Puccini's House and Lake

Wednesday 22 May 2013. Sheesh, it's a month ago and I'm still working on the photos and blog entries! I've been a bit busy of late...

Anyway on this bright Wednesday morning we jump ship at Livorno Italy and board a coach for our only paid excursion of the week. We are heading firstly for the house and lake of Giacomo Puccini, he of opera fame.

He loved this spot and lived in this house just a few yards from the lake. The house is now a museum and photographs inside were not allowed. As we listened to the guide's commentary in the first room a huge cat jumped up on the table causing all of us to jump momentarily.

Looking from the house down to the lake. There was a room with a huge collection of guns. Apparently one of the reasons he moved here was to do his best to rid the lake of wildfowl... It was a different time and a different world and today it is hard to think of a man who could compose such beautiful arias for operas such as Tosca, La Boheme and Madame Butterfly, happily grabbing a gun and blasting away destroying life...

Having done the tour of the house, we drift down to the lake as part of the tour is a trip on the lake by boat with Puccini's music played - and to give a touch of authenticity a chap in costume shoots at us from the shore. ...ok, I made that last bit up...

In the background of the above photo is a corner of the huge arena where operas are staged. There was a signboard listing upcoming performances.

Ah... and chill... We are some of the last on board and Fran and I are sat right at the back of the launch that takes us on the lake, whilst David and Jeannie are sitting in front of us. We are too far from the boat's speaker system to hear the music properly...

But never mind, the lake trip includes a glass of wine and nibbles! Here is Vanessa, guide for the quaintly named Trumpy Tours, bringing round little plastic cups of (yikes) very sweet sherry-type wine and some small hard biscuits that are a danger to teeth unless dunked in aforesaid wine for several minutes to soften them up!

Fran brandishes her biscuit threateningly. The lake trip sets off down a sort of lane separated from the rest of the lake by a row of small islands and then turns onto the lake itself once well away from the shores. What shores? I'll have another of those little cups please...

We are a long way from them, but the Italian Alps catch the sun (as do we all!) and make a wonderful backdrop to a pleasantly relaxing spell.

Then all too soon we are back on dry land and back on the coach for the second of our two destinations this morning - Pisa. Next stop here we come...

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Walking the Canals of Amsterdam

18 August 2001. Our guide, Chris, has left us to our own devices for and hour or so and we try to make sense of our map and head off along the sides of the canals to try to find the Anne Frank house.

The canals of Amsterdam are extremely pretty. Tour boats ply up and down them constantly and houseboats are moored along their length.

As a backdrop Amsterdam's unique narrow houses stand - though not altogether entirely upright. Amsterdam is a little like Venice. The houses are built over the water on wooden piles. If air gets to those piles - in years when the water level drops - then the wooden piles start to rot and the result is as you can see here. Buildings suddenly become lean-tos...

We found the Anne Frank House. Anne and her Jewish family hid in extremely cramped quarters in this house during WWII from 1942 until 1944 when they were found by the Germans and transported to the concentration camps. Her diary, kept until a couple of days before they were found, was published after the war. Anne herself died in Bergen-Belsen two months before the war ended. Only her father Otto survived.

We thought we were lucky to see no queue coming out of the door, but then we noticed the sign that pointed to an entrance around the side and that did have a queue. So much of one in fact that we reluctantly decided we didn't have enough time to wait.

Walking around in the heat was hard work! We found a bench beside an old inn of 1695 whose piles had been exposed to air at some time causing them to start rotting and making the place lean. Here we sat for a while with a drink cooling off.

We had walked past a canal crowded with boats so close you could literally walk across from one to another. A huge floating stage area had been set up and technicians were building light gantries, testing TV cameras and one chap was interviewing a young girl in jeans who suddenly let fly a stream of operatic melody totally out of keeping with her dress... Good set of lungs...

We also saw, though weren't too tempted by, the Cannabis Connoisseurs Club and The Hash, Marijuana, and Hemp Museum!

And everywhere there were the bicycles. Sometimes heralded by bells. Sometimes heralded by a warning shout. Sometimes accompanied by a scream of agony. Why do they not have brakes? Very strange! We did have to wonder how you would ever find your own bike amongst the huge numbers of chained or abandoned bicycles.

But all it takes is a small piece of individuality!

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Trial By Jury

Last night we went off to Garstang to see the Garstang Light Opera Group present "Love's Roundabout", a collection of songs about love and marriage, which led nicely to the second half which was Gilbert & Sullivan's "Trial by Jury".

I particularly enjoyed Phillip Bourne's rendition of "Girls Were Made To Love And Kiss", a song I hadn't heard for years and "The Rose" sung with excellent 3-part harmony by Marion Gaughan, Shelagh Cooney and Ann Johnston.

Trial by Jury is only a short opera lasting only 40 minutes but full of wit and humour.

Probably more so last night than normally as the jury had decided to "embellish" their parts for the last night of the show, with a few well chosen props helping to show their boredom and lack of interest in the case - puzzle books, newspapers, someone got out their knitting at one stage... Oh and a couple of hand puppets and Johnny Vegas's monkey puppet appeared a couple of times, though he, at least, appeared to take an interest in parts of the proceedings!

Then it was off to the Church Inn for the usual last night after-show party. David is a member of GLOG and the band have done several gigs for GLOG fund-raising evenings so we are almost honorary members. In fact it's only all the travelling associated with my job that stops me being a member of this excellent group!

So I ended the night playing guitar along with Peter Cooney for a good old fashioned sing-song. Fran had the camera. In her bag... You just can't get the staff...!