St. Olaf's day in Torshavn

My dad is a very good landscape painter, but he tends to choose deliberately Freudian images-- lots of tunnels and chasms with things going into them. I couldn't help thinking of his paintings as we took a very intimiate boat tour of some Faroe island cliffs.

We're here in the Faroe islands just days before St. Olaf's day. This is the Stampede, Thanksgiving and Easter all rolled into one: the Stampede because men and women who work in banks are suddenly kitted out in traditional gear. Not stetsons and boots, but rather fetching black coats with lots of shiny buttons; Thanksgiving because this is a time when Faroese families return from abroad (many, it seems, emmigrate to Denmark for work) to spend a few days with the old folks and eat whatever they eat. We haven't figured what it might be yet, but I'm sure it involves salt and fish; Easter because it's a religious holiday, and there's lots of sermonizing and such going on. 80% of the Faroese belong to something called the "State Church." There's really no separation of church and state here; tomorrow is the first day of parliament, and it involves parliamentarians and clergymen alike walking to the parliament building to open the doors.

Actually, there's not a lot of separation between the state and anything else here in Torshavn (the capital of Faroe). That little cluster of sod-roofed houses in front of the row boat is the parliament. In Iceland, they boast that you can look up the prime minister's number in the phone book and chat with her. Here, you could pop in for tea. Or fish cakes.



For those of us who are passing through, the real attraction of the islands is, well, the islands.

Ouch

It should not be possible to get sunburned in Iceland. It shouldn't be possible, especially, when you're soaking in the Blue Lagoon, a milky blue hot pool shrouded in about three feet of mist. It really shouldn't be possible on a cloud-covered, freezing cold day in the Blue Lagoon. But I'm English, which means that it happened, and two days after leaving Iceland I have a pulsating red memento of the trip on my back. Before the invention of silver nitrate, it was well known that an Englishman could be used rather than a photo-sensitive plate to capture images; you'd just toss him in front of the scene and his ultra sensitive skin would just pick it right up. Skin the fellow, and you'd have a nice image to hang on your wall. Kind of like a sepia-tone photograph, but redder.

We're in the Faroe Islands right now, which is probably the most beautiful place I've ever seen. More on them later.

Iceland is full of this kind of thing: holes in the Earth spewing hot stuff. Fantastic. If you listen carefully, you can hear a greatly excited Bruce exclaim "Oh Boy!" What an expressive fellow.

Another thing Iceland is known for is puffins.



Puffins, as you can see from the photo, are tiny birds about the size of a moderately big bumble bee. They're very common on certain islands just outside the Reykjavik harbour, but even more common on the dinner menus of various restaurants around town. I have a sneaking suspicion that puffins are not actually eaten by the Icelandic people; they just think it's funny to feed them to the tourists.

You can get to know a people by how they present themselves in their advertisements. Really, there's only one big advertiser in Reykjavik-- "66 Degrees" clothing company. Everywhere you turn, there's a poster featuring one of its brawny models posed against a steely grey sky, looking really tough, sore or cold. They like this image of themselves, the Icelanders do. Freezing, pissed-off Vikings. Even the little girl they feature looks like she would happily split you in two with an axe if you so much a mention "capris and a nice light cotton t-shirt."

Voyage on the Queen Mary 2

After three days in Boston—two and three quarters of which we spent without luggage— we left our hotel in Boston amidst the throngs of people heading to the July 4th celebrations on the Charles River. We’d been told it would be nearly impossible to get a cab on the 4th, so we left for the cruise terminal several hours earlier than necessary. Far from finding ourselves in the Queen’s lap of luxury, we found ourselves in a vast warehouse: steel walls and girders, no amenities, no food or drink, and only a few metal fold-up chairs for the dozen or so elderly passengers who were milling about waiting for clearance to board the ship. The Queen Mary 2 only docks at Boston once a year, so she berths at a commercial wharf and pier that is not equipped to handle anything that hasn’t arrived in a steel cargo box. Still, we had a pleasant nap in a little park on the shore with our luggage while watching the Boston harbor police conduct drills. They’re small, these police, all of them under 5’6” and all of them rotund. I expect that if you’re in the Boston police service and you fail your physical, you end up on a boat. I guess they figure the longest you have to run as a harbor officer is the distance from bow to stern of an average ship, which isn’t much even on a mammoth boat like ours.

There is only one question that matters when it comes to a big ocean liner like the Queen Mary 2: just how big is this thing when you park it next to various well known landmarks? It’s an obsession with Cunard, the owner of the ship, and you see images everywhere of this mega-boat and its predecessors balanced upright on their rudders next to the Empire States Building, or sitting aslant on the Great Pyramids at Giza, or parked on 59th avenue at the bottom of Central Park in New York. And yes, they really are huge. They’re immense. We get it, you have a really, really big ship, Mr. Cunard. In a fight between the Queen Mary and the Sears Roebuck building, I’m backing the Queen, no doubt .

The Queen Mary 2 is the grandest of all ocean liners; which is to say, she’s the biggest one they’ve ever made. Really, though, it’s not quite right to call her grand: all around us are references to the really grand ships, the pioneers that set the standards for elegance and style in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The QM2, though technologically unrivalled, is a pastiche of these older, more revered ancestors, long since sunk or salvaged. The Queen is grand in the way a really nice convention center is grand. Still, it’s really nice. There are 1300 people working on the boat to satisfy the needs of 2400 passengers, and satisfy them they do.



We’ve seen a lot of pictures of the Cunard ships and their occupants of the last two centuries. The passengers are almost invariably the picture of Victorian vigor and youth: hale young men manfully posing around the freezing pool or grappling with Jules Verne exercise machines, elegant young ladies hosting equally elegant, and always chaperoned, young suitors in fire-lit staterooms. Perhaps crossing the Atlantic a century ago was a more formidable business, suitable only for the young and the trim. But now, it attracts an older and decidedly sleepier crowd. The majority of the passengers on this ship don’t so much attend shows as find different venues to sleep in throughout the day. The phrase “exit strategy” has an entirely new meaning aboard the Queen referring mostly to how aging men with aging prostates will situate themselves in the theatres.

This is Cara looking remarkably pleased to be standing upon about 15000 corpses in King's Chapel cemetary, Boston. Don't be fooled by the nicely laid-out stones: those are for show. Underneath those stones is essentially the graveyeard equivalent of "Tetrus." Bodies stacked ten deep, often buried standing. Very cosy if you're dead.

Every Canadian, at some point in their lives, will be shafted by Air Canada. It's a rite of passage like circumcision or colonoscopy, but much less pleasant. After three days in Boston, we're checking out in one hour, just two hours after Cara's luggage was delivered to us this morning. Our successful reunion with our luggage had nothing to do with Air Canada's diligent customer service, by the way. You see, when you call Air Canada to say "I still have no luggage, and tomorrow is Independance Day in America, and the streets will be closed, so could I please have my luggage tonight," they say "Actually miss, my calendar tells me Independence Day is on July 3rd, so there's no problem." Really, they do. Because they're in India, not in Boston. Apparently, in India, they don't make very good calendars. Anyway, our luggage is here only because Cara did some remarkable detective work and determined that her bag was at a Japanese language school in Andover. And Mr. Y Mori's bag is here with us. Did I say "every Canadian gets shafted by Air Canada"? Apparently, Air Canada's ambitions are more global than that.

Apart from our increasingly fetid underwear, we've had a very pleasant stay in Boston. We watched the dress rehearsal for the Boston Pops last night, we did a ton of walking, learned all about America and visited MIT, the SAIT of the South.