Time to write something complimentary about Aer Lingus for a change. When we left rainy Chicago an hour late from Ohare, we were not likely to make our one hour connection in Dublin for Rome.
So we changed to a later flight that had us contemplating a quick trip to Dublin to help kill 7 hours wait time. But thanks to tail winds, we made it to Dublin close to the scheduled time, rushed to our original flight gate where a lovely gate agent got us back on this flight. Thank you Tara. I do intend to revisit Ireland sometime just not under today’s circumstances. Onward!
Finally made it back to southwest Michigan’s lake shore as the summer fades. The sky has been overcast but a wretched Midwest heat wave is over, leaving behind pleasantly warm lake water and giant whitecaps which were fun to swim in!
Red arrow roadhouse
We had excellent whitefish at Red Arrow Roadhouse in Union Pier, a fun casual spot. Judith Racht gallery in Harbert, which specializes in “primitive/outsider” art, located in an old school house, was closed for the week. I browsed inside SO (Stockholm objects) which had beautiful and expensive Swedish (and other) clothing and home goods.
On Saturday we took the three dogs for a walk along the beach and, as it turns out, a swim. All three labs love the water and Weko beach has a designated area for dogs south of the main swim area toward Warren Dunes State Park. Lunch was at The local, one of those little trendy touches in a still mostly ordinary small town, except there was one other trendy touch, a pottery gallery with ceramics from all over the world that was crazy expensive.
One pot, I kid you not, from an Australian ceramicist (for this price I’m not calling her/him a potter) was $4,600. You read that right and I did too after double and triple checking. Was it glazed in gold?
We went peach picking at a place in baroda and all decided peach trees are so pretty. The peaches are not yet ripe so here’s hoping. we went on a 17 mile bike ride leaving from Three Oaks, east on Kruger road and at the small town of Galien, we rode south on Cleveland, crossing the scary major highway (12) and then heading back east along very pretty Buffalo road which during the last mile was as A sandy gravel road that led to a dirt road (Avery) back over highway 12. Not a perfect loop but as close as we could get. We picked up an excellent Margherita pizza at patellie’s in Three Oaks.
We found affordable tasty Vietnamese street food at Doi Moi- savory noodles, a not too sweet grilled chicken with mango cold s as las and bahn mi sandwiches. Good for a big group and quick service. We also had an excellent tatte latte at tatte, an ups sked coffee and pastry shop I recognized from a long ago visit to Cambridge, Mass.
What a difference a modern aircraft and entertainment system can make on a trans Atlantic flight. My outbound flight had a near-nonfunctional entertainment system. Today’s aircraft has touch screens! Oh joy.
In flight entertainment recommendation
I stumbled upon some surprisingly good viewing options. First up, a two part documentary picturing the Obamas (about the two dazzling Obama portraits) that had me teary at times. I remember going to see them at the National Portrait Gallery and spending most of my time watching people looking at them, taking photos of themselves beside them, crying. It was profoundly moving.
This doc followed the portraits as they went on tour in five cities (including my new home in Chicago). It was fascinating to see how the five different museums created educational , cultural and marketing efforts around the portraits visit, coming up with so many interesting ways to entice people who often don’t feel welcome in high art institutions to visit and better yet, to feel comfortable and connect with the place and its art. I particularly loved watching the kids look at the portraits.
There were also illuminating interviews with Amy sherod and Kehinde Wiley, the two portrait painters whose work I have sought out ever since seeing those portraits. And of course there were fond images and footage from the hope and change Obama years.
All I saw of Ireland this trip 😕
I also found a good Austin city lights type show, I guess the Irish version called Other Voices and watched one episode filmedin a tiny church in isolated dingle peninsula with St. Vincent doing acoustic and in Austin with Margo Price. Both excellent. Another episode had a very young amy winehouse in 2006 singing to maybe 30 people. Cannot imagine!Even the food was a step up from the previous flight. Not stellar but edible.
I was confused by the layover in the Dublin airport because it seemed like a completely different place from the airport I passed though on my outbound trip and in January when I connected thru Dublin en route to Paris and Madrid. This time I had 4 hours to kill. And we had to go though security twice (pulling out our toiletries and electronics again) when we arrived and when we left, which seemed odd. We’d already sent our stuff through the conveyor belt in Frankfurt. Why did we need to do it before entering the Dublin airport and before leaving it? I don’t remember that from our previous trip and considering how tight those connecting flights were we might have been in trouble making our next flight. I talked with the security guys at the second check point snd they said something about this being new and a trial run for two months. I don’t get the thinking.
I did understand this time, unlike the past trip, that we were going though u.s. immigration/customs in Dublin, which is fabulous because it means when we land in Chicago, no long lines. (And there was NO line in Dublin.) It’s like leaving the airport after a domestic flight. Apparently Ireland is one of the few airports with this (ore- clearance, I think it’s called) and I’m I curious how it came about.
Stocking up for next flight
During the layover, I also was in one of those shopping mall/food hall type spaces to wait which was completely different from the previous trips where we were in a relatively bare bones gate area with few amenities (shops, restaurants). So it was confusing. Not the airport I remembered from just 4 days ago, let alone two months ago.
I came a long way for this visit and fortunately it proved completely worth the schlep. (schlep sounds like a German word. Yiddish. So close.) I did inadvertently make use of a German word I forgot I knew when a server at a restaurant sneezed. “Gesundheit” I said. She smiled. (I just learned how to spell Gesundheit…I was way off.)
Plaque on the old town hall
Anyway, I came to this small Black Forest town for a gathering of European diary archives hosted by the German diary archive which is located in a stately 1728 building known as the Rathaus/old town hall. There’s a small two -room museum with displays of interesting diaries, accompanied by an audio tour in various languages. There were people from diary archives in Germany, France, The Netherlands and Austria and very interesting presentations on how diaries are used by researchers (presenters were historians, a literary nonfiction writer and a musicologist) and on how A.I. coupled with HRT (handwriting recognition transcription) will revolutionize and democratize research. Combined they can be used to do super fast transcription of handwritten manuscripts…including diaries. Right now this is often done manually, so to speak, by very patient and skilled volunteers.
Old town hall, home of deutsches tagebucharchiv (German archive for diaries)
We had an excellent dinner at what I gather is the best place in town, Vielharmonie, where I had very good local fish (char?) and I stayed an odd hotel I wouldn’t recommend because it’s very understaffed. (TaomeFeng Shui) although I was greeted by a pleasant former Texan, from Austin.
I love riding trains in Europe. You never know who you’ll meet. Today, I’m sitting across from an intense young man, about my son’s age (he’s 33) who pulled out a notebook to write. Turns out he’s a young Swiss /Albanian comedian from Basel (our train’s final destination) who said he bombed during his first standup performance in Frankfurt so he was writing down his notes/thoughts in a little notebook with German writing on the cover.
I’d seen the same one in the book shop at the train station (I always get to train stations way too early) and wondered what it said. He told me it was the old Oscar Wilde saying: Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it’s not fine, it’s not the end. He bought three so he gave me one as a gift. Wise words.
He said he doesn’t write post show if it goes well. Apparently the crowd was full of women and if you lose the women right away, you’re sunk, the men won’t go for you either. He had 8 minutes to grab them. his favorite comics: Dave Chappell (the greatest, he says) and Trevor Noah plus two English guys and a Finnish guy. he’s only been at this for about 5 weeks (and has other game full employment.) He was also a big fan of Eminem. And had some interesting geopolitical views. He was very current on the mass killings in the U.S. (17 to date this year, he mentioned) and saw this as one of several signs our top dog status is drawing to a close. He showed me a sign with his name lit up that he puts beside him when he does his standup so I took a photo since he promises he will be a famous comedian some day.
Frankfurt looked gloomy when our plane landed. Grey and rainy. Didn’t help that we had to deplane down metal steps in the cold drizzle to catch a waiting shuttle bus. No matter. Lovely day in this interesting city. I hitched a ride on the subway into town with two American women who had bought a group tix that apparently covered 5 people. They were doing what a lot of people do in Frankfurt…a quick trip to check out downtown between international flights.
Romer area
The Motel One Romer turned out to be a gem. And a bargain at 99 euro a night. It’s a very modern, stylish place, with lovely lounges, bar and dining area. Best of all the very nice guys at the reception desk gave me a room almost 2 hours before official checkin which was very unexpected and appreciated after a long trip from Chicago.
I dragged myself through the city, with jet lag mounting. First stop the quality market/kleinmarkthall a huge enclosed market with all kinds of fresh fruit stalls, cheese and sausages counters, sushi, ethnic food stalls. Not as stellar perhaps as the food hall in Lyon that we visited in January but lots of good options and local character. I joined a line leading to a small window where two women worked very hard serving sausages (wurst) on buns with mustard.
A nice young traveler from Hong Kong was in line too and we struck up a conversation with a kind local (frankfurter) who offered to order for us and told us which of the four sausages was her favorite. (The one with the yellow casing, which didn’t look too appealing.)
Reconstructed Romer
She said she’s been going to this window for wurst since she was a kid. I later learned the woman behind the counter who was diligently boiling sausages of various colors and cutting and peeling off the casing before putting them in a to-go bun was Ilsa. A local luminary. The young woman from Hong Kong and I found a table at an outdoor cafe to eat our wurst, sitting under an umbrella in the rain.
Bombed out romer
Romer is a classic old German area downtown with elegant timbered and stone buildings. Except it’s been reconstructed after being obliterated by allied bombs during ww2. I had some apple Weiss (alcoholic apple cider) standing in the wide brick paved Romer plaza and later landed at lovely Kaffeehaus goldene waage) https://www.goldenewaage.com/coffeehouse golden way)some delicious pastries (merengues, florentines) and hot chocolate served in a glass.
I walked a little through the busy shopping plazas and along the pretty riverfront then finally succumbed to jet lag.
Yes, I have only myself to blame for flying this odd airline again, after a fiasco in January with lost luggage (for five days) plus long airport lines that almost caused us to miss our flights from Paris to Dublin to Chicago and led to the disappearance of my watch at the Paris securitycheckpoint. You get what you pay for I guess. But I arrived safely in Frankfurt (via Dublin).
Still it’s not reassuring when three flight attendants cannotfigure out what appears to be an ancient entertainment system. After poking at the screen for who knows how long, Isought advice from an attendant who also had no luck with the touchscreen. Another attendant told me to use the remote hidden in the armrest, also from another era. None of the attendants could figure out how to use the thing, which is an ancient cell phone on one side and an ancientremote on the other. Neither work. I did find a barely functioning screen by switching seats. Terrible sound but at least I got a movie.
I get the impression from the attendants that this is an old plane that they don’tusually fly. Hopefullyit’s just the entertainment system that’s out of date…and not working. Ididn’tcheck my luggage.
Early in our new life in Chicago, I decided not to write constantly about all our new finds here because 1)who has the time? 2) I wanted Chicago to feel more like home than a trip. But it’s time for the occasional exception, maybe because Calumet Fisheries is so far from our usual stomping ground here and it’s an interesting place.
As promised, it’s in a dreary looking industrial area of south Chicago AND it has delicious fresh fish and seafood, smoked and fried. There’s a reason it won a James Beard award for being one of those classic places to eat. It’s a humble little shack just past the underpass of I-94 and an unlovely bridge over a not-scenic stretch of the Calumet River. Across the street is what looks like a giant rusted funnel in a barren lot.
Midday on a Saturday there was a small group of customers inside. Cash only. A poster of the late great Anthony Bourdain, whose show on Chicago food got us here. The young guy behind the counter was patient and helpful, offering advice on what to try as first-timers. We got fried and smoked fare: just-fried oysters, catfish and smelt; a chunk of moist not-too-salty smoked salmon and smoked shrimp (a first for us). The forlorn picnic table outside might work in warmer weather but we opted to drive home 35 minutes before eating in earnest. We did sample a few still-hot oysters and smelt in the car. All delicious. We’ll be back!
Lovely to be in southwest Michigan in March: when the weather cooperates. It didn’t on day one. It was cold, damp, blustery with occasional furious snow squalls. Perfect day to get my hair trimmed (for about a third of what I paid in Chicago) at Paparazzi salon in the quiet little town of Stevensville, where we had excellent salad and sandwiches across the street at Full circle cafe that we took to eat at WatermarkBrewery a block south.
My Kansas cheese!
We’ve passed by Emma Hearth & Market in Bridgman many times and today we finally stopped. It’s well known for its pizza and prefix Italian dinners but I was stunned to find amidst the small selection of gourmet cheeses my fav, Cottonwood River Cheddar from Kansas! I’ve been trying to get the cheese woman at DOM’S market in Lincoln Park to stock it and had just asked our daughter if she could bring some from gateway market in Des Moines when she visits. No need now! The Emma variety (“reserve”) is a little sharper than the kind I’ve had before and without the little white crystals that give the cheese a slight crunch but all good!
Sign at Full circle cafe
On Sunday morning, there was sun and warmer temperatures. Perfect for a walk with the dogs on Weko beach, past fishermen in waders with poles stuck in the sand, catching lots of coho salmon. Otherwise few other people and nothing like the summer crowds.
Beautiful washed out colors along the shore, sandy beach, pale blue water, pale blue sky with moments of yellow sun. Lovely until some uptight woman scolded us for walking the dogs on a section of the beach where we could get slapped with a fine for doing do. Karens everywhere.
TakeBetsywithyou 