Bill Murray's Blog, page 32
August 24, 2019
August 20, 2019
Promises
I promise not to do this to Greenland! pic.twitter.com/03DdyVU6HA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019
From our tasteful, environmentally sensitive, climate change aware president.
August 19, 2019
On 3QD, On the Road: Post Soviet Museum Circuit
Read my monthly travel article now live on 3 Quarks Daily.
Quotes: “A Major National Emergency”
Most interesting to talk with a range of people in Dublin this weekend about the Republic of Ireland’s prospects in the event of a British crash out of the EU on 31 October (besides getting a crash course in hurling as Tipperary took down the good guys, Kilkenny, in the national final yesterday).
Now this morning, from the Irish Independent, “A senior Irish government source said last night ‘People might start realizing that Leo Varadkar is not engaged in project fear as he has been accused of, but actually that in 74 days we face a major national emergency if this is not resolved.'”
August 17, 2019
Travel Days Home
After starting out in April with a month in Vietnam and a brief stop in Thailand, then spending the brief Finnish summer by Lake Saimaa, and brief excursions into Russia, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and a brief bump through Paris (here, the state of the Notre Dame Cathedral today)
it’s time to head back to the farm in Appalachia. We’ll be bouncing through Dublin, Ireland at the weekend, then back to the US next week.
I’ll be working up a post on Viktor Yanukovich’s Межигір’я residence in the meantime, and you can see all the photos we’ve posted over the course of the trip on the EarthPhotos.com page Around the World Slowly, 2019.
Hotel rooms and apartments and a 13 inch MacBook aren’t the ideal environment for post-producing photography, so over the course of the coming autumn, once we get back to a big desktop computer,. we’ll have much more photography and commentary from the eleven countries and four months we’ve spent on the road.
And be sure to look up my next travel column at Three Quarks Daily on Monday.
Riga’s 700th Anniversary …
… was way back in 1901, and they “Jubilee of the city” with 44 pavilions housing some 775 exhibits. From the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation, my favorite:
#9: “Pavilion of B. Hermann’s company of sanitation equipment.”
August 9, 2019
Kyiv Again
Have spent a most engaging four days in the Ukrainian capital. Went out today to Межигір’я, the residence of overthrown President Yanukovich. Just remarkable. I’ll try to muster substantially more photos in time from the road, as we’ll be leaving tomorrow. Межигір’я, meaning something like between the hills, is a tribute to excess.
President Yanukovich lived at Межигір’я on his official salary of 800 Hryvna/month, about $1000 at pre-revolution rates, while upkeep of the grounds ran closer to $4 million/month.
Ukrainian folks have been most engaging. I’m sorry to leave.
Kyiv
The first time we visited Kyiv was in the month of March. There’s quite a difference in summer. Here are just a few low-res snapshots from day one. No post-production, no links to larger versions yet, just a few random shots from walking around town.
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Dollars? Euros? Rubles?
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The Maidan Square looks lovely at night.
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At Maidan Square.
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St. Sophia’s Church. Parts of it date from 11th century, most from 18th.
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St. Sophia’s Church detail.
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The Maidan.
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Along the Dnieper River.
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Pedestrian bridge across the Dnieper.
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Friendship of Nations arch, from 1982, Soviet era.
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Behind the lucky couple, St. Michaels Monastery. Unlike St. Sophia, which is a museum piece, St. Michael’s holds services.
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And the exterior of St. Sophia.
August 8, 2019
Riga, Latvia
Thirty years ago this month some two million people joined hands forming a human chain across all 676 kilometers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The cinematic stunt was the Baltic cri de coeur for freedom. We visited KGB museums in both Tallinn, Estonia and Riga, and I’ll have a piece on the progress the Baltic states have made away from Communism in my next Three Quarks Daily column.
We’ve moved on to Ukraine now. I’ll leave you with these three photos from Riga for now:
These are hangars down along the Daugava River built by Nazi Germany for zeppelins. Since the whole zeppelin thing didn’t take off, they now house the central market.
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A portion of the iconostasis at the Riga Nativity of Christ Orthodox Cathedral, dating from the late 1800s, on the lovely Esplanade park. The Soviets used it as a planetarium and restaurant.
Riga’s town planners were generous with their green space. Here are flowers in Kronvalda Park.
This slow trip around the world began in April and has comprised Vietnam, Thailand, Finland, Russia, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and, currently, Ukraine. Collected photos are here.
August 2, 2019
While We’ve Been Away
Just in to Riga for the weekend. Here’s a clock on the Dom Square with Riga’s name on it.
Just time to put our things down and walk down to a random terrace in the old town for “gray beans and streaky bacon with sour cream.” A bowl of goodness.
There’s no comparison, Estonia to Latvia. They look the same (same as Finland, birch, spruce and pine forests, sea and lake grass, same vegetation, all close to the sea), and we bulled right through the old pre-Schengen/EU border and the closed up pass control and customs posts without slowing down, but these are different lands.
Finno-Ugric gives way to the Baltic Indo-European Latvian, which is phonetically spelled and looks and sounds much more Russian, although I understand that Finno-Urgic Finnish and Estonian have left their mark in one way, by the stress on all Latvian words being on the first syllable, as in Finnish.
Riga, historically a much larger trading port, is much more polyglot and much more Russian than Finland’s modest projection of power across to clean-swept Tallinn, Estonia. Which was just lovely by the way, and by far this was the most fun of my three visits.
March 1992 was desperate and poor, August 2010 middling, and now, Estonia clearly has a little prosperity of its own going on, and kudos to Estonians. The road with fine houses outside Tallinn toward Riga stretches on for miles.
Here, looking back from the old town, you can see back there that Tallinn’s new town now has a center of its own:
Now here in Riga we have a bigger, grittier, more working city to explore, perhaps twice Tallinn’s size. Last trip here was also August 2010 (photos). Let’s go out and see how it has changed.
Meanwhile, while we’ve been holed up in our Lake Saimaa, Finland cabin, the world seems to have gone on without us. Let’s leave Donald Trump’s United States for later.
So just a couple of things as we come out of hiding:
A new Boris Johnson government has come to the increasingly tenuously United Kingdom. Let’s see (among a hundred other things let’s see about the new government) how much confidence and supply the Northern Irish Tories can offer up as their party back in London leads Ireland into peril.
Politics is being remade across the board in Ulster right now, isn’t it? Here is a thought on the increasing irrelevance of Sinn Fein: The concern is no longer a banner reading “England get out of Ireland”. It’s that nationalism is finding a credible face.
And Ruth Mottram, of the Danish Meteorological Institute, told CNN this week that an estimated 180 billion tons of Greenland’s ice had melted into the ocean since 1 July, raising sea levels by about 0.5mm. Can this possibly be right? 0.5mm in a month seems incredible to me.
In an article about plant-based meat in Ouside magazine, Rowan Jacobsen is surely right when he notes,
“Most Baby Boomers are going to stick with their beef, right up to the point where their dentures can’t take it anymore. But Gen Z will find the stuff as embarrassing as Def Leppard and dad jeans. “
And then there’s this:
FLIGHT ATTENDANT FOUND HIDING IN OVERHEAD LUGGAGE BIN
As you may know by now, collected photos from this long, slow trip around the world that started in April post here.
Cheers for now, back in a bit. Good weekend to you from Latvia.
