Dolls That Come Alive

By Edith McClintock

It’s strictly fun creepy, I promise.

I visited the Tbilisi Doll and Children’s Art Museum mostly because its colorful balconies caught my eye every day on my way to work while I lived in Georgia. But I also thought it might be silly and unique—kitschy.

Based on a previous visit to the natural history museum in Borjormi (a much smaller town in the mountains), I didn’t expect much—maybe a damp, slightly creepy space overcrowded with Chucky dolls—white eyes rolling and pink cheeks curved in evil grins. But the doll museum is actually fascinating (and only a little Victorianish creepy), although best experienced if you speak Russian or Georgian. Later visits to Tbilisi museums proved that most are also quite modern and interesting (I especially loved the icon museum).

The doll museum was created in 1937 by a Georgian children’s author and teacher who donated much of the original collection. Over the years, the museum fell into decline, with theft, flooding and financial problems. But in recent years, many of the exhibits have been restored.

The first level of the museum houses a collection of antique puppets and dolls from around the world, several of them reminding me of flamenco dancers and folk dolls my grandmother used to bring us back from her word travels—long since tossed in the trash due to my mom’s overzealous decluttering (my sister and I are still working on forgiveness).

The best toys in this exhibit are the ones that come alive—the mechanical and musical dolls that dance, sing, blow bubbles and play instruments. Today they seem a curiosity, but intricately constructed mechanical toys built in the 18^th and 19^th centuries presaged modern day robotics, and some of the greatest inventors of that era built mechanical toys.

Up the colorfully decorated stairs on the second floor is the Children’s Art Museum with an ongoing exhibit of children’s artwork created in the museum’s own studios. When I visited, there was also an exhibit of student paintings and sculptures around environmental themes.

My favorite exhibit was on the top floor—beautiful modern dolls, puppets and toys created by Georgia artists, most of them for sale. I wanted to buy pretty much everything in the room, and controlled myself only because I was in Georgia on a Peace Corps salary. The other room on the top floor had a collection of Georgian folk dolls from the 1960s and 1970s, with a great space for doll-making parties. But like many Georgian museums, the rooms were closed and we had to ask staff to open them. 

We weren't allowed to take photos of the mechanical dolls on the first floor, but below is a video with some of the best (dolls start at 00:18).

For more, visit my author website and/or personal blog, A Wandering Tale. Even better, order a copy of Monkey Love & Murder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Book Depository (free shipping nearly anywhere in the world).

What Do We Do With All This Stuff?

By Supriya Savkoor

Supriya may live near some of the most famous American museums—chiefly, the Smithsonian—outside Washington, D.C., but she still chose this week to rerun a slightly off-topic post from last year.
 

The Museum of Childhood 
in Edinburgh

This week, while researching our topic of the week, I learned about museums devoted entirely to jars of prepared mustard (in Wisconsin); ham (there are actually two such museums--one in Belgium, another in Spain); arts and crafts inspired solely by owls (Korea); lawnmowers (the UK); bananas (on the island of Martinique); asphalt (California); toilets (India); toilet covers (Texas); mice (Russia); and even phallic symbols (Iceland). There are countless others dedicated to almost any specialty, niche topic you can think of. (Seriously, think of one then do a web search. Chances are, it exists.)

I adore museums, but the problem is I also live in one. I collect books, few of which I plan to read again, clothes I haven't worn in years, old gifts I feel too guilty to donate, baby items I’m hanging onto in case someone else (not sure who) might need them, and an avalanche of papers that need sorting, dealing with, and/or shredding. I know I’m not the only one who lives like this. Most people I know have little museums of some sort or other in their homes. Wine bottles, matchboxes, old photos, cookbooks, gadgets, mementos. We live in a culture of collecting things. It’s what we do. The question is, why?

The Berger Collection with Teapot Museum in
Amorbach, Bavaria, houses countless exhibits
of modern art as well as Europe's largest teapot
collection, featuring nearly 2,500 teapots
and another 500 miniature ones.

A couple weeks ago, a friend told me she lies awake at night worrying about the amount of stuff we collect. Where will it all go? Reminding me of a few years earlier when my then-first-grader was in a panic about her elementary school cafeteria not recycling. What a waste of all those little milk cartons, plastic cutlery, paper bags, and cello paper that went straight into the trash! I’ve been worrying about the same issues, in my own life and all around me. We live in a community filled with pockets of great affluence. Collectively, we keep buying gobs of new stuff, getting rid of the old (the amount of packaging alone gives me the shivers), and I don’t always see as much recycling or re-using as I’d expect from such a resourceful (and well-resourced) community.

An exhibit at the Museum for Funeral Customs in
Springfield, Illinois, displays mortician's restorative tools.

I'm trying to do my part. For starters, last weekend, I took my daughter’s Girl Scout troop on a tour of a landfill. My plan was to point out the tall, stinky piles of rubbish and wag a finger at the kids: “Be responsible! Waste not, want not!” And so on. But we were all stunned, kids and adults alike, by how pristine it all was. It turns out that in most parts of the States, landfills are not the tall monuments of debris they once were. It’s highly compressed, mostly covered, and set deep in the ground between an amalgam of liners and tarps to avoid contamination. Not just out of sight, but odorless too. 

In contrast, in many parts of the world (Zabbaleen City in Cairo, Kachri Kundi in Karachi, and the Matuail landfill in Dakka, to name a few), communities spring up on top of exposed landfills and become a meager source of income for its residents (who pluck out reusable and/or resellable items) and even innovation for scientists and city planners.

For generations, we’ve been fascinated with digging up the debris of past cultures through archaeological digs. But what will future generations think about the debris we leave behind? Will we be considered one of the most wasteful generations, not caring about the environment? Or might we be the ones to turn things around and become the generation that rescues Mother Nature? I wonder which of our stuff future generations will choose to collect and build their own museums around.

One Man’s Trash…

By Alli Sinclair

As part of my daughter’s school curriculum they’ve been studying recycling and reusing materials. The topic took me back to a time in Argentina when I discovered a bizarre and fun place in Gaiman, Patagonia.

Long before recycling became mainstream, Joaquín Alonso collected bottles, cans, and all manner of disused household goods to create Parque El Desafío. Desafio means challenge in English, and I’ve never ascertained whether Señor Alonso named the park “challenge” after his project or if it had a deeper meaning.

Although it’s not technically a museum, Señor Alonso’s work contains articles that are decades old. He used these pieces to create a life-sized VW bug, garden of flowers, birds, trees, and a playground for kids, young and old, to use their imaginations and spend an afternoon living in a world of wonder.

There are signs that display his sense of humour, so it helps if a Spanish speaker is nearby to translate. A classic example is at the entrance. When I was there in 2000 he charged USD4 for ‘functionaries of the state, lawmakers, and politicians’ and 40 cents for everyone else.

In 1998, Señor Alonso entered the Guinness Book of Records as the creator of the world’s largest recycled park. With over 50,000 wine and beer bottles, 30,000 cans, 12,000 bottle caps, 5,000 plastic bottles and an array of televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and various other household appliances, Parque El Desafío, is a great testament to how one man’s imagination and talent can turn trash into a treasure for all.

Unfortunately Señor Alonso passed away in 2010 and as Gaiman is off the well-worn tourist track, his family were unable to keep the property open to the public. The latest I heard is the place is now up for sale and weeds are growing between the artwork. I hope someone can step in and save Parque El Desafío as it is a piece of history that is important not just to Argentina, but to the world. To see Señor Alonso’s labour of love disappear amongst the weeds would be a tragedy.

Even though you can’t enter the gates now, this video might give you an idea of Señor Alonso’s imagination and vision:

Tehran's Museum of Time

Time Museum in Tehran

By Heidi Noroozy

Tucked away on a shady lane in the Zafaranieh district of North Tehran stands a wedding cake of a mansion, painted blue with intricate white trim. Once the home of Hossein Khodadad, a wealthy merchant who made a fortune in shipping and textiles, the estate is now a museum dedicated to that most elusive of subjects: time.

Through the ages, people have devised ingenious ways to measure and keep track of time, from sundials to electronic clocks. When I think of the many practical instruments that we use divide the day into hours, minutes, and seconds, the first thing that comes to mind is the good old tick-tock. The museum’s designers must have been thinking along the same lines, since they filled Mr. Khodadad’s mansion with mechanical timepieces of all types. The collection includes cuckoo clocks hanging on the walls and pendulum clocks with their system of weights and chains housed in plain wooden cases. Others are so ornate they’d be right at home in a European palace—clocks set into porcelain vases, paired with bronze sculptures, and mounted on inlay cabinets.

Many of the exhibits are noteworthy because of their owners, such as the timepiece that once belonged to Fath Ali Shah Qajar, who ruled Iran from 1797 to 1834. Others are gimmicky—a tiny clock set into a silver cigarette lighter.

My favorite exhibit in this unusual museum is the Evolution of Time display in the garden surrounding the mansion. It contains replicas of unusual devices from different historical periods and cultures. Here is a selection:

A Sumerian sundial based on a design that is 6,000 years old. The Sumerians, who occupied a part of Mesopotamia now located in southern Iraq, were among the first people to use sundials to track time.

This rather crude clepsydra, or water clock, is a timepiece that measures time by the regulated flow of water into and out of a vessel, where the amount of liquid is then measured.

A candle clock has hour markings set into the wax that show the passage of time as the candle burns down.

Chinese fire clocks like this dragon-shaped one work by lighting a stick of incense strapped to the dragon’s back. As the incense burns, the flame breaks threads connected to balls that drop onto a sounding board and mark the hour.

A most unusual piece is this sundial in the shape of a book. The pages mark the hours, and each sheet contains numbers that represent the minutes. The book’s angle is adjusted according to the position of the sun, and the shadow cast onto the pages shows the current hour and minute. The number marked on the vertical page is a 12, or high noon.

Inside and out, the museum documents the march of time over the course of human history. The building is only 80 years old, but its architecture mimics the style of a 15th century Safavid mansion. It even contains a room that replicates the interior of Shah Abbas’s Ali Qapu Palace in Isfahan. And the history of its former owner is irrevocably linked to the shifting of dynasties, for the Khodadad family fled Iran in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, leaving their property to be confiscated by the new regime. Their textile factories ended up part of the military-industrial complex operated by the Revolutionary Guards, and many of the clocks in the museum’s collection were confiscated from other wealthy Tehran families with ties to the former shah.

If you can’t make it to Tehran to visit the museum in person, you can still take a virtual tour with this video clip from Iran’s English-language network, Press TV:

The First Big Trip

Jeanine Ertl is a rural, mini-homesteading mother to three young children on the Lost Coast of California. She blogs at RosieDreams. She loves writing, gardening, travel and following her ever-changing passion for learning-something-new-until-thoroughly-sidetracked.

I’m gonna backpack through Europe this summer, I told my boyfriend that day as I watered my mom’s sun parched lawn.

We were twenty years young, in college, living at our parents’, and in love.

I wanted to see with my own eyes one of the many famous landmarks imprinted from years of text books and television. I wanted to venture away from home on something bigger than a road trip.

But on that balmy San Diego evening I was met by a dreadful silence. Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might not be interested. When I’d heard about “backpacking through Europe” my mind had connected with it immediately.

But now my heart raced, my thoughts canvassing the little I knew about actual “backpacking.” I had many questions, and now, the thought of a solo adventure left me a little worried.

So I re-stated my plans, preparing my thoughts better this time. Don’t you wanna see the Eiffel Tower for yourself? Visit the Louvre? Ride trains around the countryside and feel like you know what lies beyond the USA?

I was holding my breath now. Hoping with all my might that he’d be interested.

Now’s the time. We’ve got nothing holding us back!

The idea hung in the world of anticipated dreams for a few days longer. I thought about it obsessively while batting it down into my subconscious. Midterms were at hand.

A few days later, when it was obvious that I wasn’t changing my course, my boyfriend changed his. And it was with a deep sigh of relief that I set off in research- planning-mode for our first overseas adventure. Backpacking Europe.

I like to hear about people’s first travels. The journeys that pushed them beyond. To soak up more than they’d expected. To go a bit further. To step out of a comfort zone they didn’t know existed.

And Europe was ours. It was our big First Trip. My boyfriend and I had road tripped already a handful of times, borrowing a car and heading off for a few days to check out the coast, mountains, desert.

But Europe taught us to travel.

It was the trip that taught us to breathe in life.

To stop and taste the gelato, on a curb, in the heat of the Italian afternoon.

To sleep with our heads twisted up, one eye open as the train swayed through the night.

To put up with a fresh or stale baguette--morning, noon and night.

And most importantly, Europe taught us to revel in the art of serendipity, both in everyday life and especially in travel. Because truly there is an art to beginning one’s day with an open heart and a willing mind.

Europe started like this for us…

Bag won’t zip shut. Analyze contents again in search of unnecessary items.

Drive to airport late and realize Eurorail Pass tickets are in photocopy machine at local drug store.

Fly across the US and Atlantic, curious how life will shape up for the next six weeks.

Find ourselves safely delivered to England’s doorstep. Heathrow International.

Fifteen years ago that summer, my now-husband and I stood looking at each other, said backpacks claimed from baggage and now teetering on our backs. We stood quietly for a few minutes, watching as families and passengers confidently strode by in a current of togetherness. Our backpacks loaded and our travel know-how at point zero, we were felled by the very first move.

Umm, how do we get to London? we contemplated, not knowing precisely where we were.

Hmmm. Do we want to take a taxi? I don’t think there’s a train station at this airport. I suppose we should exit that way and look for a bus?

Yeah, that would be the cheapest. Definitely a bus.

So off we went, integrating into the lifeblood of flowing busy moving people exiting airports at all hours, our feet moving at last.

And that’s the way it all continued rolling those first few days. After waking at noon to the darkness of velvet wallpaper and tiny beds, crackers neatly waiting at the door, we’d ask each other “What should we do? Bus? Tube? Walk? Where to?”

We were new travelers in every way, in awe of the simple existence of this foreign-to-us-reality--double decker buses, red telephone boxes, the Queen’s guard in all their seriousness.

We rose late, which we learned was our typical style and not actually jet lag. And we walked until way past dark each day. Flipping through our guide books at times and wandering at others, the magic of the day tumbled out at its own pace.

And our trip continued on for six more incredible weeks. Including of course, new friends along the way and missed trains, late night drinks under lit verandas and plenty of stomach ailments, crazy dormitory hostels and tiny, stuccoed apartments, non-admittance to countries we had no visa for (bad planning on my part) and sleeping in train stations and on sidewalks when those closed. And the insanity of finding peace in simply not knowing; a first for me at the time, but a lesson I’ve continued to learn over and over since.

We fell in love with the whole process of traveling. The not knowing where we’d stay that night. What we might see the next day. Who we might meet. What deliciousness, or not (let’s be honest), would fill our bellies when our feet finally stopped walking.

After traveling Europe that summer we were hooked. We felt ready to take on any of the continents. Eager actually. And to this day, though we’re much more homebound with three little children under the age of six, we love the thrill of driving into the night, pulling over to a hotel that fits the moment’s need rather than having a stringently organized itinerary. For as much as I love making an itinerary, they leave our trips feeling too much like a “to do” list and less like an adventure.

So, if you’ll humor me now. Comment with your First Travel? The trip that hooked you? And if you’re so inclined, what moment stole you away to being forever torn between home and craving the next journey?

There’s No Need To Hurry

By Patricia Winton

Italian has lots of proverbs common to English and other languages. A caval donato non si guarda in bocca, for example, translates perfectly as “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” And Batti il ferro finché è caldo literally means “Strike while the iron is hot.”

Other expressions have different literal meanings with the same result. A chi dai il dito si prende anche il braccio translates to “Give them a finger and they’ll take an arm.” In English that, of course, means “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” Chi dorme non piglia pesci means “Those who sleep don’t catch any fish” which in English is “The early bird gets the worm.”

But my favorite expressions are those that relate directly to the Italian way of life. I recently learned a new one, and it’s so central to life here that I now see it everywhere I turn: Non ci corre dietro nessuno. Literally, it means “There’s no one running behind us.” In reality it means “What’s your hurry.”

This attitude both enrages me sometimes with Italian people who never seem to rush (except on the highway) and endears them to me because they know how to enjoy life. Last week, I fumed in the supermarket checkout line while my frozen foods defrosted on the conveyer belt. The cashier continued his conversation with the customer ahead of me whose purchases were bagged and whose change was stowed in her purse. My American impatience had smoke coming out my ears, but all the customers behind me chatted with each other. I had to take a deep breath and repeat: Non ci corre dietro nessuno.  Everybody’s enjoying themselves. Relax.

And that leads me to another proverb: Dove c'è gusto non c'è perdenza, that is, where there’s enjoyment, there’s no loss. It’s this attitude toward life that keeps me living here. It’s better for my blood pressure if I keep reminding myself not to hurry and to enjoy myself. The final proverb for the day:

“È meglio morire sazio che digiuno.” It’s better to die sated than on an empty stomach. I think that’s so much better than “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. I’m too much an American to completely adopt this Italian zest for life, but I appreciate it and try to alter my attitudes and behavior to match it.