Travel time once again. The ultimate destination this time was
one of the corners of the earth - Varna Bulgaria, but first I had to kick a
little of the jetlag by cooling my jets on the Cote d'Azur, or the French Riviera
with my great friend Peter Friess who is a durable and frequent travel partner.
Peter and I met up in Nice and we picked up a snappy VW convertible with a
quaint 5-speed stick. From Nice we buzzed on over to Monte Carlo for the boat
show. There were some very nice boats up to about 40 feet some costing in the 2
million range. Oh, these were the tenders for the actual boats which started at
about 80 feet and went up to over 400 feet. The big ones can’t even get into
the harbor.
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| THE NORTHER STAR |
Peter and I set our sights on the Northern Star, a 250
footer with a nifty green helicopter on the aft deck. I asked the sales rep
taking us through if the chopper would be included in the price. He said sure
if you like. At 150 million it seemed they’d just toss it in like floor mats
for a Volvo. This boat is 5 decks of overthetopness and can go wherever 52,000 gallons
of diesel will take you. Frankly, buying the Star is a bit beyond this humble restaurateur
but it can be chartered for about 700 a week in Euros in the summer in the Med
or 700 in dollars in the Carib in the winter. That’s plus food, fuel and tip so
toss in another 25 % taking you just shy of a million a week in either currency
(they also take rubles). But it is real nice. Trust me.
From Nice we cruised down the coast in the prefect sunny weather
to Saint Tropez. We got hooked up in Monte Carlo so one of our stops was Pallis
Bulli which is Pierre Cardin’s ‘house of bubbles’.
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| HOUSE OF BUBBLES |
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| Lionheart, Hunaman and Valshida |
I was overjoyed to see the boats as I had attended all but
the last race of the recent America’s Cup in San Francisco. I did witness the final
day via Skype with my family who were at son Dylan’s apartment in San Francisco
where he has a view of the entire course of the event.
The food in France defies my humble powers of description.
One night at La Penche I had a plate of tiny cuttlefish the size of the finger
tips of angels. Each one of these squid-like cephalopods has a delicate crunchy
center. As Homer would say. AGGGHHHHH. (Not the Greek guy, the cartoon
character). We sat next to a very jovial couple from Holland who said they were
in on their 36 foot sailboat. As we left the restaurant we saw them go aboard a
giant sloop…oh - 36 meters. I told Peter if I had realized that, I would have stuck
to them a little tighter.
Then off to Cannes where we had adjoining rooms at the Carleton
and where the film stars gather for the festival. That isn’t why we stayed
there. It was because during this year’s festival some thieves made off with
150 million US in jewels from the ballroom. (Queue Pink Panther music.) Cannes
is pretty over the top. The streets are lined with Ferraris and Bentleys…sort
of like Woodside I guess. But we don’t have stores that sell mobile phones for
as much as a BMW. A salesman said with a straight face one was 35k Euros. Peter
asked what made it special and the fellow said it has electroplated gold buttons. Too bad it was a Droid, or maybe…
We then flew to Geneva where Peter is the director of a
rather special watch museum. Many
of you will recall that Peter was the director of the San Jose Tech Museum for
many years. He took that institution from a marginal operation to greatness and
after 5 years decided he needed another challenge so he took the post as
director of the Patik Philliup Museum in Geneva. He does this by commuting from
the Bay Area. The owners of the museum wanted him very badly but he didn’t want
to move from California so they accepted his offer to commute. And you thought
your trip to SF was a chore.
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| TOURISTS ENJOYING THE VIEW IN SWITZERLAND |
Peter is one of the world’s foremost experts on not just timepieces
but also historical automatons. These tiny mechanical robots are the marvel of
the pre industrial age. Picture a tree covered with birds all singing and
turning their heads and flapping their wings. The birds are about an inch long
and 300 years old. Peter is
charged with not only running the museum but with acquiring historic pieces for
what is already the greatest museum of watches in the world. He recently bought
the watch owned by Marie Antoinette shortly before she became short herself.
My cousin Will Milne met up with us in Switzerland with his
two daughters Helen and Ruth. Helen is a volleyball coach and a graduate
student in Santa Cruz and Ruth just graduated from Santa Barbara after a
stunning career as the four-year starting goalie on the water polo team. This
fall she has joined the French professional team. I see more cuttlefish in my
future.
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| RUTH AND JAMIS PARAGLIDE |
After the museum visit the five of us went to the store
where the new Patik watches are sold. I wear a Timex Ironman which really turns
heads especially in that store. It helped that Peter was taking us through. The
starter watch, the one you give for the bar mitzvah, starts at 30k. A new one
sold recently for 5 million at a charity auction. I’m told they aren’t even
waterproof.
The place might look like a fairyland but the Swiss are pretty
tough minded and have a lot of rules. All able bodied men are expected to do
real military service and are required to keep a machine gun at home with
ammunition…just in case.
But enough frolicking. We had work to do. Our work was to be
sword bearers for Will at the International Fencing Tournament in Varna,
Bulgaria.
Bulgaria is the poorest country in Europe. It is part of the
EU but doesn’t use the currency. I expected it to be a sad, drab country. The
airport in the capital city Sofia was modern enough. I asked the way to Varna
and the car guy said just go out of the airport and turn right at the gypsy
village and then he chuckled as we shared a joke about American’s thinking
there would be such a rustic sight. But soon we saw there was no joke and we
found ourselves driving through a slum of very unEuropean squalor. The city
gave way to rolling countryside and village after village of collapsed barns
and empty houses. We soon came across factories from the Soviet times, all
abandoned. Some proved to be quite large, as in Detroit auto plant-sized, and
the only employment seemed to be a gate guard or two running the remarkably
clean and modern gas stations. The road we took was a country two lane highway
with suicidal truck drivers who pass at tremendous speeds on blind curves. There
is a great deal of animal roadkill and there are frequent roadside shrines to
the vast number of traffic fatalities.
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| BULGARIAN FAST FOOD (NOT BAD) |
It was about 250 miles across the country and there was only
one city of any size. It was poor, partly abandoned and very grey though it’s
claimed to be the intellectual center of Bulgaria. We sped on through. Finally
after about 7 hours we entered the seaside city of Varna. Population about
300,000 in the winter and 600,000 in the summer. Some call it the Cote d’Azur
of the Black Sea and they aren’t far off…if you don’t look too closely. It’s
oldish and the pavement heaves a bit but there are modern hotels and lots of
them. Most were open but the season was over so we had the run of the place.
All up and down the coastline there are some tens of thousands of hotel rooms
and villas. Most of the hotels and casinos were finished but the 2008 recession
hit them hard and you see a great many that are half finished or completed but
empty. It is eerie to see whole neighborhoods of empty buildings.
The fencing tournament was a multi-day affair so we settled
into our top rated hotel. This is an ultra modern place called the Grafit and
each floor had a different theme. The hotel is famous for having truly strange
rooms with loose river stone floors in the bathrooms (necessitating putting towels
down so you can walk on them) and clear glass walls for the bathrooms. The furniture
was made of solid wood or stone and some of the tables weighed 300 lbs. The
rooms were huge, the view of the Black Sea great and all for about $80 a night.
The food in town was very good and so cheap it felt like stealing.
The world of fencing is taken very seriously by the participants
who come from all over but primarily Eastern Europe. Last year Will took first place
in his 50-59 year old saber division. This drove the other fencers simply wild
because some have been doing this all their lives. He beat university fencing coaches,
Olympians and has only been doing it for 11 years. Because he is relatively new
to the sport compared to many he bested it really stung. Will is a design/builder
of fine homes and is just finishing a house on Canada Road two doors north of
Buck’s. He brings the same attention to excellence in his profession as he does
to completive fencing.
During the preliminaries the girls and I amused ourselves by
exploring the town. We discovered that there a good many stray cats and dogs.
The dogs are cared for by the government and are all tagged and live on the
streets. They were very happy to meet us as we brought them treats from
breakfast. At one point we assembled a rather large dog posse and took our new friends
to the center of town where they inexplicably attacked passing cars with startling
ferocity. One driver tried bashing one of our dogs with his car door. The
locals snarled at us with undisguised scorn which we though unwise of them as
we had a half crazed posse of biggish dogs who would do our bidding.
The day came for the finals and we were wound up as tight as
a tiny sweater. The field of 32 was quickly halved with Will winning his first
bout 10-9. Too close for comfort. Then 8 more dropped with Will easily crushing
the UC San Diego coach. Then he faced off with another American and sadly did
not prevail. We saw one guy lose and hurl his equipment and berate the ref then
apologize profusely and sputter a list of excuses. Will stoically took his
beating and said that next year he would learn from his mistakes, train harder
and take the gold again. Last year he was modest in victory (he took first) and
this year gracious in defeat. He lost to the second place finisher so he is
still one of the best swordsmen in the world and certainly the best in my
family.
It was time to drive back to Sophia but this time we took
the southern freeway. This gave us a very different view of the country. There
were still closed factories but the south had a less desperate air even though
the countryside has been severely depopulated. In the small towns there are
people so poor they are seen collecting firewood in horse carts with the entire
family. There are farms but curiously no farmers. The corn crop had just been
taken in but there are no farm buildings and we realized that under collective farming
the small farms had been wiped out and the large scale farms were mono cropping
wheat and corn and once the harvest is in the whole place takes on a post apocalyptic
feel.
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| OLD AND NEW |
Our last night in Sofia we did the town and it was fairly vibrant.
At one point we stumbled into a polite protest against the government. The
police weren’t even interested.
Bulgaria, like the other eastern European countries, will come
around and soon. The people are shaking off the communist past more slowly than
most but I believe that Bulgaria is a good bet for success. Traveling there is
so cheap it might as well be free. The people are nice and they have real
beaches so I say, go Bulgaria!
Bulgaria is pretty far to go for fencing but next year’s
tournament is scheduled to be in Mauritius. This is to the east of Madagascar
and is the farthest place from Woodside you can go on earth before you are
actually coming home.
