Island getaway

Posted on 28 Sep 2015 by lornaofarabia

My new school takes time off for both Christian and Muslim holidays, creating plenty of opportunity for short trips.  The Eid celebration in the third week of school was our first 5-day weekend this year.

It’s still plenty hot here in Cairo but we thought it would be pleasant to soak up some of the last of Europe’s summer sun in Greece. Andreas had some family and personal business to attend to on Ikaria which gave us a good reason to book a flight to our favorite Greek island. We are also looking to buy a vacation home on the island, and we could do some exploring with that in mind.

For a long time I refused to fly to the island. I am pretty much over that now. Besides, if we took the ferry, by the time we got there it would be almost time to start home.

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We spent a lot of the weekend driving around looking at houses in various villages.

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One village we liked a lot is called Therma. It has radioactive hot springs that have made it a spa destination since ancient times. When Andreas’s friend Georgia was a little girl, her parents ran a guesthouse here for vacationing Greeks. Now she has renovated the building and she invited us to stay in her bright modern flat.

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We looked at Agios Kyrikos, the capital and largest town (3,243 people) on the island. It’s too urban for my taste but it’s a nice place to visit.

Welcome to the island of Ikaria
The plaza is filled with outdoor restaurants
Still small enough that everybody knows everybody

As a place to buy a home, my first choice is the charming port town of Evdilos. At just under 3000 people, it’s the second largest community on the island. It feels like a village but has everything you could need.

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We also made our ceremonial visit to Arethousa, where Andreas’s parents were both born and where he still has plenty of cousins.

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We enjoyed plenty of that fresh Ikarian cuisine

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And at long last Andreas finally got all the paperwork for his citizenship card completed. It has been… eight years???

The dima (like a county clerk’s office) in Evdilos where Andreas has spent way too many hours
Waiting at the police station in Agios Kyriokos for the final step

But wouldn’t you know, they needed one more day to print up his residency card, and we had to leave the next morning. I guess it never hurts to have another another reason to go back to the island.

Also, we didn’t find that perfect house. Maybe next time.

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Picture us right here.

Posted in Food, Greece, Ikaria, Islands | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The last bird of summer

Posted on 20 Sep 2015 by lornaofarabia

In the spring when I accepted my new job in Cairo, I had a special request for the director. Would I be able to take a couple of days off in September to take my daughter to university? My new boss, himself a parent of college kids, said of course.

Because of Andreas’s work schedule, I’m usually the one to see our kids off on this big step toward independence. Alekka is our last child, and the first to attend university in another country. I wasn’t going to miss this. (Good thing the director said yes, as I’m not quite sure what I would have done if he hadn’t.)

It was a very busy two days in London.

We stayed at our favorite budget hotel in Bloomsbury.

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We walked to the storage unit where we’d stashed some things we bought over the summer, closed out the account, and took her new stuff back to the hotel.

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We shopped for kitchen gadgets and essential knick knacks at Pylones in Covent Garden

Covent Garden Market was full of balloons for a special art installation.

Covent Garden Market was full of balloons for a special art installation.

We visited Alekka’s boyfriend at his work (he’s a bar man in a pub!)

Mich at work
Taking a break with Alekka

We enjoyed some tasty meals

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There is a great little cafe in the basement of the hotel

We visited her student accommodation. Alekka couldn’t move in until the day after I left but they let us in to her apartment for a quick look.

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We practiced walking to school from home, just like when she was little. Aww.

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We visited the campus. We had seen it a year ago as part of our tour of UK campuses, but a school looks different after you’ve decided on it.

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While we were there we noticed a student talking to a crowd of well-dressed middle aged folks. Someone forgot to tell me it was parent tour day.

"Whoops, sorry, Mom."

“Whoops, sorry, Mom. I guess I forgot to tell you about that email.”

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New digs

Posted on 30 Aug 2015 by lornaofarabia

Last year Andreas lived in a pleasant apartment close to work. It had two bedrooms, a living/dining area, a small kitchen, and one bathroom.  He liked it well enough but I felt that it would be too small for the both of us, especially if we wanted to host visiting friends and family. So Andreas sent me pictures of the apartments of some of his departing colleagues and together we decided on a lovely three-bedroom place with a large balcony and a great kitchen.

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It’s on the fifth floor with no elevator, but at least once I am all the way up here I am content to stay.

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Posted in Cairo, Egypt, Home life | 1 Comment

Bookish

Posted on 19 Aug 2015 by lornaofarabia

Edinburgh is a literary city. Maybe it’s the winters: we were here for a week in February 2012 and I’ll attest that the weather then was perfect for broody author types (and reader types too). It’s no wonder “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” originated in this place. In any case Edinburgh is associated with great writing and accordingly was named the first UNESCO City of Literature in 2004.

There’s often something book-related going on. And everywhere you turn, there’s a plaque or a monument commemorating some literary association. Suits me fine.

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Other notable Edinburgh writers have included J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), and more recently, Alexander McCall Smith (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series) and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting).

Ian Rankin, originator of the tartan noir genre of hardboiled Scottish mysteries (of which I am a tremendous fan), lives here and uses the city as the main setting for his Rebus detective series. You can take a guided tour of Rebus sites or go with the self-guided phone app “Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.”

Inspector Rebus’s favorite bar
Another Rebus local

The National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge houses a collection that focuses on Scottish history. The librarians assemble excellent exhibitions which you can visit in the display rooms. I wasn’t able to fit a library tour in on this trip but no matter, I like having another reason to come back. The National Library also has a great outreach team; if you are a bookish person with an interest in Scotland, I recommend “like”ing the library on Facebook for some entertaining and interesting additions to your newsfeed. These posters on sale in the library gift shop were to advertise a 2012 exhibition about the movies in Scotland.

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Taking a break from the Fringe one morning, I went on a guided walking tour of some of the city’s famous literary locations.

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One of the things I learned on the tour was that J.K. Rowling didn’t write Harry Potter at the Elephant House like everyone thinks, but at an upstairs coffee house that her brother-in-law owned called Nicolson’s Cafe. It’s under different ownership and has been renamed Spoon. There’s a small plaque on the wall about it.

Apparently this was not the place (tell the people lining up to get in)
JK’s brother-in-law let her stay and write all day

The annual International Book Festival is one of the largest in the world. It runs concurrently with the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe, but prices were too high and lines too long to see my favorite authors so Alekka and I just strolled around the grounds to soak up the rarified atmosphere.

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At the Fringe this year there were plenty of shows for literary-minded people. One of my favorites was Austentatious, offering a completely new (and completely hilarious) Jane Austen novel in every performance.

And Edinburgh might have the only train station in the world named after a novel: Walter Scott’s Waverly.

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Luckily I’ve got a good book to read on the long trip from Edinburgh Waverly to London Euston.

 

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Butt to Barra and beyond

Posted on 28 Jul 2015 by lornaofarabia

Walkers and cyclists on a quest to travel the 150-mile length of the Outer Hebrides use the Butt of Lewis and the little island of Barra as endpoints. Butt to Barra is the Hebridean equivalent of John O’Groats to Lands End.

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We didn’t come prepared for self-propelled long-distance travel, but we do have a car. On Saturday morning we checked out of our Callanish cottage and drove up to the Butt of Lewis to start our tour.

Lewis

I put plenty of photos from around Lewis in my last post, so all these pictures are from the Butt. It was my first time to the far north of the island. It’s awfully pretty up here. The old lighthouse was designed by David Stevenson of the Stevenson lighthouse engineering family; the author Robert Louis Stevenson was his nephew.

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Harris

The Isle of Harris, as I have mentioned before, actually shares an island with the Isle of Lewis. On the map above, the unmarked border between them runs across just about where the “I.” is in “Seaforth I.” If you want to refer to the whole thing, it’s called Lewis and Harris. Anyway, in contrast to Lewis’s flat peat bogs, Harris has beautiful yellow beaches and an abundance of the flower-studded grassy coastal plains they call machair.

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Berneray

The ferry from Tarbert in Harris takes you to Berneray.

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This island has been populated since the Bronze Age but remained obscure enough that in 1987 Prince Charles was able to come out here to live as a crofter for a week without the media finding out. These folks do things the old-fashioned way. For my folklorist friends and any serious Gaelophiles, here is a video about the residents celebrating the new year on January 12. They didn’t change with the rest of Britain in 1752. The video is in Gaelic with no subtitles, but you can get the idea.

We didn’t actually get a change to experience much of the interestingness of Berneray. We must have blinked when we got off the ferry because we suddenly found ourselves in…

North Uist

North Uist (pronounced you-ist) is mostly flat and marshy. We saw renovated blackhouse cottages, photogenic Highland cattle, and a Georgian folly that was built to give local men work to do following the potato blight of 1830.

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We stopped to watch a crofting family – a man with his adult sons and some grandsons – shearing sheep by the side of the road.

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Benbecula

Causeways link this little island to the Uists north and south. We blew through it pretty quickly. They say the locals killed a mermaid here in 1830, but they did give her a proper Christian burial.

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South Uist

We stayed two nights on South Uist. There’s plenty to do and see here: walks out to the beach and on paths through the machair; ruins of medieval chapels; the well-organized local history museum. We spent the better part of an afternoon looking for the site of the prehistoric roundhouses where archaeologists found mummies.

We also visited the childhood home of Flora MacDonald, the Scottish heroine who famously helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape over the sea to Skye in 1746. My friend Ronalee was on the archaeological team that excavated the house in 1990s and I enjoyed seeing the results of her work.

The Reformation skipped over this isolated pocket of Scotland, and the Catholic Clan Ranald rulers here offered sufficient protection that the people could worship openly. The population here, along with Benbecula and Barra, remains primarily mainly Roman Catholic.

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Eriskay

A causeway connects South Uist with Eriskay.

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Eriskay’s main claim to fame is that it was the scene of events that inspired Compton MacKenzie’s book Whisky Galore, which in turn became the classic 1949 Ealing Studies comedy film known in the US as Tight Little Island. In 1941 the cargo ship SS Politician, carrying 28,000 cases of malt whisky to Jamaica and New Orleans, sank off the coast of Eriskay; most of the whisky was salvaged by the islanders despite the vigorous efforts of the local customs officer. The Am Politician pub on Eriskay has memorabilia from the event, including two of the rescued bottles. They also do a nice fish lunch.

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Also of great interest to me was St. Michael’s church, which has an important role in the second book of the Lewis Trilogy by Peter May. I highly recommend this series for police procedural mystery readers. I won’t say any more about the church because I don’t want to spoil the book for anybody.

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The last link of Butt to Barra is made by ferry from the harbor next to Prince’s Beach on Eriskay. Prince’s Beach is where Bonnie Prince Charlie first arrived in Scotland.

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Barra

The main town on Barra is the aptly named Castlebay. On a tiny island in the protected bay is Kisimul Castle, the seat of the clan McNeil. The clan still owns the castle but since 2001 they have rented it to Historic Scotland on a 1000-year lease for the price of one British pound and one bottle of whisky per year. The building is mostly in its medieval state but the family keeps a few marginally modernized rooms for overnight visits and special events.

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The Whisky Galore! movie was filmed on Barra – I don’t know why they chose here rather than Eriskay, but they did – with local people in many of the roles. There is a hotel pub that has movie posters and memorabilia from the film and its making.

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Barra has the only airport in the world where regularly scheduled flights land on a sand beach. Landings are scheduled around the tides.

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Vatersay

We took the trip a step further and ventured down past Barra to Vatersay, which is connected to Barra by another causeway.

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We could have gone further still, but Sandray, Rosinish, Mingulay, and another Berneray will have to wait until next time. We had to get get back up to Barra to catch our ferry for the five-hour journey to Oban on the mainland.

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Around Lewis

Posted on 23 Jul 2015 by lornaofarabia

On Lewis we stayed in a cottage just down the road from the Standing Stones of Callanish.

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HebCelt took up three full days, but we had two weeks and a car to get around in. Here are some pictures from our time on the island.

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Most of our cottage time was spent cooking

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Except that one afternoon when the kids decided to dye their hair.

Alekka’s is dark red, Mich chose black

 

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My man Murdo

Posted on 21 Jul 2015 by lornaofarabia

I’ve written before about my ongoing investigations into the roots of the MacIver family tree. But despite many research hours spent in Lewis and Harris’s libraries, cemeteries, and family history center, I’d come away from previous visits unable to “cross the water.”

On this trip I was determined to try everything I could think of to locate my great-great-grandfather Murdo MacIver on his home island.  After dropping Mich off at the ferry terminal on Monday morning, I left Andreas and Alekka to their own rainy-day devices while I settled in once again at Leabharlainn nan Eilean Siar (Libraries of the Western Isles), Stornoway branch.

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I was happy to see that Anne, the same wonderful librarian who had been so helpful two years ago, was still there. That summer, thanks also to the remarkably thorough croft histories put together by local historian and genealogist Bill Lawson, we had eliminated all the Murdo/Murdoch MacIvers who had been born on the island’s country crofts in the 1830s.  So now Anne and I started to look carefully at records of men in the town of Stornoway itself.

I had only three pieces of evidence that Murdo was from Lewis: first, Lewis has the highest concentration of people with the surname MacIver in Scotland; second, Murdo named his second son Lewis, which is an unusual first name in Scotland but is traditional among the MacIvers of Lewis; and third, this 1860 census record that shows Murdo and his young family in Boston, Massachusetts (Lewis MacIver was born later, after the family moved to San Francisco). This is the only record that gives birthplace detail on Murdo beyond “Scotland.”

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It’s this census record that made me so sure that the Isle of Lewis was the place to look. In those days, U.S. census information was gathered by an interviewer going door to door, and if you can imagine a native Gaelic speaker with a thick Scottish accent saying “Stornoway” it could very likely sound like “Stormwal” to a census taker who had never heard of the place. But while I felt confident that this meant Murdo had been born on Lewis, I also thought there was a good chance he had named Stornoway because it was the only town on the island, in the same way that people from El Cerrito, Mill Valley, or South San Francisco might for the sake of simplicity tell a foreigner that they had been born in San Francisco.

But now we were turning our attention to Stornoway proper. There were eight men with the same name and about the right age living there in 1851. The one that looked likeliest to me was the 18-year-old grandson of the retired surgeon and ship-owner Alexander MacIver. Alexander was fairly well off, and also well documented in the various local histories. He was not a good businessman, however, and eventually had to sell his property to the Lewis herring-lord at an unfavorable price. It was about then, and probably because of the family’s diminished circumstances, that the grandson Murdoch went to sea to seek his fortune. This story matched up neatly with what I knew about my Murdo, who worked his passage on a ship and continued to work in and around ships for the rest of his life. I have to admit that I became a little over-attached to the idea of this being the right man when I learned that Alexander was descended from a Scottish warrior named Murchadh Riabhach nan Corc (“Nasty Murdo of the Sheath-Knives”). I really wanted to put that name in my family tree.

But alas, it was not to be. That particular Murdoch turns up in Canada, where he remained. So back to the census books. As I followed their lives through the census, marriage, and death records, a few more of the Murdos fell by the wayside for one reason or another. Then Anne brought me something she’d found in a Stornoway baptismal book: an adult man, Murdoch MacIver, born 1824, son of Murdo MacIver excise taxman on a ship and his wife Marion MacKenzie, baptized “John” on 6 Aug 1850.

Adult baptism is an unusual thing in Scotland, especially since this same Murdoch (with the same parents) had already been baptized in Stornoway soon after his birth in 1833 (the 1824 birthdate recorded on the adult baptism turned out to be incorrect). This second baptism would have been carried out for one of two reasons, or both: the family wanted to honor someone whose name was John, or the young man was going to embark on some dangerous endeavor. I knew that my Murdo was actually John Murdo, as he sometimes appears this way in American records, but I hadn’t found a baptism of any John Murdo of the correct age on the island yet. This would explain why. Further investigation shows the family of the twice-baptized Murdo living in a humble part of town, the father usually at sea on the ship “Prince of Wales.” The paternal grandparents of young Murdo are John MacIver and Janet Grant, so it is possible that the parents decided late that they wanted to honor the young man’s grandfather by giving his name to their only son. Also, this second baptism would have taken place shortly before my Murdo sailed to America, a good reason to make sure his soul was safe.

It all lines up. But the clincher is the family names. In Stornoway in 1841, we see this Murdo living with his mother Marion and two sisters, Catherine and Jessie. His father is at sea. In America, my Murdo’s second, third, and fourth daughters are named Marion, Catherine, and Jessie (the first daughter, Mary, was probably named after her Irish Catholic maternal grandmother). Murdo’s first son is John Murdoch and his second son is Lewis. I am satisfied I have found my man.

Posted in Family, Islands, UK | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

HebCelt 2015

Posted on 18 Jul 2015 by lornaofarabia

Andreas and I had a blast at the HebCelt music festival in 2013 and knew it would be a highlight of our summer in Scotland this year as well.

The bands were all new to us with no repeats from two years ago. As soon as the lineup was announced I downloaded as many albums as I could find. After listening to that playlist a few times I had a pretty good idea about how I wanted to divide my time between the three performance stages. The ones whose albums I’d liked best all put on excellent performances, and there were also some happy surprises when bands had great live energy that didn’t come across in their recordings. A few of my favorites:

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In 2013 we were blessed with gorgeous sunny weather all three days. This time the climate was more typical of the islands, but a little rain can’t dampen the spirits of festival-goers here.

A few festival FAQs:

What are the venues like?

The main shows are on three covered stages (Main, Island, and Acoustic) on the grounds of Lews Castle in Stornoway. You can bring a chair or blanket, but most people stand, especially when it’s raining. There are a few other venues in town and around the island.

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What do you wear?

Dress for Scotland, dress for a music festival, dress for the weather

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What do you eat?

The on-site vendors offer plenty of choices to go with your local ale.

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Posted in Islands, Music, UK | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Camden town

Posted on 10 Jul 2015 by lornaofarabia

Our flat in Camden is a big funky old place with Victorian furniture. The owner is an artist, and it’s got charm and character. I do kind of wish it also had internet, but the lack gives me a reason to check out the local coffee shops (as if I needed a reason other than the coffee).

I’ve written a little about Camden before and I won’t repeat myself here. On this visit I spent a sunny afternoon listening to local bands at a music festival in Camden Lock, and on another day Alekka and I had fun browsing the High Street shops.

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There is always something interesting to see in Camden, but the coolest sight was out our kitchen window looking down on the back garden.

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A Sunny Afternoon

Posted on 9 Jul 2015 by lornaofarabia

Our east-to-west cross-Britain expedition complete, Alekka and I drove back from Penzance through Exeter to London. On Tuesday I returned the somewhat worse for wear rental car.

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I thought I had deleted this photo, but I found it. Ouch.

Alekka and I moved into an Airbnb in Camden for a few days while we wait for her boyfriend Mich to finish up work. He’ll be free after Friday night, so Saturday morning we will pick up another car for a road trip to the HebCelt festival on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland.  I will try extra hard not to hit anything this time. Andreas flew from LA to Glasgow today; he’ll meet us Monday at our cottage in Callanish.

Alekka and I spent this evening out in the West End.  First we went for a quite yummy pre-show pizza. I will be making this at home for sure.

Prosciutto and fig with arugula and shaved parmesan

Prosciutto and fig with arugula and shaved parmesan

The main event tonight was a musical called A Sunny Afternoon, based on the story of the British rock band The Kinks and featuring their music. The show won the Olivier award (like a Tony, only British) for best new musical this year. Here’s the cast performing at the Olivier awards:

I don’t know if Alekka even knew who the Kinks were before this, although she did recognize a few of their songs – it would be almost impossible not to after living with me for 18 years. But I think they gained a new fan today.

The Harold Pinter theatre is only a couple of blocks from the Red Lion pub so of course we stopped in to buy a pint from our favorite bartender after the show.

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Two more sleeps and we’re off to Scotland. And we’re taking the bartender with us.

 

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