Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2016-17

---

IN THIS ISSUE

• Kate Brookfield continues her blog from Spain
• Mike Yeager has just returned from a visit to Vietnam
• The editor writes from Ericeira on the coast of Portugal
• Betty Audet shares some thoughts about vitamin F
• Shirley Coutts forwards another blonde joke
• Don Henderson knows why men love leather dresses
• Sites are suggested by Bruce Galway, Catherine Nesbitt, Don Henderson, and Irene Harvalias

Kate Brookfield continues her travel notes on her blog at Word Press:

SPRING HOLIDAY

Tuesday, April 12: Will this darned rain ever stop? I am reminded of a song of the weather by Flanders and Swan, British entertainers from the ´60s, "At the Drop of a Hat:

"April brings the sweet spring showers "On and on for hours and hours."

In spite of the rain, we had a full and interesting day. In brief, we "did" the Cathedral, the Castle of the Kings, the old Jewish quarters, including the 10th century synagogue, finally ending our day at the Archeological Museum.

The Cathedral of St. Mary: Although now an active Christian cathedral, this magnificent and imposing building is usually referred to as "the Mosque." Originally there was an early church dedicated to St. Vincent, reportedly with relics of that saint. When Spain experienced the invasion of Muslims from Morocco, the church was demolished and a mosque built on the site. Talk about signs of power and domination, but also signs of devotion and perfection of artistry. Construction began in 785 AD following the plan of the mosque in Damascus. It is beyond the scope of these notes to relate all details. I suggest you look it up if you need more than the sample photos show: http://wp.me/p7neuK-21

Adios Cordoba - driving to Seville with detours on the way, no doubt.

It is still raining cats and dogs. Mike has gone to pick up a rental car. He wanted to walk to railway station where car rental places are located. I opted to stay here and enjoy the excellent WIFI in this room. Don´t know how good it will be in the next place.

I have yet to post about our visit to the Castle of the Kings and Archeological Museum. The castle was a wonderful surprise for its gardens that we did not know about. My pictures will show the splendid views full of colour. It seemed all the flowers had fragrance so all senses were stimulated. The smell, sight, and silence matched the beauty and serenity of the formal gardens with lake and fountains - until a group of teenage boys arrived, disturbing the peace. Who brings boys to gardens?

But - joy unbounded - the sun came out and we saw the gardens in sunshine for a short while. Walking the ramparts in pouring rain was not fun. I was so scared of slipping on the wet marble pavement slabs, it spoiled my pleasure in the views. I have to admit to saying more than a few swear words about the "%#@@#!? rain!

The Archeological Museum in on the site of a Roman amphitheatre. Some of the foundations are still visible. Most of the museum is devoted to the Roman period of Cordoba, when it was known as Beatica.

Pictures to follow. I have to pack everything up now and when that is done might have more time to upload photos. http://wp.me/p7neuK-2p

April 13: There has been a change of plans, and we are going to Granada before Saville.

It is still raining. The song from "My Fair Lady" is an ear worm in my head. Now I know why Shaw chose to write "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain."

We drove into town, but there was no place to park, so we went back to the highway. There were rows and rows of olive trees, some newly planted. The fields are large irregular shapes, probably following the contour of the bedrock. We stopped for lunch at a small town, Baen. I had cheese and ham on toast. Ham is a specialty in Spain. They have different names for different curing methods. It is cut paper-thin. Very tasty!

At Alcaudette, we stopped for a photo of the castle: http://wp.me/p7neuK-2N

April 14: A very full day! My fitbit tells me I have walked 20,000 steps today! The is the equivalent of 10 miles. The gardens were beautiful, but these palaces of sultans and kings are far too big to see in one day! As I suggested, I think you will be better going to the site on YouTube or Google. I have oodles of photos, but I can hardly keep my eyes open tonight. We had shrimp paella tonight, and I think I ate too much.

Tomorrow we leave here for the mountains. It seems WIFI is available at most places, so I will be back tomorrow.

The drive from Cordoba to Granada took 31/2 hours with two stops. The first, at Espejo, was disappointing as there was no place to park. European towns and cities are not built for cars and there are too many! I know we have added to the number. Backpacking is the best way to see Europe! At the Palace of the Kings and Cordoba mosque there were large bus tours going around with one guide. When the group approached, I felt like I was in the path of a stampede of buffalos!

I have never seen so many olive trees! It would be interesting to see this area in harvest time. I can´t imagine how they do it. I know they put nets down and bang the trees for the olives to fall, but dont know if they employ foreign labour.

The second stop at Alcourdette was unplanned, but the large castle on the hill could not be passed up! I am having problems uploading photographs and do not have a program to reduce image size or time to read how to manage photos with my Apple devices. I am going to try adding photo pages to the blog instead of inserting them in the text. They never go where I want them!

Back to car travel in Europe. Mike is a marvel at navigating the narrow streets and one-way system. Granada is a very complex mass of small narrow streets. With great difficulty he got us within walking distance of this apartment, but with no access for the car. The owner of the apartment took him to an underground parking place where the car will stay until we leave.

This apartment, got through AirB&B, is fantastic! There is the usual courtyard door and attractive sitting area with fountains. Not the usual flower pots around the walls. We are on the second level with bedroom, bathroom, living and kitchen area. Shuttered windows open onto a courtyard and the street side looks onto a building under renovation: http://wp.me/p7neuK-38

The big attraction here is the famous Alhambra, a large Islamic building dating from the 10th century. There are formal gardens on the roof. This place is so popular that one needs to book tickets before coming, and they issue specific times. Our tickets are for 2:00 to 6:00 pm. I suggest readers look it up on Google for photos. I will no doubt have many and will try adding a page of photos to this.

http://wp.me/s7neuK-granada, http://wp.me/p7neuK-3u, http://wp.me/s7neuK-alhambra

I meant to say that the rain has stopped ... or we have left the plains. The approach into Granada is spectacular, with the snow-capped Sierra Nevada range as a backdrop. When you travel with a geologist, you can be sure you will see mountains.

I am sitting in the courtyard waiting for the washing machine to stop. We can hang the clothes on the sunny terrace on the roof. Very convenient and all included in rent! http://wp.me/p7neuK-36

Alcaucin

We drove here along the coast road before heading into mountain area. The sight of the sea is so tempting for me. I always want to go and wade or swim. The place we stopped at was a pebble beach with a steep slope at the water´s edge, so I did neither. Michael lost his hat. If it had been a Tilly, I might have swum to get it, but it was a $2.00 one from a dollar store, so we watched it drift away in the current. The road we were on is the road to Motrin and Malaga, but we turned off up the valley into this mountain area in a National Nature Reserve.

The place we are renting is government owned complex of five units. They call it a bungalow, but it is a two level apartment built into the slope of the hill. The entrance level has a large fireplace and dining room table with patio doors to a small verandah overlooking the trees. From this room there are stairs to the upper level with a kitchen area with a washing machine, a large dining table and a smaller round table. It has two bedrooms, each with two beds. There is also a patio door to another verandah. It also has WIFI and a TV, but no English language channels. I can watch Netflix on my computer, but I am happy to read from my Kindle. http://wp.me/p7neuK-3N

April 17: The day started off dull with mist rolling down the valley. We drove to another National Park famous for huge ammonites. Lots of tourists at the visitors´ centre. The paths around were too slippery because of wet mud. In the restaurant, a woman was being put into a stretcher. Several people warned us that the walk was treacherous, so I stayed close to the centre. I saw deer and a bird of prey. Not sure which one. http://wp.me/p7neuK-4h

April 18: Sadly, we leave the clear, refreshing mountain air of Alaucin and drive to Saville. The first part of the journey was the same route as yesterday to the El Torcal Conservation park. Only today, we could see what was hidden in cloud yesterday!

April 19: We drove from the mountain area of Alcaucin to Seville on Monday. The lost post was about the drive and the clear views of the valley. I will try to redo it later.

We spent today looking at famous gardens in the Palace of Spanish Kings, another Moorish building converted into a Christian palace. The Spanish added in the Muslim style. Beautiful tile decoration. The Cathedral next to it is the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world.

It rained all day!

April 20 Cordoba-Madrid

This is our wedding anniversary and grandson´s 10th birthday. I am writing this in a cafe at Cordoba Railway Station.

We left Saville at 7:30 a.m. It was raining, dark, and in rush hour traffic, but we finally found the main road to Cordoba. Guess what? It is still raining in Cordoba. I suppose showery weather is the risk one takes travelling in April.

The WIFI at the hotel in Saville was very poor, and as a result, my blog site got a bit messed up. Also photos would not upload. I am going to do new summaries of the places visited in separate posts.

For today, we are taking the train to Madrid, where we will rent a car again to tour the sites in that region....

Now we are in a very nice apartment in the centre of Madrid, overlooking the Botanic Gardens. But it is still raining. We don´t seem to have the key to go onto the roof patio.

This is the view from our 6th floor apartment: http://wp.me/p7neuK-4N

To be continued.

Mike Yeager writes about a nostalgic visit:

RETURN TO VIETNAM

I used to have nightmares about being back in Vietnam. I´d wake up in a sweat, my heart jumping out of my chest. Frightening thoughts and feelings would haunt me for the rest of the day.

It´s been almost 50 years since my tour of duty in Vietnam and it was time to return. Katie and I spent 15 days travelling by bus, train, and plane from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) to Hanoi. We got back to Singapore just the other night, and Peter asked me, How was your trip?

I answered, It was heaven and it was hell, kind of like the first time.

The country has changed, and yet it hasnt, the biggest change being, no war. Every moment we were there, I was thankful for that. In 1967-68, I had an intense desire to experience this beautiful country and culture sans war. In the midst of that conflict, my heart opened to the Vietnamese people, and as I discovered, it never closed.

Its strange, all these years the Vietnam War has been foremost in my consciousness, as if it were still going on, but as we travelled around the country, I saw very little evidence that a decade of American presence ever happened. Over 60 percent of the population was born after the war ended. People 40 years old and younger are the first generation to experience life without war and foreign domination since the French colonial times, which began in the late 1800´s.

Vietnam is a country on the rise. From the end of the war until 1986, the government basically stuck to the hard-line communist approach concerning their people and economy. In 1986, they adopted the Doi Moi policy, which allowed free enterprise and opened the country to more trade with the rest of the world. Almost immediately the economy took off, and Vietnam has been steadily modernizing ever since. In 1994, the trade embargo was lifted by President Clinton. In 1998 they joined APEC and now have free trade agreements with much of the rest of the world. Vietnam has a literacy rate of 92.8%, and this year it is the world´s second-largest rice producer. It seems only a matter of time until Vietnam becomes a major economic success. The people are eager and more than ready to enter the modern world and raise their standard of living.

I hate to express this thought, but if America had never gotten involved in the Vietnam struggle to begin with, the country would be farther along in their development. That, of course, would mean all the suffering and death on both sides need not have happened, which is hard for a veteran to acknowledge. If I think about it too hard, it makes me feel sick. I should adopt the Vietnamese tendency to look not to the past, but toward the bright future. I hope future generations of Americans learn from the mistakes of our time.

I plan to write more blog posts about our experiences and the various places we visited, but here is a summary of our trip.

We flew into Ho Chi Minh City, then we took a sleeper bus to the beach town of Mui Ne. From there we took another sleeper bus to Phan Rang. The bus driver had an inordinate amount of gas and he farted, belched, and talked on his cell phone for the entire trip, all the while blowing the horn and weaving in and out of traffic.

In Phan Rang we stayed in a resort and visited my friend Tuat and his family.

From Phan Rang we took an all-night train (the cockroach express) to Danang, then a local bus took us to the ancient city of Hoi An.

From Hoi An we boarded the bus from hell (there will be an entire blog post on this bus ride) to Hue. From Hue we flew to Hanoi, and caught a plane back to Singapore.

We are happy to be back in the world of potable water, sidewalks, and crosswalks where the traffic actually stops and allows us to cross the street.

ED. NOTE: To see Mike´s many pictures of Vietnam, click on http://www.aretiredboomer.blogspot.ca/

The editor continues her dip into the past, from old letters:

TRAVELLING OVERSEAS

July 8, 1971: I finally found the post office in Ericeira this morning, and posted the letter I wrote some days ago. How many days, I have forgotten. Time is so hazy in this land of the lotus eaters. One day fades into the next, marked only by small changes in the weather and differences in the menu.

And what menus! I´m paying 83 escudos per day ($1 = 28.5 esc.) for room and board, including a bottle of wine with lunch and dinner. And those two meals consist of soup, entree of fish, the main course of meat and veg., and dessert. I´ve managed to convey the idea that I want to skip the main course, and every day the entree gets larger. Breakfast is always rolls and marmalade and cafe au lait. I will be fat in no time.

I´m not getting much exercise either - a stroll downtown, a promenade along the seawall, a couple of hours reading on a bench set on a rocky promontory, then lunch, siesta, another stroll, another hour or two reading, and back for dinner. I´m getting a bit of a burn on my arms and legs, but I´m being pretty careful.

I suppose I should be moving on, but there is an inertia that I´ll have to overcome first. It´s easier to drift comfortably to and fro.

Most people here speak a little French, and I manage to buy books and fruit and stamps, and to communicate with my poor little waiter, who thinks I´m decidedly odd.

One of the guests who speaks English and who is very friendly is a young Scotsman, who is, by a remarkable coincidence, a school librarian. We´ve had some interesting conversations, and it´s nice to have someone around who speaks the same language. There are three girls from Glasgow here too, but we´ve never got beyond "Good morning!" and there are two French famililes, who smile and say, "Bon jour!" The place is by no means full.

Every morning the people stream down to the beach, lemming-fashion, taking their numerous small lemmings with them. They come home for siesta, then stream back in the late afternoon. The stores close from 1:00 to 3:00 each afternoon, and also Saturday afternoons. They all seem very leisurely until they get into cars, and then look out!

July 10? 11? 12?: I know today is Sunday because millions of Portuguese descended on this normally-quiet little village, parking their cars all over the sidewalks, covering the beach, and overflowing onto my favourite rocks. But it was not a nice day, and now a fog has rolled in off the Atlantic, and the cars are roaring away again. The people are probably all convinced that the weather went sour just to spite them and spoil their Sunday outing, while I am convinced it was entirely for my benefit!

Using this as a base, I have explored quite a few of the byways within easy driving distance, some very picturesque, and all interesting. In some places the hills and valleys are completely cultivated, all cut up into little fields by stone fences. They had to get rid of the stones somewhere! The infinite patience it must have taken to work all those hills is matched by the way they make their roads - they are all cobbled, except perhaps the most recent ones. The roads that go from village to village are thinly blacktopped, which makes it handy when you´re zooming through the town because you can always tell the main roads, even when they snake around corners and inch between houses set bang up against them. Along-side most of the roads there is a painstakingly-laid border of cobblestones, which my poor little car is often obliged to move onto because of the way the drivers hoot around corners in the middle of the road. No wonder they honk their horns when they come to a curve!

Yesterday the young librarian, Jim, who doesn´t drive, went with me on an expedition. He was the navigator, and we didn´t get lost until we reached the town of Torres Vedras, where the narrow streets are mostly one-way and not too clearly marked. We accidentally ended up at an old castle, where we took a few pictures. It was good to have someone to talk to, and when we ran out of conversation, we talked shop.

Jim very gallantly volunteered to escort me downtown after dark, where I would not venture by myself. The main square was packed with people, from babies to very old people, and the open-air cafes were doing a roaring business. We looked in all the tourist traps, both trying to find things to take home, but neither buying anything. The tourists from the big hotel were mingling with the crowds, and it was fun trying to pick them out and to guess where they came from.

Today has been a quiet one for me. I went for a drive this morning, but there was so much traffic I was glad to come back. I went down to my rock, but it was aswarm, and besides, the weather wasn´t good. So I finished reading Dorothy Sayers´ "Gaudy Night," which I hadn´t read before.

Hope all is well with you, and that I could hear from you in return.

To be continued.

Betty Audet forwards this beautiful message:

VITAMIN F

Why do I have a variety of friends who are all so different in character? How is it possible that I can get along with them all?

I think that each one helps to bring out a "different" part of me. With one of them I am polite. With another I joke, with another I can be a bit naughty. I can sit down and talk about serious matters with one. With another, I laugh a lot. I listen to one friend´s problems. Then I listen to another one´s advice for me.

My friends are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When completed, they form a treasure box. A treasure of friends! They are my friends who understand me better than I understand myself. They´re friends who support me through good days and bad. Real Age doctors tell us that friends are good for our health.

Dr. Oz calls them Vitamin F (for friends) and counts the benefits of friends as essential to our well being. Research shows that people in strong social circles have less risk of depression and terminal strokes.

If you enjoy Vitamin F constantly, you can be up to 30 years younger than your real age. The warmth of friendship stops stress, and even in your most intense moments, it decreases the chance of a cardiac arrest or stroke by 50%. I´m so happy that I have a stock of Vitamin F!

In summary, we should value our friends and keep in touch with them. We should try to see the funny side of things, and laugh together, and pray for each other in the tough moments.

Some of my friends are friends online. I know I am part of theirs because their names appear on my computer screen often, and I feel blessed that they care as much for me as I care for them.

Thank you for being one of my vitamins! The most beautiful thing about friendship is that we can grow separately without growing apart.

Have an awesome day!

Shirley Coutts sends this story of

THE BLONDE AND THE LORD

A blonde wanted to go ice fishing. She´d seen many books on the subject, and after finally getting all the necessary tools together, she made for the ice.

Afterpositioning her comfy footstool, she started to make a circular cut in the ice.

Suddenly, from the sky, a voice boomed, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE!"

Startled, the blonde moved further down the ice, poured a thermosof cappuccino, and began to cut yet another hole. Again from the heavens the voice bellowed, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE!"

The blonde, now worried, moved away, clear down to the opposite end of the ice. She set up her stool once more and tried again to cut her hole.

The voice came once more, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE!"

She stopped, looked skyward and said, "Is that you, Lord?"

The voice replied,"NO. THIS IS THE MANAGER OF THE HOCKEY RINK!"

Don Henderson forwards this little-known fact about

LEATHER DRESSES

Do you know this about leather dresses?

Do you know that when a woman wears a leather dress, a man´s heart beats quicker, his throat gets dry, he gets weak in the knees, and he begins to think irrationally.

Ever wonder why?

It´s because she smells like a new golf bag!

SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Bruce Galway and Don Henderson forward this URL for this little-known war-time story of the Casa Loma in Toronto, which many of us have visited:

Catherine Nesbitt sends this link to a video of Glen Campbell playing the William Tell Overture, which he dedicated to Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels, who starred in The Lone Ranger:

Catherine also suggests this site for a video of the fantastic folk dances created by Igor Moiseyev in Russia:

Don Henderson says this video is funny, unless youre on the log: Why you should never join a seniors group:

After looking at these photos from Iceland, Irene Harvalias wants to go there:

This five-year-old boy is already a math genius. Watch him solve problems in his head as fast as we could do it with a calculator:

This site shows many of the beautiful places in Portugal that I missed when I was there 45 years ago:

This beautiful dance celebrates nature in a unique way in this Asias Got Talent grand final:

In this TED talk, B. J. Miller discusses what really matters at the end of life:

To check out the features of the "freedictionary", which changes daily, go to