Post by Grubb Delft is a compact, tidy town bisected by a canal and its grid line tributaries. Vermeer caught its quiet domestic beauty in “The Little Street”; he captured the play of light and shadow of the cloud drift in his “View of Delft”. These paintings are more than four-hundred years old, but the neighborhoods we’ve…
Author: Grubb
Return of the Clumpets
Post by Grubb Every now and then in our travels we stay in an apartment on either the first or second floor, and around one or two in the morning the Clumpet family arrives to clamorously settle in upstairs. Heavy footsteps tromp back and forth, back and forth, for the next couple of hours. The unceasing, almost…
Esther’s Pond
Trustworthy The street where we are staying in Den Haag only allows pedestrian traffic and is lined with small shops. Right next door to our apartment is a coffee shop across from the store pictured below. While I was sipping my morning cappuccino, I watched the sales woman in charge leave without closing, much less…
Den Haag Holiday
Post by Grubb Vermeer Auditions These young women waiting for their flight to Amsterdam discuss which Vermeer portrait they’d like to pose for. Monumental Hunger I walked by a park that had a pungent dispensary aroma and noticed that even statuary get the munchies. Hanging with the old dudes We stopped at a cafe for…
Ali Baba! Ali Baba!
Everywhere I’ve gone in Morocco, men have taken great pleasure in addressing me as “Ali Baba”. It seems advanced age combined with a less than kempt beard has earned me the sobriquet. It’s enough to make me consider dressing in a djellaba and start looking for some gullible followers, or at least beg a few alms. However, I…
A gourmet goodbye
I signed us up for a cooking class so that we could leave Marrakech with a good taste in our mouths. We were supposed to meet our host/instructor at the Bab Doukkala mosque along with ten others who spoke English. After yesterday’s rat-in-a-maze misadventure trying to scout where the mosque was ahead of time, I convinced Ella…
The blue dot only goes so far
…and the rest is up to Allah Today was about charting the journey. After striking another palace off the list of Medina destinations (a nineteenth century ruin that was crumbling to dust), along with some tiled tombs (of sultans turned to dust), we picked out three different museums that we hoped would give us a closer…
Sunday at the palace with Ella
…and a million other people! That would be the Bahia Palace inside the Marrakech Medina. Built by Ba Ahmid, a fat 19th century sultan who made sure there weren’t many stairs, and who named it after his favorite wife, Al Bahia, “the brilliant.” It has courtyards with fountains and geometric inland tile as well as exquisite…
The Minaret and the Militia
Above the crowded bustle of a Medina’s streets will invariably be the towering minarets blaring prayers, like Allah’s air raid siren, five times a day. No matter how much chaos goes on below, spiritual order is maintained, and with it an eerie sense of clerical control. Traveling from the Atlas Mountains to the Atlantic we passed…
Medina Riviera
Yesterday. If it weren’t for the prayer broadcast from the minarets five times a day, I would have thought that we were mixing with the holiday crowds on the coast of France. I’ve given up trying to exchange pleasantries in Arabic; the lingua Franca in Essaouira is French. And it seems like there’s a crepes vendor every…
How to make a million in Morocco
Ice cream. Wherever we’ve gone so far, there seems to be a shortage. If it’s listed on the dessert menu, the waiter is quick to be apologetic. (Of course we have yet to see a waitress.) If indeed it appears, it is dripped in lacy swirls on pomegranate seeds, or cake. The markets lack ice cream vendors. (Ella says “Sorry Jamie,…
Old man and the surf
Where are my EarPods? That ocean’s loud! I mean, after the silence of the Sahara.. Okay, it started with the blue rocks suggesting a kindergarten for adults. Then, last night and today, families, French, Italian, American, with their kids on the beach and in the restaurants, as if school were out. Was it? I know last week was A Moroccan…
Rock Pile Playground
somehow, we neglected to publish this from Tuesday.Walking on a different kind of sand. Yesterday morning Ali picked us up at the hotel around nine and drove to a boulder strewn mountain valley outside of Tafroute where the rocks were painted blue. One thing about Morocco, and certainly about the Anti-Atlas Mountains, if you’re looking for…
Wait a minute Mr. Lean
I think I’ve got the shot! Okay, maybe I didn’t use 78 mm film and a telephoto lens, but it’ll do for a Sahara morning memory. Leaving camp we said goodbye to Bashir who clasped my shoulder and said, “Bslama, Ali Baba!” We barreled over the desert flats. Stopped at a cozy oases. Three hours…
Camel Jockeys
Sunday. After dinner last night, around 9:30, the dry heat of the day (nothing extreme in the autumn sun) had cooled so that by the time we went to bed there was a faint chill in the air. And silence. And a darkness so deep that even my doppelgänger kept his distance. In the middle of the night I…