MWBrazilBlog

In March 2016 we visited Baekseok University in Cheonan City, in northern South Chungcheong province, South Korea.  Simone Ferro taught dance and Laban Movement classes, Meredith Watts photographed.

These images are of Korean dance students in a Laban class.

Frankfurt was our first European layover after leaving Brazil.  We only stayed about three days, enough to begin accustoming ourselves to 5-15 degree (Celsius) temperatures (after leaving São Luis at about 30 degrees and São Paulo at about 25.

This meant buying a jacket and a warm hat.

It was also a time to visit family and friends, and a few museums, around Frankfurt/Hessen. 

Wiesbaden is a former aristocratic spa that was spared in World War because the American military wanted it as a headquarters.  The American presence is reduced now, and the city has a charm and commercial/artistic character of its own.

Below is a figure commemorating the German unification.  The meaning of the green man is a bit unclear to the casual visitor, but he is a symbol nonetheless.  In the background of the photo is an old hotel that has been refunctioned into apartments.  We stayed in a dear friend’s place there, looking down on the green man.

This is another view of Kranzplatz and the hotel.  It shows why the “bad” (bath) in Wiesbaden.  Beneath the city are hot mineral springs that have for centuries been used as thermal baths and spas.  This mineral fountain bubbles constantly in the cool March air, giving off a faint smell of rotten eggs.  Nearby there is a bulletin posting the mineral content and offering a drinking fountain of the water.

Below is an example of Wiesbaden functional public art.  It decorates one wall of a playground and park that is usually filled with children, families, and a multicultural mix of Germans and immigrants.

Below is the Russian-Orthodox Church, also known locally as the “Griechische Kapelle.”  Above the city of Wiesbaden, it looks down into a valley through surrounding forests.  Many visitors mention feeling a sense of meditative calm when they visit the church, as did we.

The church was built by architect Philip Hoffman for Duke Adolf von Nassau to commemorate the early death of his wife, a 19-year old Russian princess. It was dedicated in 1853 and has been maintained since as a center for worship of an active orthodox community in Wiesbaden and Hessen.

Wiesbaden offers a spa, a casino, opera, and ballet — and the world’s largest cuckoo clock (really!).  But for many visitors the “Greek Chapel” is the most beautiful and culturally interesting of the city’s sites.

The Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art

For the serious visitor, there is a multi-card available at the visitor’s office on the Römerplatz (next to the city hall).  The card offers discounts on multiple museum visits in a day.  We visited the Miró exhibit at the Schirn Gallerie and the Museum of Modern Art before the day ran out.

German museums have followed the international museum trend of allowing visitors to photograph works of art.  Unfortunately I didn’t take photos of the Miró exhibit and found out only later that I might have.  That exhibit highlighted the artist’s fascination with large works that simulated rural farm walls in their backgrounds.  Most of the canvasses appeared to have been painted on farm walls.  This was a perspective on the “materiality” of his works that I had not seen before.

The lead exhibit in the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art was curated by John Forsythe, the American choreographer who had just finished 25 years in Frankfurt.  He curated an exhibition in which virtually all the pieces used the visitor as part of the installation.

Visitors entered the art installations, danced, swung from gymnastic rings, crawled into small spaces, struggled to enter doors, looked into rooms that seemed to house a sleeping or dead person, and so on.

In this piece,  dance steps are given on the floor (an Arthur Murray-type fox trot I think).  A museum attendant helped us figure out what to do.

In another era this might have been a number in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie.

This exhibition has a title referring to a Chinese ghost descending a mountain.  It appears static at first, but as you walk around the vases they uncover pictures together than unfold the story.  It is a piece of work to enter and walk around many times.

From the photo you can probably see that the vases have different elements of the picture, allowing the story to unfold like an old-fashioned deck of pictures that show a moving scene when flipped. This is more meditative.

These gymnastic rings in the photo below invite you to cross the room (which is itself the art work) on the rings.  We didn’t see anybody do it.  Most ended up hanging helplessly like this person.  Maybe that is the point.  It may be a meditation on humility.

In the photo below “Old Bridge” crosses the Main River from the area of the Römerplatz to the Museum Embankment (Museum Ufer) where there are a dozen or so museums, each worth a half day or more.

I’ve seen this custom of attaching locks to a bridge in Cologne near the art museum there, and I understand that is widely done throughout Europe.  A common interpretation is that it ia done by couples to signify lasting love.  There is even a story of a bridge in Paris where tons of locks were removed because they threatened the integrity of the bridge.

The custom reminds me of the light poles outside some museums where visitors stick their exposition stickers when they leave. Someday a cultural anthropologist will find this interesting and write a monograph about it.

The Main River from the “Alte Brücke” that leads pedestrians from the Römerplatz to the Museum Ufer where the far embankment of the Main houses a dozen or so museums.  We are looking back at the Frankfurter Dom, he cathedral just to the left of center in the photo.

Northern Italy Between Venice and the Julian Alps: Udine, Tarvisio, Palmanova, Aquilaea, Vila Manin, Castelmonte, Gemona, Cividale, Venzone.

Within a few hours drive of Venice are vast regions of Roman cities and ruins, the base of the Italian army during World War I (close to the invading Austro-Hungarian border), regional villages, and  the remnants of a major earthquake that changed the landscape and wiped out cities in 1976.   A bit further to the north is the city of Trieste, which is treated in a separate blog.

Udine is the center of our trips here.  Not as well known as Venice, it is a major regional city and former Roman outpost.

As a frontier city between Italy and the regions of the Austro-Hungarian empire (now Slovenia and Austria), the city of Trieste is a fascinating mix of languages and cultures.  It has four official languages — Italian, Slovenian, Friulian (Eastern Laldino) and German.

It has been occupied by the Romans, the Habsburgs, Mussolini’s Fascist regime, and a mixed regime of allied forces after World War II.  It reverted to Italy in 1954 as the Allied occupation withdrew.  Officially it is the capital of the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia.

It is located on the sea and is a major port.  In the photo below the sea below has extensive oyster beds that seem to be tended by boats like the one below.

Not far from the view above is Miramar Castle which was built by Maximilian, brother of Ferdinand, Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  He was commander of the navy and built this seaside complex as an appropriate residence for his status, interests in the sea, and culture.

It was completed in 1860, but he lived there only a few years before receiving an appointment as the Habsburg emperor of Mexico.  He took the office n 1864 but it happened that the Mexicans did not want a European emperor.  In the 1867 rebellion the regime was overthrown and Maximilian killed.

As it happens, I visited the ramparts of the castle in Mexico City where the resistance fighters made a stand and a number of cadets lost their lives in the fight.  This was a major event in Mexican history, but in the slightly smarmy audio tour of Miramar there is scarcely mention of this (amid the lavish praise for his culture and lifestyle).

His wife Carla lived on for decades thereafter, but the empire in the New World was lost. The rest of the empire was lost and divided when  the Habsburgs found themselves in World War I some some 50 years later.In fact as history buffs will remember, the triggering event of WWI was the assassination of the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.

Maximilian’s Mexican empire was never fully established.  It was not recognized by the U.S., was supported provisionally by French forces, and never conquered the resistance forces of Benito Juarez.  After the American Civil War the United States supported Juarez more strongly, the French troops withdrew, and Maximilian was left exposed.

Waiting for coffee, these empire-style mirrors were irresistible.

These photos are from a walkabout in Venice during March, 2016.  We were with the Antonelli family from Udine and were guided by Erika Antonelli who lives and works in Venice.  This local guidance from a dear friend is one reason that many photos are from small side streets in Venice, from the water canal and its commuter taxi, and from the train/auto terminal as you exit the city.  We saw the  major sights in the central plazas of the city, but it was a  chilly day with construction going on and platforms everywhere to be erected if the water was high.  Even the gondolas were more available and interesting because they were short of passengers and busied themselves with small chores, maintenance of the boats, or were simply happy to have us around.  It was exactly the way I would like to see such a place — with a friend to guide us, a shortage of tourists due to the season, and plenty of time for lunch and a stroll.

On our way to a restaurant where Erika Antonelli works, we found this produce store, floating in the canal.

In the smaller streets we spent time in the shops — well, some did, and except for the jewelry artisan (see photo below) stayed on the street to photograph.

The artisanal mask shops were especially fascinating (though some in our party liked the jewelry crafts better).

The familiar masks below have many apocryphal origins — my favorite is that they were worn in during the plague by people who had to handle the sick, dying and the dead.

Some who saw the British production of “Sleep No More” would have put on masks like these to wander among the artists during the play.

Erika seemed to know this jewelry artisan who allowed me to photograph her at work inside her shop.  The only time I entered a jewelry store.

The gondoleer was less busy than during the tourist season and was here cleaning up his boat and the steps of his dock.  It was curiously familiar to see the boatsmen as working people doing normal tasks, rather than just bearing up under an onslaught of tourist with little cameras, cell phones, and selfie sticks.

Another street/canal with boats at rest.  I have been in Venice before, but never during such  beautiful, lonely, and reflective time.

This is Erika’s Antonelli’s finger pointing out the court on the left and the jail on the right.  The walkway in the background shortens the time between sentencing and being herded off to the wet dungeons in the basement or the sun-baked cells above.

The photo below is taken from a water taxi.  Unlike the gondolas, which are picturesque and inefficient, the commuter taxis are power boats that dock periodically at quayside stops that are like subway stops in a landlocked city.  The taxi takes you to the outer edge of the city where you can catch a train or pick up your car for the trip by land.

As our water taxi slowed to wend its way under the Rialto Bridge, this gondoleer passed us and the brightly-it dockside. Photographers will notice that he was kind enough to come by in HDR (the high-definition photographic technique used to bring out dark areas of a photo or film and sometimes produce surrealistic images).

Below is one view of the terminal complex as you leave the city for land connections.  The terminal and parking structure is in the background, the commuter trains in the lower section of the photo.

We arrived by car and train and left by water taxi and car.  The commute takes some patience, as life on the water normally does.

Venice has its own Calatrava-designed bridge leading out of the city.  It is a pedestrian bridge, elegant but still impassible for those with mobility limitations.  It is slippery in the wet weather and altogether impractical, though elegant.  Milwaukeeans may remember that Calatrava’s bridge from downtown to the Milwaukee Art Museum also had to be redesigned for safety and access.

These photos are a  small fraction of the images from our visit to Seoul and Cheanon, Korea in March, 2016.  They are not thought of as a representation of Korea, but are simply some of the places we visited.

The goal of the trip was to spend a bit more than a week with the dance communities of Cheanon and Seoul, involving at least four universities that had dance programs.  The time for actual touring and photographing was compressed and often done along the way to another commitment.

The dance photos will be the subject of another blog, but this is just a survey of some images from:

The “welcoming/farewell committee” for tourists at Incheon Airport

Scenes of the region’s urban density

A few peaceful places (a lovely lake, a reonstructed 17th century folklore village)

The Gakwonsa Buddhist temple complex near Cheanon

The imperial castle complex of the Joseon Empire, in the middle of Seoul (Gyeongbokgung Palace, established in the 14th century)

But first, to get this out of the way:  The Koreans are not above entertaining visitors with costume melodrama at the Incheon Airport.  We happened to be leaving Seoul when this procession came by.

They were actually a bit in the way as we struggled along with our luggage, but both western and Asian travelers lined up to take this picture.  So did I, I’m afraid.

In the region around Seoul there are cities, mountains, and very little “country.”  There is agriculture in tiny plots all around the highways and urban spaces, but this is not the place for farms.

It is a place or urban high-tech consumption with shopping only hindered by the need for the newcomer to figure out what is behind the brilliant signs and lights.

This is along the main street of Cheanon, just at the entrance of a network of smaller commercial streets.

This area seems to have a 24-hour culture, with even Korean saunas staying up all night in some areas.  You can spend the night there eating squid and baking under hot rocks or on beds of Himalayan salt.

This is a pizza shop along one of the smaller commercial streets, with plastic sheeting against the March damp and chill.

The photo below is from the apartment in Cheanon where we stayed.  The traffic is nearly constant, reminding me of the 24-hour traffic jams in São Paulo, except that here they (sometimes) move faster.

The lake at the right is dotted with several universities and schools, along with small agricultural plots in virtually every unbuilt space.

A reconstructed historic village.  Asan Village seems to have its origins in the 14th century with a major expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.  It is preserved and open to visitors.

It is meant to give a flavor of the diversity of class and status in the village.  In mid-March we were there just as the buds began to open on the flowering trees.

Because of the concentration of population in the Seoul region and because of the density of mountains here, the building go up.  Wide open spaces are rare and far from the city.  There are peaceful places in the mountains, though, and the Temple of Gak Won Sa (below) is one example.

The lake below is in Cheanon and was visible in the traffic photo.  It is oddly peaceful in the morning and between classes of the surrounding universities.

The Independence Museum is also in the region of Cheanon.  It chronicles and dramatizes the struggle for independence of Korea — from the Chinese and, most of all, the Japanese.

Displays and dioramas are deeply patriotic and dramatic about the rigors of war and occupation.

The Gyeongbokgung Palace is in the center of modern Seoul.  It is the site of the Joseon emperors who united the three major kingdoms of Korea and fought back the Chinese and Japanese.  Their territory actually extended into parts of current China and still provide for historical arguments about territory (as do Korea’s relations with Japan).

This is one of the imperial buildings with blossoms opening.  The trees have an enormous symbolic and esthetic value and are usually surrounded by visitors photographing themselves in front of the trees.

In fact, the blossoming of the trees at times turns into a plague of selfies.  The young women here posed for visitors, and when there was nobody posing with them they posed themselves.

This is not the place for authenticity (see welcoming committee in the opening photograph), but it is pretty nevertheless.  For “authenticity,” they will put away their cell phones and pose with visitors.

The Gak Won Sa temple and grounds represent a large temple complex in the mountains near Cheanon.  It is said that in the 1970’s it was dedicated to prayers for the unification of North and South Korea. It is nestled near Mt. Taejosan

The statue of the Buddha is some 15 meters high (about 45 feet).  A common observance is to walk clockwise around the buddha and bowing in front of him on every circle.  The person below is doing just that, and her figure gives a sense of the immensity of the statue.  Mt Taejosal is in the background.

There are many other buildings of the temple complex.  In some the smaller temples are open for visitors to meditate.  This is one of them where I spent the afternonn.