Get out the Atlas -- the NEW One!

Chuck's most recent business trip was to Moldova.

Well, he didn't know anything about it either, until a few weeks ago. Moldova is one of the "republics" of the Former Soviet Union -- now an indpendent country. It's quite small -- only 3.3 million people -- and is squeezed in between Romania and Ukraine. For much of its history it was part of Romania and, after World War II, found itself part of the USSR -- whether it wanted to be or not. Today the population speaks both Romanian and Russian and the country is trying to get on its feet. At the moment it's the poorest country in Europe -- the director of the Institute for Applied Physics, a very distinguished physicist and professor whom we visited --- earns about $1200 per year, and doesn't get paid every month.

The main difficulty is caused by the fact that almost all Moldovan industry consists of plants that were part of larger industrial entitities that were Russian dominated. After the collapse of the USSR, these very specialized plants, which made components for things assembled in Russia, found themselves without customers or orders.

The population is highly literate and very well-educated -- and after what the country has been through for the last 60 years is highly motivated and willing to work. Unfortunately, it's taking a while for the necessary economic reforms to take place and take effect. While many of the industries are now "joint stock companies", the fact is that the government is the largest shareholder in most of them. Since the country is not yet a part of the European Union, and since the government does not yet permit foreign investment, except in limited circumstances, there is no access to most means of funding. So plant managers must find ways to make products people want, but to do so in the plants and with the equipment they have on hand -- much of which was very specialized for predominantly military products. Despite this, some of them are showing remarkable creativity -- one plant we visited, specialized in the production of military sonars -- has figured out a way to make over 70 "consumer products" with machines and facilities designed for a different purpose.

Also, it was apparent from our visit with leading members of the science, industry and academic sectors of the country, as well as the Minister for Industry, that there are many very capable researchers working -- in most cases in terrible facilities. There is no shortage of smart people with good ideas.

We, at the Office of Naval Research, don't have the funds (or the charter) to invest in industrial development. But we do hope to be able to foster some joint research efforts between some very qualified Moldovans and American partners. Such projects would only introduce small amounts of money into their economy but might build foundations for greater economic activity as research matures into products. In addition, we can help some small numbers of their best people with travel expenses to attend international conferences which will allow them to "network" and make needed contacts.

One bright spot in the Moldovan economy is the wine industry, which is producing high quality wines that are developing a following. Several of us living in London have noted in recent months that Moldovan wines are increasingly available in London shops -- and those who are far better wine tasters than either of us are assure us that they are good wines. The Minister of Industry mentioned the wine industry as the number one money earner in Moldova -- and also mentioned that it is fully privatized. We assume there is a connection there.

Most of us who have visited the country have found it to be one of our favorites, with people we really like -- but with many problems to be solved. Despite the problems, one gets a good feeling walking around Chisnau, the capital -- the people are busy, interested and interesting, living well under difficult circumstances. In fact, from just interacting with the people, one could believe he was in any modern Eurpean country. Chuck found them truly admirable.

For more pictures of Moldova, beyond those shown below, go to: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/560980


The lobby of the hotel we stayed at -- nice rooms, beautiful
public rooms -- and a place few Moldovans could afford to
patronize.


We were surpised to see that even in poor Moldova, the
latest edition of Star Wars opened at the same time it
opened in London


It's probably not really evident in this photo -- but most
of the industrial or academic or scientific-related buldings
are holdovers from the Soviet era and exhibit the same
spalling concrete and all-round dilapidation that Soviet
buildings seem to display everywhere.

Flaming Spirit

We had a minor surprise at church on Pentecost Sunday.

We had already learned that the Anglican Church is pretty laid back about alcohol -- on several occasions our after-church coffee fellowship had included sherry. But we were in for a new wrinkle on Pentecost.

You all remember the scriptural account of how the apostles had tongues of flame appear over their heads as they were visited and enlightened by the Holy Spirit on that occasion. Well, in order to symbolically portray the event, we had flaming Drambuie at the after-church visit. Yep -- Drambuie, the liqueur. As each person took a glass, the church warden, Maxine Wiltshire, ignited it -- so each glass had a tongue of flame above it. (Of course, those who were partaking had to blow out the flame and let the glass cool a bit before drinking.)

A bit of a surprising (for us) church event -- drinking flaming spirits right there in the nave. See what you could be missing!

The London Theater Experience

If you've been reading this blog for any time you know we are frequent patrons of London's "West End" theater scene. (At the time when many of the theatres were established they were at the west end of London, where the city was relatively less developed and land was available -- now, of course, the city extends westward well beyond the theater area, but it's still called the West End). This is a great city to be living in if you like live theater.

The first great thing is that ticket prices are still well below Broadway -- though the difference isn't nearly as large as it used to be. Secondly, there is an official (sponsored by the London Theater Guild) "half-price ticket" booth in Leicester (pronounced Lester) Square, in the heart of the West End. (In recent years a number of commercial booths selling tickets (some at reduced prices) have sprung up in the area as well.) The policy at the half-price booth is that you can only buy tickets for that day -- either matinee or evening; and you must take tickets for a given show as they are offered. So, if you say you want 2 tickets to a show, the clerk will tell you "I have two tickets in the 3rd row of the upper circle" -- and he'll show you where the seats are. But you must then take them or ask about another show. You cannot say "I don't want those seats, what else have you got?" This, no doubt, is to permit the line to keep moving, which it does -- and there is almost always a line. But, when you have your half price tickets you have a pretty good entertainment bargain.

We frequently arrive at the booth shortly after it opens on a Saturday morning (at 10) and get tickets for a matinee (we always have 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices of shows ready). Then it's off to the British Museum, or the National Gallery or Covent Garden or any one of dozens of other great London attractions. A couple of hours of that sort of thing is followed by lunch -- then off to the theater for the matinee, which typically starts at 2:30 or 3:00. After the show, it's home for dinner (or occasionally a second meal out), having enjoyed another great London theater experience.



The theater buildings themselves are an integral part of the pleasure of it -- most of them are well over a hundred years old, though some are newer. Many of them have fantastic interiors of the kind typical in the 19th century -- statuary, scrolls, stained glass domes, intricate plaster ceilings and more. (The picture is of the ceiling and dome in the Coliseum theatre, just off Trafalgar Square.) All London theaters are equipped with bars. The typical drill is to visit the bar before the show to place an order for one's "interval (intermission) drinks". These are ordered and paid for and are awaiting the customer at the interval. Many patrons, of course, enjoy some liquid refreshment at the bar before the show and while ordering those interval drinks.

When we first arrived in London, we thought that after a few months we'd have seen every show that interested us and we'd then only rarely go to the theater. But, there are so many available, and many of the shows open for only limited runs, meaning that there is almost always a choice of several shows we'd like to see. And when, temporarily, there isn't -- well there are about 94,754 other interesting things to see in this fascinating city.

In our minds, the whole experience greatly beats a movie -- and, with the half price tickets (and the incredibly high prices of London movie tickets) the live theater only costs about one-and-a-half times as much as the movie. We think it's worth it.

By the way, our most recent play was on Friday night, 27 May -- we saw "On the Town" at the Coliseum Theatre, the home of the English National Opera. You may be familiar with the movie version, with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. The movie was made several years after war had ended -- the stage show was a wartime production, opening at Christmas of 1943. There are only 3 songs that are in both versions; and the stage version contains many more dance ensemble numbers. In fact, the dancing was one of the best things in the show, which we thought very highly of overall. (The singing by a cast which is actually an opera company was, of course, magnificent.) An incredible thing about the show is that when the stage version was first produced the five key creative people involved were all in their 20s -- Leonard Bernstein (music), Jerome Robbins (choreographer), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (book and lyrics) and Oliver Smith (design). For several of them it was their first broadway experience.

They created a pretty great show that remains interesting and poignant while being a great example of musical and dancing excellence.

More Beauty than you can Imagine!

The Chelsea Flower Show has been a major, world-wide attraction for many years. It is held on the grounds of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea -- a hospital and home for British military veterans and a subject, in its own right, of a future story here. The show is an incredible undertaking, with many hundreds of exhibits, some of which are entire gardens erected just for the show and totally gone a few days after it closes. The Great Pavilion (housed in a huge temporary building, also in place only for the 6-day length of the show) contains an overwhelming display of beauty in an area covering a number of acres. It is truly difficult to portray, in words, the magnificence of color and form that are on display.

The first picture, below, is typical of the displays in the pavilion -- but it doesn't convey the incredible variety of those displays. Many of the exhibitors specialize in just one kind of flower -- or a family of them -- as is the case in this first picture. So every new exhibit seems to open a whole new vista to the visitor. And the displays are not limited to flowers -- many include fruits and vegetables -- some arranged in amazingly artistic ways. (We've only included a few pictures here -- to see many more, click on: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/558786)

(By the way, the ability to include a picture within a blog posting here is something new -- we've just downloaded the software that lets us do that. So this blog will become a bit more graphical in the future, though we'll continue to send you to another website for more pictures.)

The second picture is a close up of a variety of daffodils that Chuck liked particularly well.





At the show, gardens can be entered in several categories, including "city", "courtyard", "chic" and "show". The picture below is of one of the show gardens entered -- this one was the winner of the "best of show" prize. Understand that the entire garden must be created on a bare spot of ground -- so the cottage, fence, pond and other parts of this garden were prepared as part of the entry. This particular entry was sponsored by the pensioners (the retired veterans) who live at the Royal Hospital (whose grounds host the show) -- and it was created according to their ideas by a professional garden designer. The theme was "A Soldier's dream of 'Blighty'" -- essentially a British serviceman's idealized memories of home ("Blighty" being slang for England).



You may not have the good fortune to be in London when the Chelsea Flower Show is on -- after all, it's only 6 days out of the year. But if ever you are going to be here at the right time try to get the tickets and make it a centerpiece of your visit. (And you need to order tickets months in advance -- we ordered ours in February).

An interesting sidelight of the show that we had not thought of beforehand is the "allergy connection". At various times we found ourselves sneezing, then realized that if you listened to the crowd you could hear quite a bit of sneezing going on. I guess those thousands (millions?) of flowers and plants give off a lot of pollen -- lots of plants plus lots of people = lots of sneezing.

By the way, it's also a fertile ground for celebrity sighting, although the closest we game was a close brush with Diarmuid Gavin, the Irishman who is seen frequently on TV gardening shows on both sides of the Atlantic.

What would you do?

So your name is Richard Gelding. And you want to open a men's store. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that some men may not care to associate with a store called "Gelding". We noticed this store recently and made this point while out to dinner with a couple living here in London with us. When Chuck commented that Richard Gelding probably should have named his store something else. Carol retorted, "at least he used 'Richard', not 'Dick'".


Gelding's Mens' Store

Shipping Out

Phil and Sue John visited us in London for the day on May 21st. Phil was Chuck's host during the year Chuck taught at the Royal Military College of Science/Cranfield University in 2000/2001. Phil is the head of the Systems Engineering faculty there; he and Sue and their three kids live in Harpenden, a village a few miles north of London. We had visited them a couple of months ago and this most recent visit was a chance for the four of us to have a fun day out in London.

We started the day with a great brunch at our flat, courtesy of Kathi. From there it was off to visit HMS Belfast, a Royal Navy cruiser of World War II vintage that is now a floating museum in the Thames. We took the Underground to London Bridge Station on the south bank of the river and walked from there, stopping at the Hays Galleria enroute. This was a covered dock on the river bank; built in the 19th century, it was a water-filled berth which ships could be brought into, with warehouses on either side, covered by a glass roof. (Another example of the kind of Victorian engineering Chuck is enamored of.) One of the major cargoes handled here was tea from the tea clipper ships. In recent years the water has been filled in, the warehouses renovated and it is now the home of offices and shops -- a "galleria".

From there it was a short walk to the ship. Chuck was in his element -- a former ship's gunnery officer, he provided a personal guided tour of the gunnery installations on Belfast. Sue and Phil were good sports and paid attention the whole time! The ship has been very well preserved and is presented very well -- a great deal more of the ship is open to the public than is usually the case in preserved ships such as this. It was fascinating to see the living conditions aboard a Royal Navy warship of the 1940s and to visit the bridge, the operations room (combat information center (CIC) in USN terms), the galley, laundry, gun installations and so on. The ladies even developed a reasonable facility with traversing the inclined ladders found everywhere on a Navy ship.

From the Belfast (and after a restful cup of coffee at a cafe) we took the Underground again to Covent Garden to mingle with the crowds that are always there, browsing in the shops and enjoying the sidewalk entertainers. On to dinner at a very nice restaurant just off the Garden then on to a play at the Comedy Theater near Haymarket. The play was "The Home Place" starring Tom Courtenay -- a drama set in Ireland in the time that country was undergoing the transition to home rule. The show had gotten very good reviews -- but all four of us agreed we "didn't get it" -- the first act was very slow and the somewhat more active second act led to an abrupt ending that left us all somewhat baffled. Some of the reviews had compared the play to Chekhov -- maybe we should have taken that more seriously and expected to be left baffled.

To see some of the pictures from the day click on: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/556253/1/23126034

At the end of our very enjoyable day, Phil and Sue caught the Underground to the railroad station and returned to Harpenden while the Calvanos took the bus back to our "little London flat". Great day. We hope to have another adventure with Phil and Sue before too much more time passes.

It's Soooooo British!

London has a huge fleet of large double-decker buses (many very modern) which we've been enjoying using lately. The Underground is wonderful for getting to places quickly. But it has one drawback -- traveling in a tunnel underground doesn't let you get a feel for where things are in relation to each other. (We had used the underground to go both to Picadilly Circus and to Leicester Square many times. Because these two places are stops on different underground lines, we hadn't realized that they are only a short distance apart.) Lately, we've been taking buses more often and find it's really a helpful way to learn our way around London.

Recently, London has been adding new, very long articulated buses that have an accordion-like section in the middle that lets the bus make turns as though it were a shorter vehicle. There are buses like this in San Francisco and other US cities -- I think they are generally called articulated buses. See one at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/548620.

But the Brits have their own unique way of looking at things -- here in London, these are called "bendy buses". Actually, that's a very good name for them -- really describes them. But, somehow, we don't think they would ever have gotten that name in any other country -- "bendy buses" is so British!

Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew

Kew Gardens is the UK's national botanic garden -- now a UN World Heritage Site -- that covers 300 acres on the banks of the Thames, about 90 minutes by boat upstream from central London. There are thousands of specimens of trees and plants from all over the world, many collected during the days of the British Empire by the global explorers that established that Empire and kept it working for a couple of centuries. We took the boat trip there on May 7th and spent several hours walking the beautiful pathways and taking in the riot of color that adorns the park in the spring.

The enormous glass conservatories date from the 1800's (examples of another of Chuck's favorite British things -- spectacular Victorian engineering). They contain a bewildering variety of plants from any part of the world you've ever heard of -- and some you may not have heard of at all. The mind-boggling magnitude of the incredible wealth of botanical knowledge represented in Kew Gardens is greatly enhanced when the viewer realizes that the park's roots (no pun intended) go back to the 1730's and the great botanist Sir Joseph Banks.

We were fortunate to have planned our visit at the height of the short blooming season for the native British bluebell wildflowers; this is, apparently, an eagerly anticipated event among British gardeners, which in this country is a very large part of the population. While the bluebells blooming by the millions in natural meadows were very beautiful, it would be hard to choose what was most beautiful or interesting. Rhododendron Row contains many, many dozens of different species of that beautiful flower -- some of the plants are well over a century old. The Row extends for about a half mile and is spectacular to see when the plants are at the height of bloom.

As the name implies, the Botanic Gardens are located in the London region of Kew. As we arrived in Kew and were leaving the pier for the Gardens, we passed the Kew common where a cricket match was in progress. The common is surrounded by beautiful older homes, many with Wisteria vines covering the facades -- and we seem to have arrived at just the right time to see these beautiful flowers in bloom.

Despite the fact that it was a bit cool and windy, the boat ride there and back was a big part of the enjoyment of the day. The river banks in central London are made spectacular by all the glorious older buildings as well as a dizzying display of modern architecture of all kinds in office and apartment buildings. There are pictures of the river cruise and views of the gardens at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/548358/1

“The Dresser” and “Being Victor Borge”

Our two most recent “West End” theatrical dates have been the drama “The Dresser” and a premiere of a one-man comedy production done as a tribute to the late Victor Borge.

The dresser in the play of that name is the man who serves as the personal valet to a stage actor – cares for his costumes, gets him dressed, watches over him. The actor in the play is a man of huge ego and the dresser, at first, appears to be a humble, dedicated servant. The story very cleverly involves the gradual recognition that the dresser really exercises a great deal of power over the entire theatrical company and even “Sir” – the form of address he ever uses for the actor. I won’t go any further with the plot – in case you decide to see it some time.

On Saturday afternoon we were strolling in the Trafalgar Square area (it was a lovely spring-like day) when we were handed a flyer advertising a production entitled “Being Victor Borge” at a theater we knew nothing about – called “The Venue”. The flyer said it was a 2-show preview and starred an unknown named Rainer Hersch, “bringing together his comedy and music in his personal tribute to one of the world’s greatest entertainers” – Victor Borge.

There are things like this going on in London all the time – sort of “off-off-Broadway” theater. But we’d never followed through on one and, when someone put one of the flyers in our faces, we usually took it and threw it away.

Well, we’re not going to tell you the show was great. There were a lot of places where a little more writing would have greatly strengthened it. But Hersch was a pretty good comedian and an excellent classical pianist. He had worked as a stand up comic for some time and, at one point, decided to use some of his musical skills in his act. After one very successful show he got three different reviews which compared him to Victor Borge – or said his show was reminiscent of Borge. Hersch, being sickeningly young, had no idea who Victor Borge was. Some time later, when he was “doing a gig” in Copenhagen he found that Borge was playing in a concert hall just up the street. Hersch went to the stage door and asked to meet him and Borge posed for a photo with him. (Borge was in his late 80s at the time and died a couple of years later.) Hersch’s curiosity was aroused and he began collecting all the Borge CDs and videos he could get his hands on. He fell in love with Borge’s work and developed the current show to try to “keep Borge’s memory alive”.

All-in-all it was reasonably good fun; and we hope the show, which is good fun, will get even better.

The Wallace Collection

Today, (Happy May, by the way), we were on our way to take a Thames River boat ride upriver toward Kew, Richmond and Hampton Court Palace. But when we went out it was obvious today was going to be one of those “periodic showers” days and we decided a River cruise might not be ideal.

As long as we’ve been here, people have been suggesting to us that we visit the Wallace Collection – a fine museum located about a 20-minute walk from our flat. So we changed plans and headed there. Despite all the recommendations we had received, we were not prepared for what we found – an incredible number of fantastic artworks. There is cabinet after cabinet of gorgeous Sevres porcelain; hundreds of beautiful small bronze sculptures; enamels by the hundreds; and incredible roomsful of 14th, 15th and 16th century swords, shields and armor. This is not to even mention the Titians, Canalettos, numerous Dutch masters, and other paintings.

The absolutely amazing thing is that this collection was amassed by a single (very wealthy) family over about a 70 year period starting in 1800. It was bequeathed to the British nation by Lady Wallace in 1897 and is the largest and most valuable private collection ever bequeathed to any nation. (Unfortunately, since virtually all museums do not permit photography, we have no pictures we can post to give you a taste of the collection.) If you’re interested, check it out at the Collection’s own website: http://www.wallacecollection.org/index.htm. From that page click on “Works of Art” and from there on “Gallery Views”. This will show building plans of each floor. Try clicking on the room names – many of them will open up views of parts of the collection.