Evora
is as beautiful as it sounds.
Drove over here from Lisbon yesterday and arrived around 6:00PM when the
sun still had a few hours left to the day. With nothing else that a street address and the name of the
hotel we headed into the city walls in this little Volkswagon I’m driving. Amazed to see the name of the small
hotel we were booked at on a list of arrowed signs, I headed right. We followed the road through improbable
turns that would have been impossible in a car any bigger than this one. At least three times, when I was about
to give up, get out and ask, there’d be another sign with “Hotel Riviera” and
numerous other’s names on it.
Cool.
My wife, who is rather familiar with hutong driving, riding shotgun beside me was unfazed and unimpressed
with my flappable navigational ability.
“Did you see that?” “It’s
no big deal.” “Come on, that was
cool.” “Concentrate on where
you’re going.” I drove up and up,
the only way possible forward, convinced I was now completely lost. Finally I surmounted a hill to a square
with Roman ruins and fortress-like cathedral. Beautiful. But
what now? Limping along to where the
horse and buggy carts were parked, I almost yelped to find yet another “Hotel
Riviera” sign and with that, the literal end-of-the-road. We strolled down a cobble stone path no
more than fifty feet, and there we were.
This must have been a karmic gift after my horrendous exploration of the
wrong side of the Douro River in Porto.
Very pleasantly surprised by the accommodations here at this
joint. Lovely older gentleman at
the front desk who calmed my fears about getting ticketed where I’d
parked. The rooms are spacious,
with what must be twelve-foot ceilings that come to an improbable stone dome
over my head, where I am writing now.
It’s one thing to explain the mystery of arch building to my daughters
sitting in a church. It is another
matter entirely to sleep beneath said mystery. Any one of these stones dropped on my head from that height
would be more than enough to do me in.
Last night we walked straight up to the Roman temple
ruin. Apparently it was covered
over for years and only recently uncovered. It isn’t anything like the ruins of Ephesus we saw last
summer but that it is here at all is remarkable. I’d laughed when my little one said “No temples” as to her
touring preferences in Portugal.
That will be easy love there are no temples they’re all churches. Very glad to know I was wrong. I pointed out to my older one that this
was the same time as the Han Dynasty roughly in China and that there was not
one Han building still standing in China.
Plenty of other remarkable evidence but wooden buildings have not
survived.
She said something interesting for a young lady, who has
just had years of intense obligatory, Chinese history: “Chinese history is boring. I like Greek and Roman history because
I find it interesting.” I tried to
tell her that it is OK to say “I am not particularly interested in Chinese
history.” But it sounds ignorant
to say that it is boring. It
disappoints me to learn that she feels that way, though I should be thrilled
that she likes any history at all, I suppose. But what are they doing over there, such that they take the
sweep of Chinese history and make it “boring” where as Rick Riordan, and “The
Lightening Thief” and hopefully a few of our trips, have made Greco-Roman
history compelling? Bad
history teachers will be 千古罪人[1]
I was following suggested names in Rdio and came upon a gent
I didn’t recognize, Mr. Les Baxter.
I have on the song “Moonscape” from the 1958 release “Space
Escapade.” I suppose I prefer Sun Ra for my 1950's space exploration but still, its pleasant. Mr. Baxter who looks
more like a quarterback than he does a curator of the exotic, seems to have had
a rather prolific output in the late fifties and early sixties sound-tracking
the unexplored from space, to jungles to Babylon. I had been familiar with
Martin Deny’s work and this seems to fit squarely into that genre, that mixes jazz
capabilities with Hollywood necessities. There was a quote from Mr. Baxter’s
wiki page by David Troop which seemed fitting:
Baxter "offered package
tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll
around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the
sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home hi-fi comforts in the white
suburbs."
This all seems fitting, listening now, having actually made
it out of my exotic Chinese suburb to the wilds of medieval Portugal. I’ll cue up some more pagan sounds for
the ride back down south today, and ignore that fact that Baxter’s sampling is
all a bit a-historical and thoroughly of his time.
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