Otira Odyssey

Tags

Bob Norman, Mangaweka, Otira Viaduct, Possums, Rata Forests, Road engineering

Our trip through the Otira Gorge this summer was done with open windows and open jaws.   The first hint of what was to come was the beehives – strategically set out at the start of the Gorge. Then we saw why.  Rata honey was in production!

At any time of year, going through the Otira Gorge and Arthurs Pass is a dramatically beautiful trip – but we had hit the rata forests in flower.   Nature’s paintbrush had swiped crimson over the hills – and it was simply extraordinary.

These are the Southern Rata (Metrosideros umbellata)  –  which grow as standalone trees from the ground up – as distinct from the Northern Rata (Metrosideros robusta), which start life as epiphytes, growing on – and eventually taking over  – the skeleton structure of other trees.

Southern Rata (Metrosideros umbellate) in the Otira Gorge

Northern Rata (Metrosideros robusta) – in Golden Bay

And then there is the other major jaw-dropper of the Otira Gorge – The Otira Viaduct. It has replaced the jaw-clenching section of road they used to call the Zig-Zag (or worse things).

And once you have recovered from the stunned mullet position of open-mouthed amazement, you start thinking, and learning…

One thought is about the regeneration of the rata forests. Rata is a top menu choice for possums.  The strong growth and vivid flowers in the Otira Gorge are largely courtesy of 1080 poison, in a concerted and long-running programme by DoC, and now with Project Crimson.

For doubters – there is a neighbouring uncontrolled area where the dead rata trunks stand bleached white.   As we travel, we see many anti-1080 protest signs -  and yet the living signs of regenerating forest are to me more convincing.   Even if there is some by-kill from the poison, the burst of life and habitat it enables must surely outweigh that.

Then there’s the amazing story of the viaduct itself.  Just an engineering project? No! I learnt heaps from the IPENZ website which tells of some remarkable cultural and ecological considerations.

Otira Viaduct, approaching from the West

For centuries, long before “labourers with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows and two-horse drays” started to make the road through Arthurs Pass and the Otira Gorge to the West Coast Goldfields in 1865, this had been a Maori Greenstone trail.

So – to respect that long tradition, the kaitiaki – boulders which had marked the trail – were carefully protected during the construction process. I’m pretty sure that’s one in the foreground.    One, a 140-tonner at Death’s Corner, could not be preserved, so the necessary rituals were conducted to permit its destruction.

Corresponding care was given to the flora and fauna.  Before the contractors moved in, humus, soil, moss, small rocks and leaf litter were collected and stored, to be replaced at the end of the project  – and regeneration hastened by the growing on of more than 100,000 seeds and cuttings taken from the site at a specialised nursery.

I’d wished I’d known all that when we were driving through – everythng looks so natural now I hadn’t even given a thought to what must have been involved.

And so it often is.  Some roads we have a vague recollection of how it used to be “before”. Other roads we simply know “after” and accept them as they are.

http://www.bridgeforum.org/files/pub/2004/austroads5/118_Billings%20Austroads04.pdf

But I look at familiar roads differently when I know the stories.

A neighbour of ours, Bob Norman, used to be Commissioner of Works. He tells great anecdotes  – and has written some of them in his two books.  His book on Bridges (“To Get to the Other Side” ISBN 978-047-319363-8) went with us in Feierabend this last trip and I was bridge-spotting as we went.

Now when I drive through the Mangawekas (one of the awful/awe-ful roads of our youth) I think of Bob’s story of its reconstruction.  “You Can’t Win ‘Em All” (ISBN 0-473-04659-8) has the full story – but the short version is that the original redesign work was done in the early 1960’s, and came up with four options – but the project was then shelved for lack of funds.  Many years later, the money was available – and so was computer-power.  The change in technology produced 38 possible re-alignments. The best choice was not among the original four – and cost less than half the price.

So – to those who gave their effort – and their lives – to create the Otira Coach Road in 1865-66 with pickaxes and wheel-barrows – to those who built the Otira Viaduct in 1997 – 2000  – and to all those who’ve built the roads and bridges we use so easily and casually in between – our gratitude!

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Reinventing Democracy

Tags

Democracy, Dr Jim Dator, Eels, NZ Futures Trust, Plane Trees, Totaranui

I know  -  this is a slightly different post from my usual, but it’s been a while since I’ve posted… and this is one of the things I’ve been diverting my mind with. Then there was the puzzle of what picture I could use to illustrate it.   I’ve chosen native bush emerging from the huge stump of an old macrocarpa at Totaranui. You’ll get the significance as you read on. (More about the trees at Totaranui at the end.)

Macrocarpa stump hosting new indigenous life

This is a post I’m keen to get your comments on, if it stirs thoughts in you.  It’s coming out in hard copy in Future Times – the magazine of the NZ Futures Trust.    You will gather that I don’t think the current conversations on the New Zealand constitution are nearly radical enough!   So read on….

On Democracy

I’ve been musing on democracy, and what “the next great thing” might be. My most recent prompt was listening to Dr Jim Dator, Professor and Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was Skyping to our “Thinking Futures” workshop, and defined “The Unholy Trinity plus One” of factors which are now the “new normal” – that is, a given common factor in futures scenarios. (“Trinity” because they can be described separately but are inseparable.) 

1                 Energy: we will run out of cheap available oil before there is an equally cheap available alternative

2                 Environment: human-influenced environmental change will affect where and how we live

3                 Economy: neo-liberal economics will continue to fail and we have not created an alternative

And 4      -  Governance.  Democratic government has proved itself unable to address the Unholy Trinity.

So – if our good democracies are functioning as well as they can – and they demonstrably can’t deal with what’s facing us globally, what can?   Leaving aside the immediate attractions of Me as Benign Dictator, here’s today’s possible design.  All alternatives and improvements welcome!

The Three Ring Circus. (Yes, the title is intentional, because one great failing of governance is to take itself deadly seriously.)

How it works

We the people elect a Selection Committee.   The Selection Committee choose the brightest and best people available for three Groups.  The Chair of the Selection Committee could function as “head of state” for international affairs.

Group 1 – The Thinkers.  They consider present and future opportunities and problems, and come up with possible solutions.

Group 2 – The Ethicists.  They discuss the values we hold, and want to hold as a society, and examine the possible solutions in light of those.

Group 3 – The Excellent Executives.  They look at the implementation of possible solutions, what it would take to make them work, the resources needed, and the things that might emerge along the way. They could take advice from Government Departments.

Then thinking together, the three Groups agree what should be done and craft it into a clear proposal.

We, the people, then vote on that well-formed proposal.

Of course, sometimes action is necessary without full public participation. Even in that model of direct democracy, Switzerland, the government sometimes acts alone if prior warning would lead to market speculation. And – sometimes something matters too much to wait for the majority. That’s why Swiss women didn’t get the vote till 1971. Popular movements didn’t abolish slavery, or do many things we now know mattered.   So under my system, there would be a “three strikes” limit. Any 3-Ring Circus could make three “undemocratic” decisions, and then would have to stand down.

So – there’s an opening bid for a discussion on Design for a new form of Democracy.

Comments please!

And for those of you who prefer nature rambles to political ones… more on Totaranui.

Back in 1865, when the Gibbs family were settling this remote beautiful bay at the head of what is now the Able Tasman walkway, they planted an avenue of London plane trees, interspersed with macrocarpas.

The avenue of London Planes stretching down to the beach at Totaranui. The balls of foliage are native mistletoe.

According to the Notable Trees Register website, the plane trees are parents to Nelson city’s pollarded planes – and one may have the largest girth of all trees in NZ.     They are magnificent - trees on a monumental scale, not native, yet fitting naturally into the landscape, perhaps by virtue of having been a part of it for nearly 140 years.

And – at least half as old, and in their own way magnificent huge specimens – the eels of Totaranui.  They lounge around in the shade of the stream bank, and come daily to the sound of slapping on the water, to be fed.  These are not “public entertainment eels” – there are others you can visit in Golden Bay – but we were lucky that brother Mark and sister-in-law Vicky were on eel-feeding duty when we visited them at their life-style-job looking after the Totaranui DoC Camp this summer.  Others of us would have to win a ballot for a camping spot there over summer, but Mark and Vicky got paid for the privilege. Smart folk!

Mark on eel-feeding duty

The Letterboxes of Rarangi

Tags

Letter-boxes, Marlborough, Rarangi Beach, sunrise, sunset

We’ve set out on this South Island holiday intending to revisit some favourite beauty-spots – and find new favourites.  Rarangi wasn’t on the re-visit list…not because it isn’t beautiful – it is – but because we’ve started our last two South Island sweeps there, and it was starting to feel like a habit.  But… the ferry was running late, and we didn’t want to go as far as we’d planned, so….

Rarangi it was.

In the dark centre – a boy is leaping

If you’re reaching for the map, find Tuamarina, on the main drag between Picton and Blenheim, and head for the coast from there.

That’s what people used to do, by the horse and cart load, for Sunday picnics.

Now, the road out has acres of grapes on one side, though the rest is hanging on to dairy.  And when you reach the beach, there’s an expensive coastal subdivision going in.  But turn left along the long beach-side road and it becomes one of those wonderfully haphazard collections of old baches and newish holiday homes you find in such places.

The natural look

And here’s the magic. Had we not noticed this before? Or has it appeared in the couple of years since we’ve been there?  The seaside dwellers of Rarangi  are cultivating their letter boxes, turning them into works of art, or whimsy or recycled humour.

Empty gas bottles awaiting a top-up

This outboard motor’s not going anywhere

Actually, we weren’t surprised.

The old loos had character(s)

Rarangi had showed its whimsical side last time – in the minor stone art in the loos.

These are gone now:  perhaps in the general spruce-up.

DoC has put quite some work into the place – a new toilet and ablutions block… and some well-defined and fenced areas for parking.  Necessary that!  The natural base here is soft pea gravel. Drive onto that, and you’re in trouble.  The first time we stayed there, we’d read the warnings in the NZMCA guide – and seen the signs erected round the place, and parked ourselves safely on the hard.  A very big fully-loaded house-bus drove in later in the evening, didn’t see the signs, hadn’t read the manual … and was immediately down to its belly.    All morning tow-trucks and tractors strained to extract it.  In the end, it took a bulldozer.    Perhaps the locals got tired of the rescue-missions and the entertainment palled.   Anyway, now you’d have to be a very determined idiot to get in trouble.

The architectural look

The natural look

So – Rarangi.

Evening light on the Wither Hills

Gin on the beach counting the waves, and watching the light change on the Wither Hills, and breathing the scent of pine forest mixed with sea-air – and not at all sad about the lateness of the ferry.

The first sunrise of this holiday

Bulls – a town like no udder!

Tags

a pun-full town, Bulls

Herd of Bulls?  A town like no udder!

What future can one make for a rural servicing town when farms amalgamate, and farmers get their services from further afield?   Whoops – that pun was unintentional – but clearly the Bulls mode is catching.

Signs outside the Mothered Goose (“delect-a-bull”) Cafe and Deli. Bulls used to have just your standard tea-rooms, but this is a stylish and tasty stop-over

Bulls – otherwise distinguished just by being the junction at which one goes straight on up the North Island’s west coast to Whanganui and Taranaki or turns right to traverse the middle of the island through the Desert Road – has taken up a playful distinction on its name.

I’d love to know the story about the initial impulse, and how the businesses in town adopted it.

But of course, whatever we’re told might also be just a load of bull!

Actually, they’re lucky to have the pun to play with.  In the early days, Bull Town (after one of the founders) was renamed boringly as Clifton, and then, happily for us, given its original name back.

As Wikipedia notes,  depending on your sense of humour, you may consider the results “commenda-bull” or “horri-bull”.

You be the judge – but personally – this farmer’s daughter chortles.

Even the sauces in the Deli are in on the act!

Bank-a-bull

Plaintive thought about babies …nonreturn-a-bull!

Bulls C.A.L.F. – Childcare and Learning Facility – smart!

The Const-a-bulls are in on the act. I wonder what they would call the local Policeman’s Ball if they still held one?

The Medical Centre gives confidence – “Cure-a-bull” – while it’s Trojan-style mascot reassures us that “if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done”. Perhaps not an encouragement for early intervention!

Of COURSE the publics loos are Reliev-a-bull

… and the little local Museum Memor-a-bull

The Town Hall is fittingly Soci-a-bull

Sadly, pun-i-ness is no panacea for declining turnover.  Empty buildings don’t tell quite such a funny tale.

BUT – there is a naming opportunity untaken…. the Library.  Built in 1918, and standing as a War Memorial to WWI with the unbelievably huge list of local sons lost, perhaps it feels too sombre to be bulled around with.    I like the symbolism though. Far more than a cenotaph or statue can,  it tells us that perhaps through the learning and world-understanding we gain from reading we become less and less likely to resort to war.

Returning to Russia – Tretyakov Gallery

Tags

Russian Art History, Tretyakov Gallery

First – apologies for my absence – but no excuses!

“There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.”  Mary Wilson Little is an American writer who understands.

But now I’m resolute, my musing is … if art is a window into a nation’s psyche, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow is an illumination.

Tretyakov Gallery

The Gallery started as the private manor-house of Pavel Tretyakov. He and his brother Sergei gathered a private collection, as wealthy patrons of the arts.  Sergei collected international artists – but Pavel specialised in Russian art.

He didn’t just accumulate earlier works, but supported a group of artists who rejected (and were rejected by) the rules of the Academy and were the 19^th century art-revolutionaries.

When he handed his collection to the State in 1892, it was a wonderfully representative survey of Russian art up to that time.  Now, the Tretyakov covers work up till the Revolution. If you want modern work, there’s a “New” Tretyakov across town.  But there’s more than enough to go on with here.

Original entry hall, with Tretyakov’s statue at the head.

The rooms in the Gallery are organised chronologically, so you walk through the historical development of Russian painting – and if I can summarise the story it tells, as told to us by our guide…

Up till the time of Catherine the Great, Russian painting was entirely iconography.    The rules there were strict, with set ways of representing the saints and holy ones. Of course sometimes the rules changed  – and you can see which form of Orthodox belief was represented through, for example, whether the gesture of blessing was done with two (Old Believers) or three fingers (New).

So, for centuries, if you were an artist, that’s what you painted.

Catherine II came from a more cosmopolitan education as a Prussian Princess to marry Peter the Third, who was such a disappointment she deposed him and perhaps ordered his murder just to be sure.     (If you look through the names of Russian rulers, there’s a pattern: each time you see a woman’s name, you know she got there through a coup e’tat; there was no other route to the top!)

Catherine had admired Peter III’s grandfather, Peter the Great, and set out to continue his drive to modernise and “Europeanise” Russia.

Hence – the development of  “fine art” painting.   A group of  young painters were sent off to Europe, especially Italy, to study – and it’s their work in the first rooms.  Portraits, yes, but blink again and they could be icons.  That deeply inculcated way of seeing is there – as is the way of expressing what you’ve seen.  The faces tell you nothing, but the status of the sitters is shown in their clothing and accessories.

I didn’t note which royal he was – but we can all know forever that he was a plantsman

Move on a room or two, and some context is starting to appear.  A glimpse of (italianised) landscape in the background, perhaps an animal.

Symbolism is strong; the flowers shown with a woman indicate her status as maiden (bud), woman (bloom), mother (bloom with buds).

Then another room and within the space of a decade, character is starting to appear in the faces.

Then – landscapes.  The move from iconography is complete.  Now we’re looking at an environment.

Not yet a Russian environment – the early ones all look like Italy – but it’s still a “somewhere-else” within which people might place themselves in their imagination.  Symbolism is still strong – almost every painting has a track, road or path which is shown as clear and easy – or rock-strewn and difficult.

Roads of metaphor

It is still painting by rules.   The Academy wrote and enforced those rules – and decreed the subject artists should focus on year by year.

Then,  Revolution!   A group of young artists – they called themselves the Wanderers – rebelled.  It had taken about a hundred years since Catherine had started the process, but now art was determined to be liberated.  Art is now telling Russian stories, romantic, and appalling, and the Wanderers will determine what they paint.

These are the artists that  Pavel Tretyakov supported – and many rooms of his Gallery are dedicated to their work.

VL Kurilov – The Boyarina Morozova. She was being dragged off to a death by starvation in a convent for her role in the 17th C. Church Schism. As an Old Believer , she’s blessing the crowd with the old two-fingered blessing.

Preparatory sketches

Some of the work is breathtaking in its scope

– and seeing huge paintings with adjoining walls full of the preparatory sketches, is a tremendous insight into the way that artists were now perceiving and portraying their world, a Russian world.

Significantly – there’s only one painting there where a subject is smiling. He’s one of a trio of successful hunters.  Remember, random smiling is not “done” in Russia to this day – it indicates stupidity.     There are people who think that everything done with a serious face is sensible. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799) was a German scientist and satirist – great combination!

A serious error – he’s smiling! (VG Perov, 1871)

There’s another which shows three Bogatyrs – folk heroes from around 1000AD, who together are said to represent the Russian character  -  humour (unsmiling of course), courage, and dedication to the protection of the homeland.

Victor Vasnetsov’s “Bogatyrs” (1898)

Monstering my Mani!

By now, my head is full, and my wits befuddled.  Mani sits down to rest his back, and I am too slow  to rescue him from one of the terrifying gallery guards who notices that he has a video camera and no sticky label showing that he’d paid to use it.

This is a favourite form of Russian revenue-gathering.  Almost everywhere, you pay 100 or 200 roubles to take photos, on top of the entry price.

Mani objected and went for civil disobedience to make his point. (He was already grumpy at having had to check in his Swiss Army knife as we went through security.)

If I’d only been quicker to see her coming, I’d have  slipped him my sticker  – but as it was, he out-grumped her  in a contest of mutually impenetrable accents.

And on we went…..

The frame speaks more than the painting

Pukirev’s “The unequal marriage” was a protest-painting about arrranged marriages. It was personal – the heart-broken artist shows himself as an on-looker.

Moscow – Red is Beautiful – The Kremlin

Tags

history, Napoleon, Stalin, The Kremlin

“Kremlin” in Russian simply means fortress … add a simple “The” and it carries so much more meaning and history.

Stalin had the golden double-headed eagles on the towers replaced with Kremlin Stars

It’s odd visiting a place mythologised in its most recent incarnation – then peeling back the layers of history to find centuries of significance.

So this fortress started out in wood – pine, then oak after it had been destroyed by the Mongols in the 13^th Century.  In the 14^th Century it was fortified with white limestone – then in the 15^th Century the “new” Kremlin was built in brick – and it has been red ever since.

In old Russian, the word for “red” also means “beautiful” .  Red Square is also Beautiful Square.  Red cheeks, red lips  … the colours of beauty.

So The Kremlin was built to be beautiful, admired, and significant.

After the fall of Constantinople, Moscow became the capital and centre of the Orthodox faith.  Ivan the Great marked this by inviting Italian master architects Solarius and Ruffus to assist with the makeover … so the Kremlin was rebuilt as a functional fortress in a wondrous mix of Russian and Renaissance styles.  Those walls and towers took just 10 years to put up between 1485 and 1495, and apart from a few additions and reconstructions, are what we see now.

Ivan’s reconstruction meant the demolition of  most of the 14^thCentury churches. The last of those, the Church of our Saviour, survived until Stalin ordered its demolition in the 1930s – that’s the one that’s now been rebuilt outside the Kremlin walls. Quite a few churches went down then, to enable the building of the great grey Communist Party Congress Hall which was opened in the 1960s.    It’s a concert hall now  -  but the Kremlin still houses the President’s offices.

The 9 domes of the Cathedral of the Assumption rise over the Party Congress – now Concert – Hall

Stalin was, of course, just doing what previous rulers had done:  Ivan the Terrible made some major changes to his Grandfather’s work;  the early Romanovs went on a building spree; and then after the Kremlin had been more or less abandoned when Peter the Great decided to move the  capital to St Petersburg, Catherine the Great did a major makeover in the mid 1700’s with her favourite architect, the Italian Rastrelli.  Power means changing things, leaving your mark.

And sometimes things can be protected…  during WWII, the Kremlin was covered in camouflage, and a replica built over the river. The replica was bombed.  Today’s technology would not allow that subterfuge.

This Giant Cannon was placed in the Kremlin “to frighten Mongolian diplomats”. (The Mongols had destroyed the wooden Kremlin in 1237.)

Napoleon would have capped the lot -  he ordered the entire Kremlin to be blown up as he left his unsuccessful occupation of it.  Fortunately he wasn’t successful in that either – and the damage that was done was soon repaired.

This huge bell – the largest ever made – never made it into the bell-tower. During a fire, water and heat combined to crack it.

The Ivan the Great Bell-tower; built 1600, damaged by Napoleon, and until the Revolution, by edict the tallest building in Moscow. Nothing could be built higher than its 81 metres.

The post-Napoleon rebuild must have been a huge endeavour.

As well as the war damage, so much of Moscow had been destroyed by fire, to deny Napoleon a foothold there.

I imagine it looking like Christchurch post-earthquake, like the New Jersey shoreline post-Superstorm Sandy.

How, in those days, would the mobilisation of effort to rebuild have worked?   And how did that influence the next decisions – to rebuild the great palaces destroyed by the Germans?   More on the recent rebuilds when I (eventually) get to write about St Petersburg.

Given all that, how wonderful to see the 16thCentury structures -  still absolutely beautiful, admired and significant.

So  – I was open-mouthed in the rain,  and seeking shelter in ancient churches built to give metaphysical shelter to generations.

Sadly though, something was missing.  I am not a believer – but most times when I am in a place of worship I feel the sanctity of a place where generations of believers have brought their prayers.   You sense that accumulation of spirit, of  a desires for connection with something greater, the remaining emanations of  joy, hope, despair and all that human yearning for something…something beyond.

Here, perhaps it was just too many of us crowding in as tourists, too many people with too little time, straining to see, to hear…   And perhaps I was  carrying too many other meanings of The Kremlin in my mind.

More Pictures

Cathedral of the Dormition (completed 1479). Even when St Petersburg was the capital, the Tsars came here for coronations and weddings.

The Arsenal (1701). The large cannons are Russian – the small Napoleon’s. The Kremlin Guards are quartered here, and guard the eternal flame just outside the walls in the Alexandrovsky Gardens

Moscow – Two Stories of the Underground

Tags

Moscow Metro, Novodevichy Cemetery

My nature gravitates to the wonderful haphazardness  of  places that have evolved over time – through layer on layer of human decisions about what to build in this space, in this generation.  A controlled and enforced environment immediately arouses my inner anarchist.

But -  shock horror – I may have uncovered a streak of inner Stalin.    Before you do it, let me denounce myself.  Of course he was an abomination, a mass murderer, a megalomaniac. I admire nothing about him … except…. there’s that little glimmer… how would it be, to be able to decree the shape and design of things based on a philosophy?

This thought arose from two consecutive days in Moscow, when we had two quite different experiences of the “underground”  -  the Moscow Metro, and the Novodevichy Cemetery.

There are more parallels than just in the pun.

The first stations of the Moscow Metro were opened in 1935.   Wikipedia has a great entry, which covers not just the technicalities – but also the philosophical base.  It’s worth a read – especially the sections on Glorification, Mobilisation and Social Engineering.  But the Local Version, as explained to us by our guide as we piled on and off the carriages in the breath-taking stations, was that Stalin believed that the workers should have the experience of being in palaces for the people, as they made their way to and from work.

So those first 13 stations were miracles of marble, of light and reflection.  The light-fittings are stunning.

Marble from the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour got recycled into this more glorious purpose.

Then as more lines were added, you get themes emerging … the station that celebrates the addition of the Ukraine to the Soviet Union ..and the one which has bronze statues of heroes, including farm workers, sports people, a glorification of ordinary folk  …

Once Russians built churches to celebrate great events.  I guess it’s just a continuation of the tradition.

See the gleam on the hunter’s dog’s nose – it’s patted for luck.

I’ll put more photos below this post.

Now the Metro has something like 9 million passengers per day.  You pay 28 roubles (less than a NZ dollar) for travel as far as you want to go.

Looking at the our fellow travellers (that expression has a different resonance here), I think it was only us goggle-eyed tourists who were actively noticing the art and architecture; the locals were buried in their iPods or that protective cocoon we grow when we’re too close to too many strangers.

But still it seems to me that at a subliminal level we are affected by the environment we’re travelling through, and I hope that the workers are still having their souls lifted by beauty.

 

And so to the Cemetery.   It’s the Novodevichy Cemetery, outside the walls of the 16^th Century Novodevichy Convent.

It had been a cemetery since the end of the 1800’s  -  but  -  Stalin had ideas.  He was busy demolishing medieval monastries, and their evicted famous remains needed somewhere to go… so the Cemetery was redeveloped into a place of monumental symbolism.

Andrei Tupolev – aircraft designer

Over the last 80 years, 27,000 significant and famous people have been buried or re-buried here

– and you need to be judged as very special to get among the last remaining spaces.

 

What intrigued me was the way the monuments are used to define the spirit of the times and the people.

The amount of military hardware sculpted in stone!

And then not far away – hands holding a red crystal marked the grave of a heart surgeon.   (Aleksandr Bakulev)

Krushchev captured in the sculptor’s revenge

And the ironies.  Khrushchev disliked cubism, and publicly criticised the sculptor Neizvestny’s work. Guess who was commissioned to do his memorial – and what style was used.

Boris Yeltsin – a quick learner –  dictated the form of his own memorial:  a depiction of the Russian flag.

Special for me, was finding the sculpture of the founder of Circus Nikulin, which we’d visited the night before. His dog was sculpted near him – and fresh flowers showed he had frequent visitors.

Circus founder and friend

Raisa Gorbachev always has flowers too.

She is sculpted with her favourite lilacs – and there is a real affection for the first of the fashionable Russian First Ladies.

Depending whether you were drawn down a lane of dancers and musicians – or a lane of generals (there seem to be more of the latter) – you got another glimpse into the complexity and contradictions that mark this place.

And perhaps what we see now in both the Metro and the Cemetery is the natural evolution of a dictated environment into one that’s shaped by the people who now populate it.

“Was Lenin relegated down to the back of this Station?” we asked. “No, he’s always been been here.”

Once police and dogs may have produced anxiety. Now a dog-training exercise provides reassurance.

Decoration in the Kiev style

The stained glass throughout this station is to evoke the great Russian Houses

Moscow 1

Tags

Circus Nikulin, Russian humour, Traffic, Weddings

The New Zealand paua shell heading is back  – so, so are we.  The re-entry checklist is ticked off. The jet-lag no longer an excuse. The weather is too grey to tempt me into the Labour Weekend ritual planting of tomatoes …. so what better to do than (at last) start posting about Russia.

As I try to sort my photos and impressions, I remember something reassuring.  Almost every time any one of our Russian guides told us a story about something or someone, she would say  – “of course, that’s only one story. There’s another, our local version, which goes….”

So, if I now am constructing my own versions of a land of complex and complicated histories – I am in good company!

The short itinerary:  We flew into Moscow from Zurich, and yes – the driver was in the airport, holding a sign with our names on it.  That was a good omen:  all the other arrangements were equally smooth.  We stayed a couple of nights in a central hotel (remarkably quiet) as a base for sightseeing trips around Moscow.

Then, five days cruising down the Baltic Waterway , stopping at villages along the way, till we reached St Petersburg and had three days exploring there.

Moscow Impressions

So – what to make of our three-day version of Moscow?  People!

The heels, the brand-named bag, the hair extensions…

The “resident” population is nearly three times that of New Zealand… and the “work-day” population is twice that again.   The variety of people you see is much like any large city  -  but oh, those who’ve got it know how to flaunt it.

Entering a centre-city grocery store – the fashionista and the working girl

Traffic! Four lanes each way in the centre city … park where you can … ride a bike or scooter at your own risk.

Traffic lanes make fine parking places

Architectural surprises.  The recent history of Moscow is written in stone.   In order to cheat Napoleon of his prize and deny him a foothold, the people of Moscow burned their city.  So apart from the churches and a few other buildings that were protected or spared, the bulk of the city’s architecture dates from post 1812.  A two-hundred-year-old city, on 900-year-old foundations.

Then of course Stalin also set out to erase history.

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour – in a modern frame

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (famous now for the Pussy Riot Performance) was built to celebrate Napoleon’s retreat, then demolished by Stalin, and rebuilt in the 1990’s.

Other churches were demolished in the Kremlin in the late 1950s, to make way for a grey monolithic Party Congress Hall, which is now a Concert Hall.  Stalin had other major intended demolitions, which fortunately were stopped.

So, it feels like a four-era city:  A few precious buildings from the 15^th and 16^th centuries; a Paris-like city  (sweet irony) from the mid eighteenth century; the symbolist post-revolution and Stalinist architecture (love the building which, looking down on it, is laid out in the form of a tractor!); and of course, the see-them-everywhere modern buildings.

The Moscow Metro is a story in itself – so I’ll post that later.

Yuri the Long-armed, founder of Moscow (1147). His long arms were metaphorical…. what he wanted, he took!

Public statues and monuments are quite a recent development.

Rather, it used to be that to celebrate anything or give thanks for anything, you built a church.

Pre-revolution, Moscow had 800 churches.  Post-revolution, there were 200 left standing, 80 of those as active churches, and the rest converted to other uses.  Church photos are coming up in another post.

What to do on a free evening in Moscow?  We went to the circus.  The Circus Nikulin works in a purpose-designed building, with a sky-high centre.

Live music; sequins, white top-hats and tails on the dancers; no animal acts – except the horses who seemed to relish being the moving platform for acrobats; trapeze and tightrope artists high up in that ceiling, contortionists … all you could imagine.  My only disappointment was the clowning. I had thought that to be an international language  – but somehow it didn’t translate.    Perhaps Russian humour is an acquired taste? See below for some samples.

The taxi ride there symbolised Moscow traffic. The show started at 7.30.   “It’s about 15 minutes drive away”, said the hotel concierge,  “So you’d better leave at 6.30.”

“Oooh, no”, said the taxi dispatcher, “that time of night… better make it 6.10″.   So we did, and by 6.30 there we were.   But later we heard of fellow travellers going in the other direction who’d taken 70 minutes for a 20 minute journey.   No matter, it gave us time for heaps of people-watching, and the best hot chocolate I’d ever had.

Wedding party outside Novodevichy Convent. Tschaikovsky sat on the banks here composing Swan Lake

Other great people-watching:  the wedding parties. Friday and Saturday are big days for weddings – and it was getting close to the end of the season for outdoor parties – so they were everywhere!     People have either church or civil ceremonies – or both – but, as our guide said looking at a bride whose bosom was leaping out of her gown “hers must have been just a civil ceremony, she’d never get into church in that!”

“Put it up there”

Crossing the canal on the way to the Tretyakov Gallery (of which more later),

is a bridge with trees of padlocks.

The custom is that after the wedding,  the bride and groom place their padlock onto the tree, and throw the key into the canal.

“Here?” “Yes there”

The divorce rate in Russia is very high – but I suspect not many keys are retrieved.

I was reading that the authorities in both Paris and Venice have been busily removing padlocks from the bridge railings.   A made-for-purpose avenue of padlock trees is a joyful alternative.

The ritual is for passing strangers to demand that the bride and groom kiss – and as they do, to count out loud.

It worked each time, once we’d mastered the pronunication.  The duration of the count is supposed to indicate the duration of the marriage (or the number of children  – “it depends on which version of the story…..”)

We found another wedding party making good use of a sculpture of a mother duck and ducklings donated to the children of Moscow by Barbara Bush.

And the stretch limos … they’re an event in themselves.

Strange though, even the wedding parties, champagne in hand, weren’t smiling much, even when we smiled and saluted them.

We asked whether Muscovites are by nature sad, or grim, or unfriendly.  “Oh no – it’s that people who smile a lot are thought to be stupid.”   Uhuh … as an inveterate grinner I must have impressed an awful lot of people with my imbecility.

Or perhaps that’s just expected of tourists.

Moscow Jokes

Of the building which used to house the KGB  -  “This is Moscow’s tallest building – you can see Siberia from here.”

“Russia has two seasons.  A green winter and a white winter.”

Of St Petersburg which is notoriously rainy…   A visitor asks “When is summer here?” A local responds “It’s already happened, but I was working that day.”

Migration season

Tags

Canton Appenzell, Föhn, Plants, Seasons

My hands tell the story.  Left fore-fingernail – broken this morning in collision with a wall I was scrubbing. Right middle finger cut – something bit back when I was pruning. Left ring finger – grazed by a misapplied pot cleaner.

It’s the week of preparing our Swiss husli (little house) for its winter hibernation, and us for migration back to the New Zealand spring.

The weather is not helping. It’s gorgeous, and promising to be warmer here next week than the forecasts we’ve seen for down under.  Deck-chair days, not scrubbing weather.  I count on a foretaste of winter here now to confirm we’re right to fly south. That’s not going to happen this year.

Still, we’re sufficiently ahead of the checklist that we could take a day earlier this week for a long meander through the Appenzell countryside.

The green of Canton Appenzell

There was a bit of a Föhn  – the warm wind from the South, which moved the grass on the hillsides enough to make them glimmer with green light.  Where we’re going, the southerly wind is the one that brings Antarctic chill, rather than a fine red dust of Sahara sand.

However there’s not been time to make sufficient sense of the 1462 (!) photos of our Russian trip to even think of sharing some of those with you.   So – with a promise that a New Zealand southerly wind will have me hunkering down to do that soon enough, here’s a little seasonal something to go on with.

Portrait of a Very Small Garden.

Autumn is slash and burn time.  Only the truly winter-hardy things will survive, so everything else is evicted from its pots, and the pots emptied of soil so they won’t crack when the soil expands with ice.

On the left the always-flowering diplodena, on the right the always-bearing scarlet runner bean

The Diplodena is the only exception – that gets unwound from the veranda tomorrow and taken to the garden centre for its winter holiday.

The Elder tree is pruned back to bare basics.

But joy – I’m saved from having to cut down the scarlet runner beans, because a neighbour has volunteered to eat the still-growing beans and take out the plants when they’ve truly finished.

I hate this.  Throwing geraniums still in flower into the compost bin seems almost immoral.  I make bunches of flowers and herbs for friends – and still have to harden my heart to finish the job.

The amazing elder will shoot again to give us spring flowers, full summer shade, and late summer fruit

A Red Fox enjoys the Sonnenhut (Echinacea)

Summer was wonderfully productive.

“The farm”

Our “farm” is a row of pots along the sun-heated south wall.

The cherry tomatoes – both the bought plants and the self-sown seedlings – kept us in vividly coloured flavour-bursts.

Cress sprouts there in three days, and rocket takes only a little  longer. The pot-herbs flourished.  And the beans – ah the beans fed friends and neighbours as well as us.

And, bless the gods of growing things, they all did it while we simply observed from the shade of the elder tree.

Spring is so sudden, so dramatic here.  Things do “spring forth” as if they’ve been tightly coiled waiting for a signal from the weather.

A rose bush goes from bare branches to blooms in what seems to be only a fortnight or so.

And our peonies responded to the particularly cold winter in spectacular style.

Not our own roses, but by our community’s swimming pool

Now the kiwi fruit vine tells the story.  It has gone from bee-full spring blossom to goldening leaves.

Kiwi-fruit vine turning to autumn

The days here are shortening rapidly now we’re past the solstice…. So time to head for where the light is lengthening, and our other kiwifruit vine is bursting its buds.

Aah – homewards!   I smile as I write that.  I know our ‘two halves” life is enviable.  I know that if there are two countries in the world it is good to be “at home” in, they must be Switzerland and New Zealand.   Both beautiful.  Both small enough you can feel yourself encompass the country, not just a small piece of it.  Both independently and peaceably-minded.

But… as my fingernails take their annual autumn-cleaning punishment, that feeling always rises in me…. really home soon.

Storks, Frogs, and Messages by Lampion

Tags

Celebrations, Frogs, Lampions, Storks

We’re just back from a fortnight in Russia. Sadly that doesn’t sound nearly as exotic as it would have twenty years ago –  but it’s still going to take me more than a few days to process a mindful of impressions and a cameraful of photos to share those with you.

So meantime, some small joys from before we went….

 The Storks.

It’s the second year the storks have come back to Altenrhein.  When Mani was a boy, there were storks here – but in the past seventeen years he’s been here over summer, the storks have been absent – till last year.

We often see one, or a pair, staking out a paddock for frogs, mice and insects.

Storks sky-spiralling above Altenrhein

Last month, there were six over our house, starting the process of gathering for migration.   Almost certainly we missed their leaving – so let me share the photo from last year, when thirteen had gathered on the airport (yes truly) to do their flight-preparation.

Last year, thirteen storks gathered for a pre-take-off planning meeting

 The Frogs.

It has been a great year for frogs (just as well, given the hungry storks!).  We must have had a mass metamorphosis event down in a neighbour’s fish-pond, because suddenly the garden was alive with little frogs.  A couple took up residence in my compost bin, feasting on the fruit-flies.   One left cold footprints over my bare toes while I was farewelling guests.  Then, just as suddenly, before I got round to taking a photo, they were gone.  Most of them will have made it down to the Old Rhine, where those that don’t make a meal for the herons will, I hope, have a raucous life.

But most raucous of all are our resident Laubfröschen. These tiny tree-frogs establish a shouting-rights territory, and have tremendous evening contests.

We’re sure the one in our kiwi-fruit vine uses the hollow pipe vine-prop as an amplifier.

Bellows inflated – mine’s bigger than yours!

The call is half-way between a laugh and a duck-quack, and absolutely contagious. We can’t help but join in.

Frogs also featured at a party recently.  Inge is making a serial-celebration of her 90^th birthday, so we gathered for more festivity.

Those frogs got everywhere!

Lampions.

I love the way they do festivities in Switzerland, with flair – and often with fire.  During one of my early visits here,  we went to  a nephew’s wedding. The wedding-feast was in the rittersal (knight’s hall) of a hill-top Habsburg castle. That was special enough for this colonial girl.

But then, we trooped down into the courtyard, and lit long sparkler-type fireworks attached to white balloons, made a wish for the newly-weds, and let them float off over the countryside in a procession of lights (that’s the balloons, not the happy couple – though they may have felt like doing a Chagall-like drift.)

For Inge’s party, someone had got a set of lampions– tissue-paper balloons with a platform that you light.  We wrote our wishes for her on the balloon-paper, and let the night-air waft them towards the lake.

Many years ago, from just the same place, Mani and his boy-hood mates wrote anti-Hitler messages on lampions and floated them into Austria as heroic lads pursuing their war-effort.

Same place, same action – but such different times and sentiments.

Launching lampions into the night

Lampions over Thal and heading for Bodensee

Now to down-load the next batch of Russian photos…..