The lake has been separated into two parts, the Aubenalster and the Binnenalster. That “b” in Aubenalster is actually a double “s”, but that is beyond the scope of this post. We would be getting into German, which sometimes seems as alien to me as Chinese, even though I did manage to plow through Chaucer.

The boundary of the two lakes now carries a considerable amount of traffic via two major bridges, but the split was created by the Wallenberg fortifications, built in the 17th Century. The inner lake is quite small, and its southern edge is in the very heart of Hamburg.

The Aubenalster measures three kilometers from one end to the other, and the jogging trail is a 7.6 km loop. Dedicated runners pound their way around it in significant numbers, even when the weather is miserable. In sunshine, it seems like the entire city empties itself on to the edge of the Alster. Joggers compete with bicycles, baby carriages, dogs and strollers, threading their way with admirable aplomb through the migrating crowd. Cell phone addicts interrupt the flow with their irregular head nods, glancing at an incoming text. The numbers of cigarette smokers shock one accustomed to North America.

The Hotel Atlantic Kempski anchors the southern end of the eastern shore. It was built in 1909, has 252 rooms and its own, private movie theatre. Known to locals as “the white palace on the Alster,” it has looked after the likes of Charles de Gaulle and Michael Jackson. On the opposite shore, not far from the Gasthaus, is another enormous white hotel, the Intercontinental. For real class, however, one must book a room at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten (the Four Seasons), on the Inner Alster. It has been around since 1897, attracting luminaries like Sophia Loren, Aristotle Onassis, and the Rolling Stones.

In addition to fine-looking mansions, boat houses and coffee stops, the outer Alster is home to the Imam Ali Mosque, the Litteraturhaus, and a number of fascinating public sculptures, from kite flying children to man-made meteorites. Everywhere you look there is a new vista and something surprising, a face in a tree or a bridge full of padlocks, linking lovers to the one spot in busy Hamburg where time stands still, if only for a moment.

So, we arrived in Hamburg absolutely exhausted. Our handful of German words had disappeared and the taxi driver was quite dubious about our destination. He offered to take us to the Elysee Hotel to pick up the key, but had no idea where the Gasthaus might be, even though I had the address and assured him it was only a short distance away.

People who are nearly catatonic so easily pass for idiots, especially when they don’t speak the language. In the end, it all worked out just fine. When in doubt, dress well. That’s our motto.

For those readers unfamiliar with the two hemispheres, it is now summer in Melbourne. It is a good time to be elsewhere as the temperatures in Australia tend to soar into the stratosphere. This year, our escape entailed a return to our home in Nova Scotia (for Christmas), and a visit to the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, Germany for January and February. Not to mention a brief stopover in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

You sentimentalists will be happy to know that our Christmas in Grand Pre was white, although the snow disappeared soon after it arrived. Maritime climates are fickle that way. Two years ago they were skating on the lake called the Alster, within walking distance of the Gasthaus. This year it is fine for boats and birds. It is a winter of rain.

We are fortunate to have found a home away from home at the Gasthaus of the University of Hamburg, a building that has some serious history and a wonderful staff. We are not the only visitors here associated with the Max Planck Institute, which runs a centre dedicated to Comparative and International Private Law.

The nearly 80 research institutes of the Max Planck Society conduct basic research in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. They have a total staff of approx. 13,000 permanent employees, including 4,700 scientists, plus around 11,000 non-tenured scientists and guests. Their budget for 2006 was about €1.4 billion, with 84% from state and federal funds. The Max Planck Institutes focus on excellence in research, with 32 Nobel Prizes awarded to their scientists, and are generally regarded as the foremost basic research organization in Germany and Europe.

We are talking big potatoes for a country this size. Exploring Hamburg and the surrounding area will be a new adventure, challenging for both us in terms of language and culture. This is will be the first of several posts based on my sojourn here. And I have some catching up to do, so you will find me backtracking to do a couple more posts in Australia. Things have been a bit hectic of late, and I’ve been preoccupied. We are in a good place to write now, so stay tuned.

The Melbourne Festival kicked in with the installation of a kindergarten full of alarmingly tall, one-ton, black cherubs with reptilian tails and wings. They arrived courtesy of a Russian art collective, which had previously set them loose in Lille, France. Prominently placed in downtown Melbourne, the six meter (20 foot) shiny black babies gave pedestrians good reason to pause and stare. They looked ready to pounce, mischievous and not at all angelic.

The rest of the Festival could not compare to the dramatic presence of those enormous angel/demons, but a theatrically-oriented arranger and composer of Indian music certainly did his best. His set, inspired by the red-light district in Amsterdam as well as Hollywood Squares and Bollywood movies, played a stunning counterpart to the bewitching folk and classical music from Rajisthan.

Then there was “Hedda Gabbler,” performed with dazzling panache by a renowned German troupe from Berlin. They turned Ibsen’s claustrophobic play into a modern fable of psychopathic obsession. With the ultra-modern set spinning like the events on stage, it was hard to know if the conceit really worked or not, but I was rooted to my seat. We followed that up with an Edinburgh Fringe Festival favorite– The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane. This one deconstructed Hamlet with three actors auditioning for the role, two well-trained, live Great Danes, and a scene in which actors pop in and out of garbage bins. The piece passed me by as “Much Ado about Nothing,” but it was our fourth night out.

Then our guests arrived. We have known each other a couple of decades now, first in Montreal, later as next-door neighbors in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia. After a long career as an educator and director of a day care, Barbara has launched a new career doing workshops in “challenging behavior” mostly in North America, occasionally overseas. This year she landed a three-day workshop in Melbourne hard on the heels of one in Singapore. While our respective wives worked, I introduced Martin to the sights and sounds of the City.

I had made firm plans for one outing during their stay at our place, up into Spa country with a stop at Hanging Rock (for a picnic, of course,) followed by a visit to one of the Gold towns. In the meantime, Barbara had been urged by some of her “students” to go down the Mornington Peninsula for a visit to wine country. It seemed simple enough. We could go down on Friday, avoiding the weekend crowds. What I hadn’t counted on was the very beginning of the four-day weekend heralding the “Race that Stops the Nation,” – the Melbourne Cup. In a version of hell reminiscent of my worst memories of Los Angeles, our arrival back to Melbourne corresponded exactly with everyone else’s attempts to flee via the Westgate Bridge.

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Hanging Rock seemed to have moved. I concluded that after driving in circles for a good half hour in a vain attempt to find the back road that led us there on one of our first outings after we bought a car. We eventually got decent directions at a tourist information centre, learning that a craft festival was in progress so our entry fee would be reduced. Unfortunately, the weather gods had picked that day to be taking their cues from the demons. What with the wind and the rain, the craft fair was a far cry from the thriving place it should have been. One soaking after another dissuaded us from tackling the strange, spooky mountain.

Our accommodation, at least, was all we could have hoped. We had booked two cottages at a place called Bodidharma in Shepherd’s Flat, out on the border of the bush. My wife and I had stayed there once before, and been charmed by the ambience. With fresh pasta from the fair and a couple bottles of wine from town, we settled in to keep watch for boxing kangaroos. It was sparring season, apparently, but they were shy. We had to settle for the DVD of “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” long walks, and a fascinating discussion of the rewards and perils of bush life and the prospects of reincarnation.

The next day we drove up to Maldon, one of the best preserved of the small gold towns in the area. A folk festival was in progress, so the town’s population had probably doubled that very day, not unlike the actual days of the gold mine boom. The discovery of gold happened in 1853. At least 20,000 miners flocked to the area, working the alluvial deposits. Within a year the surface gold was largely exhausted, and by the next year, only 2,000 miners remained.

After a hearty lunch, we attempted to orient ourselves and follow a map with a walking tour of the town’s architectural gems. It took in more territory than we thought possible, but the founders of Maldon had no reason to think the gold would play out as quickly as it did. Our tour came to an end in front of the huge chimney of the Beehive Mine. It was one of many that kept the place hopping until 1929. A total of 2,105,000 ounces were extracted from the Tarrangower Goldfields. It would be worth close to 3 billion dollars today. The present population is about 1600, not counting kangaroos and wallabies.

It was a fine trip, even if the kangaroos refused to come out to play. Stay tuned. I haven’t given this old blog up yet. There is more to come.

I may have everything absolutely wrong, of course. I am a foreigner, after all.  Sydney did start out as the only officially sanctioned British settlement in Australia.  The settlers of Melbourne sailed across from Tasmania and put up their tents without any authorization.  They were illegal upstarts, a second wave of boat people.  The discovery of gold changed everything.  Gold has a way of doing that, turning pirates into princes overnight.

When you shoot up to Sydney for a quick visit and the weather gods offer you a blast of warm sunshine, rather than cold, wet weather like it did last time, it is hard not to get the impression that Sydney is the bride that was meant to be, and we ended up with the best friend, the daughter that was destined to make doilies rather than marry into society.

My excuse was the usual one. I was tagging along as the trailing spouse at yet another conference. A friend from Sydney had invited us to stay with her, and it was too good to resist.

I took the opportunity to catch up with another friend from the long distant past. Barvara hails from Sydney, but she spent many years living in many other places, including London, France and New York City. We met in 1969, first in Salonika, Greece, then again a week later in Istanbul. I had hitchhiked there from Denmark and she had arrived from London by way of the Greek islands. We ended up spending some time together down along the southern coast, not far from Antalya, in the village of Side.

Barvara re-discovered my whereabouts on Facebook shortly after we arrived in Australia, but we had not seen each other for forty-three years when this trip took us back to Sydney.  I wondered how we would recognize one another, but she had inherited a talent for it, nailing an old primary school classmate on the street not long ago and even coming up with a name.

There wasn’t enough time, of course. Too much had happened to both of us. We remembered some images from Turkey.  We filled in a few of the vast gaps, toasted the good times and commiserated over unhappy events. It was all we had time for. I leafed through her book of photographs and she listened to my history of inherited children.  We shared a long bus ride back from Watson’s Bay.  There was a quick goodbye.  I managed to make it back in time for a dinner party.  Friends of our host had been invited. There was champagne and sparkling conversation. I drank it all in and went to bed, exhausted.

The following day, my wife and I kicked back and relaxed with Claire and and her rambunctious sheepdog, Bridey.  We went for a long walk in Centennial Park, then visited Vaucluse, the odd estate that began life as the abode of an Irish knight, then took on new status, if not real respectability as the home of William Charles Wentworth, the father of the Australian constitution.

Wentworth was born in the Colony, His father had been arrested for robbery four times and his mother had been a convict as well. D’Arcy, the father, prospered, but the “convict stain” was passed on to his son. It was exacerbated by his illegitimacy. The new settlers had brought along their class consciousness, of course, and they were either “emancipists” (former convicts) or “exclusives” (free settlers and military men.) William was educated in England and returned to Sydney in 1810. At the age of 21, he and two friends discovered the first route across the Blue Mountains.

Three years later he returned to England to study law. He was a strong advocate for establishing a constitution in the Colony and introducing trial by jury. Upon his return, he became one of the wealthiest men in New South Wales. He hosted large dinner parties to celebrate the departure of each succeeding governor and became a leader of the emancipist faction.

In 1824 he founded The Australian newspaper and used it to attack the Governor and other exclusives. He struck a deal with seven Maori chiefs to buy a third of New Zealand for a pittance, which would have made him the largest landholder in the world if Governor Gipps had not vetoed the transaction. As Wentworth aged and became wealthier, his populism shifted to conservatism. He lived in England for the last years of his life, but his body was returned to Vaucluse for burial.

On the way back we took a long walk along the water at Neilson Park. It was tricky footing, but the sunset was beautiful. Sydney showing off again, revealing her true colours.

Claire’s house in Edgecliff offers such a wonderful view of the harbour that it is hard to see how she tears herself away long enough to do the grocery shopping or dog walking. It was a Sunday, though, and the weather was gorgeous. So we walked down to the beach and caught the ferry into Circular Quay.  It was chaotic, the Sydney marathon was in progress. We managed to thread our way through the crowd and catch the connecting ferry to  Cockatoo Island.

Once covered with trees, Cockatoo is now home to some fifty cranes. The largest island in Sydney harbour has been through many incarnations in its life, serving as a prison for convicts from Norfolk Island, a workshop to repair ships, an industrial school for girls and a reformatory. In the 1880s and 1890s, shipbuilding and ship repair expanded, and Australia built its first steel warship on the island. The dockyard finally closed in 1992, and in 2001 the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust assumed control. It is now open to the public for overnight stays, as well as various events, like the bi-annual Sydney art shows.

A gelato and a bus ride carried us back to Edgecliff. Just time to catch our breath for the flight back to Melbourne. Straighten up, tighten our seat belts. Act civilized. Melbourne doesn’t put on airs or act like an actress. She wears sensible shoes and whispers in church. We don’t want to disappoint the old girl.

I suspected it was emanating from Cape Chignecto.  As I sat in the kayak, mesmerized, I heard the imperative words of our guide, Luciano– “Backpaddle, now!” He did not want us to get sucked beyond that line until the tidal turmoil had subsided and we were good and ready for the crossing.  I paddled backwards furiously, easing the boat away from the invisible threat.  Here be dragons!

It was a trip that began, as these things do, with a simple suggestion from me to my wife that we should have a little fun before we packed up and headed back to Australia. We had both been working a fair amount since arriving back in Nova Scotia. My wife had been consumed with her part of co-authoring the chapter of a book. I had been trying to make some headway on a long list of things that had been neglected at the Stewart House, everything from having a dead tree cut down to cleaning up the carriage house.

We hadn’t been to the other side of the Bay of Fundy in some time, and a little nosing around on the internet revealed that NovaShores, a kayak outfitter, was offering a three-day trip around Cape Chignecto. It was an opportunity to see some of the most spectacular cliffs in Nova Scotia. There were two significant question marks to be considered: the weather and our ability to handle this kind of paddling trip. If my wife had had more time to focus on the risk involved, she might have pulled the plug, but our contact with the outfitter and the guide was very reassuring.

Our immersion in Bay of Fundy waters had taken place over twenty years ago with one of the small companies offering Zodiac boat “surfing” on what is called the tidal bore. This refers to a wave that precedes high tide by a couple of hours. The rubber rafting companies offer tourists a chance to zip across the wave as it forces its way up the Shubenacadie, a large river near the end of the Bay.

Twice a day, the tide hits the river, sending salt water up and over the fresh water flowing into the Bay. The wave is usually not high, but it is powerful, and surfing across it in a Zodiac can be like white-water rafting on a field of liquid red mud.  Bald eagles often soar overhead.

I doubt if any of the companies still do this, but we were encouraged to jump into the river about halfway through our tour. With our life jackets in place we bobbed along like corks. The guide told us to take a good look around, then close our eyes for a whole minute. When we opened them the landscape around us had changed. We were moving very fast up the river, but couldn’t feel our speed because we were part of the flow.  It was a memorable experience, a Bay of Fundy baptism.

There are two places on the Bay of Fundy that generate serious turbulence. They stick out like scimitars into the most powerful body of tidal water in the world. Cape Split is only forty minutes from our place, and Cape Chignecto is the other, on the opposite shore. At Chignecto the incoming waters split in two. Part of the tide goes up into Chignecto Bay. The rest rushes into the Minas Channel, squeezing around the cliff called Cape Split, then shooting down Cobequid Bay and eventually up the Shubenacadie.

All of this takes place slowly at first, then gradually increases to fast walk, a trot a canter, then a gallop. Twice a day one hundred billion tons of sea water sloshes in and out of the giant, mud bathtub called Fundy. The water can travel five miles inland or five stories up, depending on the topography it encounters. The force is equal to 25 million horsepower. You don’t want to get caught around a headland when the tide is coming in, at one inch a minute.

It was the morning of July 5. The trip had been delayed one day by weather, but it was still on. Our small group gathered for a briefing at the home base of NovaShores in Advocate Harbour. Our fearless leader, Luciano, was a transplant from Quebec with Italian roots. The other guests looked to be in their late thirties. Glen and Marcia had driven all the way from New Jersey in a tightly packed Mini. It was their first time in Nova Scotia and the kayak trip was the centerpiece of their vacation. After signing the waivers and getting our gear, we piled in our cars for the drive to Spicer’s Cove.

Double kayaks may look roomy, but cramming the “essentials” (plus the gourmet goodies we all eagerly anticipated as a perk of hard paddling) into two tandems and a single is a fine art that requires patience, skill and experience. After lugging the boats and all the gear across the rock strewn beach, we were more than happy to leave most of the packing to our guide.

Our drive up had been through scrub forest, covering an area of amazing geological diversity. This was a boundary area of tectonic collisions, when a huge chunk of ancient Africa broke off and attached itself to the North American plate. More than a dozen rock types make up the plateau that formed the backdrop of our trip.

Our route would take us southeast, tracing a leisurely semicircle back toward Advocate Harbour. The cars would magically reappear at the end of our trip. Despite our early start, it was noon by the time we were ready to launch, and from our point of view the timing couldn’t have been better. In the time it had taken to get all the gear into the boats and our bodies into the PFDs and spray skirts, the tide had come in and the sea was lapping at the hulls. One push and we were off.

On the water, a kayak trip soon turns into variations on rhythm, the stroke of the paddle, the counter stroke of wave against boat, the dip and pull of another stroke. We launched in fog, but by lunch time that had burned off and the rest of our trip was fine. The first day established the pattern– a late start dictated by the demands of breaking down the camp, rolling up mattresses, having breakfast, brushing teeth and then packing everything back into the tight confines of the hatches.

And we had serious tides to consider. Hauling the kayaks up above the high tide mark was essential to avoid having our sleep interrupted by sea water. Our journey would take us past Squally Point, the Three Sisters, Seal Cove, and French Lookout.  Two spots were haunted by memory– Eatonville and Refugee Cove.

Each party in a group adventure of this kind brings something to the table, jokes, anecdotes, songs or some ability that others don’t generally take for granted. Glen and Marcia brought the candor and off-beat humor that New Yorkers seem to cultivate as a mark of the tribe. Marcia’s artistic temperament came into focus as soon as she discovered a rudimentary driftwood creation on the beach. By the time we left it had been transformed into something worthy of an exhibition.

Luciano brought his paddling skills, of course, navigation, trip coordination, culinary talents, and a repertoire of songs.  My wife brought stories and her inimitable skill at starting fires the old-fashioned way.  I brought along my own stock of anecdotes and enough cameras to cover a wedding. Unfortunately, only one was waterproof.

Refugee Cove and Eatonville represent two eras in Nova Scotia history– the unhappy end of the Acadian saga, and Nova Scotia’s golden age of sailing ships. The Cove is the only significant break in the southern escarpment.  It is fronted by a high cobblestone beach littered with logs and a sheltered flood plain beyond the beach. Acadians fled here in 1755, at the time of the Great Expulsion, struggling to survive one winter on game and fish. Later, a logging operation would operate here for some time.

In the 1870′s the Eaton Brothers established a settlement at an anchorage on the western shore of Chignecto Bay, naming it after themselves. Twenty-one boats were built here, including one that weighed over 1,550 tons.  The lumbering and wooden shipbuilding industries would soon be replaced by iron and steam, however, and the community was abandoned by 1920.  It was a peaceful, beautiful spot, offering us a fine place for a gourmet lobster lunch.

Our progress toward the Cape was slow but inexorable. All the while my wife’s anxieties about the traverse had been gnawing away at her. On previous trips, we had both encountered waves for which we were wholly unprepared. I had been dumped unceremoniously into the freezing waters of the Nahanni, and twice into the Bonaventure River.  Both immersions had been from canoes, however, not kayaks.

We both knew the Bay of Fundy was no cakewalk, but I had more faith in the stability of the the big, Quebec-built tandem than she did. Fortunately, the weather on the day we encountered the Cape was absolutely perfect. Our timing was a little off thanks to our habitually late start.  We had arrived about three hours before slack tide, so when Luciano told us to back paddle, we did not hesitate to do as he suggested.

We retreated to the nearest beach and sought shelter from the sun until the time was propitious for the crossing. It was a quiet time, a little tense. In the interest of balancing our strengths, we switched paddling partners. The water crept up the beach. It was time to go. When we reached the mesmerizing line that had extended out from the Cape, it had disappeared.

We were near slack tide, and the waves would carry us on into West Advocate with very little effort required to keep the boats moving.   As we shot around Chignecto, atabatic winds barreled down off the bluff, whipping up the water and nearly tearing the paddle out of my wife’s hands.  In no time at all, the Cape was behind us. The rock formations of the cliffs were stunning, but we were moving too fast for more than a couple of photos.  I could not do them justice with my waterproof camera.

We were past the Cape, moving fast and it felt good.  We were on our way home.

Now, in enormous jets traveling at over 800 kms an hour it takes, well, days. It could have taken fewer of them if we hadn’t made a detour through Portland, Oregon to visit our son and his family, but the jet lag would have been worse. Instead of two legs, our itinerary morphed into four– Halifax to Calgary, Calgary to Portland, Portland to L.A., and Los Angeles to Melbourne. It is that last jaunt, the one that Australians laughingly call the hop over the “pond,” that is tantamount to torture. I used to refer to being at the economy end of the stick as traveling “cattle class.” I don’t anymore.

A shocking investigation into the treatment of cattle transported to Indonesian abattoirs cured me of using that term forever. The video was so appalling I simply couldn’t watch more than a minute. Australian viewers were apparently of the same mind, so the traffic of live animals to other countries for slaughter was halted, temporarily. It is set to begin again, under a lot more scrutiny. “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer and that video confirmed my inclination to go green in body as well as mind.  It is certainly not easy, despite the advent of so-called veggie options in restaurants.  And it does require a major shift in thinking about meals.

Mind you, I drive too much and spend far too many hours burning up the skies. On a long haul flight, you are basically immobilized for sixteen hours as the giant metal tube creeps across that vast expanse of ocean far below.

If you are assigned to a seat in the very last row, as I was, you wish they would just shoot you and get it over with. But we are highly adaptable creatures, and 21st century commercial airlines prove it. One gets used to the stultifying boredom, the noise, the dehydrated air, the toilets and the airborne equivalent of “food.” It is a luxury most of the people on this planet cannot afford, so how can one complain? I am always amazed that those lumbering machines can actually get airborne despite all that luggage.

On the tiny screen three inches from your face, you can unreel a fair selection of Hollywooden flics, Australian films, TV shows and Other. One movie I had been wanting to see was on the menu, “Oranges and Sunshine.” It tells the tale of 130,000 children who were deported from England and sent off to various countries, including Australia, under a scheme to rid the motherland of children from orphanages as well as others the authorities felt might become wards of the State. It was entirely illegal, but that never stops governments.

The heart breaking story is revealed through the eyes of the British social worker, Margaret Humphreys, who found out about it when one of the “Australian” children sought information from her about her birth parents. This happened in 1986. It is a very moving film directed by Jim Loach, with a great performance by Emily Watson and a fine cast.

We arrived home to an eviction notice. Apparently our landlord wants to sell and wishes to do some renovations to the house before it is put on the market. So, yours truly had to scramble to find a new place to park ourselves and all our stuff. That has now been accomplished, and the rest is simply packing and moving. As my sister noted, wryly, we should be getting frequent mover miles. We are not going very far, but moving is moving. Everything still has to be boxed.

For my next posts, I will be reporting from Maribyrnong. I have written about the River in a couple of posts– The Walk We Drive To, and one about the Henly regatta, if memory serves. The new place has lots of windows, so it will be a bit like moving from a cave to a treehouse. I’m looking forward to that. And we’ll be able to walk to the river.

All new pics and posts have taken a back seat to all this travel and disruption. If you are waiting for photos from our adventure on the Bay of Fundy, please be patient. I’ll get to it. In the meantime, cheers from the country and continent Down Under.

When I first came to this house it was late summer, 1987. My wife had agreed to buy the house from the other two potential inheritors, since neither was interested in taking it on. They probably believed that it was a white elephant, a money pit of major proportions, and that assessment was not far off the mark. In short order, we had engaged a contractor to have the back chimney propped up with great lashings of concrete. Carpenters were busy rebuilding a rotten corner of the living room, replacing the paper thin siding on the front of the house, replacing sills and the old shingles on the roof.

Thanks to the reserved, Scottish character of my wife’s great aunts, the Stewart House had been empty for ten years. No one had been asked to look after it.  All my spouse knew was that it was still standing. A local antique dealer had been asked to appraise the furniture. He must have believed that he had a good chance of acquiring the lot, since he came up with a figure of five thousand dollars, and offered to haul away the “junk.”

After driving by the old house, our first stop was a local cafe that has been in business for a very long time. It is now called the Evangeline Cafe. We called it after the family who owned and ran it– Stirling’s. When I came here it was run with an iron first by the indomitable, grey haired Miss Stirling. She closed up the adjacent Evangeline Motel at 7 PM. One day I worked up the nerve to ask her why she closed so early. She looked at me in surprise. “Why, you never know who might be traveling at that hour,” she said. Right, I thought to myself. You just never know when the werewolves and vampires, ax murderers and serial killers will come out. It just might be at 7:15 every evening, but it won’t be dark until nine.

Stirling’s featured lobster chowder, “hamburgs,” cucumber sandwiches and a very good selection of pies. The pies attracted people from miles around, and Sunday after church the parking lot was always packed. That afternoon back in 1987, we stopped to have lunch and to kill time before our rendezvous with the neighbour with the key.  We had no sooner sat down and ordered than we found ourselves overhearing some local gossip. And it wasn’t just any gossip. “I heard that a New York lady lawyer got the Stewart House and she plans to tear it to the ground. That would be a real shame. I was through there just the other day and it’s a bit run down, but you could live in it and there’s some nice stuff in there. Wouldn’t that be a shame if she threw all those old things out?”

The woman who confided to her neighbor that afternoon may well be among my acquaintances now, but at the time I didn’t turn around. I gently put my hands on the shoulders of the New York lady lawyer to keep her from levitating. We owned the house and unless this lady worked for Canada Trust, she should not have been going through the place. Lawyers are a little touchy about things like that.

We will never know how many people traipsed through the house, or how many antiques walked away in our absence. We had no intention of tearing the old house down. It had been in my wife’s family since it was built, over 200 years ago. That summer we started the process that led to its registration as a heritage property. Each time we come we spend a considerable amount of time, energy and money attending to the needs of its creaky bones and joints. I look forward to the day when all the problems have been addressed, but I know that day may never come.

The thing is, when the light falls across the old siding in the late afternoon, or when I rediscover a pencil drawing done in 1898 inside an old suitcase that we packed away when we first arrived, and see that the subject is our old back stairs, a shiver goes through me. It is magic. Like the summer light. And I’m ready to do whatever it takes to keep the magic alive.

For some reason, I was unable to book into the hotel where most of the other participants were staying. So, we booked into a hotel that was a twenty minute walk from the town center. The only reason this mattered is because of the outrageous taxi fares. The day after we arrived, I purchased a bus pass, learned how it worked and used it frequently. Busses are not quite as timely as Swiss trains, but they are comfortable and reasonably priced. Our most interesting ride in Fribourg was in a unique funicular which is run on sewer water, believe it or not. Needless to say, a certain amount of odor is part of the ambience.

Like Bern, its sister city, Fribourg has preserved its medieval origins. It is located on a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the Sarine river. The architecture of the old section dates from the Gothic period; much of it built before the 16th century. The houses are built of the stone. The old town is rich in fountains and churches and bridges dating from the 12th century until the 17th century. The Cathedral of St Nicholas was built between 1283 and 1490. It is 76 meters (249 ft) tall, luring unsuspecting pilgrims into climbing 365 steps to reach the top of its tower.

The fortifications of Fribourg form the most important medieval military architecture in all Switzerland. There are two kilometers (1.2 mi) of ramparts, 14 towers and one bulwark. For a town of only 35,000 people, Fribourg presents itself as a dense and rich community, full of surprising vistas. During the three days we were there, I wandered around with only a vague sense of direction, staggering up steps, strolling across vertiginous bridges, and threading my way through its many museums. Plopping down in the middle of the day for a coffee to keep me going. I paid hommage to the native son of Fribourg, artist Jean Tinguely and his wife, Niki de Saint Phalle. I caught up with my wife in the evenings.

One of those evenings was at the Restaurant Hotel de Ville, where we enjoyed one of the best repasts I have ever enjoyed. It is impossible to convey in words or in photos the precipitous topography of Fribourg. The balcony of the restaurant looked out over the Sarine river, a silver thread far below. The oldest part lies along the banks of the river, surrounded on three sides by towering cliffs. Most of the town is now located on the plateau overlooking the fast moving, shallow river. Since it is a steep walk from the old part to the plateau, many tourists take advantage of a motorized miniature train that offers tours of the town.

On our last day, the host had prepared an outing into the countryside. Our first visit was to one of the first of the Swiss chocolate houses to be gobbled up by Nestle, followed by a cheese fondu lunch in the village of Gruyeres. The castle towers above the medieval town. Gruerius, the legendary founder of Gruyères, captured a crane (in French: “grue”) and chose it as his heraldic animal. Despite the importance of the House of Gruyères, its beginnings remain mysterious.

Nineteen counts held the castle between the 11th and 16th centuries. The last of them, Michel, was in financial trouble almost all his life and his tenure ended in bankruptcy in 1554. His creditors, the cantons of Fribourg and Bern, shared his earldom between them. From 1555 to 1798 the castle became residence to the bailiffs and then to the prefects sent by Fribourg. In 1849 the castle was put up for sale and sold to the Bovy and Balland families, who stayed at the castle during the summertime and restored it with the help of their painter friends. The castle was then bought back by the canton of Fribourg in 1938, made into a museum and opened to the public.

We returned to England exhilarated and exhausted by the quick trip. We were not quite ready to head back “home” to Nova Scotia, but our tickets were booked and we were back to suitcase living. Fribourg is a fine Swiss town thick with historical interest, apparently thriving with modern commerce. Just far enough off the well worn tourist track to feel like a discovery.

His party won 69 of the 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament. Based on the SNP’s lead over Labour, Salmond should be able to push through a program of policy and public service reforms for Scotland. But will he be able to persuade his people, who currently disapprove of leaving the UK by more than two to one, that they should  strut down the path of independence? That dream is heady stuff.

Last week, we had a window between the end of the teaching term and the beginning of exam marking. It seemed as good a time as any to make a pilgrimage to Scotland. My wife does have ancestral connections, after all. I had been to Edinburgh once as a child, when my father was working overseas and there was a conference that coincided with our return to the USA through Europe.

I remembered the castle, of course, and being utterly baffled by a local’s response to my request for directions. I knew the man was speaking English, but I had no idea what he was saying. We were returning from Iran,  so I knew a thing or two about the vagaries of my mother tongue. But I think I realized for the very first time that this was not limited to people who spoke English as a second language. The man was speaking his native tongue.  It was English, just not my English.

In the “keeping chamber” of our house in Nova Scotia, there is a name scratched in a window pane in very small cursive script. It is the name Robert Leard (or Laird), the man for whom the house was built. He had come from Scotland by way of Ireland and New England. No one knows for certain what made him take up residence in Nova Scotia, but it may well have been the fact that settlers from Scotland found the place agreeable after the expulsion of the Acadians.

When Robert was trying to decide between going out West or heading northeast, he stood his staff on its point and let if fall, like a dowser looking for water. His staff chose the northern course. Robert’s daughter married another Scot, John MacNeil Stewart, who had been impressed into the British Navy, but jumped ship when his vessel put into port at Pictou, a village on the Northumberland Strait. He was on the run. He made his way to Windsor, not far from Grand Pre. Eventually, he met and married Elizabeth Leard and our home came to be known as the Stewart House.

What with the religious wars, massacres, soldiering for the Empire, Highland Clearances, and the desperate departures in search of work and fortune, Scotland has exported so many people over the years that it seems a wonder anyone is left. The current population is a little over five million, and it is falling.

There must be five or ten times that many with Scottish blood around the world, but, unlike the Irish, they do not seem bent on returning home, despite the current prosperity. For North Americans, Scotland is the land of “Braveheart” and bagpipes, castles, whisky and curious foodstuffs. Castles are great places to visit, but you can’t imagine living in one or paying the utility bills.

The more Scottish history we learned, the more questions we had. Did the Covenanters from Scotland settle in Nova Scotia? How did this place produce so many first-rate physicians and economists?  Why did the people to the South want the land badly enough to do battle for it?  Time and again the fierce Scots were goaded into defending their turf.

The English paid dearly for every conquest.  If Bonnie Prince Charlie had not been intercepted by a clever Irishman within spitting distance of London, the history of the UK would have been very different.

I’m not the kind of traveler who leaps on a bus to see an entire country in six days, but I may have been under ambitious on this trip. I had booked a place in Edinburgh for the entire week. We had the option of renting a car to see some of the countryside, or taking the train to Glasgow or even Aberdeen. In the end, we did neither.

Our only adventure out of the City was a one day tour into the West highlands with Rabbie’s, a small group tour operator. Mackenzie Dalryrmple did himself proud as our guide, regaling us with story after story and history lessons to boot. Mac even played the pipes at one of our stops. You can check out his performance on my Flickr site. We were blessed with sunshine for much of our trip. That is extraordinary for Scotland.

Apologies to generous friends and family members who flooded me with suggestions on where to go and what to see. There is certainly plenty to do on a return visit and I am looking forward to it. The photos my son took on his honeymoon trip there with his new bride have whetted my appetite to see more of the highlands and the West coast.

What struck me was how imbued Edinburgh seems to be with its history and its stories. The buildings and volcanic landscape speak directly of a dramatic past that haunts the place, mesmerizing storytellers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ian Rankin, from Robert Burns to JK Rowling. Everywhere you go, from the castle to Holyrood Palace to the stunning new Scottish Parliament, there are tales that appear to transform and transfix the city.

Whether Scotland will pull off the dream of independence hinted at in the wonderful film “The Stone of Destiny,” that is another question. As the Bloc Quebecois learned to its dismay in Canada, it is one thing to land a referendum, it is quite another to pull off independence. Whatever happens, I’m sure the future of Scotland will be brighter than its dark and bloody past. Perhaps the weather gods will favor us again on a return journey. We’ll listen to the dark stories and sip the whiskey, pay the haunting pipers and haul ourselves up the steep slope of Salisbury Crags and down again. Cheers ’till next time.

Addendum:  from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, May 10, 2011

Last week David Cameron reacted to the election of the first Scots nationalist majority government by saying he would “campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre I have”. Dare we ask why? Cameron has no political interest in Scotland, where the Tories have had just one MP in 20 years. He would have a strong Tory majority at Westminster were it not for the Scots Labour hordes.

Scotland’s economy sucks England’s taxpayers of £8bn in annual subsidy. Its first minister, Alex Salmond, is Dracula at Cameron’s milk-white throat. Yet when Dracula wants to kick the habit, Cameron pleads for more.  Scotland, like Ireland, has always turned English politicians mad….What is a continuing mystery is why London does not call Salmond’s bluff, if bluff it is, and give him what he wants. If the Scots want to order their own affairs, England should not complain….

If you want to get a sense of the scale of consumption, you could do worse than visit Hampton Court Palace. It belonged to Cardinal Wolsey before Henry VIII got his hands on it, but in just ten years Henry spent more than £62,000 rebuilding and extending the buildings and grounds. That would be approximately £18 million today. When he died in 1547 the King had more than 60 houses, but none were more sumptuously decorated than Hampton Court Palace.

Henry’s palace was one of the most modern, sophisticated and magnificent buildings in all of Europe. There were tennis courts, bowling alleys and pleasure gardens for recreation, a hunting park of more than 1,100 acres, kitchens covering 36,000 square feet, a fine chapel, a vast communal dining room (the Great Hall) and a garderobe (or lavatory) – known as the Great House of Easement – which could sit 28 people at a time. It was not quite Versailles, but not too shabby as palaces go.

In August, 1546, Henry played host to the French ambassador and his entourage of two hundred gentlemen – as well as 1,300 members of his own court – for six days. An encampment of gold and velvet tents surrounded the palace for the occasion. These sorts of feasts depleted the countryside, of course, requiring regular moves from palace to palace.

Our own invite to the wedding has not been forthcoming, but we did take advantage of a somewhat impersonal invitation (extended by way of a poster in the tube station) to view a small collection of Dutch landscapes in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. It was Easter Sunday, and serious tourists had camped out in front of the Palace to see the changing of the guard. The Queen’s Gallery is tucked in close to the Mews, where the royal horses are being groomed for the Big Event. Most of the paintings were purchased by George IV, who had a penchant for the “good” life, but was also partial to paintings of rustic, rural scenes, where peasants brought in the hay in a soft golden light. For him, it must have seemed fanciful and fun.

You might assume that time is not right to be plotting to overthrow the monarchy, but Republic, a tiny, London-based, anti-monarchist organization recently held a meeting in a pub just south of Queen Square. Forty brave souls showed up, united in a common cause. They would very much like the monarchy removed from their country’s pocketbook and constitution. Bolstered by fellow comrades in Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia, Republicans are hoping that when the international spotlight shines on the Royal Family during the wedding palooza, the flawed system will be laid bare.

They argue that the monarchy is unaccountable and unrepresentative, a drain on public resources and it makes a joke of democracy: Only half of Britain’s parliament is elected, and the head of state can never be. They say the Royal Family cost British taxpayers £180-million (about $285-million) through payments, deferred taxes and security costs. The Royal accountant begs to disagree. Republicans have been given the green light to hold a street party on the day of the royal wedding in Red Lion Square. A spokesman said they will celebrate “democracy and people-power, rather than inherited privilege” on April 29.

So, will it all come crashing down when the the Queen shuffles off the mortal coil? Don’t count on it. As “The King’s Speech” makes abundantly clear, the Royals may be a mediocre lot, but they are resilient. And if they have to skip a generation to keep the throne intact, it will probably be arranged. Prince William will be King before Charles has counted the royalties from his new book. The author of “Harmony” has a lot to learn about winning hearts and minds. He could have picked up a thing or two from his mother or his ex. Or the brand new daughter-in-law, the Princess Bride.