A Disorganized Author Fair

 

I've always had mixed feelings about the value of attending author fairs, and Saturday was a good advertisement for staying at home.

Here is how they usually go. After paying a table/registration fee, which varies with the venue, I sit at a table for 3 to 5 hours talking to visitors and selling books. For part of the time, anyway. Although I enjoy the interaction with readers, there is a lot of down time. I take something to do, but it isn’t always enough. Still, if I make more than my table fee, I usually consider it a success.

By that measure, Saturday’s Hammond Author and Art Fair was a success. And I did get a lot of work done. But by other measures, it was a failure.

The Hammond Public Library event is the most expensive author fair that I participate in, so I was pleasantly surprised when they gave participants a ticket for lunch at a food truck. Unfortunately, the line was too long. I didn’t want to take that much time away from my table, so I munched on the snacks I had brought from home.

The bigger problem, though, was the distraction. The material soliciting author participants said we would have a fifteen-minute slot somewhere else in the library to give a reading from one of our books. I went through Learning to Surrender and selected two related passages to make up my quarter hour.

When I arrived at the library, the reading opportunity had morphed into fifteen-minutes each to discuss why we had written our books. Furthermore, the schedule for the two rooms to be used did not include me. (More about that later.) The employee who was passing out the schedules promised to slot me in at the end, however.

I might have been okay with that format, but just before these sessions were supposed to start, they morphed again. Now the 15-minute presentations were to (and did) take place in the same room as the book sales.

That was totally counter-productive. Before then, visitors felt free to walk from table to table, talking to the authors and buying books. Now, sales suddenly stopped. Too many people thought it was rude to wander around looking at books and talking to other authors while someone was giving a public speech. (Fortunately, I had already made my table fee back before the sessions started.)

That wasn’t the worst problem, either. I felt as if I was forced to sit through solicitations I had no interest in, and I imagine I wasn’t alone. The original format would have allowed people to choose which, if any, of the sessions they wanted to attend. The revised location made that impossible.

The Hammond Library staff who work on the author fair are extremely nice, but the fair itself has always been badly managed. My checks don’t get cashed for months, and this time they lost the check and messed up my registration. They must have found it because they allowed me to participate without asking for a replacement check, which I was prepared to give them. However, that is probably why I wasn’t on the original presentation schedule, and when they moved it to the other room, they simply forgot about me. I don’t know if I would have had additional sales if I had been called up to present, but I definitely felt left out.

If they use the same format next year, I won’t participate. Like I said, though, the staff is extremely nice, so maybe they’ll listen to feedback.

I certainly hope so.

A Tale of Two Wedding Showers

 

I’ve mentioned before that my son and my niece are getting married within two weeks of each other. Rachel is getting married at the end of this month and John’s wedding is on September 14. Both brides had showers, although they were reversed, with Christina’s before Rachel’s. Both were fun, but they were also very different.

My daughter, Caroline, and I flew out to North Carolina for Christina’s shower. We left from and returned to different airports and used different airlines, but we managed to work our schedules to arrive at and leave from the Raleigh airport at approximately the same times. Unfortunately, Caroline couldn’t make it to Rachel’s shower, so I was the only one there from the Camp family, but I enjoyed the 1½ drive for listening to classical music on the way there and an old radio drama on the way home.

Christina’s shower was what I consider a traditional bridal shower with games as well as food and gifts. With probably only two exceptions, including me, the guests were all Christina’s age or younger. Everyone dressed up a little, and it was all women. Not even John was there. (He was on his bachelor party trip to Niagara Falls. Knowing who else went, I doubt that it got very wild, but they probably had a great time.)

One of the three games involved splitting into teams and dressing up a “bride” in a toilet paper wedding dress. That’s the photo at the top of the page. The team that dressed the woman in the middle won. Christina was the judge, and I agree with her choice. (If there had been a last-place pick, it would have been the team I was on.) The other two games were pen-and-paper: one to see how well you knew the bride and groom and one a bingo game based on the presents she received.

Rachel also had food and gifts at her shower, but there were no games. Instead, her guests decorated concrete and clay pipes and turned them into flower arrangements to line the aisle at the planned outdoor ceremony. The next photo shows Rachel demonstrating what was to be done, and the third shows some of the guests doing it.

Since we were painting, people wore jeans or other casual clothing. The casual dress also worked well for the setting, which was the farm buildings on my brother’s property. As you can see from the picture, there were men at the shower, and many of the guests were older than Rachel—either aunts and uncles or friends of her parents who also played a big role in Rachel’s life.

Both were a lot of fun, but they demonstrate how different wedding showers can be.

I’ll leave you with a photo of the three Camp women taken at Christina’s shower, with the bride-to-be in the middle.

 

I'll Try Again Next Year

 

Another Lake County Fair has come and gone. I submitted 15 photos this year and won nothing. That’s not unusual. My record has always be uneven. Last year I won three white ribbons and one blue one, but the year before that I also won nothing. And that’s okay. Yes, I like winning, but its the process that’s fun.

That’s why I’ve already started selecting photos for next year. Oh, not all of them, and even the ones currently in my 2025 folder may be replaced if I shoot something better before next summer. But if it fits a category and I like it, why not save it as a possibility?

One category I’ve never entered is for photos from the Lake County Fair itself. But last week I took several photos, including the one of the 4-H color guard that heads this post. I don’t know if it is good enough to win anything, but it is certainly good enough to enter, so I saved it to next year’s folder. I’ve also saved a couple of potential portraits (both taken at my soon-to-be daughter-in-law's’ bridal shower), a butterfly who posed for me while I was out on a walk, and a sports complex taken in Sydney during our trip to Australia last year.

I’ll add others over the next nine or ten months, and then I’ll have the fun of sorting through them and choosing the ones I like best.

Because, although ribbons are nice, I enjoy the process even when I don’t win.

Romania

 

We finished our Eastern European cruise in Romania. We docked in a fairly rural area and took an excursion bus to Bucharest, which is not on the Danube. When we left the boat (for good) and were waiting for the buses, there were feral dogs close by. I didn’t see it but was told that one of them had chased a woman. When I saw them, however, they were just standing or lying about, including one lying in the street and making cars drive around it. Here’s a photo.

The bus dropped us at our hotel in mid-afternoon. In the meantime, it took us on an excursion into and around Bucharest.

Our first stop was at the Palace of Parliament. The Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, built the huge building (one of the world’s largest) as a monument to himself. In the process, he tore down houses and perfectly good buildings and spent more money than even Trump has, impoverishing the population and draining the economy. He limited people to two hours of electricity a day in order to preserve the limited energy supply available to the building and to Romanian industries.

After Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989, Romania had no idea what to do with the white elephant that was very expensive to maintain. They considered selling it but couldn’t figure out how much it was worth, so they turned it into government offices. It wasn’t paying for itself, though, so they also rent out office space to commercial entities (and probably anyone who is willing to pay the rent). It also contains an international conference center and several museums and can be visited by tourists for a price, but we only saw it from the outside. The inside would have been interesting, but I’m not sure we would have had time for it.

The next two photos show the Palace of Parliament and the Central Committee Building at Revolution Square, the significance of which is described in the subsequent paragraph.

We made a short stop at Revolution Square, named after the revolution that overthrew Ceausescu in December 1989. He tried to give a speech to calm the crowds that gathered in front of the Central Committee Building, but the angry mob forced him to flee to the roof, where he escaped in a helicopter. He was captured and executed three days later (on Christmas), and that was the end of Communist rule in Romania.

Our next stop was for a walking tour and lunch in Old Town. The highlights of Old Town were the palace occupied by King Vlad III and the oldest church in Bucharest, which is right next to the palace. We didn’t go inside the church for lack of time, but we had an entirely different reason for staying away from the palace—it probably would have collapsed on our heads. The photo at the head of this post shows the palace from one direction, but the next photo, taken from a different direction, shows the true state of the wreckage. The guide said that there is some discussion about restoring it, but that will be a long time in the future, if ever.

So why is King Vlad III’s palace important? He was also known as Vlad the Impaler and was the model for Dracula. He got his nickname because he executed his enemies by running a stake through them lengthwise, starting at the space between the legs and going toward the brain. It was apparently a very slow, painful death.

Here are two other photos taken in Old Town. The first is a street, and the second is the oldest church.

The last stop on our excursion was at the Village Museum, which includes the current “palace.” The remaining members of the last royal family stay there at times, but calling it a palace may be overdoing it since there is no monarchy in Romania today. The family was staying there when we visited, so we couldn’t get too close. But the real attraction at the museum is all the old houses that were moved there to show how people used to live. One of the really cool ones is the buried house used by poor people in one region. As you can see from the final photo, only the top of the house is above ground.

That was the end of our very interesting cruise. If you want an easy way to see Eastern Europe, I recommend Viking.

But now I have to come up with an entirely new topic for next week’s blog.

Bulgaria

We spent two days in Bulgaria during our cruise, starting with a trip to the Belogradchik Rocks and Fortress at one of the highest points in the Balkan Mountains. The Romans added some walls and gates but relied significantly on the fortifications provided by the natural rock formations, making this a highly unusual fort.

You can see the main part of the Belgradchik Rocks and Fortress in the photo at the top of this post. Roland and I walked through the first gate and up to the second but did not make the grueling climb up the steps to the third gate at the top of the formation. The following photos show the first gate, another view from the distance, a closeup (through a zoom lens) of the climb between the second and third gates, and a face carved by nature—no human hand at work here.

The next day we took a full-day bus tour to several other locations in Bulgaria. Our first stop was at Arbanasi, where we saw a 16^th century orthodox church. It is different than the more recent ones because the country was occupied by the Ottoman Empire (Muslims), and it tried to ban the building of Christian churches. Although money bought permission to build some, they were not allowed to stand out, so they looked like any other house rather than having the ornate exterior of most orthodox churches. The interior was highly decorated with murals depicting Christian scenes, however. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed inside, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

In that village, we also saw a museum which showed what a rich man’s home looked like around that same time. These photos show the exterior of Nativity Church and one room in the rich man’s house.

From there we drove to Veliko Tarnovo, which was once the capital of Bulgaria. The main sight was an old fortress on top of a hill that was in use during Bulgaria’s first and second golden ages (centuries ago). We did not walk up to the fortress because it was 95 degrees out. We did, however, do some shopping before hopping on the bus and returning to our boat during a violent thunderstorm. The next photo shows the fortress from a distance.

Like many of the countries we toured, Bulgaria’s charm contrasted with the drabness of the communist era. The last two pictures show a street in Vidin that escaped the communist stamp and a typical apartment building that exemplifies it.

The final stop on our cruise was in Romania. I’ll finish this travelogue there next week.

 

Serbia

 

The first day we were in Serbia, our morning excursion took us to Belgrade. We started with a walking tour through Belgrade Fortress. The ruins have been turned into a park and aren’t that impressive, but the location was important in former times because it is at the confluence between the Sava and Danube Rivers. These photos show part of the old wall, the place where the rivers come together, a plaza with a monument of “Victor” (a naked man seen from the rear in this photo), and a bird strutting down below the walls.

From there, we took a short bus ride to the Church of St. Sava, which is Serbian Orthodox. Although it was planned out between the two world wars and the first stone laid in 1935, construction was stopped until 1984, when they finally got government permission to complete it. It is a gorgeous church, as you can see from the photo at the top of this post. It is also stunning inside, as the next picture shows. There are no seats inside, though. During the 2-3 hour services they bring in chairs for the elderly and infirm, but most people are expected to stand.

That afternoon we took a bus excursion to Kovečica, which is a Slavic artists’ colony. We saw a number of cool paintings, but I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to infringe on anyone’s intellectual property rights.

While there, we also visited the workshop where Jan Memčik makes and restores violins. He explained the process to us and showed us examples of the wood he uses—Bosnian maple for the bottom and sides and resonant spruce for the top. The next two photos show Mr. Memčik at his work desk and an example of the Bosnian maple he uses.

Our second day in Serbia started with a stop at Golubac Fortress right on the Danube. It never saw much action as a fort because the owners kept giving it away peacefully, but it must have given pause to would-be conquerors. Because the area next to the river is narrow with mountains rising above it, for about a century (until fairly recently), the road ran right through it until fairly recently, when tunnels were built to route the road around it. Before then, trucks and buses scraped the tops of the arches and often got stuck in them. The problem was usually solved by letting some air out of the tires, but still . . .

The following pictures show Golubac Fortress and a catapult that is a replica of ones used there.

The rest of the day was spent sailing along a scenic portion of the Danube called the Iron Gate, with Serbia on one side of the river and Romania on the other. We heard a couple of different reasons for the name. One is because the rocks along the cliff have iron ore in them. But the river here was tamed with a set of locks, which could also be considered an iron gate.

As I said, it was very scenic sailing, but I’ll just give you two highlights. The first photo shows the entrance to that stretch of the Danube, and the second is Decebalas Rex on the Romanian side of the river. He was a king who fought against the Roman Empire, and the carving is apparently their version of Mount Rushmore.

From Serbia, it was on to Bulgaria. I’ll blog about that next week.

Croatia

 

After leaving Hungary, we continued sailing down the Danube to Croatia. We docked in Vulkovar, which is a typical Croatian town, and were treated to a vocal concert of classical Christian music at St. Mary’s Church. These photos show the church, the vocalist, and a Vulkovar street.

From there, the excursion bus took us to the city of Osuek, where we took a walking tour of an old citadel. It has not been used for military purposes for centuries, however, and is not what you expect a fortress to be. It was never on a hill, and most of the wall is gone. In fact, it was converted into a neighborhood many years ago (in the 1800s?). The photo at the top of this post shows part of the original fortress, and the two below show Holy Trinity Square, in the center of the citadel, and parts of the remaining wall.

Croatia was occupied many times, but its buildings didn’t suffer much until it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Although it won that fight four years later, its building suffered significant damage. Most of them have been restored, but there are still evidences of that war. The next two photos show bullet holes in the side of a building and a train station that was destroyed.

The last stop on our bus excursion was for cakes and drinks in a local family home, after which we were shown around a small petting zoo that the family keeps as a hobby and to show school children. Apparently the zoning laws allow farm animals within city limits but limit the number of each kind (e.g., five pigs, ten goats, etc.). The next picture shows the front of the home we visited. The entrance is on the side because, at the time the house was built, you paid taxes for every opening onto the street. Although people wanted windows for light, having a door there wasn’t as important.

Later that day, we listened to a Tamburica Band on board ship. A tamburica is a stringed instrument that comes in several sizes with different string counts, resulting in a variety of complementary sounds, and each of the instruments in the photo below is considered a tamburica. Even the large one that looks like a bass was plucked, not bowed.

Next week’s blog post will follow us to Serbia.