A MidsummerNight's Dream, II: Iceland's Golden Circle

The Golden Circle Tour proved to be a delightful way to spend a day. The weather started out overcast and a bit chilly with a bit of rain, but skies soon cleared and the thermometer soared to about 65F (18C). The driver was knowledgeable and funny, and best of all, he didn't get us killed. I learned a lot about Iceland, among other things that hot water heaters are unnecessary. The geothermal springs that are found all over the island provide all the hot water required, not to mention power to generate electricity. 

I also learned a great deal about the flora and fauna. When the first Vikings arrived from Norway in the tenth century, the island had no native land mammal except the arctic fox. Polar bears sometimes landed on the north of the island, but never took up permanent residency. The only native tree was the dwarf birch, which grows to about six feet. This is the source of one of the driver's best jokes. Q: "What should you do if lost in an Icelandic forest?" A: "Stand Up."

The Vikings brought in other species, including reindeer and horses. The horses are small, more like ponies, but do not tell an Icelander that. Call them horses, please. Farm animals, dogs, cats, mice, rats, and many different plant species have been imported over the centuries since the first human settlement. One particular import, the lupin, has taken over large swathes of the island.

The Golden Circle passes through a lot of beautiful landscapes, including the most spectacular waterfall I've ever seen, Gullfoss, on the Hvita (White) River. (Gullfoss)

Gullfoss is fed by Iceland's second largest glacier, and is considerably larger than Niagara Falls. The roar of the falls is certainly deafening. Gullfoss means "Golden Falls". The name derives from the fact that the sediment-laden water looks golden on sunny days. It drops 32 meters (105 feet) into the chasm below. It is the largest waterfall in Europe by volume, if one considers Iceland part of Europe. That brings me to the second highlight of the Golden Circle: Thingvellir.

Thingvellir National Park stands at the place where two tectonic/continental plates meet: The Eurasian and the North American. Iceland is thus partly in North America and partly in Europe. 

Thingvellir is a geologist's paradise. But its importance is not only geological. It is also significant in Icelandic history. Starting back in AD 930, the national assembly (Althing) met here, and continued to do so until 1798. The name Thingvellir means something like "Parliament (or Assembly) Fields." (Thingvellir)

Thingvellir lies in a rift valley that marks the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the evidence of geologic activity is all around you.

  

Thingvellir, and Iceland itself, sits atop the Iceland Plume, a volcanic hotspot which is believed to have formed Iceland some 16-18 million years ago. Geologically speaking, that is very young, and it means that the island never had dinosaurs, or many other species that emerged elsewhere over eons. But volcanoes and geothermal phenomena abound. That brings me to the third highlight of the Golden Circle: Geysir. (Iceland geology)

Geysir (from which we get "geyser") is a hot spot where Iceland blows off a lot of steam. The place is named after the largest of the geysers in the park, Geysir. It erupts infrequently nowadays, sometimes not for years, but its recorded eruptions have sometimes reached heights of more than 100 meters. Other geysers nearby are rather tame most of the time, just bubbling away. Good places to boil some eggs. But one geyser, called Strokkur, erupts about every 6-10 minutes, which is good for tourists on a tight schedule. Strokkur sends a plume of hot water about 30 meters into the air. Thankfully, the water cools a good bit by the time it returns to earth, because it is hard to avoid being hit by some of it when up close. 

Having completed the Golden Circle, our coach returned to Reykjavik. I went off to check into my hotel, only to discover that they didn't have a room for me. But they had booked me into a nearby pension, which turned out to be comfortable and boasted a scenic view of the harbor. I slept well after a long but delightful day.

Iceland: A Mid-Summer Night's Dream

Iceland: land of volcanoes, geysers, waterfalls, glaciers, and trolls. And constant daylight in mid-summer. Having left London in pitch dark of midnight, I arrived at Keflavik Airport in blazing sunshine around 3 am. I took a bus to Reykjavik, the capital and largest city. Actually, the only city in this land of just over 300,000 people. It was 5 am but it looked like midday, and the streets were deserted. I felt like I had walked onto the set of an apocalyptic film, in which some superbug had wiped the entire population.

As I walked from the bus station through an elegant park graced by a lake I was relieved to hear sounds of life: ducks quacking. Ahead of me, I spied a well-dressed man sitting on a bench. When I got closer, he turned out to be a statue of some local worthy. I'd read that sunlight in Iceland turns trolls into stone, so maybe this was my first troll. He did look as if he had been there awhile, though.

I continued on, looking for my hotel. I had prided myself in having reserved a room at one of the cheapest hotels in Reykjavik. I found it and it fit the price. Shabby, sans the genteel. Well, this is Iceland, I thought. Cockroaches surely don't flourish here as in Charleston, South Carolina, where I had lived for many years. In Charleston, roaches have been known to grow as large as small dogs. I went inside. No one was at the desk. At 5:30 am I shouldn't have been surprised. I decided to continue my walk through the town until something opened up. I strolled down toward the harbor and discovered, among other things, one of Reykjavik's most famous landmarks, the World's Best Hot Dog Stand.

Vowing to try one when they opened, I walked on and soon came to the Gray Line coach terminal. That's it! I thought. Take a tour, and see something of the place, rest, relax, and go to my hotel at a normal time. Unfortunately, the coach office was not open yet. I decided to get some breakfast. I walked up and down the main streets, but found nothing open. Oh, yeh, I reminded myself, it's not quite 6 am. Too early for cafes, too late for bars.

At one intersection, I spied a large, unusual, pyramidal building, that dwarfed everything around it. Curious, I walked up to it, and discovered that it was Hallsgrimmelskirkja (Hallsgrimmels Church), the tallest building in in Reykjavik at 75 meters. It was unlike any sacred building I'd ever seen. Its designed to look like a volcano, which Iceland has quite a few of. A warning of divine anger, or merely something inspired by the landscape? Disappointingly, there is no smoke, fire, or lava, spewing from the top. Standing there, doing nothing in particular, it looks like a cross between a moth-balled rocket ship and Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Yet it does make a statement and gets your attention.

    
 In front of the church I spotted a large statue of a Vikingy-looking guy. It turned out be one of the most famous Vikings of all, Leif Ericson, who discovered America some 500 years before Columbus, but failed to get the credit -- or the blame. The statue was a gift from the USA to Iceland's people, for letting the US Air Force use the island as a giant aircraft carrier during the Cold War.

I retraced my steps to the Gray Line office, and found it had opened. I entered and went up to the reception desk, where a woman who reminded me of Britt Eklund asked how she could help, in flawless Americanese. I said I'd like to take a tour that would last several hours, at least until I could get into my hotel. 

"The Golden Circle Tour is perfect for you," she said. "it runs from 8:30 to 5."

"Great, I'll take it." I'd read about the Golden Circle and was sure it would be interesting. Waterfalls, glaciers, geysers, fault lines, that sort of thing. I had some time before the coach left to get some breakfast. The receptionist directed me to a nearby cafe-bakery, where I snarfed down a couple of delicious pastries and coffee before boarding the coach. I now knew that I would survive my first day in Iceland. And thrive.

More to come.

  

Olimpos: Turkey's Hidden Gem

Olimpos (sometimes spelled Olympus) is a remote but popular resort locale on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. A city of that name flourished here in ancient times. A nearby mountain was called Mt. Olympus after the one in Greece that housed the Greek gods, and the city was named after that. 

The region was once part of Lycia, and survived through Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine eras, before earthquakes, war, and plague destroyed it in the 7^th century. The ruins cover a wide area at the end of a narrow gorge in the Taurus Mountains. They are now a national historic site.

Olimpos boasts a beautiful rocky beach, and a famous trail, the Lycian Way, runs through it.

In the nearby hills, one can visit the Chimera, where flames of natural gas have been burning for millennia. The phenomena are best viewed at night, but as we found out, a guide and good flashlights are a necessity.     

The Olimpos valley is home to many pensions and restaurants catering to the tourist trade. The pensions are rustic but comfortable and inexpensive. The pension we stayed in, Bayrams, included breakfast and dinner in the price, and the food was excellent. It is served buffet with a good number of dishes to choose from.  There are many more pensions and hotels in the nearby resort town of Cirali.

Olimpos can be reached by bus, taxi, or rented car. Antalya airport is about one and a half hours to the east.

A Visit to Eastbourne, Beachy Head, and the South Downs

The East Sussex city of Eastbourne is a marvelous place to enjoy the seaside and the nearby South Downs and chalk cliffs. My wife and I spent a couple of days there recently. The weather was a bit cool, but the spectacular scenery made up for it. The partly cloudy skies produced an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic blue-green patchwork on the sea. 

Eastbourne is an old settlement, going back to Anglo-Saxon times at least, but it was only a village until the 19^th century. It began to expand after 1800 when Georges III and IV made sea-bathing popular for health and recreational reasons.  It boomed after the railway line arrived there in the 1840s, allowing tourists to get within easy walking distance of the beaches. The train is still a pleasant and swift way to get there, taking little more than an hour from London. Today, the population is expanding again, and is currently about 100,000.

The heyday of Eastbourne was the late 19^th and early 20^th century, and the town retains a distinct Victorian look. That includes Eastbourne Pier, an attractive place to promenade, which has been nicely restored after a devastating fire in July 2014.

 

The Grand Hotel, built in 1875, is another Victorian gem. When opened it had about 200 rooms, but only five bathrooms. Chamber pots were of course provided, and staff emptied them daily. Some aspects of Victorian life were lacking in charm.  Today all the rooms have loos, but there are fewer rooms, only about 150. They had to put the bathrooms somewhere, I guess. Between 1924 and 1939 the BBC orchestra performed in the Grand Hotel Ballroom on Saturday nights. World War II and the Blitz ended that. Much of the population was evacuated because the town was an easy target for German bombers. Today, the Grand has returned to its old glory, and is a 5-star hotel.

One of the best ways to enjoy the charms of the Eastbourne area is to walk along the “boardwalk” to the west, then up the hill to Beachy Head, the highest and last chalk cliff jutting from the South Downs.

 

At its peak, Beachy Head is 561 feet above the sea. The views of the town, the sea, the cliffs, and the Downs from here are delightful.

There is also the scenic Beachy Head Lighthouse, of which I took many photos. Too many! 

From Beachy Head, the South Downs Way winds along the cliffs known as the Seven Sisters. Along the way you can see the first lighthouse built here in the early 19th century, Belle Tout Light. It was not a great success due to fog often enveloping the cliff tops. The Beachy Head Light replaced it in 1902. Bell Tout is now a private guesthouse. In 1999, it was moved back 56 feet after a large section of cliff fell into the sea.

  

If you cannot walk all this way (several miles in one direction and sometimes steep), you can take an Eastbourne tour bus that starts at the Pier and winds along the cliffs and the Downs before circling back to town. The tour takes about 45 minutes if you don’t get off anywhere. It is a hop-on hop-off tour, so you can get off, walk about, and then get on the next bus, which comes along every 30 minutes. If you are a bit peckish or in need of liquid refreshment, two attractive pubs and a café are located at bus stops. We had lunch at the charming Tiger Inn in the village of East Dean.

We enjoyed our trip to Eastbourne and are planning to return soon, hopefully when the weather will be a bit warmer!

Man Rescued From Manure Pile Returns, Praising Trump and God

A man was rescued yesterday from a manure barge in Kansas. Two teenage
girls biking along the shore spotted his head sticking out of the fragrant cargo. They called out to him, asking if he wished to be rescued. “Hell no!” he replied, “I belong here. I love it.” Refusing to believe what they had heard, the teenagers called 911. The local rescue squad intercepted the barge at the next lock.

The man, known only as Clyde at present, resisted his rescuers’ attempts to extricate him from the muck, shouting “Leave me here! God chose me for this position.” Despite his resistance, the rescue squad succeeded in pulling him out, accompanied by a large sucking sound. Far from being thankful for his release, the man continued to protest as he was taken away for a shower and a change of clothes.

Asked how he ended up in such an unusual place, Clyde replied that he did not know. “All I knows is I’d drunk a couple bottles of Thunderburst and next thing I knows I’m riding down this river, watching the scenery go by. Then I recalled then what my wife said to me the night before. ‘Get out!’ she said. The Lord ain’t through with you yet.’ I realized that God had put me here, through the actions of his blessed instrument, President Trump. We folks maybe not understand it all, but the president, he knows what’s best for us. He's gonna make us great again, and we must accept whatever that means. It's Godswill.”

Asked if he believed that God had also intended his rescue, he replied, “No, this is Satan’s work. I must go where Trump and God want me!” At that, he ran and jumped back on to the barge with a large plop. Source: ANN (Alternative News Network)   

Bedlam! London's Bethlem Hospital and the Word it gave us.

In our language today, "bedlam" usually means a scene of mad and noisy confusion. It was once a common or generic term for a madhouse. The word "bedlam" derives from an institution with a very long history, London's Bethlem Hospital. It was originally a medieval monastic foundation, the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, founded in 1247 to care for sick paupers. By the 15th century at the latest, it was specializing in the care of "mad" people and the name had become corrupted to Bethlem, or Bedlam. 

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530's, he gave Bethlem to London, and it became a public hospital. By the 17th century, the original building had become inadequate and the city replaced it with a new structure at Moorfields, just outside the walls. The image below is of this second Bedlam, opened in 1676.

During the 18th century, Bedlam became a popular attraction. People could visit on certain days, to see the "lunatics." Some histories claim that the public came to stare at and cruelly taunt the patients. Others argue that the public openness brought in money and helped prevent mistreatment. 

In the 1730's, William Hogarth famously depicted a scene in Bedlam in his didactic series, "The Rake's Progress." The rake, who has gone mad as a result of debauchery and debt, is shown at the center, naked, raving, with his head shaved. He is surrounded by stock caricatures of lunatics, including religious maniacs, megalomaniacs, melancholics, and would be popes and kings.

Public visits were banned in the late 18th century. In the following decades, the building deteriorated badly, and a parliamentary investigation in 1814-15 revealed scandalous conditions. Patients were often filthy and ragged, sometimes beaten and chained up. One patient, James Norris, an American sailor who had been chained to a wall in a metal harness for years, became an icon of a reform movement that was gathering pace by the early 19th century.

The movement was inspired by advocates of what became known as "moral treatment, or "moral therapy." One of the most effective spokesmen for moral treatment was a French doctor, Philippe Pinel, who has been immortalized in a famous, if romanticized, painting. 
It shows Pinel ordering the chains removed from women patients at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris in the early 1790's. Pinel's methods became widely known after he published his Treatise on Insanity in 1806. 

Another important inspiration for "lunacy reformers" came from an English institution, the Retreat, near York. The Retreat, opened in 1796, was the idea of a Quaker tea merchant, William Tuke, disturbed by mistreatment of patients at the nearby York Asylum. The Retreat adopted the principles of moral treatment and soon became world famous, especially after Tuke's grandson Samuel published A Description of the Retreat in 1813. Below is an early image of The Retreat.

Moral treatment was essentially a psychological therapy. The idea was that the mad retained a modicum of reason and human instincts and could best be managed -- and often cured -- by appealing to their feelings or emotions and their desire for acceptance. 

Promoters of moral therapy downplayed the use of medical therapies, which often involved bleeding and harsh purgatives. They denounced physical punishments, chains and low diet for "maniacs," which often bordered on starvation. Kind treatment, they argued, was more effective in "managing" patients. 

At the Retreat, the patients were informed that they were part of a family, and the routines were designed to imitate family life as much as possible. Patients were encouraged to help in cleaning, gardening, and other work. 

Moral therapists did not abandon all means of coercion and control. A controlled order was essential to the system. Moral therapy sometimes involved the revoking of privileges, isolation, and mechanical restraint for unacceptable behavior. And above all, the patients were institutionalized, sometimes for many years.

The reformers who investigated Bethlem Hospital in 1815 were aware of the work of Pinel, the Tukes, and other examples of moral treatment. Their reports to Parliament led to the building of a new hospital south of the Thames at St. George's Fields. (below, c.1820) 

  
The new Bethlem gradually adopted many of the principles of moral treatment, or tried to. The same was true of the hundreds of public lunatic asylums (later renamed mental hospitals) established during the Victorian era. The system worked reasonably well in small institutions with adequate staff. Some asylums claimed to cure a high percentage of patients, as high as 90 percent. The claims were undoubtedly inflated, but in some cases, at least, the asylums functioned as refuges or retreats for the suffering.  

But the institutions grew ever larger in the late 19th century, holding hundreds, even thousands of patients, many of them with chronic conditions the institutions could do little for. Costs soared. Those responsible for funding sought economies of scale that inevitably undermined the methods of moral treatment. 

The following image, of Bethlem's men's gallery in the 1860's, illustrates the problem. It is clean, orderly, and bright. But the seemingly endless gallery, the barred windows, and the patients wandering about indicate that all is not well.

Conditions were often much worse elsewhere. Huge, underfunded asylums, despite the best efforts of many doctors and nurses, became warehouses where moral treatment became routine if applied at all. Individuals became lost in the mass. Many remained in the asylums for years, often for life. Scandals became common, with overuse of mechanical restraints, poor diet and sanitation, endless boredom, and sometimes abuse of patients.

In the late 20th century, most of the old asylums/mental hospitals closed down or were converted into acute, short stay institutions. Deinstitutionalization was encouraged by the development of new psychotic drugs, evidence of abuse of patients, and a desire to save money.

Advocates of deinstitutionalization, like those who promoted asylums, were hailed as reformers. Patients, they argued, could be better treated in the community, in a more natural setting than an institution. The results of "community care" have been mixed at best, often bedeviled by inadequate funding  A new crop of reformers now advocate a renewed attempt at creating therapeutic communities within hospitals.

Bethlem Hospital continues to treat and care for mentally ill and emotionally disturbed patients. It relocated to its current location near Beckenham, on the outer fringes of southeast London, in 1930.

And what of the old building at St. George's Fields? The wings were knocked down but the central part of the building remains. It has housed the Imperial War Museum since 1936. Appropriate, perhaps.