#reminds me of how we view history... get 1000 year distance and more and historic events aren't presented with idk emotional heaviness?

[wurdulac]

i loved playing roadwarden...

[port-porto-zen-blog]

Port, Porto and Zen in Portugal

Portugal to us meant blue ceramic, port wine, custard pies, sea food and the forgotten Europe on the Iberian peninsula. Most all of that is true and more...the quaint little towns, the winding streets with cobbled stones, port wine every where and the now ubiquitous pick-pockets. We visited many towns & cities and will go back again for a longer visit. Until then these pictures will remind us why Portugal is a lovely country.

Porto

In what is considered the north of the country, Porto sits on the estuary that connects the Douro river to the Atlantic. It is a delightful city that has learnt to combine the large city with the small town vibe. A city that is easily traversed by walking the narrow & steep cobbled streets and by plenty of easy public transportation like the trams.

Praça da Batalha 

Porto like many European cities has an abundance of squares; large ones are called "Praca" and the smaller ones are called "Largo".

& Cafe's aplenty. Cafe Majestic apparently dates back to 1921 under the name of Elite 

& is conveniently located on Catherine which is a pedestrian street.

The ceramics are plenty & everywhere, on the walls, on the tables, in the kitchen and they are so brightly set telling historic tales or reflecting contemporary symbols. They appear on church walls...

...cutting boards....

...they adorn their railway stations at São Bento

...to homes

The city is built on the Duoro river and so the river forms an important part of their lives.

...they live here..

...party here

& plenty of transportation..with libations

..& without

Given the history of Portugal, Porto certainly has its share of churches in town starting with the most famous Clérigos & its Tower.

...San Francisco

Carmelitas and Carmo

The city’s character outside of being the founding region of the delicious Port wine, is made of wide boulevards...

...steep and winding streets

...and old streets with cobble stones and fading facades.

Food in Porto was reasonable but little underwhelming for a Mediterranean country. The Francesinha thought a local Porto dish is interesting and quite tasty...essentially a cheese, meat and sausage sandwich doused in Port sauce.

 In addition Portugal has many Michelin star restaurants with a couple in Porto. Our experience at the Yeatman was OK with some interesting dishes.

Guimarães

This is a sleepy little township an hour north east of Porto, easily accessed by train. Its claim to fame is its preservation as a bridge between medieval Europe and the modern. Some also consider it to be the birthplace of Portugal because Afonso Henriques, who went on to be the first king of Portugal, was born here

View from Nossa Senhora da Consolação e dos Santos Passos Church

The main attractions include the 10th century fortress which is typical of any 1000 yr structure that is reasonably preserved...not much to see! 

Still some pretty views from the castle accentuated by the lovely fall colors.

the tourists!

...the Palace of the Dukes of Bragança

The old city is typical of most old fortified European towns.

The calmness of the town was one that we enjoyed very much and hope these pictures capture it.

Braga

About 30 minutes by bus from Guimaraes gets you to this quaint but energetic little gem you could easily miss. The whole reason we went was in search of this 14th century hill top sanctuary outside of town called  Bom Jesus do Monte.

Its a little bit of a hike from where the local transport drops you off if you choose not to catch the funicular.

Along the hike there are chapels that have depictions of the Passion of Christ

The hike breaks up at a point where the approximately 600 sacred steps begin...

...until we reach the chapel on the top.

But really the views from the top are pretty cool.

Back in main town of Braga, life is full of energy in the town square

in case we forget where we were!

Douro Valley

enough said?

Well, the valley is formed by the third largest river, Duoro, in the Iberian Peninsula, which runs for eight hundred and ninety seven kilometers from the Spanish town of Duruelo de la Sierra to Porto. But more importantly for me this is the home of the first great wine regions of the world, that started growing grapes and making wine for the Romans back in the “BC’s”

The valley is home to many famous “Quinta’s” or estates that grow grapes and make Port. Port is nothing but wine mixed with Brandy at the right temperature...really the best of both worlds.

They are aged in big and small barrel’s, just like wines

& come in both red & white

& taste really really really good.

Coimbra

The university town that apparently inspired Harry Potter’s black gowns is actually fairly sober. This is our first view from across the water with main university tower at the top of the hill.

The main town square with the typical pedestrian street leading from it.

The most important church in town is Santa Cruz which also shares space with a café (a converted chapel).

Often local markets give us a good taste and view of how the locals shop.

The route up to the University is through a variety of easy to get lost winding & steep cobbled paths.

Including running in to these “Harry Potter’s” collecting money to fund their graduation party.

& churches 

& interesting sculptures.

before we get to the university...that charges a fee to let tourists in....says something about the need for diverse funding sources.

A gander through the early 18th century Baroque library which was once considered the richest library. Today the rare editions are allowed access through librarians only and no pictures allowed in there.

The main building provides access to various facilities including 

auditorium to defend doctoral thesis

arts....

and some fascinating views of the town

Expectations of cheap tasty eats in a University town were sort of met at  Travessa Paço do Conde just around from Coimbra A station. A bottle of a really good house wine cost us ~$3 says something about good things in life are inexpensive.

We stayed at a Quinta in Coimbra to experience the plantation living and it was as expected.

A real nice view of the university from the Quinta from across the river

The Quinta holds the legend of Prince Pedro and his bride's lady-in-waiting Inês de Castro who had a forbidden royal love affair for many years, starting in 1340. On the Quinta grounds are a variety of fountains and such that represent the romance of the age.

"Fonte das Lágrimas"

The country is full of graffiti, much of it makes it look like it has been taken over by the vagrants, but this one at the station caught my attention.

Lisbon

The capital city is like most European capitals that blends cosy neighborhoods, wide boulevards, 18th & 19th century buildings and the ever so ubiquitous cafe’s that encourage us all to take a load off. 

There are plenty of praca’s (large squares) ....

Rossio Square

...largo’s (small squares) peppered around the city.

However what was very disappointing but not surprising are the pick-pockets. There are signs of them everywhere...

...& we had our own experiences with this lot...twice. 1st time on this tourist trap of a local Tram 28 that while traverses an excellent route but is packed like a can of sardines that is petri dish for the bad guys.

They have gotten so brazen that they tried to unzip our backpack during the day in an open area setting...

after recovering from that shock I caught them on camera...they dress up like tourists and behave just as lost and duh as the rest.

Once you get past this distraction given that the country, people and the wine is so good, Lisbon has other attractions. One of them is the Jerónimos Monastery on the Tagus river in the parish of Belém (a gentrified neighboorhood).

In the cathedral...

... is buried the remains of Vasco da Gama the 16th century explorer who found his way to India vs. that other guy who lost his way to the new world...& still missed it :)

Right across from the monastery is the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (monument of discoveries) a monument that celebrates the Portuguese Age of Discovery with ships departing to explore and trade with India and Orient.

East of this monument is the Belem tower, built apparently to be the last thing Portuguese sailors saw as they sailed in to the horizon.

The food scene in Lisbon is a bit of a hit or miss. The custard pies at the Pasteis de Belém are considered the best & we thought that was true both by the taste and the long lines outside.

The more modern chef’s come together at this food court in the market with some really tasty creations.

One of the really interesting neighborhoods is Alfama

It is full of narrow, curvy, steep and cobbled streets

& famous for its Fado  

We had the opportunity to listen to some live Fado at Tasca do Jaime d'Alfama which one of the locals said was the better one. What do you know papa sings and mama cooks...cant get any more real.

São Jorge Castle sits at top the hill overlooking Lisbon and the Tagus river. While the castle has been reasonably preserved

...the sights overlooking the city are brilliant.

Praça da Liberdade from the castle and the Sanctuary of Christ the King in the distance

Rossio station

the classic red tiled roofs that caught our attention everywhere in Portugal

Wandering around by foot is the way to check out this town. And as you do that, it fast becomes apparent that its strangely different given its steep streets...

...decorated with graffiti that different folks will describe its relevance in different ways. Me personally feel its a bit of a blotch on the city that is otherwise beautiful.

Even Tram’s are not spared from the graffiti artists.

The tiled facades like in Porto are quite catchy though I don’t think 2 dimensional pictures do them justice

The night life apparently is all the bars in the Bairro Alto area but the town looks nice.

Rossio station

Sintra

About an our north west of Lisbon on the foothills of the Sintra mountain is this little fairytale induced resort town that is a tourist magnet...I am ashamed to have gotten caught in it, but then kinda glad I did as some of these pictures tell.

There are essentially 3 big things in town you are not supposed to leave without seeing, the fairytale based Pena Palace, the Moorish castle and the National Palace.

Most will catch a local bus to get up the hill to the Pena Palace...we chose to hike it up which was fun.

yeah that is where we are headed up above to the castle

Sintra as we get close to Pena Palace

The Pena Palace is a sight for sure that makes you wonder about the people involved in this “thing”.

The views across the palace would not be advised with anyone with vertigo

The garish colors I imagine was a way to repel enemies? I mean who would want this?

The palace has been reasonably well preserved given it was in use until the early 20th century when Portugal transitioned to a republic in 1910.

The weather turned on us as a thick fog comes in as a precursor to heavy showers...rains Portugal has been rather desperate for. This makes our short hike to the castle rather spooky.

The castle is an 8th century construction by the Moors ....but is now really a pile of rocks...fairly neatly arranged still. 

Nothing much to see here folks...moving on to the National Palace which has its genesis to the middle ages of the 10th century. It has changed hands from the Moors to others that ruled Portugal.

It represents architectural styles of the Moors, Goths, Mudejar, Manueline and more.

royal kitchen with their two giant chimneys below

Évora

Another quaint town about 90 minutes east of Lisbon that is the capital of the Alentejo region that makes some pretty good wines. The walled city is really all there is to see with a couple of churches sprinkled in.

The quaintness and the curvy cobbled streets really continue to catch our fancy.

with cute outdoor foyers

The views of the township are nice from the top of the Evora Cathedral

But of most macabre interest is the chapel of bones or Capela dos Ossos. This chapel is actually constructed with human bones and skulls. The story behind this 16th century construction has to do with monks wanting to think about the after life and such other things. Well here now in the 21st century it is a good source of revenue!

"We bones, that are here, for yours await"

Portugal is a must visit. We enjoyed and will likely go back for a longer stay and possibly explore the south coast. 

As we think about that, here are some additional random pictures

Mosteiro da Serra do Pilar across the river from Porto in  Vila Nova de Gaia

Moorish Revival Arab Room in the Porto stock exchange

Porto stock exchange that is not in operation anymore

Livraria Lello or Lello bookstore, the oldest book store in the country that is supposedly the inspiration for JK Rawling’s Harry Potter

Christ the King overlooking Lisbon at the end of the  25 de Abril Bridge in Almada

A view of Belan tower and monument of discoveries  from the  25 de Abril Bridge

cheese

no...the port did not taste any better in this pipe glass

the generational divide? Tech vs. Paper at the station

my next ride...if I can fit in

Here are links to my other travelogues

Argentina and Uruguay

Brazil

Costa Rica

Czech Republic, Germany and Austria

Dominican Republic

Ecuador

Egypt and Jordan

Ireland

Italy

Luxembourg, Switzerland, France & Germany

Morocco

Russia, Mongolia, China

Turkey, Jordan, Israel, UAE

Romania & ukraine

[jewishphilosophyplace]

(Every People Under Heaven) Jerusalem (At The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Click to view slideshow.

The blockbuster exhibition Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven at the Met has long since come and gone, so my weigh-in here comes a lot more than a little late. But I wanted to gather my thoughts about what it was that I think I saw in a semi-coherent way. And since those thoughts revolve around retrospection and after-impressions, there’s a little bit of logic to these late comments about place, memory and imagination in relation to הקודש עיר (ir ha’kodesh, the holy city). For those who did not see or read about it, the exhibition gathered objects either from or relating to Jerusalem between the years 1000 and 1400. It was a time when it seemed, at least according to the conceit of the exhibition, that Jerusalem was indeed at the center of the world. Many of the objects are ecumenical, like the glassware, ceramic and metallic plates, lamps. Some come from rather far-flung places. They confirm this notion of Jerusalem as a center of cultural and commercial interactions drawn more or less equally from perspectives drawn from Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Needless to say, the secular objects and the religious objects cannot be understood one without the other.

My thoughts about the show concern the exhibition of and the viewing of objects, the city itself, and the place of the city not so much as real physical place in real historical time but rather as a shifting datum of the imagination, as a memory construct or thought-image that flares up in memory, and so on. In life as in art, that illumination, the mental illumination, the one that develops only after the first direct impression, is far brighter than that first impression of the objects that define one’s initial sense of a place or a thing as it stands out in the imagination.

 These were my impressions, the first impression and the after-impression:

My first impression was bothered by a kind of boredom. I went having read great reviews and there was a lot of positive hearsay. As a Jewish Studies scholar, I was expecting or hoping to see fantastic things. The exhibition itself was a bit of disappointment. If anything, it reminded me of the Old City today. The first impression was of all the objects that I have seen so many times before on countless visits to the city over a lifetime. These were only deluxe versions of the same. What this first impression of the exhibition brought to mind were all the decorative junk and religious tschotshkes that crowd the stalls and narrow lanes of the shuk. The physical objects on exhibit were mostly little things. They did nothing to fill the eye’s optical frame in any compelling sort of way. As someone who likes to take digital photos at museum and gallery visits, I found them difficult to shoot.

Far more interesting and far more “impressive” for me than the first impression of the objects gathered together and put on view was the after-impression they made as I began to recollect the exhibition only after leaving the museum out into the light of a bright winter day in New York City. What the memory of my first walk through called to mind was a flash, as it were, recalling the after impression of gold, glass, stone, wood, ink, gold leaf glaze, and so on, all placed in glass display cases lit up by high tech museum-lighting systems. As I’m recalling it only now as I write these lines, the after-impression was dominated less by shape and more by color and light. When I returned to revisit the show, I did so with a much better idea how I wanted look at the objects. Instead of taking in the objects with an idea of the whole, viewed from a distance, my eye was drawn to close-up kinds of visual cutting the effect or sense of which is both visual and haptic, relating to the “touch” or “feel” of a physical object. I have tried to convey this sense of a view in the digital photos posted here at the blog.

What are we looking at and what are we looking for in an exhibition such as this? Consider two reviews that were not entirely helpful in conveying a sense of the exhibition-aesthetics. The first is this actually excellent review by Peter Brown here in the New York Review of Books. The second is this petulant review that appeared here online at the rightwing Mosaic Magazine.  In both cases, the frame of analysis was historical, not visual. Neither reviewer gave any attention to the art and to object-aesthetics. Most problematically, less severely so in the review by Brown, was how no sense whatsoever was given to indicate that Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven was not so much about history and historical truth. As I have sought to convey it, the exhibition worked most powerfully as an image bubble, an after-impression from a distant place and time. In terms of western Enlightenment literature and political philosophy, the show recalled to mind the imaginary world dramatized by Lessing in his great play Nathan the Wise.

About the second review, the one that appeared at Mosaic, I want to register a closing statement about ideology masquerading as art review. The ideology in question has as its true object contemporary cultural politics surrounding Jerusalem and the deteriorating Israel-Palestine imbroglio. Judge for yourself if you want. My own take was that the review came down to whining about the absence of a Jewish presence in the exhibition and the representation of Islam by either the exhibition or the exhibition catalogue.

As regards that first matter: as I saw and remember seeing it, the Jewish dimension in Jerusalem 1000-1400 was represented mostly by images shown from illuminated Hebrew manuscripts relating to Temple design and equipment, and by three beautiful little wedding rings. Indeed, apart from the layout of the Temple Mount there is otherwise no strong material Jewish footprint in the Old City, which for most of the common era, has been dominated by Muslim rule. What then were the curators to do about Judaism? Focus on Muslims and Christians as the actual historical power players and exclude the Jewish stake? This is precisely the reason why one should not have confused this show with a history exhibit. Exhibitions like this should not be read too literally for historical information of a positivistic sort. What they do to better effect is to lift historical objects abstractly out of context, conjuring impressions and after-impressions of mental-visual-imaginal landscapes. One of the subtle differences between imagination so-called and reality so-called is the way they touch lightly upon each other.

Regarding the second matter about which the reviewer at Mosaic complained, it makes better sense simply to set aside this or that rhetorical excess in the written record represented by some of the catalogue essays and to look to the objects on display as visual data. Again as I remember seeing it, the actual artwork in the exhibit made no necessary claim about some putative Islamic-Christian-Jewish harmonious synthesis at any single historical moment. What the exhibit did instead the exhibit was to work carefully across historical and cultural strata and alongside historical cultural seam lines, which, when properly re-constructed as a work of the imagination, hold together in a glimmering relation to the diversity of and conflict between its diverse parts. In these kinds of exhibitions, the grit has been intentionally removed to brighten a polished visual effect.

One can read for ideology if one wants to, and perhaps one always should. But too much gets obscured by this kind of politics that having to do with beauty, imagination, and in this case, religion. Rather than historical truth, the truth conveyed by these kinds of exhibitions are phenomenological in character. It is in the interstice between history and memory, between matter and memory that a city-place like Jerusalem appears, disappears, and reappears in the work of the imagination. This is as true in life as it is in art. As imagined, particularly in relation to places of pilgrimage, the effects and affects produced are made possible only by human subjects who circle back and forth around, towards and away from the physical object writ small and the place of the city writ large. That Jerusalem is so overinvested in religion, religious history, religious ideas, and religious conflict only intensifies the tension in the alternating close-up and distancing nature of the phenomenological experience, a dynamic that a flat and grimacing ideological critique cannot hope to illuminate.

What Jerusalem 1000-1400 manages to do is hold together a diverse group of objects relating to the same place and time in a three-fold suture. Bracketing politics and other social fissures, the objects are essentially neutral and equal as such. That reflects the decision of the curators and their skillful tact, to bring all these objects together in their independent suchness, and to bring three religions together in the exhibition space of the museum. At the end of the day, what such an exhibition leaves behind is the bright after-impression of a visual memory with which the viewer walks away.

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