Civilized Travel

I’m so jealous.

I’m writing this in the absolutely magnificent St. Pancris station in London, using the free, fast wifi while waiting for the Eurostar to depart for Paris.

I may be jinxing us by saying this, but so far we’ve found travel far more efficient than our experiences at home led us to expect.

We’ve flown Baltic Air twice and Ryan Air once–each time leaving promptly on time, with a minimum of fuss. No removing our shoes, no “getting intimate” with security personnel. No boarding by row numbers. (In the case of Ryan Air, no assigned seats.)

We flew from Dublin to Birmingham, and took the train directly from the airport to London’s Euston Station. The train was high speed; we were served breakfast, and there was free wifi. Businesspeople plugged in their laptops and worked, and there was no clickety-clack to disturb them–it was smooth continous rail. When we arrived in London, we walked three blocks to St. Pancreas, which, in addition to being beautifully renovated, is immaculate and inviting. The rest of our trip to Berlin will also be by rail.

Trains here are modern and clean. Electronic signs on the platforms tell how many minutes until the next arrivals; similar signs are at bus stops. (We have access to the technology, but to my knowledge it isn’t being used by IndyGo. It would be helpful in Indianapolis, since unlike the five-minute headways here, our buses run every forty minutes or so, and are frequently late.)

It’s so civilized to travel on a dependable, integrated transportation system. We could have such a system, if we had the political will.

Instead, we aren’t even repairing our bridges.

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Last Day in Dublin

We had scheduled a train excursion to Waterford and a couple of other spots in the Irish countryside, but it was cancelled for lack of other participants (apparently we were the only people who’d signed up), so we spent most of the day walking around Dublin.

The area around our hotel is fairly posh, but a few block away, things changed. While the amount of retailing remained astonishing, the quality of goods on display–and seemingly all being offered at 50-60% off–was somewhere between poor and shoddy. While we had remarked on a lack of diversity around the hotel, there was much more in the poorer precincts, leading us to form an impression that ‘people of color’ are probably disproportionately poorer here, as at home.

We walked through and around Trinity College, where students could be identified by their traditional black robes (now polyester–I wonder what they used to be). The campus is very old and impressive, but there is a lot of deferred maintenance visible.

We were struck by what appears to be a really first-rate public transportation system. Buses, rail, taxis are everywhere. And we were jealous of the impressive bike-share program; the distinctive blue bikes can be checked out through a kiosk, which unlocks the bike from it’s stand. No attendant needed. From casual observation, the program seemed very popular–we saw lots of folks checking them out and returning them.

People are not as thin as in Vilnius, but still far, far from as obese as we are in Indiana.

Tomorrow is a long travel day–we need to leave our hotel at four in the morning, and then it is air and rail with several changes until we reach Berlin.

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DUBLIN

The difference between Vilnius and Dublin in attitudes is palpable. Although the young woman who narrated our tour in Vilnius said that Lithuania was experiencing an economic downturn, it wasn’t visible–shops and cafes were bustling, there was significant construction and restoration activity, and everyone we interacted with seemed upbeat.

In Dublin, by contrast, the shops are all plastered with sale signs, there are empty shops even on Grafton Street, the “fancy” and expensive shopping thoroughfare, and both our cab-driver yesterday and a salesclerk in Marks and Spencer’s today volunteered that Ireland is experiencing a depression. (Their terminology.)

The taxi driver also volunteered considerable anger at “the bankers” who are giving themselves bonuses after their actions bankrupted the country. People are losing everything, he said, and those who brought on the crisis are still living high. One of these days, he predicted, someone with nothing left to lose will shoot a couple of them.

Sobering realities, and not so far from those we left at home–although I haven’t heard so direct an indictment elsewhere.

Last evening we strolled around Temple Bar and ate at a traditional Irish restaurant called Gallaghers. We had Irish boxty–the Irish version of Knish, with some variation. (It has been a theory of mine that every culture has similar dishes that are simply named differently–kreplach, ravioli…).

Tomorrow we are taking a day train out into the Irish countryside, and quite early on Tuesday we head for Berlin via Birmingham, London, the Chunnel and Paris. It will be a long travel day, and I anticipate no time for blogging until we are in Berlin.

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A Meditation on Taxi drivers

We’re in Dublin, having arrived via Baltic Air a little past midnight local time (around three a.m. Vilnius time.) I’ll share observations about the city itself in a subsequent post, but two experiences with cabbies are–in my opinion, at any rate–worth thinking about.

Yesterday we took a taxi from our hotel to the sole remaining synagogue in the city. (it was closed when we got there, but that’s a different issue.) The Lithuanian cabbie spoke halting English, and was surprised that we were from the US, because he could understand us–most Americans, he said, didn’t really speak English, but some confusing offshoot. (Given my undergraduate students’ written work, I had to agree.) when we got to our destination, he offered to wait for us, since it would be difficult on that street to get a taxi back. When I asked how much he would charge to wait a half-hour, he quoted us a ridiculously low amount; he was clearly genuinely worried how we’d get back.

Arriving late in Dublin, we took a cab from the airport. Our driver nearly talked our heads off, but–again–was a great ambassador for his city. When he found that this was our first trip to Ireland, he pointed to landmarks, took a couple of detours (which he didn’t charge for), and protested that we were tipping too much when we tried to compensate him with a generous tip.

My husband and I both remember when the Hudnut administration held regular “tourism training” sessions for cabdrivers and others who are the first face of the city–the people who give visitors their very first impression of the city. To my knowledge, Indianapolis no longer does these, and that’s a pity. Our experiences with these “road diplomats” left us with a very favorable impression of Vilnius and Dublin.

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Last Day in Lithuania

We woke to a really magnificent day–sunny, warm and breezy, and no humidity. We strolled though Uzupis and Old Town, stopping at
A couple of the ubiquitous cafes and doing lots of people watching. Lithuanians are a remarkably attractive people–many of them resemble Scandinavians ( since they are neighbors, my guess is they’ve intermarried).

Lithuanians also seem fairly prosperous. They dress well and I have been impresses by the tidiness and condition of their public spaces. I’ve seen very few abandoned properties and many, many buildings under renovation.

If there has been one disappointment, it has been the lack of evidence–historic or otherwise– of a Jewish presence in a city that was half Jewish before the second World War. I had hoped to learn more about the community from which my great-grandfather emigrated in the late 19th century, but at least in our brief time here, we’ve seen nothing reminiscent of the community once known as a center of Jewish life and scholarship.

We leave tonight for Dublin. (Our itinerary is an odd collection of places we’ve previously missed–after Dublin comes Berlin!)

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