Monday, November 4, 2019

In which we venture to Vilnius.



In June, my father's Albuquerque-based choir traveled through Lithuania, Latvia and Riga, filling ornate old churches with their voices and learning the history of the Baltics. As I rarely get to spend time with my family and had never been to this region before, I had hoped to accompany them throughout the whole trip, but ultimately theater and work got in the way. Luckily, I was able to swing a few days away in order to join them for the first leg of the trip in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Due to impertinent technical issues in New Mexico, my parents weren't able to leave their side of the planet as planned and had to postpone their arrival by a day, leaving me a day and a half to venture to Vilnius on my own. I was sad that our Family Adventure Time was being cut short, but knowing that they would soon visit me in Hamburg made it okay, and I was honestly ready for some Unscheduled Away Time after several intense months of work and rehearsal stress.

I left early on a fine Wednesday morning, flying through Riga and then over the red rooftops of the Vilnius old town, where I would spend the next few days wandering and searching out shady, quiet areas.


The first thing to do upon landing was catch the bus into the city. Once there, I found myself too tired and too hot to want to do anything. It was too early to check into hotel and no one was expecting me anywhere, so I wandered into the train station entry hall and ended up half snoozing on a beanbag chair for a very long time while children and adults alike wandered over to play a piano in the corner, the music echoing through the hall. As it turns out, all Lithuanian children know how to play the piano. (I'm sure there are no exceptions to that.) Half of the grand entry hall had been turned into a little library, and I found it absolutely lovely.


Once restored, I dropped my things off at the nearby hotel and started my city wandering at the Gates of Dawn, quietly peeking into orthodox churches so ornately decorated that they were literally breathtaking. There were noticeably more people coming in to pray here than in other countries I'd visited, with many older women praying out loud.

There were many, many churches in the city, and it was clear that not all were equally prosperous. Several loomed sadly on forgotten street corners, overgrown, boarded up, their facades chipping away. I imagined that they too had once been so grand.










The wandering landed me in a park on the outskirts of town, which could have been in the middle of the countryside anywhere. Three little ponds reflected the rippling light, connected by a footpath. One girl was playing guitar under a tree, another was snoozing or reading or both, with her big dog keeping watch nearby. I found my own napping spot under another tree and watched the sun play in the leaves overhead. A very pregnant woman sat on a picnic blanket nearby, and over the course of the next hour or so, was joined by many more pregnant women, all wearing summer dresses and sometimes bringing a partner in tow.




How lovely it was just to be there in that soft, quiet space, with no sign of the city or appointments to be kept.


From there I continued north, crossing bridges to the Republic of Užupis and onward to a little vegan café I found bordering a park with beautifully purple chilled beet soup. It was still very hot outside.






From there I walked up the hill to the Three Crosses monument, which, like many things in this city, has sobering history, as well as an excellent sunset view over the old town. Someone started flying a drone around just after I arrived and its massive, mechanical, mosquito-like tone and appearance was so annoying that I cut my visit short and spent the next couple hours wandering the streets around the cathedral, university, and old Jewish ghetto, now bustling with cafés and bars.










The next day brought with it my parents, surprisingly awake after traveling over 9000 miles, and we spent the afternoon exploring the city and eating more chilled beet soup before my father's choir concert that evening. 















My parents had to leave early for Riga the next day, leaving me with another several hours to explore before my own journey home began, so I decided to visit the city's Holocaust Exhibition. Having spent so much time researching Hamburg's WWII history, I always find it vitally important to keep visiting these museums and memorials in different cities and countries. The exhibition was in a small, old house on a hill, up a back street and not clearly marked. The door was locked and a little old lady let me in when I rang the bell, then took all my information about where I was from before kindly ushering me into the exhibit rooms. I was one of the only visitors in the house, and the wooden floorboards creaked loudly as I walked from room to room. There I read about life in the Vilnius ghettos, about prominent Jewish families, about Nazi extermination reports and massacres in the forests. I read things that I cannot unlearn and saw images that months later I still cannot unsee. 

From there I sat in the shade of a tree for a while until continuing to the other part of the museum at the Tolerance Center. There I was introduced to the paintings of Samuel Bak, a Jewish painter who had escaped the Vilnius ghetto as a boy and worked his way through the experiences he had there and since on his canvases. I am by no means a learned art critic, but I think the Pucker Gallery's description from the Pucker Gallery accurately describes my experience of his work:

Bak’s work weaves together personal history and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience. Across seven decades of artistic production, Bak has explored and reworked a set of metaphors, a visual grammar, and a vocabulary that ultimately privileges questions. Depicting a world destroyed and yet provisionally pieced back together, Bak's artwork preserves memory of the twentieth-century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit.

The exhibit itself was beautifully done, with his paintings illuminated and his voice telling stories from his life filling the otherwise silent room from a video on one wall. The creativity, the devastation, and the hope I read in his paintings took my breath away. I can't possibly describe it here, but something about them just clicked inside as I sat alone in the dark gallery, letting the stories wash over me.


Walking the streets of the old Jewish ghetto felt so much more intimate after learning the history of the people who had lived there those decades before, feeling the footsteps of its ghosts on that hazy afternoon. 



Time passed and I made my way to the airport and back to Hamburg, flying over the rapeseed fields and colorful shipping containers stacked along the harbor. It had been a hot, grand adventure to a new old place, and I was happy to be home.



Saturday, September 21, 2019

In which we have a Future Friday.



Klimastreik, 12 Uhr! Hamburg was taking part in the global climate march, and I wanted to be there. I thus took the day off work, slept in, and then took my globe for a walk. 

It was expected that about 30,000 people would take to the streets in my home city, but in the end, final estimates from the police put us at 70,000 -- a picture of us even made it here! There were so many people that we first had to stand for hours before even starting the march route. 

Making my way from my apartment to the U-Bahn, I got a little teary to find myself surrounded by kids leaving school, carrying handmade posters and talking about going to their first protest. There were whole kindergartens, kids donning high-vis vests and flowers or pictures they had drawn. Teachers were there with their students, parents with their babies, whole offices that had been allowed to leave work early that day. All smiling (despite the depressing signs and reason for being there), all helping one another, like the strangers helping people in wheelchairs up the escalator when the line for the elevator was so long. Lots of kids wanted to spin my globe, several of them playing the "Where am I going on the vacation?-game", where you spin, close your eyes and point. 

Later, looking through the news at pictures from protests all over the world, knowing my friends and I had been marching with millions, I felt hope as well as worry, and hoped that hope will win.