The road out of Idrija was closed for construction, so we took little mountain roads from our hotel to bypass the closure. All of Slovenia is quite scenic. The search for Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice (always the first stop of the day) led to several bistros in the town of Žiri. The last one had it — the proprietor said “God bless America!” when we said we were from California. Slovenians have a delicate relationship with the US just now.
We drove to Skocjan Cave, a very popular tourist spot. There were 250 people on the 12:00 tour, and we split into five groups. The first part of the cave had some nice stalagmites and stalactites, but it was the second part which was special: it was 140m tall, up to 60m across, and 3.5km long. We walked along the path about halfway up, with a ceiling way above us, and a floor way below. The surface of the path, rebuilt recently, was very high-tech; though it was pretty consistently wet throughout, there was no lack of traction anywhere, one always felt stable footing.
We emerged from the cave, walked along the river, went back to the car, and drove on to Trieste.
We found our hotel in Trieste on a pedestrian mall. It was brand new; our room was decorated with coffee paraphernalia; and it was all accessed with codes, no keys needed. We moved the car to a place we could get it at 7am, and then walked around town. We walked directly to Piolo & Max, the amaro shop where our picture is on the wall, and it was closed with a “back soon” sign. This can mean anything, in Italy. Around the corner was an outlet of Trapizzino, the fast-food joint we’d gone to in Rome. They serve little pieces of bread with stew inside; several different flavors were available.
After we finished our two pieces, we returned to the shop, and it was open. The woman immediately recognized us, and we spent awhile tasting several of her different infusions. We ended up with one with ginger, one with cardamom, an absinthe, and one with lemon verbena.
We completed our dinner a block away at Nearby Open Now which was an Osteria, Traditional in Decor. Watercolors of sailors arm wrestling, from the days when being seen with women made you less a man.
As we walked up the pedestrian mall back toward our hotel, we counted seven gelato places in one long block.
We drove on to Idrija. We stayed in a humble little room over a bar (TripAdvisor) some 6 km out of town, up a hill. As we were getting ready to go to sleep, a bunch of people musicians arrived to the bar below, with an accordion.
Through all of this, we were continually chatting with our friends who went to Hisa Franko with us:
Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:01:24 Dave Oppenheim The Wi-Fi here is called TP-LINK. I wonder if the admin login is default too. No Wi-Fi password needed. Also, here they use no top sheet. The duvet is too hot and using nothing is too cold. A sheet would have been just right.
Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:01:49 Emmett Byos
Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:02:01 Dave Oppenheim And there are mosquitoes.
Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:02:50 Emmett Our airbnb host is ridiculous
Sent 25 Aug, 2019 22:02:52 Hisa frankers and a tuba
Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:03:23 Emmett Oh you play the tuba to scare off the mosquitos
If Ibn Battuta had had chat, he would never have got anything written. Or maybe much more.
Monday, August 26
Several years ago, on the way back from NAMM, we attempted to go to New Idria, an abandoned mercury mine east of Hollister. We never reached it, there was an impassable pile of asbestos dust. Idrija is what that was named after, which had the second largest mercury mine in Europe (after Almaden in Spain, which another mine in the Bay Area was also named after). The mine in Idrija closed down about 20 years ago, but it is of course open for tours. Like the tour of the silver mine in Potosi, we were issued protective gear (this time only a jacket and a hard hat). Unlike that tour, this mine was easy to walk through standing all the way up, and there were no workers scurrying by as we explored. It was interesting to see deposits on the walls of cinnabar (mercury ore), and tiny inclusions in the rock of liquid mercury.
Our guide had backpacked through South America around 2000 but did not go into the mines at Potosí.
The part of El Tío is played here by Prekmandlc the dwarf.
Then we went to another building several blocks away, the smelter. It had a fairly comprehensive museum detailing all the things mercury is used for, and showing the history of the Idrija mine. We walked up into the smelter, though there really wasn’t much left to see.
The guide at the smelter was funny, though. When you meet somebody in a faraway land, you speak slowly, but you also listen slowly, and you aren’t parsing for irony and zingers the way you listen to Emmett. So he got the drop on me at first. I don’t remember the conversation — another characteristic of witty talk — they must have had wall-to-wall secretaries at the story conferences for “Your Show Of Shows”.
After a bite of lunch featuring Idrija’s signature lamb dumplings, we went to the museum and saw many historical exhibits, including several showing Idrija’s history as a center for lace-making. Apparently lace was an industry which permitted money laundering from the mining industry. It also was Women’s Work. Since the mines closed, gender became redundant, and now boys do lacework, too. One of the guides said that boys even win some lace competition but I can’t find evidence for this on the merciful Internet, p.b.u.www.
We arranged with the museum guy to meet us at a historic water wheel a few blocks across town. We tried to drive there. Google sent us around tight curves and down a bike lane. Fortunately nobody seemed to care. The water wheel was immense — 10 meters in diameter. It had been used to pump water out of the mine.
We drove a short distance away to “Wild Lake”, a curious tiny lake by the side of the road. The curious part was that it was in a very small box canyon, with a fault at the far end. And beneath the fault, there was an underground cave, full of water. We would frequently see ripples from the cave on the surface of the lake. A sign next to the lake showed the various dives into the cave which have happened, people have gone quite deep into it.
We had dinner at the Hotel Jozef Restaurant, and went back to our little room. I like Hotel Jozef. Don’t be put off by the second floor view of the Hip Hop Petrol station — HJ manages to avoid most “view restaurant” tropes, like high prices and tiny creative portions. The salmon came with carrots, not broccoli (as was on the menu) because they hadn’t any broccoli. Our guide at the mercury mine told us this afternoon that nobody here grows carrots because they pick up mercury from the tailings. Hopefully these carrots came from upstream.
We arrived at Mestre, the city on the mainland closest to Venice, and after missing a few of the frequent but scattered trains to Santa Lucia (I wrote the word “Wack-A-Platform” in my notes), transferred to a train that would take us to the spot printed on our ticket. From there, we walked to pick up our rental car, and learned that now the rental cars are a short distance away. We schlepped there, got the car, and headed toward Slovenia.
(Note to self and others: no more renting of cars to leave town at the Venice car rental offices! It’s just too complicated. For all the walking you must do, and people-mover ticket buying, and where-are-we-ness, you might as well take the water taxi or a bus to the airport. Maybe there are agencies around the train station in Mestre.)
We were chatting with our friends who told us we’d need a “vignette” for Slovenia, a little sticker that shows that you’ve paid the tax. The one place in Italy we found that sold them had a really long line, so we figured we’d get it somewhere else.
On the way to Slovenia, we stopped in Cividale del Friuli, a city with a UNESCO-impromada medieval center. In the old days, it was a seat of Longobard power in Italy, which if you type on your iPhone will tell you all about longboards. The Gastaldaga area has a museum enclosing an Episcopal complex which surrounds a small Longobard chapel. Very Russian Doll and the signage isn’t great.
When we arrived, it seemed like there was a Renaissance Faire or something happening, but I suppose tourists dress up and go there every weekend. We poked around a bit, touring the monastery and its chapel which was of course under restoration. There was a nice river flowing through the center of the town.
From there we headed to Hisa Franko, the celebrated restaurant just across the border in Slovenia. Four of our friends were also there, and we checked into our hotel rooms (you don’t want to drive anywhere after a wine pairing) and hung out on our “private terrace”, only accessible through two of our rooms. Before long it was dinnertime, and we went down and had exquisite bites of many little things. There were many wines over the course of the evening as well. We told them that Ray and I wanted to split a wine pairing. The whole point was not to drink so much, but they poured just as much as if we’d ordered two pairings (though they only charged us for one!) We were eating for about two and a half hours, and then went in the kitchen and said hi to all the chefs.
Then more hanging out on the terrace, sampling some of the amaros Emmett and Nikki had bought in a tiny store in Trieste the week before, where they’d seen a picture of me and Ray and Johan tacked up on the wall! (The picture had been taken in a restaurant in Venice four years earlier, by one of the shop owners). Around 2:30am, we couldn’t stay awake any longer.
Sunday, August 25
The waiters, as well as the guests, look very Men-Before-Ten at breakfast. There is a wide assortment of snacks, including cheeses and Kuleshov salami by which I mean it comes in several varieties with Michelin-starred backstories but would be indistinguishable in a blind tasting. I have blind tastings much on my mind, since Clear Lake.
We all had a nice breakfast, and checked out, leaving a 75 euro tip. The staff get 6 euros an hour as salary. This is regarded as a lot of money.
We headed to nearby Kobarid to walk around, stopping at the gas station to buy our “vignette”. From there, we walked to Slap Kozjak, a waterfall. As we crossed the bridge, Kevin set up his phone to take a picture of us from a distance, and used his watch to trigger it. That spurred me to look into my little camera, and I discovered that I could use its WiFi mode with my phone to not only trigger it but also to set any other parameter (except where it’s pointing). Anyway, the walk to the waterfall (which had an admission fee) went up this narrow river canyon, and there were tons of cairns in the river. Finally it got to a huge enclosed area, a cathedral of sorts, where the waterfall was located. Quite scenic! We walked back past some WWI trenches.
We all had a delicious lunch at Hisa Polanco in the town of Kobarid, operated by one of the owners of Hisa Franko.
Afterwards, we checked out the farm where Kevin and Lindsay were staying. Their host told us that the owners of Hisa Franko have gotten divorced but are still business partners. Do you have friends who know what all the chefs are doing? It seems to be a thing you can follow, like telling the difference between oregano and marjoram.
We arrived in Frankfurt in mid-morning. The passport stamper didn’t insert our passport into a reading machine. What new tech is this? Perhaps he has everything he needs to know, from Singapore Airlines. There is a good chain of custody for us, from entering JFK. Frankfurt is a good place to enter Europe because there is an intercity train station right in the airport, and the train fare plus the plane fare were the best deal. I think I found the plane ticket on kiwi.com. When kiwi.com is working well, you can submit a query like “New York to Germany” and it will give you a list of flights.
We walked to the airport train station, and boarded a train to Munich. Our friend Dennis picked us up and took us to his new apartment, where we met Lucas, who is Dennis and Paulina’s one-year-old. We then walked to Occam Deli, a nearby restaurant. Dennis’s neighborhood has most of what you need nearby. Occam did not seem particularly child safe, as you expect from a restaurant named after a razor, but Dennis and Paulina have had a year to perfect their baby eyes and stopped him from going in all the important directions. Now they get to learn a whole new set of tricks when he walks and then drives. Afterwards, idle post card and mobile plan shopping and so to bed, hoping to avoid jet lag.
Thursday, August 22
I set up my computer in Dennis’ office, and worked for most of the day. At one point Dennis and I rode bikes downtown to get SIM cards which we can use all over the EU. Buying them from Vodafone required a two-month minimum, but coincidentally, our time in Europe covers most of a two-month period, so that was just fine.
Duje, another friend of ours in Munich, and his girlfriend Leem, came over for dinner. Paulina made a delicious Brazilian fish stew. Leem seemed like she was doing something terrifically interesting in Hollywood, but she couldn’t talk about it. How many different reasons are there that you can’t talk about your job? The most common reason is that there are only three people in the world, all of whom share your open office, who understand what you are doing in any more detail than you could fit on a Hallmark card. The reason everybody thinks of first, is that your government is planning to kill someone, and you are helping them do that, and it mustn’t get back to the intended victims. Leem’s reason, also very common, is that the product isn’t announced yet, and you don’t want to lose a competitive advantage. I am sure you could continue this list at some length, interspersed with distracting commercials that you must be very careful to avoid clicking by accident.
I don’t know what Duje does. I think he doesn’t talk about his work because Liberal Arts majors are never really satisfied with their career until they can’t talk about it for proprietary reasons.
Friday, August 23
We hung out at Dennis’ most of the day, working and writing postcards. Lucas is fun, just like Paulina and Dennis are. All engineers should have babies. The differences and similarities between babies and other projects are too humorous to miss.
In the evening, Dennis took us back to the train station, and we found our sleeper cars on the train to Venice. We had a compartment of four on the overnight direct train to Venezia. Our bunkmate greeted us directly: “I hope you don’t snore.”
We kicked off the European segment of the trip with a nonstop JetBlue flight to JFK, starting at Terminal 1 in SFO. I am not usually impressed by airport art, much less by airport political history, but SFO has really scored with the re-opening of Terminal 1 as the Harvey Milk Terminal, and I encourage you to fly somewhere on JetBlue or Southwest, and allow an hour more to see it, before the reaction happens and it’s rebranded after Dan White. There are an impressive number of large photos, and exhibits by other artists (at Gate 7, a photographer had played Cindy Sherman Dress-up as her father and her mother, explaining that her father was secretly a gay man and her mother was secretly of mixed race). In the non-secured area are a bunch of continents done in metal by a Ms. Glynn, hanging from the ceiling, with steel plants hanging upside down like giant versions of what Fiona Hall casts in sardine cans. But where was Europe? From a position waiting to have our passports and boarding passes looked at in a long line, I couldn’t totally see Asia but it seemed only to extend to the Urals, and the White Nationalists are going to be annoyed to find their homeland gone.
As we were getting off the plane, a voice from the row behind said, “Dave Oppenheim?” It turned out we’d been riding the whole way in front of one of Dave’s Avid coworkers from several years back. He was on his way to a few days on Fire Island and we didn’t hear from him again.
From JFK we got a Lyft to our Airbnb in Brooklyn. You ask the airport people where to meet your Lyft, they say outside the arrivals area. You ask the app, they tell you the departure level. So we go up there, and get a call from our driver who, of course, is down on the arrivals level. He circles around and finds us, but they really should get their story straight, for a better user experience.
Our airbnb was a beautiful two-bedroom ground-floor apartment just east of Prospect Park, in the West Indies. Besides the bedrooms, there was a study, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Two blocks from the 2 train. And it’s less than $100 per night! Our host greeted us, despite our 10pm arrival, and explained the keys. As we left for dinner, we thought we just locked ourselves out, but learned it was just a sticky door. When we returned, we really had been locked out by one of the other residents of the building, but we successfully woke somebody up and get in. The deadbolt in question got taped over for the rest of our stay.
We tried to find a particular restaurant that was said to channel Ghana, but we had the same problem as in Lima: they were closed despite Google saying they’d be open. We found a happening pizza pub on Flatbush Ave and ate there instead. Pizza is locavore fodder in Brooklyn.
Saturday, August 17
Best thing I did: asking Marcus, our airbnb host, “SO, if this is a West Indian neighborhood, where can I get ackee and fish in the morning?”
Even through all his innate geniality, you could tell he was genuinely stoked that an old guy from Duck Dynasty wanted to know that. He said there were too many to count, i.e. he didn’t know. I think what’s happening is that his mom, who also lives upstairs, cooks it for him. Often a problem with asking natives for advice. We found it at a juice bar in the next block.
(Ackee has not always been available in the U.S. I don’t know which problem USDA had with it. There is always something unavailable for reasons unconnected to psychedelic drugs. Szechuan Peppers carried some kind of canker, French Cheeses are always being tariffed to death every time the French are right about the results of US Foreign Policy before we are willing to admit it. For surrender monkeys, they sure have a feisty labor movement, and the retirement age and health care to show for it.)
In May before we left, we saw the Andy Warhol exhibit, rejoining SFMOMA with a membership with reciprocal admission privileges at several US museums. This included the Guggenheim in New York, so of course we went there. Getting there was a bit confusing, since the subway maps showed the 2 train going up the west side of the park, but Google showed it going up the east side of the park. The station agent pointed out that Google was correct, there was construction on weekends which was rerouting that line. We did all of our traveling on Reduced Fare Metro cards, giving us two rides for the price of one, available by cash from station agents. I wasn’t quite 65, but after the first station agent let me slide, I kind of expected it from all of them, and didn’t have any issues.
The Guggenheim had a show curated by six artists featuring many interesting works. But the main draw for us was “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now”, because it has dick. The most interesting part was “Notes from the Margins of the Black Book”, in which Glenn Ligon had annotated Mapplethorpe’s “Black Book”, a collection of his photographs of black men, with quotations which either responded to Mapplethorpe’s work, or commented on the lives and situations of gay black men at the time. Dave thought quotes from Essex Hemphill were most incisive. You can’t take photos of course and when you go to look them up on the Internet to remind yourself, the Internet says, “bla bla COOKIE POLICY bla bla” and “Sign up for our newsletter?”
In general, criticism of Black Book is only not Dada-lunatic if you start from the axiom that sex, and dicks in particular, are a thing completely outside human experience, with a minor in Black people being outside human experience. Thought experiment: grab a criticism of Black Book, replace Dicks with Lilies, and see how it reads as exegesis on Monet. (Mapplethorpe was not above replacing dicks with lilies, himself.)
The stupidest remark in the margins of Mapplethorpe, and there are many contenders, is that white gays grow up expecting privilege. Um, they start out as children, which is never privileged. Anyone under 18 knows what it is to be ignored, denigrated, stereotyped, unpaid, imprisoned, hit, the whole nine Wojnarowicz yards. Only by pretending the first eighteen years of your life are not a part of it, which is much done, can you make such an assertion.
There’s no reason to go to an art gallery if you aren’t going to be grumpy.
We took the train down to Christopher Street, and waited to meet Ray’s cousin Johan at Monsters, one of his favorite bars. We had their happy hour frozen margarita, and then headed to a nearby foodie taco place for a light dinner. Empellon Taqueria has improved since the TimeOut review. The taco fillings are much more flavorful than their reviewer described. Still Nordic around the edges. Smoked tilefish tacos. The rum-tequila-absinthe drink was just weird. I don’t have enough experience with hot pink shaved ice chick drinks to judge. Also Johan’s smoked something margarita.
And then back to Brooklyn.
Sunday, August 18
We had breakfast near the hotel at a little sandwich shop that featured rye waffles, which were quite nice. Then we headed to South Street Seaport to meet Roger, a cousin of Ray’s from his father’s side. He and Ray hadn’t ever met, but they decided it would be fun to. We wandered around for awhile, including checking out the World Press Photography awards, and then found a little Italian restaurant to hang out in and talk for three hours or so. He was an interesting guy, whose career includes having been the principal food photographer for Subway.
They gently kicked us out after awhile, and we walked across town to the World Trade Center to see what was there 18 years later. Besides the new tower, there was a huge memorial fountain, and a massive shopping center called Oculus. We dashed into the Oculus when it started raining, walked through the Eataly store to use up some time. Oculus looks like a church. The alien archaeologists will be convinced that lower Manhattan is a temple complex, to the God of Money and Consumption.
When the rain stopped, we left. We said goodbye to Roger, and went up toward Johan’s apartment. He had turned in for the evening, but we found Naya, a delightful Lebanese place at 56th and 2nd, and had some kebbe and other tasty snacks.
And then back to Brooklyn.
Monday, August 19
The Airbnb had no washing machine, but Nostrand Ave had tons of laundromats. We did breakfast and laundry in parallel, and then went to the Whitney museum, another SFMOMA reciprocal partner, to see its biennial.
They dedicated most of the building to art they’ve discovered in the last two years. The most alarming exhibit was a video documenting the use of machine learning to identify pictures of a particular brand of commonly-used tear gas canisters. Once trained, the bot culled the Internet to see where the tear gas canisters had ended up, which is everywhere. A sign next to the entrance to the video pointed out that Warren Kanders, one of the board members of the Whitney, was the CEO of Safariland, the company making the tear gas. Eight of the artists in the biennial had withdrawn their work in protest. A few days later, Kanders resigned, and the artists stayed in the show. That all happened about three weeks before we were there, which explained why we saw all of the works in question. Christine Sun Kim, one of the eight protesting artists, had a memorable array of pie charts describing the experience of deaf people in modern society, which was written about here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/t-magazine/christine-sun-kim-artist.html .
“Museum Piece con Gas”, Nicole Eisenman
Being at the WTC memorial the day before reminded me of Mary and Kelly, friends I hadn’t seen for ages. They’ve lived nearby, in Battery Park City, since before 2001. We walked along the Hudson to their place. It was fun to see them and catch up on how things have been.
We made more definite arrangements to see Johan’s apartment, so then we went up and did that. It’s a fabulous little place with a Murphy bed and a good view. He’d already eaten, so we foraged in the neighborhood and ended up at Totto Ramen up a block on 52nd. We had Chicken Paitan Ramen, with an amazing thick broth ideally made by cooking down some other chicken broth, including bones. We’d never had anything like it. (And now, we find it’s everywhere.)
And then back to Brooklyn.
Tuesday, August 20
We walked through Prospect Park and met Dave’s college friend David at Terrace Bagel, a place that another friend of ours swears makes the best bagels in NYC. There was certainly nothing wrong with them. David tells the same political line as our other friend Bertram, although he’s a plutocrat and Bertram is a cabinet maker: after dealing face to face with Donald Trump, he will have nothing to do with anything he’s involved in, since the 1990’s. He lies, cheats, and steals (but people do love that…)
Afterwards, we walked up the west side of the park and into the Brooklyn Public Library to get out of the sun for awhile. David got back on the subway and we walked back to the Airbnb, packed up and got a Lyft back to the airport. We found our Singapore Airlines flight to Frankfurt, got on board, and did our best to get some sleep. A380’s are so massive, there is no reason they should be able to fly.
Adam’s birthday is the time for the annual pilgrimage to Indian Beach Resort at Clear Lake. I think this event is adequately covered on social media. There is kind of a lull in gossip-worthy behavior when people are in stable relationships, before the next generation is old enough to get in real trouble. I personally made one bad social call, presuming that a wine tasting which came at the tail end of eight hours of Coors Light and chemically processed Cheet-ohs was an elaborate joke, when the perpetrator thought it was a psychological experiment. I therefore made comments (which I’ve forgotten) that should have been jokes but were actually rude. My interpretation was defensible, but you don’t go to parties to defend yourself. This is why we should all only text. Wouldn’t it be swell if there were some recognizable way to evoke emojis, live, only just using facial expressions and easily identifiable objects? The Unicode Consortium should look into this.
We took some rides out on the Brown Squall and watched the athletic people wakeboard. Also went to the appalling bar on the other side of the lake, because it’s cool to go somewhere on a boat that’s faster than driving to it. Every time this group goes to that bar, they order something with flames in it, that is supposed to taste really horrible, but serves as a bonding experience I think. I have never personally understood hazing, at all, but it seems to be important to some people.
Look, Ma! No rope!
I had one off-campus discussion with the proprietor of a thrift store who likes post cards (but her inventory is at home and not in the shop, because nobody buys them). She told me she had lately closed up the shop for an hour so she could walk across the street and watch vultures eating a carcass. I like her.
