Destination: Uncategorized

It’s Yuletide…literally, “the turning of the sun.” Since long before the birth of Jesus, Europe has celebrated the return of light as the corner is turned on winter, the shortest day is past, and the promise of renewed life is assured.

The December 25th party was called “Saturnalia” by ancient Romans. Like Christians built churches upon the sites of pagan temples, it just made sense for them to celebrate the birth of Jesus on the pagan festival of Saturnalia.

Whether you worship the sun or the son, life and love are the theme today across Europe (and Christendom). Norwegian farmers are lashing bundles of wheat to fence poles — a treat for the birds. And families light candles at the tombstones of lost loved ones to remember them as they enter and leave their village churches.

In Burgundy, families cook and eat Le Réveillon de Noël, the biggest feast of the year, while children gather an orange and a star-shaped cookie to put in their slippers — a thank you in advance to Père Noël for his kind generosity.

Throughout Paris today, Christmas carousels (manèges de Noël) are thrilling wide-eyed children visiting from the countryside. The Champs-Elysées is a forest of twinkling trees. Families are out lèche-vitrine(literally, “window-licking”) as department stores fill windows with festive animation and yuletide whimsy. Stores thoughtfully even put up little wooden stepladders for kids to get a full dose of the big-city Christmas wonder. And families with muffs and mittens are ice-skating 200 feet above ground at the holiday ice rink on the first level of the Eiffel Tower.

In Nürnberg, little Germans munching gingerbread (still warm out of the oven) are marveling at market square stalls well-stocked with Prune People — figurines made with a walnut head, four-fig body, and prune limbs, all dolled up in traditional folk costumes. But their highlight is an encounter with the angelic, teenage, real-life girl crowned the “Christkind.” As the children multiply around her, she raises her gilded arms and says softly, “If you are very, very gentle…you can touch my wings.”

In 1818, Franz Gruber first sang “Silent Night” in the village of Oberndorf near Salzburg. Today Oberndorf is a muddy mess as a traffic jam of tourist buses inundates the place. Each Christmas Eve, holiday-goers from Florida to Yokohama converge on the village in search of olde time charm…and find mostly just each other.

In Salzburg, the Gunners’ Club lines up atop the castle to fire off handheld miniature cannon to shoo away evil spirits. Meanwhile, parents shoo away the children so they can decorate the tree. (Tree lots here don’t even open until the week of Christmas, as buying and decorating is done just before the big day.) Later this evening, with a fantasy of gifts under the glittering tree lit by countless real candles, the door is opened, the children stampede in, and the “land of if” becomes the here and now.

And throughout England, little ones sing while mixing their Figgie pudding, cupcake-sized mince pies are cooked up (to be eaten one a day through the 12 days of Christmas — to ensure a happy 2008), and Wassail-ers are eating, drinking and being merry.

And in a few minutes, in our household, the extended family is swooping in as we celebrate Christmas in our American way. So…I’ll post this now and wish all ye jolly travelers a Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Squeezing a few days in Rome between a Greece tour and researching in Istanbul this fall, I met my friend Tim Frakes — who produces videos for the Lutheran Church (www.elca.org) — to finish a video about St. Peter.

Over the years, Tim and I have collaborated on five teaching videos, taking us from Lutheran-funded hospitals in Papua New Guinea to the room where Martin Luther translated the Bible from Latin to the people’s German (…really annoying the pope).

For this video (similar to an earlier one on St. Paul), Tim filmed places around the eastern Mediterranean where Peter had lived and worked. We planned to have me “host” the video in Rome by filming (over two days) about 20 “on-camera” bits at the Vatican and in generic ancient settings.

Filming on St. Peter’s Square is always thrilling, with a backdrop of the greatest church in Christendom and so much rich Church history to share. While the square is a crowded mess through midday, it is glorious — rich colors, striking architecture warmly lit by a low sun, and no crowds — early and late. That’s when we filmed there.

(Of course, there is the nagging issue of whether St. Peter ever even went to Rome. Scholars differ on this. And as Lutherans, we didn’t want to anger Roman Catholics by questioning the veracity of the claim that Peter is buried under St. Peter’s Basilica. We proceeded as if the tradition itself of Peter’s work and death there authenticated the story.)

We needed distinct and evocative sites for each of our 15 generic ancient setting on-camera performances. We tried for Ostia Antica, but failed to get permission (without paying the $3,000 fee that they asked). Finally the people at Hadrian’s Villa gave us permission, supporting our church’s educational work (but didn’t quite understand why we were “filming St. Peter” at a place he certainly never visited). As it turned out, Hadrian’s Villa was much better than Ostia Antica would have been for our needs.

Tim and I scouted the site and set out to shoot all the on-cameras. It was an exhilarating day and we were both happy with the work. Exhausted, we returned to our hotel and went out for a celebratory dinner.

Later that evening, Tim knocked on my hotel room door with panic and horror on his face. He asked me if I had seen a videocassette. One was missing.

It was the nightmare of every TV producer: While working at his laptop, he had knocked three tapes from his desk to the floor. He bent down a bit later and picked up two. Then he joined me for our pasta and red wine.

Rome is not a place where garbage moves fast…unless you dropped a precious videocassette into a trash bin. While we were out, the maid came in and emptied the garbage into a big plastic bag that went outside…and then, with incredibly bad luck, the garbage truck came and went.

We got lovely Annamaria from our hotel (The Aberdeen) to go into her building’s garbage room. With plastic gloves on, she emptied bags on the floor, analyzing the empty jugs and so on to determine which bags were from Hotel Aberdeen. All her bags had already been picked up and taken to the Rome dump. Heroically, Annamaria and her husband actually drove to the dump…only to find that all had been smashed together. Our cassette was hopelessly lost.

Tim felt so bad, considering how hard we had worked. We just agreed not to punish ourselves, changed our morning flights home, and arranged to return to Hadrian’s Villa to re-shoot the 15 on-cameras…which were absolutely critical to the production.

Back at Hadrian’s Villa, the weather was as good as the earlier day. But there was a different man in charge. We explained our story (with the help of our gracious driver and Annamaria on the phone). The bureaucrats running the site seemed to enjoy watching this humbled American film crew begging for a chance to enter and reshoot our lost bits. They said no.

I couldn’t believe this. The light was perfect. We were permitted the day before. I had a flight that night to Turkey. And the gate was closed to us and our camera. We sat there looking like abandoned little puppies, sad faces, trying to stay cool…until noon, when they finally agreed to let us in “as tourists” and re-do our work.

With time ticking away, Tim and I lined up all 15 stops efficiently and, with precision focus, re-shot the entire list. The work went perfectly, and I was impressed by how easy it was to call back the lines I had previously memorized. I think my performance was actually better this time around. By 3:00 p.m., we had shot the last bit — just in time for me to zip out to the airport and resume my itinerary in Istanbul.

Tim flew home with all the footage to complete his St. Peter video. A week later, I was home and recorded the general voice track. Within about a month, the project was compete and a new teaching video was in the mail to all 11,000 ELCA Lutheran churches.

Our friends at the ELCA website have organized all the videos Tim and I have done into one fun page at www.elca.org, so anyone can click on over and see our work.

My favorites of this work have been the Papua New Guinea show (even thought it’s pretty old…our first collaboration, which let me share my thoughts on First/Third World relations) and the Martin Luther story (since I had to sit through the old-fashioned, black-and-white versions when I was a kid in Sunday school, and this would pump up the color and energy for kids warming those same little chairs today). And for understanding the work that St. Paul and St. Peter did in the formative early years of the Christian Church, the other videos tell that story.

If you’re interested, I hope you can enjoy our latest work: The Life of Apostle Peter.

When my books were 200 pages long, I prided myself in personally visiting every listing every year. Now, with 20 books averaging 400+ pages each, I rely on a staff of researchers. We just had our annual meeting, and I had four hours to inspire and instruct our team. Here are a few concerns we dealt with:

Reader feedback: We get mountains. While tips on what has changed and areas of confusion are really helpful, most new hotel and restaurant suggestions are a disappointment. Still, we track many of these down because gold nuggets do pop up. Run down suggestions when you can.

Writing vs. checking information: Researchers are primarily information-checkers. My co-authors and I get the exhausting privilege of expanding our coverage.

Tap locals for help, but don’t be hoodwinked by cronyism. We need to survey our friendly hoteliers and B&B hosts, as they know what our readers are doing day in and day out…which tours, tricks, eateries, and so on work best. Where are we letting our readers down?

Cheap tricks: With our dollar in the tank, in 2008 we will all dredge up cheap tricks for eating, sleeping, transportation, and sightseeing at every stop.

Decipher hotel price schemes: When hotels have crazy computer-generated price schemes, try to find the average peak-season rate and suss out how travelers score the best actual prices in each place.

Avoiding lines: If there’s a line, there is a way to avoid it. We want those with our books to never need to wait through a line. Find clever ways around them.

Get deals for those with the book: Many prices assume a commission for some agency or website. Because our readers are going direct, try to negotiate for them a discounted rate that cuts out the middleman, saves our readers money, and gets the business all it would net out through an agency. But be very careful not to negotiate a discount from someone who isn’t in authority to back it up and make it happen next year. Check each discount in the book anonymously.

Don’t clutter up the book with bad-value sightseeing passes. Europe must have a university course called “Confusing Nonsensical Museum Passes.” Few are worth the trouble, much less the ink to explain in a guidebook. Really crunch the numbers.

“Live the book”: When researching, you are working every waking hour — eating, sleeping…living the book. Know what’s in the book. Know the frustrations of our readers. Do what our readers do, and report on it.

Think strategically: For example, figure out the connection from Lagos to Salema (which our readers will want to use). Avoid an expensive hotel by taking the overnight cruise from Copenhagen to Oslo. If flying home from Milan’s airport, consider spending your last night in Stresa and catch a shuttle directly to the airport from there, rather than detouring through Milan.

Don’t pollute the book with needless details (last entry 15 minutes before closing) or rare offerings (free second Sundays, English tour summer Wednesdays).

I like to illustrate a job well done by examples from last year’s research. Here are a few I used:

A new sight listing (in Berlin) written up clearly after a visit: The Film Museum is the most interesting visit in the Sony Center. Your admission gets you into several floors of exhibits (3rd floor is film and TV permanent exhibits, 1st and 4th floor are temporary exhibits) made meaningful by the included (and essential) English audioguide. The film section takes you from the beginning with emphasis on the Weimar Republic time in the 1920s when Berlin rivaled Hollywood (Metropoliswas a German production from 1927). Three rooms are dedicated to Marlene Dietrich, and another section features Nazi use of film as propaganda. The TV section tells the story of das boob tube from its infancy (when it was primarily used as a Nazi propaganda tool) to today. The 30-minute kaleidoscopic review — kind of a frantic fast-forward montage of greatest hits in German TV history — is great fun (it plays with 10-minute breaks all day long). Upstairs is a TV archive where you can dial and click a wide range of new and classic German TV standards. The Arsenal Theater downstairs shows art films in their original language.

A new restaurant listing (in Berlin) that makes the dining experience clear, and offers a distinct style and great value: Zum Schusterjungen Speisegaststatte is a classic old-school eatery. It’s German with attitude and retains its circa 1986 DDR decor. The “Boot Boy” is famous for its schnitzel and filling €7-8 meals. It’s a no-frills place with quality ingredients and a strong local following. It serves the eating needs of those who lament the fact that it’s hard to find solid traditional German cooking with the flood of ethnic eateries (small 40-seat dining hall, daily 11:00-24:00, corner of Lychenerstrasse and Danziger Strasse 9, tel. 442 7654).

A cheap transportation trick: Eurailpasses don’t cover the Czech Republic, so you need to buy a ticket for the Czech portion of the trip before boarding a train. (Tip: Since the Germans charge double what the Czechs do per kilometer for tickets within Czech Republic, you can actually save money by crossing into Czech Republic without the Prague leg of the journey paid for. Buy it from the conductor for €7 and pay the €2 penalty…and save a few euros over the €14 price for the ticket bought in Germany.)

An example of a fun detail (in Luzern) that could change if Frau Segesser retires, and therefore needs to be checked each year: Midway across the old wooden covered bridge is a little chapel from the 16th century, built to guard against destruction by flood. A line of family crests acknowledge the volunteers who, over the years, have kept the chapel decorated with the seasons. Since 1987, this has been the work of Frau Segesser. While you’re paused here, notice the serious woodwork.