Places – Kyle Schroeckenthaler

On the Difficulties of Travel Blogging

How do people do it – I mean – exactly WHEN do people do it?

Any plans to post about weekend activities while working from Europe for the summer have been a complete failure.

Here I am, a day before leaving to fly back to Boston, finally writing something about not writing much. Not once while visiting cities around Switzerland did I ever make the time before going to bed or in the morning before going out to write about the past day, the places we’d seen and the things we’d done. There was always too much to do! And so I’m amazed that there are so many people out there that manage to share their experiences – I wonder what their secret is to cranking out material.

Sofia was just complaining yesterday about how she spent over an hour posting pictures on Instagram from a weekend. I think it was just 2-3, maybe 4 photos. She couldn’t understand hour people manage to post a half dozen of these curated lifestyle-type photos of themselves ever day – and still have any life left!

While on vacation this past week – other trips have just been weekends in between working – I finally finished reviewing the photos I took with the camera in Turkey. This is why I don’t take photos… Just deleting the bad ones too me over two months! So maybe I’ll pull a few of those photos and do a nice blog sometime.

I still want to try to write a bit about our adventures – just to have something to help me remember to. So maybe they’ll just be more removed from the actual events they retell – or maybe they won’t ever happen because I’m too caught up following other peoples comments on Twitter or something….

Oberes Hohmoos: Day 1

Today Sofia and I moved into the Studio that we’ll be subletting for the next two months. This came along with some requisite house cleaning and unpacking as we settled into the first space that will be ours for a period of longer than 3 days since leaving Boston May 10th.

It’s just south of the train station at Stettbach, which makes it really convenient for transportation, especially to get to the EBP offices near Stadelhofen. There’s full SBB rail, two trams and numerous buses coming into the hub on a regular basis. I was told that although the Zürichbergtunnel opened in 1990 this part of the city really didn’t start developing until very recently. It’s only 6 or 7 km from the very center of Zürich, but its still pretty quiet.

There are some very new looking apartment buildings in a large complex across the street and an increasing number of corporate campuses with a veritable skyscraper going up right behind the station. Our place though might have been here since earlier than the 90s and at least some of the adjacent buildings seem to have been repurposed from farm structures for additional apartments.

A large grey cow grazing in a green field with the buildings of Stettbach behind.

It backs right into the woods of Zürichberg. After lounging around most of the afternoon we managed to get ourselves outside to explore. Zürichberg is an expansive nature preserve right in the city with the zoo somewhere near the top. And it’s full of well maintained hiking and cycling trails. Yellow diamonds and signposts abound! Right in our backyard we saw a wild deer grazing that eventually rain off up the hills. Along the trails there were several pastures with cows out, one bunch of which had their distinctive Swiss bells clanging.

We must have been out for around 4 km. It’s been absolutely fantastic weather since arriving in Zürich, with a few showers and a foggy morning that are nothing worth complaining about. We’re really excited to be so close to the peaceful and quite trails out back while at the same time having great connectivity to continue to explore the city (and get to work efficiently, of course).

“Impossible” Journeys

This is one of those posts about a place not so far away from home — the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. But more that the physical place, I have some thoughts about the places one of the special exhibits can take you. One important thing about the MFA though – it’s free after 4 pm on Wendesdays. Amazing!

Sofia and I went to see the special exhibit bringing work by Maurits Cornelis Escher to Boston for the first time ever. It’s titled “Infinite Dimensions” and Escher is famous for creating paradoxical scenes as well as playing with time and space in his prints.

I really enjoy how Esher’s art is very grounded and rational — stemming from his work with geometry, tessellation and other technical considerations, while at the same time it’s irrational and abstract. Most abstract contemporary and modern art is very unappealing to me — maybe I’m just not creative enough. But Escher stretches reality in just the right way for me. For me, the exhibit was really about the journey to the impossible places that Escher is able to create for us.

Here is “Double Planetoid,” in which a binary world arises out of the void, showing the natural and the man-made intertwined but distinct from each other. Much of Escher’s work has this connection to the natural world — his most common themes for tessellations are birds, frogs, and fish. While sometimes the human and the wild interact with each other, in “Double Planetoid,” the city is completely sanitized, with nature outside of it’s walls and guards on watch. The natural world is likewise untouched by humanity. Although they are intertwined with each other they don’t really touch.

Sometimes, I feel like this is how a lot of people want our planet to actually function, and maybe it would be better if it did. Cities and highways in so many cases were built without consideration for effects on or connections with the natural world. But humans always spill over into the world around us. Most of our wild places are gone now, or walled in to protect them. Escher “Double Planetoid” took me briefly on a journey to a world where the wilderness was really pushing back on the build environment. Something we don’t confront much in the U.S. these days.

This next piece was definitely my favorite – it’s over 12 feet long and covers an amazing number of topics. It’s called “Metamorphosis II” and the artist masterfully connects geometry to detailed scenes of a honeycomb and bees on one side, before dissolving back into simple shapes and after moving through several tessellations to a coastal city scene — which is also part of a chess game. Lizards, birds, and fish are all present.

Escher completed it after leaving Italy as the political climate started to deteriorate in the lead-up to WWII. However, the coastal village couldn’t be anywhere else except the Mediterranean and it makes me feel the same wanderlust that took the Dutchman to Italy in the first place. It also reminds me of the Torre de Belem outside of Lisbon and other river defenses from from our last trip to Span and Portugal. These old cities still hug the water features that were the arteries of their economy centuries ago.

In Escher’s depiction the promenade along the water is full of people walking, and for me the buildings and the narrow winding streets speak of people who see their neighbors on a daily basis and know what’s happening in their community. In a way, this is a further point of symmetry with the beehive on the opposite side of the print. Both are close-knit and cooperative communities. Something I feel like is so lost in most of the U.S. and probably other modern economies today.

That all these were done as prints, intricately fitting together and yet so crisp is amazing. “Metamphosis II” has half a dozen colors and making woodcuts to fit together perfect must have been exhausting.

There’s a few more pieces that I found really powerful. “Day and Night” seems like a somewhat less common theme for Escher. None of his other most popular work really depicts the countryside. In this piece, birds arise directly out of the tile farm plots around a rural Dutch community. The night and day are symmetrical across the vertical center, with white birds flying into the night and black ones into the day. The town, or two towns, lie along a slow moving river, with ships sailing away and roads radiating out from the community.

For another really abstract impossible journey, “Other World” takes us into outer space to a crater strewn celestial object. An impossibly wise looking bird stares in towards us with galaxies revolving in the background. The building we look out from could be a temple to the insignificance of the observer in the universe.

Of the scenes of impossible building geometries and people’s lives with-in them, I’ve chosen to share “Waterfall.” It combines the monotony of daily life, with some truly otherworldly vegetation and a waterwheel with a closed supply system. Perhaps I also enjoy how this piece again connects people to the land, so that the alienation isn’t complete, but is still tied to the terraced fields behind the focal point.

There were over 50 pieces in total which included some of Escher’s most famous work. Here are some of the other popular pieces that are on display until the end of May: Ascending and Descending, Belvedere, Print Gallery, Three Worlds, Bond of Union, Relativity, Order and Chaos, Puddle, Drawing Hands, Eye, Verbum, Reptiles. If you can’t make it to the MFA, you can check these out online at the M.C. Escher official page.

Welcome

Hey! Thanks for stopping by my blog page. This is my space to share fun insights with you from adventures around town or journeys across the globe. Hopefully you find my musings inspire you to get out and explore as well. I think travel is an amazing way to learn about yourself and other people – whether your travel companions or local and other journeyers.

Some of my most formative travels, which I might go back and blog about retroactively include some of these trips:

The first time I finally made it to Europe – Portugal and Spain – November 2016
An academic year in Beijing – and Tsingdao, Xian (3 times), Chengdu, Hebei, Jiangxi, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, etc – 2011-2012
My first trip to Colombia – May 2015
Asheville and the Appalacians – 2014, 2015
Jamaica, May 2014

You’ll also hopefully see some local adventures in the Boston area, since I really believe you don’t have to go far away from home to find hidden places that have a meaningful impact on you. These might have to wait until later in the summer though as Sofia and I are off to Zurich and hopefully some other European adventures for two months this summer after a week in Turkey starting May 11th.