A Dutch Treat   To continue the Dutch theme from the Bowery discussion, below are some examples to show how similar Dutch and English are, even more similar than German and English. (Note the special form for neuter nouns.)

Of the six forms, de, deze, and dat are strikingly similar to English the, this (these), that. It is not to surprising to think that those forms could possibly have survived in local New York dialect pronunciation.

Here are some Dutch sentences I've put together, a bit contrived, yet real. Have fun.

Visiting Ground Zero   That last sentence moves us into a more somber frame of thought. A few weeks ago, rail (subway-type) service from New Jersey was resumed at the site of the World Trade Center. A temporary winged canopy has been built at street level, to be replaced by a rail station by a major architect. I had occasion to go by and went down a level or two into the station, but not beyond the turnstiles. From the south side of the pit you could look down six stories and see trains pulling in and out. Since it's all supposed to be underground, and will be again, it's kind of looking like a cutaway drawing.

As it turns out, my niece's husband Joe has been doing some major electrical contracting work, including in the refurbished interior of Radio City Music Hall, but then specializing in train work. He built the new Air-Train to Kennedy Airport, and has been working on the train at the WTC. He asked if I wanted a tour of the WTC site, and two days before Christmas (the day after our Bowery day), I left Bev watching TV and took an hour's tour.

In 1961 I clerked for a half year on Wall Street, and during lunch hours would familiarize myself with the old Dutch street pattern that is the financial district. I remember going over to where the WTC was going up and noticing at the time that the one megablock that had been assembled from 16 traditional blocks was just too big, and the rising towers were just in the wrong place. The open pit now gives the same impression. Fortunately, a number of streets are going to be reconnected through the site, notably Greenwich Street north-south and Fulton Street east-west, and others. Some might just be for pedestrians, however.

I had to get a pass as a day visitor and leave my driver's license. Joe and I walked down the six stories via the concrete stairway from the parking garage. As you looked out on each level going down, you could see the remnant of the garage floor, with yellow lines for the parking spaces. At the bottom there was actually very little to see, strange as it seems. You saw the four sides of the slurry wall ("the bathtub"), with all rubble cleared away except for that staircase used for access and the adjoining remnants of the garage floors. You could see all the special supports that had been added to hold the wall in place until new floors could be put back to support the walls.

Picture a house having burnt down with the rubble cleared away. It was like being in the cellar of that house, except on a much larger scale, with the feeling that bright sunlight shouldn't be there.

At all historic sites, or sites where something monumental happened, you have to bring with you the life knowledge you've gained in order to understand. When crossing the Atlantic and the area where the Titanic went down is pointed out, all you see is the sea, no different from what you had been seeing. You have to bring the knowledge of the events, from reading, from the movie, somehow. It's the same at Gettysburg battlefield, which looks like a nice grassy park with a few monuments. At the "bathtub" as well, you have to know what transpired there, because there is little to actually see.

The ramp coming down from the south side is formidable. When you consider it has to drop six stories in a short distance, you'll understand why trucks and even pedestrians have trouble negotiating it.

All around the slurry wall there are openings for old, or new, water, sewer, electrical connections. It heightens the affect of looking at a cross-section of something in a science book.

In the first decade of the 20th Century, the Hudson Tubes were built. It's a rail system, a private subway actually, that connects Newark Penn Station with Jersey City and the Hoboken rail station, and then crosses under the Hudson to New York. The north branch goes under Cristopher Street in Greenwich Village uptown to NY Penn Station (and was never completed to Grand Central Station). You will recall that the man on Gay Street was working to prevent the extention of the Christopher Street station on that line.

The south branch has two "tubes" to lower Manhattan. Trains come in one, make a left turn to the station, then left again to leave via the other tube. There used to be a station building called Hudson Terminal, which was one of the buildings that the WTC replaced. (The line is now called PATH for Port Authority Trans-Hudson.) At that point, the two left turns in the line were cut short so that the station was more centered in the site. I now found out that the train line was also lowered considerably at that point, so that if you look up on the east slurry wall you see huge openings where the cut off tunnel area is. We went up to this "left-over" piece of tunnel, which is now used as a loading dock for truck deliveries.

Finally we went down again and entered the station from the pit. It's all stainless steel, with sunlight shining through. We watched the trains coming and going with New Jersey destinations, then exited out the turnstiles where I had been the previous week, to the street.

Joe said the trains run on DC power, which used to be supplied from the New York side, but which now comes from New Jersey. Joe's jurisdiction and responsibility extends to the state line in the middle of the Hudson in the two tunnels.

Transporter Wheelchairs   When we first needed to buy a wheelchair a few years ago, I looked online, and without too much thought decided we didn't need the big wheels, and I found what is called a transporter wheelchair (one person transports the other), which has four seven-inch or twenty-centimeter wheels. It turned out to be the wisest of moves.

Think about people you've seen in wheelchairs. Most of them are in those big-wheeled monstrosities, meant for people to self-propel. How many people have you seen actually doing that? Surely a minority. Most people in a wheelchair are usually too frail to use those big wheels anyway. Even in airports, where airlines provide wheelchairs and people to push them for you as well, nobody thinks of providing a small-wheeled chair. Even the international symbol for the handicapped shows a stick figure above a huge wheel.

If you wonder what on earth the difference is and why anyone should care, experience has shown me very clearly that if we were stuck with one of those big-wheeled monstrosities we'd have a fraction of the mobility we do. Without a curb cut, curbs become a problem, but managable. But that's just one step. With big wheels, how do you easily bring someone up 3-4 steps? You can't. If the restaurant doesn't have a ramp, you need a couple of brawny guys to help. You can move a chair with small wheels up and down stairs just like a baby stroller. The increase in mobility is incredible, yet so few people use them.

I manage up to about four steps on my own, but with more than that, for safety's sake, I like someone to spot me at the foot end of the chair. Without a transporter wheelchair we wouldn't be able to do much of our travelling.

In regard to that, I've "invented" a way to make the chair narrower. On planes, they supply an extra-narrow "aisle chair" to bring people down the aisle. Trains usually don't even have anything like that.

All wheelchairs collapse side-to-side for storage. On ours, I've had friends make two four-inch tubes from some PVC pipe with slots down the side. I store them on some horizontal bars. When necessary, I snap them onto two vertical bars which then prevents the seat from coming down all the way. The effect is to have a slightly drooping seat, and a chair narrower by about three inches. I'm looking forward to using it going down train aisles to sleeping cars, and to also be able to go down to the dining car down the narrow aisles.

But I used it on a plane for the first time coming down to Tampa. In the waiting room I moved Bev and narrowed the chair. It went right to our plane seat. When getting off the plane we waited until all the passengers were gone, then one of the two waiting pilots, believe it or not got our chair. He apologized for not being able to get it open all the way, until I explained what was going on. Both pilots and all four flight attendants were very interested in our "narrowable" chair.

Finding Three More Countries   You may wonder how a person could be so out of it as to "forget" having been in three countries, but that's not how it happened. In order to join the Travelers’ Century Club, I’ve tried to add up countries we’ve been to, and, as of last summer, having added Guernsey, Jersey, Sicily, and Malta, I thought we were up to 82. Now I've found three more. I saw an article from the Wall Street Journal about the Travelers' Century Club. First it was just heartening that the TCC should merit a front-page article on the WSJ, but also it showed a map of some places, including Srpska.

Note that countries come and go. The TCC now lists East Germany under its "retired countries", for instance. Also, if you've been to a place that later became partially or totally politically independent, you can count it. After all, you have been there, even though it wasn't separate at the time.

We were in Yugoslavia in 1972 as part of our sabbatical. Yugoslavia was one country then. Coming from Bulgaria, I clearly remember driving to Belgrade (in the province of Serbia), Sarajevo (Bosnia), then on to Dubrovnik (Croatia) on the coast, then north. I've counted all these places in my original total.

However, the map in the WSJ article reminded me that the Serbs living in the north of Bosnia were not happy, and declared themselves to be in Srpska. No government recognizes this political entity (they have a website--look it up), yet it is separate. There is no way could have driven from Belgrade to Sarajevo without having been in Srpska. Add one.

At this point, I was on a roll, so I got down Bev's travel diary and read in her inimitable handwriting that while in Dubrovnik, we took a day trip south, to Kotor, on Kotor Bay, the only fjord in the Mediterranean. Checking the map, I see that's in Montenegro. I didn't recall that. Add one more.

Picking up two, I checked the whole list again. In the 1960's, we had taken our only trip to the Middle East. We were in the West Bank. Jordan, otherwise on the far side of the Jordan River, controlled the West Bank. I had counted Jordan. But now the West Bank is becoming Palestine. Could I count them both? I e-mailed the TCC website, and yes, I should count them both. Add a third one. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, without going anywhere, we added three countries, to bring our corrected total to 86. Just 14 to go.

Travel in 2004   For the first time in many years, we are taking a winter trip. The longest cruise we've ever been on so far was two weeks on the Deutschland in 2000.

This Thursday, January 22, we will sail round-trip from Fort Lauderdale on Cunard's Caronia to a totally new area for us, beyond Europe and North America. We will go through the Panama Canal and circumnavigate South America, making many stops all the way. The trip takes seven weeks, and we return, curiously, on Bev's birthday, March 12. (This is doubly curious, since last summer we got off the QE2 on my birthday, September 1.) We will be in terra incognita and onboard for a long while, both new experiences.

I'll say now we'll be in nine new countries. If all goes well, our TCC total will reach 95 after this trip. We will hit # 100 on a trip right before Christmas, and join the TCC by the end of the year. # 100 should be Tortola in the British Virgin Islands.

[Note: “All went well” on the South American trip, and we both made it to 95. All did not go well after that, and Beverly didn’t survive to make the December trip with me and get beyond 95.]

Ironies   Last week we got formidable-looking invitations to go to Fort Lauderdale on January 28 as members of Cunard's World Club, to tour the Queen Mary 2, plus a cocktail reception and lunch. Fort Lauderdale will be the QM2's home port. I think we would have gone, except for the irony that we'll be sailing on the Caronia from the same spot six days earlier, so that's the end of that.

There are two other ironies involving the QM2 of a more philosophical nature. The New York Times had an editorial a couple of weeks ago, in which they pointed out that in 1969, two events happened close to each other. For the first time, the Concorde flew between New York and Europe, ushering in the new era of SST travel, and Cunard, somewhat wistfully, sent the QE2 on it's first transatlantic crossing to New York, surely the end of an era.

Now, again within a few months of each other in late 2003 and early 2004, the Concorde has flown for the last time, and the QM2 will make its first transatlantic crossing to New York. Who would have ever believed that three decades ago?

Beyond that is this. I remember seeing in the paper that one of those last Concordes was sent up the Hudson on a barge (we missed seeing out our window), to the Intrepid Air and Space Museum, on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in midtown near the cruiseship terminal.

Therefore, everytime the QM2 and other ships come and go, it will pass a defunct Concorde. I think the QM2 will have too much class to thumb its nose.