldn’t resist this adorable little guy, sitting on a small block outside the building where Thailand holds coronations.

Our next day was fun – lounging and picnicking on the beaches of Ko Kut.

I had to include this; you’ll never guess what it is. Part of our adventure was “Caviar in the Surf” which is just what it sounds like. It was really weird – not the event but what it looked like. Droves of our fellow passengers moving together from the beach out into the sea to the tables of caviar — kind of spooky looking from the shore but a great treat for all.

We leave in the morning for Angkor Wat. More from there.

Arriving in Bangkok

That’s sunrise just outside Laem Chabang, Bangkok’s nearest harbor that will take our ship. We’ll have a two-hour drive into town and then explore all day. More to report then.

For now:

leaving singapore — View from Deck 8 as we sailed away from Singapore

Chef preparing #ThomasKeller designed dinner

More when we return from out wanderings this evening.

Lanny Budd, Hero for a Lifetime: a Pilgrimage to Juan-les-Pins

Lanny Budd lived somewhere on this hill .

He’s been part of my life for more than fifty years – dashing, smart, generous and always on the side of the angels. With him I wandered through most of the 20th Century in the company of critical figures including playwright George Bernard Shaw, powerful arms dealer Basil Zaharoff, Adolph Hitler and his brilliant propaganda director Joseph Goebbels, Leon Blum, the first Socialist (and Jewish) Prime Minister of France and of course Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, as well as the infamous “modern dance” pioneer Isadora Duncan, Chinese rebel leader Mao Tse Tung, and, among so many others, Albert Einstein and of course, FDR, whom he served as a Secret Agent from before WWII to well after the war.

When we met, he was 13 and I a couple of years older and, much like the NYT’s Julie Salamon, my mom introduced us and from our first meeting I knew that I would love him forever. His remarkable life revolved around his home base of Juan-les-Pins, where he grew up, and to which he always returned.

The house was built on the top of a rise, some way back, from the sea. It was of pink stucco with pale blue shutters and a low roof of red tiles. It was in the Spanish style, built around a lovely court with a fountain and flowers; there Lanny played when the mistral was blowing, as it sometimes did for a week on end.

Last week we went there, where Lanny lived, with Beauty Budd, his artist model mother. Though she and his father Robbie Budd, a New England arms dealer, never married, Robbie visited often, struggling to transmit his conservative capitalism to a young man living in dire danger of corruption among artists, journalists, socialists, communists and wealthy ladies, many of them an earlier version of trophy wives. Their fierce conversations were a wonderful window on the conflicts of those times.

Lanny is, of course, not real – at least not to everyone; he’s the hero of eleven novels written by the prolific Upton Sinclair (yes, he’s the one who wrote The Jungle) tracing world history between 1913 and 1949. Best-sellers all when they appeared in the 40’s and early 50’s and translated into 16 languages in 20 countries, the books formed much of my political and historic perspective and I was hardly alone.

When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to Upton Sinclair’s novels. — George Bernard Shaw

As we walked through the village I turned to my ever-tolerant husband with a catch in my voice, said – surprising myself with the depth of my emotion “I’ve known him almost longer than I’ve known anyone except my family.” He and the saga that surrounded him felt, in so many ways, just that real.

One of Lanny’s childhood friends, Silesian, and bitter about the deprivation caused by enormous war reparations after WWI, became a Nazi; another, British and liberal, a fighter pilot and socialist.

His first wife ended up hanging around with with the Nancy Astor and the pro-German “Cliveden Set.” My world view was formed through their eyes and conversations and the events they faced as allies and sometime adversaries.

The books, Lanny, and the characters who moved in and out of his life were, for me – a very personal window on the horror and violence, courage and evil, glamour and idealism that was the first half of the 20th Century.

Oh, and of course, it being the South of France, the literary folks hung around there too. We had lunch at Scott Fitzgerald’s “Villa Saint-Louis”, just down the hill from Lanny’s neighborhood and now the Hotel Belle Rives.

Belle Rive fitz patio — “With our being back in a nice villa on my beloved Riviera (between Cannes and Nice) I’m happier than I’ve been for years. It’s one of those strange, precious and all too transitory moments when everything in one’s life seems to be going well.”  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, March 15, 1926, Juan-les-Pins (Plaque outside the hotel that was his home on the Riviera)

Clinton confidante Lanny Davis was named for Lanny Budd. The late NBC News anchor John Chancellor once told me he wanted to be Lanny Budd. At 15, I wanted to marry him.

Now, I wish I could have gone up the hill to the pink villa, rung the bell and just thanked him for all I learned from him, how much more available I am to travel and political thought and my own role in the world because I’ve known him. He may not be “real” but his impact on me, and so very many others, was profound.

Indeed, thanks Lanny, and Upton Sinclair, and my long-suffering husband who tolerated a pilgrimage to a place where not so much happened in the “real world” but plenty happened to me.

The Jews of Girona, Their Exile – and Bruce Springsteen (Seriously)

This is Girona, home to a large, prosperous, and effective Jewish community until a confluence of events took it all away.

In a single year, two historic moments changed western history and Jewish history, too. It was 1492. The very Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, partners in a marriage made to consolidate power, threw all the Jews out of Spain. Immediately. Convert or get out.

At the same time, of course, these same “Catholic Kings” sent Christopher Columbus on his way to the “new world” and forever changed faith, power and geopolitics.

The Jewish History Museum of Girona beautifully documents much of this story:

Two "JIDE" - Jewish figures from the 1050 "Creation Tapestry" and also seen here. — Two “JUDEI” – Jewish figures from the 1050 “Creation Tapestry”

The letters floating above these two little people say “JUDEI” – Jew.

This 14th Century mikvah was found only recently. How haunting, especially with the recent mikvah scandal, to see before us evidence of how long women have honored this commitment.

Words from a tombstone (see next picture)

For some reason, this just felt extra sad. There are so many little boys in my life – and some big ones – so maybe that’s part of it. Beyond that though, the humanness and loss felt so real, and the suffering of those times so much more concrete as I absorbed the words of this one grieving parent.

But what, you may ask, does any of this have to do with Bruce Springsteen? Well, as I entered the lovely museum gift shop, attended by this equally lovely gentleman, I heard Bruce on the radio. Gradually, I realized that he was singing My Hometown.

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to your hometown

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed Talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
I’m thirty-five we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around
This is your hometown

Exile and loss, pain and deprivation can be understood on so many levels. Just as the Jews were brutally ejected from the homes and community they had so painstakingly built, so were workers throughout this country as the factories and mines and mills that had sustained them for so long collapsed. Although on a different scale, they too lost everything they knew and the life they had loved, and were forced to find another, unknown place to call home. Although less brutally required to depart, they had no choice, really.

Loss of home, love, family and community is a hardship experienced by more and more people throughout the world. Hunger, terrorism, civil war, drought, economic collapse and religious, gender and racial discrimination hurt in different ways and to different degrees, but the pain is the same in nature if not in degree. The only thing that changes is the faith, or class, or color of the refugees. We still certainly don’t seem to have learned to care much more today when it happens to people who aren’t us.

Battles and Bougainvillea in the South of France

maquis — Maquis of the French Resistance

There’s lots of history around here – spread out among the beauty that distracts from most of it. For the second time, today in the village of Borme Les Mimosas, the flowers overwhelm. Borme wins the best in show award for the region regularly and it’s not hard to see why. But before I share the loveliness, here’s a cool fact: the WWII resistance fighters known as Maquis got their nickname from the dark green plants and shrubs that covered huge swaths of ground and offered perfect hiding places – so perfect that the brave men and women they sheltered came to share the name.

War history haunts the fields and French villages crammed with memorials and statues, villages also overflowing with flowers, climbing the walls, overtaking public walkways and making very turn in the tiny streets a wonderful new surprise.

So for the second and probably the last time, here are the award-winning blooms. This time: the flowers of Borme des Mimosas.

Multicolored Bloomd og Borme — Multicolored Blooms of Borme

Bourn flower petals — Flower petals fill a tiny square

Bourn Bougenvillia path — Borme’s purple pathway

Bourn covered passage — Flower-decked covered passageway

How’s that for a treat and a break from all the awfulness that seems to haunt us lately. Whoever urged us to stop and smell the roses – well. . .

Harbors, Cathedrals, Markets and Lavendar UPDATED

AIZ Marseille boats and cathedral — Harborside view of Marseilles and her cathedral

Marseille was a funky town once. Now it’s got a shiny harbor, some beautiful museums and broad vistas, a hugely diverse population and close to a million tourists per year – up from the 20,000 it claimed when we were there in the 1980’s.

On arrival we went almost at once to nearby Aix-en-Provence, and its markets, lavender shops, cathedrals and history. (Even aerosol olive oil – see second pic.)

The wars are here too, as they always are in Europe – today in memory plaques for the “martyr’s of the Resistance.” The story of those real participants is scary and moving and true. There’s also a memorial to those who helped to liberate Aix.

It was really hot in Marseilles so we took this tiny train on a one-hour circle up to the Basilica Notre-Dame de la Garde and back.

And on the way, one more reminder of the continued ghost of WWII here – this tank was part of the liberation of Marseille and sits on a triangle of land among apartments and houses and a plain residential neighborhood. History doesn’t have to repeat itself – it’s still here.