Holy Temple Ratman!

“Let's go to the rat temple.”

That's what Paul said.

We all looked up from our postcard writing and guidebook reading, “What? The what temple?”

“Rat! The rat temple! The Karni Mata! It's only an hour out of our way!”

He was enthusiastic.

By now we all had acquired more than a passing familiarity with the range of animal gods in the Hindu pantheon from the monkey-headed and the ever popular elephant-headed through to Vishnu's eclectic assortment of avatars. I assumed that the rat temple was to honor Ganesha's vehicle, Kroncha the rat. How a rat could possibly be a “vehicle” for an elephant is another story but in any case I was wrong. Kroncha is in fact a mouse, not a rat, and the Karni Mata was built to honor Laxman, stepson of the goddess Karni Mata. Laxman died accidentally and Karni Mata begged Yama, the god of death, to bring him back to life. He did so, but as a rat. The 20,000 rats that inhabit the temple today are descendents of Laxman.

So, lacking anything better to do and, to be honest, somewhat brain addled by heat, poor nutrition and dysentry, we agreed with Paul and off we went. To the rat temple. Now a thing that you should know about Hindu temples if you don't already is that you have to take your shoes off before going in. Another thing you should know about Hindu temples is that even the famous ones can actually be quite small and cramped inside. And finally, one more thing you should know, this time about rats, is that rats poop a lot. Bare feet, small space, 20,000 rats pooping. It well may be that the temple was beautifully carved and decorated inside, but I will freely admit that the entirety of my attention was directed towards foot placement. I stood on my toes and scanned the tiled floor, calibrating each step with great care. But still it was nasty. And I like rats. I can only imagine what kind of a state a rat-o-phobe would be in. The poop wasn't the only thing to be on alert for. The mortality rate among the rats seemed to be quite high, despite the lavish attention and care accorded them by the priests, so while the live ones would scatter with each step, sometimes running right over your feet in their panic, the dead naturally did not and thus presented additional obstacles. And should you accidentally be the cause of a rat's demise, say a slow witted, slow moving one, you will be obliged to donate a gold rat to the temple. I'm absolutely serious.

This funhouse atmosphere kept us amused for, oh, perhaps a minute or two before we began trying to make our way to the exit. On the way out I saw a pilgrim bend down and pick up a gnawed upon piece of rat food (amusingly called “bhog”). He made a prayer motion and popped it in his mouth. Eating food the rats have chewed on is apparently a high honour. I was, however, completely satisfied with my state of dishonour and moved on, thinking only about clean water, a bucket and a towel.

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 7. La Vie En Seine

Ok, I know the grammar is suspect, but I couldn't resist the pun. And technically we were staying "sur la Seine" rather than "en Seine", but anyway... So the end of the trip found us in Paris, on a houseboat. We rented the "Chalik", moored beside the Pont d'Austerlitz. From the bridge tourists would look down and see us enjoying a lunch of baguette, goat cheese and cheap white wine on the deck and they would smile and get their cameras out. I could see the thought bubbles floating above their heads, "Ah, those stylish Parisians, what a life!" Tourists taking pictures of other tourists. Sometimes I would give them a thin smile back and sometimes I would ignore them, haughty Parisian I had become.
The boat had some decidedly funky features, such as the lack of light in the shower - solved with a carefully placed flashlight - but by and large it was a brilliant way to live in the heart of a big city. It functioned as a kind of refuge, slightly separated from the constant tumult on land. That being said, Paris may be "The City of Light" but it is also "The City of Constant Sirens" and there was no escaping that on the water. Moreover, we were regularly subject to being swept by high intensity search lights as the dinner cruise boats passed by in the evening which would then rock the Chalik in their wake.
Those caveats aside, the location was marvelously convenient to the Metro, markets, boulangeries, patisseries, cafes, bistros - really everything one desires and expects living in Paris. We felt very in-the-know and debonair locking up our houseboat and sauntering over to the local bistro for a bite. And trying as much as possible to fit in we would use our Francaise rustique and not stoop to consulting a phrasebook before ordering random delicacies such as rognons. Red onions, right? No. Not red onions. Kidneys. Whoops. Imagine extra firm liver with a hint of urine. Back to the boat then. Back to bobbing on the Seine. Back to munching baguette and goat cheese and smugly watching les touristes watching us. Pretending to be Parisian was significantly more fun than being Parisian.

  

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 6. Les Clochards

There is no denying it, the Eiffel Tower is impressive and, yes, beautiful in a way that sidesteps the cliches. It is astonishing to think that it was almost torn down in 1909 when the original 20 year permit expired and only avoided that fate because having antennas so high up was deemed useful. We took the requisite several dozen photos from various angles, necks constantly craned upwards, but what sticks in my memory is what I saw when I looked down. On the narrow cement boulevard in the street that runs between the tower and the Seine lay a man. He was black and shoe-less and lying face down, wearing a shirt that hung loosely from one shoulder and pants that were so torn that most of his left buttock was exposed. Streams of people passed around him on both sides like a river around a rock. It was hard to tell whether he was breathing. This was our first clochard.

Les clochards are the Parisian versions of bums or winos or what I suppose we now rather colourlessly call homeless persons. They have a long tradition here and few tourists fail to notice them. The clochard classique is a scruffy bearded fellow wearing too many layers sitting with his fellows on the banks of the Seine, gripping a bottle of red wine by the neck. These still exist, but the range is much wider today. The unconscious fellow under the Eiffel Tower represents the one extreme where it's hard not to imagine a heart-rending back-story involving a West African family pooling its savings to pay a smuggler to take their brightest boy across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, only to have the dream end in destitution, starvation and collapse. Or maybe he was just tired and needed a nap. At the other extreme, near where we were staying, we saw a pair of clochards pitch two spiffy mountaineering tents on a patch of grass under the Pont d'Austerlitz. Every morning they would pack up their tents and clean up their campsite and then every evening they would set everything up again. They didn't bother anybody and nobody bothered them.

My favorites though were the nattily, if eccentrically, dressed old men, greasy grey hair carefully combed, colourful scarf knotted just so, favorite bench reserved from where they would smile at the pretty girls (yes, no shortage thereof in Paris) and perhaps thumb a fat tattered novel, sipping something from a paper bag. Or perhaps these weren't clochards at all. Perhaps they were just happy to get out of the house.

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 5. The Ballad Of The Missing Brick

And so it came to pass that we found ourselves with several hours to spare in Munich before boarding a night train to Paris. Munich is fun, Munich is cool, but Munich late on a Thursday evening offers few diversions for a family with two children. So we took them to a beer hall.
Some Munich beer halls are exactly what you picture: long wooden tables of people swaying and singing while comely waitresses in dirndls (google that) carry giant mugs of beer and a polka band does its thing. That's not where we went. I remembered a smaller polka-free spot from my last visit, the Andechser am Dom, and I remembered that with luck we could get a table in the crypt. A beer hall with a crypt. Sure enough, the waiter led us through the packed hall, down a curving stair and into the basement where there were a handful of high tables set in dark niches. Much quieter, much cooler. "Medieval".
And so it also came to pass that Alexander brought his new Lego to that dark niche. We ordered great lashings of sausages and beer, or at least I did, and settled in for an evening of watching the toings and froings and generally soaking in the beer hall crypt vibe. This entertained Alexander for all of twenty seconds after which he began campaigning to open his Lego package. I told him, no, that's a bad idea because inevitably you will lose a piece and it will disappear on the dark floor below. The crypt was very old and very dark with lots of cracks and corners and spaces, in short a black hole for Lego.
But I really really really want to.
No, it's a bad idea. Look at the cool pictures on the wall.
Da-ad. Please please please, I won't lose any. I promise.
By then the beer had buffed my edges down to a smooth agreeable gloss.
Ok. But it's your problem if you lose a brick.
So Lego playing began on the small high table with the yawning black hole below. More beer was consumed and the evening slid along in an agreeable fashion until... plink.
Uh oh.
What happened?
I lost a brick.
See! Well, you won't find it. It's lost forever down there. I hope you learn something from this. Yada yada yada.
To our chagrin Alexander hopped off his stool and began crawling around on the floor, under other people's tables, in front of waitresses carrying armloads of beer, poking in dark corners that hadn't been poked in since 1571. Everyone was very accommodating though, charmed by the cute little boy looking for his Lego. The waiter even crouched down and used his lighter to illuminate the area.
No luck. A piece of fossilized chewing gum and an earring, but no Lego.
See! You didn't find it did you? It's lost forever down there. I hope you learn something from this. Yada yada yada.
When it finally came time to leave and we stood up to put our jackets on Alexander suddenly dropped to the ground. Before I could say anything he was up again, grinning triumphantly, holding up - you guessed it - the missing brick.
See dad, you were wrong!
So, the moral of the story is...

   

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 4. Bavarian Green

When you think of Bavaria you might think of the Alps, or of gigantic mugs of beer, or of ornate castles, or of, I don't know, lederhosen? You should think of green. I have been many green places from Prince Edward Island to England to Belize to New Zealand (to be fair, the latter just for a day), but now when I think of the colour green I only think of the view outside the window of our farm-stay in the foothills of southern Bavaria.
After some confusion involving the fact that the tiny village of Niedersonthofen sported two farm-stays run by families named Schoell we settled in and began to stare at the green. Or at least I did. Lorraine spent time with the farm's beautiful Arab horses and the kids loved feeding the goats and watching the gentle brown cows being milked, but I would sit on the balcony and stare at the meadow or, even better, wander out into it and stand there. A Bavarian meadow is not just grass, but an array of plants, all diligently cropped to a uniform height by the cows. It is claimed that many of these plants impart subtle flavours and even health benefits to the milk. I cannot vouch for that, although the fresh milk certainly was tasty, but I can vouch for the colour: yes, green. Not just regular Canadian suburban lawn green, but an intense pure green. Acid trip green. Mad science radioactive green. Alien planet green. Photoshop green. I don't know why this is. Perhaps the cows produce not only special milk, but special manure too. Regardless the effect is mesmerizing and I could not get enough of it. This was a wandering through and standing on and staring at meadow though, not a laying on meadow like in Provence. "Special manure".

  

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 3. Manarola Inside Out

Manarola can be a little hard to get to. Apple Maps infamously sent drivers deep into the Australian Outback where they had to be rescued, but Google Maps need not be too smug as it sent us down a serpentine Ligurian road towards a dead-end that had been created over a year ago by a mudslide. So we backtracked, returned to the main road and took a circuitous detour to approach Manarola from the other direction.
Manarola.
If you've ever received a calendar from a real estate agent you've seen it. It's one of the five fishing villages that make up the Cinque Terre on the northwest coast of Italy. It's a multicoloured Lego brick town jammed against a cliffside. Paul Klee could have painted it. The harbour is so small that the fishing boats are hauled up on rollers and parked in front of the houses on the only road, and that road is only open to local traffic and then only for a few hours in the early morning. Visitors park above the village and walk down, their rolling suitcases making that characteristic rattle on the cobbles. Only one road even though 800 people live here. This is because all the other streets are in effect really just open-air hallways. Narrow, winding open-air hallways, interrupted and connected by staircases, in some cases very steep and long staircases. There are no bicycles and very few fat people. These "hallways" are often only as wide as you can reach. The house we rented was one small room wide and five floors high. The front door was on the first floor and the back door on the fourth floor.
The effect was bewildering and delightful. When the church bells rang and children raced ahead and disappeared around corners I felt like I had stepped into a classic Chef Boy-ar-Dee commercial and I laughed. When Alexander raced ahead and disappeared around a corner - really disappeared - I felt like I had stepped into the opening scene of a made for TV drama and I shouted. We eventually found him, of course.
If we had stayed a few more days we would have cased every odd little side passage and stairway and inevitably the strange topography would have become familiar and even ordinary. But the maze spreads outwards, up and down the steep wine terraces to the next village and then the next and the next, so I don't think I would have become bored.

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 2. Bathed in Klimt

Les Baux de Provence is a tiny fortified medieval town that sits high on a rocky outcropping and has the distinction - perhaps even notoriety - of being named one of France's "most beautiful towns". This appellation brings with it the promise of tour buses, many many tour buses. Being tiny as well as most beautiful then becomes a significant problem. Fortunately we were there in early April, at a time when the tour buses were in the single digits, rather than the double or even triple of July, but it did lead one to wonder, where would all the people go? The answer it turns out was into the mines. The bauxite mines. A couple hundred meters back, along the side of the rocky outcropping, was the world's first bauxite mine (bauxite, Les Baux, get it?) and this has been transformed into an otherworldly art experience. I was skeptical. "Tourist bait," I thought. "Cheesy and overpriced," I thought. "Bo-ring," I thought.
I thought wrong.
Maybe the experience in July packed shoulder to shoulder with jostling seniors from Hamburg would be different, but that day it was mostly empty and it was extraordinary. We stepped into a vast empty underground chamber, the floor, walls and ceiling of raw stone. The ceiling was three or four stories up and the chamber divided into sub-spaces by massive square pillars and partial walls. And all around us, on the floor too, were moving projections of paintings. Moving and morphing and blending into each other. The show that day was Gustav Klimt. We were bathed in him. Bathed in his astonishing colour. Music took this already overwhelming experience and made it emotional. "Overwhelming" has a pejorative flavour, but I mean it in its most positive sense. My jaw literally dropped. I mean it: my chin hung loose with my mouth open. I almost cried it was so beautiful, so moving, so unexpected. This went on for twenty minutes as we wandered the vast space, but I could have spent the whole day there.
This was apparently originally the idea of the artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. His films are run continuously in a second mine space. We saw old Greek women wailing about a dead boy in jerky black and white. We lasted about two minutes. This was the anti-Klimt. Perhaps the antidote was necessary to ease the transition back into the world.

  

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 1. An Hour In Provence

Meadows are nice. Even the word meadow is nice. Among the nice meadows I have known the small one on the slope behind the Mas de l'Ange is one of the nicest. To backtrack a little, the Mas de l'Ange is a 16^th century farmhouse in the Provence region of southern France that we rented for a week. It is built into the side of the hill such that the back walls of the dining and living rooms are the rough limestone of the interior of the hill, like the walls of a cave. The red tiled roof then forms a continuous slope to the back with the meadow that covers the part of the hill not eaten by the house. This is "the meadow".

I am not an especially smell oriented person. I love light and form and texture and song and taste, but I rarely give much thought to preferred or memorable smells. The meadow is however a smell memory. It is the memory of the smell of honey and of thyme and of rosemary. The last two had obvious explanations because they grow in numbers reserved for objectionable weeds at home, but the honey was confusing at first. It was confusing until I realized that there was so much in bloom that large amounts of nectar were being volatilized into the warm spring air. Flowers countless and nameless (at least to me) formed the perfect bed for the perfect nap. At least until I figured out how to position myself to avoid the less showy small prickly plants, also countless and nameless. Then with my eyes closed, breathing in that honey scented air, I only heard the thrumming of bees and the distant sounds of a farmer attacking the dead branches of his olive trees with a chainsaw. Van Gogh was committed to an asylum a few kilometers to my right and from the ruined castle straight ahead the infamous Lords of Baux once looked down on this meadow with rapacious eyes, but none of that was on my mind. All I was thinking of was, “rose is absurdly cheap here, I should have brought a bottle to the meadow rather than just a glass...”

  

F Deck

You'd be hard pressed to find a backpacker in Europe who does not respond to the mention of Brindisi with the remark, "Ah, sleazy Brindisi". When we arrived in the Italian port this seemed like an exaggeration. Unpleasant Brindisi, yes. Dodgy Brindisi, for sure. But sleazy? However, rhyme has a power and inference of truth about it, so soon we found ourselves muttering "sleazy Brindisi" as we pushed through the sweating crowds along the motor-scooter choked road to the port where we were to catch our night ferry to Greece.
Our packs were preposterously large and it was an oppressively humid hot evening, so when we arrived my first priority was to find a place to stow our packs for the three or four hours before we would be allowed to board. The port area was deserted except for a police post. I entered and smiled my best innocent Canadian abroad smile at the three men inside. They were wearing neat olive green uniforms accented with all manner of piping and epaulets and each sported a thick black mustache and large black sunglasses. The effect was almost comical.
"Mi scusi," I said, holding open the English-Italian section in our multi-lingual dictionary.
"Do you know where we can store our luggage for a few hours?"
"This Italia, you speak Italian!" one of them barked, thrusting a finger at me.
"Uh," I began flipping through the dictionary.
He cut me off with a brisk wave to the door and turned his back. The other two didn't move or speak.
I left.

We were traveling that day with a team of marathon runners from South Africa. John and Elke were like specimens from a Bowflex advertisement whereas Vince and Gloria were decidedly gnomish and difficult to picture as runners. Vince was the very image of a kindly old gentlemen with his snow white hair and twinkling eyes, so it was all the more jarring when he leaned over and whispered to me, "Ach ja Philipp, the black man, he don't like to work, you know, he only likes to breed."  John and Elke, on the other hand, although also white, were very active in the Zulu based Inkatha Freedom Party and talked a lot about politics, peppered with bits of colour from everyday life in South Africa: "Ja, I have five guns already, but the 9 mm parabellums are too heavy. I need another smaller one." In any case, John, being imposing Bowflex man, offered to stand guard over the luggage while the rest of us went back into town and foraged for supper.

When it was finally time to board we stumbled our way through the dark labyrinthine docks to a poorly lit metal ramp where we boarded alongside a line of idling diesel transport trucks. Once on the ferry we were, to our surprise, greeted by a Russian crew. Even though the Cold War was over there was still something faintly menacing about being given instructions in a thick Russian accent.
"Cabin is on F deck. Follow me."
We followed the thin-lipped but attractive young blonde purser down a long series of metal stairways, her black pumps clank-clank-clanking ahead of us.
A deck. B deck. C deck. D deck. E deck. Then F deck, well below the waterline and constructed entirely out of grey metal with low ceilings and a disorienting grid of identical gangways leading to the cabins. She open the door to our cabin, gestured inside and then turned heel and left. We peered in. It was a box. A grey metal box. A grey metal box with bunk-beds, a sink, a ventilation grill and a large warning sign on the wall. That was it. I cannot emphasize enough the strong resemblance to a prison cell. A prison cell in a totalitarian state with a questionable human rights record. We stepped inside and read the sign:
"Note: Passengers are kindly reminded that the bow thruster which is situated below this deck makes an unpleasant noise when in use on departures and arrivals. This is quite normal and should give no cause for anxiety."
One has to wonder how many times passengers ran in screaming panic down the gangways before management decided to mount such a prominent sign. It was curiously only in English and French. Are Italian, Greek and German speakers calmer?

We explored F deck, checking out the utilitarian metal shower rooms and the various opportunities for becoming lost or claustrophobic or both. When we had milked this for as much entertainment value as possible we returned to our cell and waited for the bow thruster. It was beastly hot in there and it was morbidly fascinating to listen to the sound of giant chains being scraped along somewhere above us, presumably to secure the transport trucks. Then there was silence for a few minutes and then the bow thruster came violently to life. We were glad to have been warned.

To escape the heat we went up on deck and watched the ferry cut into the Ionian Sea in a dark so black that the sea and sky merged together. The stars were perfectly reflected on the water ahead, creating the illusion of traveling into space. After a time we went back below where the ventilation was now working and quickly fell asleep. There was no sensation of motion.