Shakespeare's home in Stratford

Saturday I went to Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born and bred, and where he spent the last half-dozen years of his life.



Here I am at the house where he was born and lived his early years. There have been two excellent biographies about Shakespeare recently, "Will in His World," which explained a lot about his acting and business career, and "1591," which focuses on the biographical roots of "Hamlet." Both made this visit much more meaningful for me.



When he was in his 30s, Shakespeare was wealthy enough to buy one of the best and biggest houses in Stratford, a large five-gabled affair, which is now gone. This is the garden behind the site. A spiteful minister who had bought the house in the 18th century had it torn down, the story goes, to avoid being pestered by Shakespeare pilgrims and to avoid paying taxes on the house (he lived there only a few months of the year and wanted to pay taxes for only a few months).



This shows his granddaughter's house, with a banner where Shakespeare's house once stood. Shakespeare's granddaughter was the last of Shakespeare's direct line descendants. She had no issue.



Stratford is a lovely place because of its gardens and its restrained tourism. The guides I heard stuck to the facts and avoided the kind of sensationalistic and misleading speculation designed to get laughs that you hear at a lot of places. This is the garden beside the cottage of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, with whom he had three children. The death of their son Hamnet, when he was 11, may have haunted Shakespeare and had a role in the writing of his play "Hamlet."

(Shakespeare's favorite kebab house.)

I went to see "Twelfth Night" performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in a fine modern theatre. It was an excellent production of a difficult play, one of Shakespeare's dark comedies. John Lithgow, famous for "Third Rock from the Sun," among other things, played the role of the foppish Malvolio to the hilt. He was great. (Lithgow's father, incidentally, was the first artistic director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, so for me it all made a neat circle –Shakespeare in Cleveland with Lithgow pere, Shakespeare onstage in Stratford with Lithgow fils. The GLSF started in Lakewood in 1964, 400th anniversary of his birth.)



This is Trinity Church, where he is buried.
Shakespeare acquired crypts in the sanctuary for himself, his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law, another sign of his wealth acquired from his shares in theaters and acting companies. All four are in the floor right in front of the altar.



The people who suggest that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays don't know what they are talking about. That canard was created by some 18th century scholars who couldn't believe that someone who hadn't studied at Oxford or Cambridge could have written so brilliantly.


Everyone told me that finding a room in Stratford would be nearly impossible and expensive. I found a perfect B&B through my Lonely Planet guidebook for only $50 a night and walking distance to everything. No froo-froo, and a good English breakfast, almost the full Monty, with eggs, ham, sausage, cooked tomato, beans, toast, juice and coffee.



The next day I took a half-hour bus ride to Warwick Castle, said to be the best preserved, most stunning medieval castle in England. It's impressive, but I was annoyed that after paying the 18-pound admission ($36), I couldn't go up on the walls or the towers because of some private event. After being were politely tenacious in the face of many, "I'm very sorrys" and "there's nothing to be dones", I got them to give me my money back.



A bike race through the heart of Warwick.

Everything in England is twice as expensive as in the U.S. Gasoline is $7 a gallon. A daily newspaper costs $1.60 (80 pence). The average home price in England is $450,000 ($658,000 for detached homes). My short tram ride to work costs $3.60 each way. I made the mistake of ordering the standard buffet breakfast in the Hilton Hotel my first day here -- $33. My room there was $336 a night. Let's not even talk about London prices, which are much higher. When converted from pounds to dollars, journalist salaries are twice as high as in the U.S., but they earn no more in real terms.

From Manchester to York

I'm in Manchester, England, for the next four months to help with the startup of a weekly business newspaper here, Crain's Manchester Business. My former colleague at American City Business Journals, Arthur Porter, had always dreamed of doing this. Manchester is his hometown. At the moment, we're interviewing candidates like mad and have hired a few key people.




Manchester is in northwest England, about 30 miles upriver from Liverpool. It has quite a mix of modern architecture and old brick buildings. It's a city on the move, and growing rapidly. Manchester was the first industrialized city in the world and was a center of textile manufacturing for the better part of three centuries. Today much of that industry is gone, but it is England's No. 2 economic center and is growing in business services.
I have a studio apartment for the next few months in the old industrial quays area which has been rebuilt with apartments, condos, etc. The old ship channel is now used for recreation. I haven't seen a single barge or ship. The slips have names associated with the Great Lakes -- Ontario, Erie and Superior basins, and Detroit Bridge. Haven't the foggiest why. Must ask.




Medieval York



Saturday I took a train east about 90 miles across the Pennnine Mountains (hills, really) to York, which is famous for its miles of medieval walls still standing. It was mobbed with English and German tourists. The narrow streets in the city centre are quite charming.



The walls are impressive. The first ones were built by the Romans, and you can see the remains of those in several places. They established a fort on the site in 71 A.D. Those walls were the base for many of York's later walls, which were extended up to 20 feet high. The Romans pulled out in the 400s when protecting Rome from barbarians seemed more important.



This is a ruined abbey in the center of the museum park. Lots of young people hang out and medicate themselves here. The city of York got its name from the Vikings, who called it Jorvik. They invaded and took over from the Anglo-Saxons in around 870 A.D. A lot of their words survive in place names. York street names often end in "gate" -- Highgate, Deansgate, etc. -- from the Viking word for street. DNA tests of York residents show a high percentage have Viking blood. In some parts of the Scottish isles, the percentage is as high as 60.



While living in Bolivia, I despaired over my inability to understand more than half of what any cab driver was saying to me. Now I don't feel so bad about that, because I understand only half of what any English cab driver says. Sitting on a train to York yesterday, I was next to a bunch of guys who were going to Leeds to watch a rugby match on television. (There are televisions in Manchester, so there is no logical explanation for this. It's a guy thing.) They were all pounding down beers at 10 in the morning and talking at a fast clip. I believe they were talking about sports, drinking, sex and cards. Perhaps they were talking about Yeats's poetry and Renaissance sculpture. There is evidently a requirement that the F word be in every sentence and subordinate clause, either as a subject, verb, adverb, adjective, object, imperative or interjection.

Last week in Bolivia, then Mexico and home

The editors of La Razon have a little coffee and snacks after another session of leadership training. The last week in Bolivia, June 11-15, I did two leadership training sessions a day, one at La Razon and the other at their crosstown rival, La Prensa. A training consultant has to be like a confessor -- total confidentiality.




Cindy met me in La Paz, Mexico, which is near the southern tip of Baja California Sur, where we've been considering a move. On a boat trip in the Sea of Cortez, hundreds of dolphins surrounded us. Later, three timid manta rays glided along beneath the boat. At the island of Espiritu Santo, sea lions laze on the rocks.





My first day back in Baltimore, I trimmed the hedge that runs for about 150 feet along the sidewalk. Working out in the sun was a relief after a day wedged into airplanes.



Saturday night, we made our annual family outing to the ballpark and saw the Orioles beat the Angels in a very well played game. That's me, Cindy, daughter Christine and son Patrick. What did I notice about baseball after being away? People for several rows around us, young and old, were pounding down the $6 beers (10 times what they cost in Bolivia). The effect was obvious.

The red ponchos and talk of civil war

The Aymara people, who represent about a third of Bolivia, have a tradition of putting on their red ponchos when they go on a war footing. So any display of this symbol can be interpreted as merely tradition or a threat.

On the day I arrived in Bolivia in September, the vice president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, recalled his days as a guerilla fighter and urged a crowd of indigenous people to have their rifles ready inside their red ponchos to fight against any attempt to divide the country.



He was talking about the eastern half of the country, known as the Half-Moon, which voted last July for autonomy, meaning more local control of its money and government affairs.

Talk of civil war heated up at that time and again in January when President Evo Morales, at a gathering of 10,000 Aymara in their red ponchos, called on them to fight against any attempt to divide the country. (People in the Half-Moon would say they´re not trying to secede, but they do want more autonomy.)



Morales´s Aymara host announced that day that he had 100,000 people ready to take up arms at a moment´s notice if the president wanted. You can imagine what a stir that caused. These images (the one at the top is from La Razon, the other is from El Nuevo Dia) were on TV and the front pages.

Morales, who has a very positive reputation in Europe and the U.S., frequently engages in saber rattling. When he was campaigning for office, for example, he ended speeches with, `Death to the Americans.´

The talk of civil war died down for a couple of months, but tension is growing again because of conflicts between the central government and the Half-Moon about everything from the Supreme Court to foreign trade agreements.

The people you meet in La Paz

In the Plaza Murillo, which faces the Presidential Palace and the home of the Bolivian congress, you see a mix of people in modern and traditional dress.




A military band performs on a Sunday morning on the Prado, the main drag in La Paz. They performed a medley of Strauss waltzes punctuated with a lot of heavy pounding on the bass drum.



This lovely woman was standing outside my hotel yesterday. An hour later, as I was working at a computer in the hotel lobby, she sat down at the computer next to me. During a cell phone call she identified herself as Carla Ortiz. She is famous as the actress in the most expensive Bolivian movie ever made, The Andes Don´t Believe in God. Its budget was $500,000. She was great in it, and I told her so. She was very gracious and friendly. She´s a native of Cochabamba here, but she lives in the U.S., where she appears in TV shows like CSI Miami. This photo is from La Razon newspaper.



Theese men in traditional dress were walking on the Prado yesterday. You more often see women in traditional dress. I followed them for a block or two trying to discretely photograph them. They all hopped onto a big tourist bus.

In La Paz you have much more sense of the indigenous culture of the country. There is a museum of traditional clothing here as well as the Museum of Coca, which chronicles the history of coca in patent medicines (legalized opiates common in drugstores in the last century), toothpaste and modern anesthestics. The coca leaf is considered sacred.

On the street of the witches, ironically right behind the main cathedral, locals come to buy the stuff needed to cast spells on enemies, bring good fortune and guarantee fertility. A typical store is below. Mummified llama fetuses are in abundance in many stores (not this one). Not sure what they’re used for.



Up until 1975, most people in Bolivia did not speak Spanish. The education system missed them. Two-thirds of Bolivians consider themselves to be members of an indigenous group, with 30 percent identifying themselves as Aymara (the group of President Evo Morales) and 27 percent Quechua. About six in 10 Bolivians speak an indigenous language, depending on which source you refer to. Last fall El Nuevo Dia published a language map of the country that showed some 36 languages spoken, but most of these are very small groups and their languages are in danger of dying out.



Mount Illimani looms over downtown La Paz. How high is Bolivia? The western third averages about 15,000 feet. A wall three miles high separates the plains in the east from the capital. Although it’s only 335 miles from La Paz to Santa Cruz in the eastern lowlands, according to my World Book Atlas, a bus ride takes around 20 to 24 hours because of the twisting mountain roads. You´ve probably seen the pictures. I decided not to do it.

Flying is scary enough. La Paz is at about 12,000 feet, and its airport is higher than almost all of the Rocky Mountain peaks. The air is so thin that the takeoff run needed for a Boeing 737 to get airborne is about 30 percent longer than normal, which seems like an eternity when you’re in a passenger seat. The runway is almost twice as long as that of Reagan National.

Bolivia covers 1 million square kilometers, more than 8 times the size of Pennsylvania and 45 times the size of Maryland. Lake Erie has three times the surface area of Lake Titicaca, although the latter is much deeper.

Business note: There are 250 publicly traded U.S. companies that have higher revenues than the gross domestic product of Bolivia, which is $9 billion.

Bolivia´s growth industry: contraband fuel

Bolivia is suffering from shortages of all kinds of fuel because its low, government-subsidized prices encourage transporting it across the border where prices are higher.
In October I was on the border near Brazil and saw lots of little roadside stands where families had set up shop to sell contraband gasoline. All of the official local gas stations had exhausted their supply, so the driver we had hired to take us to Brazil filled up a fuel can at one of these improvised stations (while one of the family members smoked a cigarette).
If they had been wearing suits and ties, these local folks would be called arbitrageurs. They go to service stations, buy fuel at the government-subsidized price of $1.75 a gallon, collect it in all kinds of improvised containers and sell it for $4 a gallon to Brazilians who come across the border. The Bolivians make a nice profit margin and the Brazilians get a big discount from the $6.50 they pay on their side. So there are spot shortages of gasoline in Bolivia.


This photo of a gasoline stand at the Brazilian border is from the daily El Deber. Who´s worried about safety?

On the other side of Bolivia, the border with Peru supports a thriving industry of contraband liquefied gas used in cooking and as fuel in vehicles. In Bolivia a 22-pound canister of this fuel sells for $2.82, a government-subsidized low price. The market price in Peru is nearly four times higher, or $10.
So enterprising Peruvians and Bolivians buy low on one side of the border and sell high on the other. That´s why Bolivians can´t always get this essential household fuel.
The smuggling is so institutionalized that the customs officials from both countries have a gentlemen´s agreement not to enforce the laws on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The canisters pass through unchecked. The authorities also benefit from the contraband.

People and places around Santa Cruz

These schoolteachers not only get low salaries, they get paid only once a month AND have to stand in line to collect it. You have to stand in line for everything in Bolivia. To pay your phone, electric and water bills you go to a bank or the utility offices and take a number. The post office doesn't do local mail delivery so you can't pay by check. (Your bill comes by courier.)

To buy a plane ticket, you go to the airline office and take a number. Or you can use a travel agent, but you still have to go to the office and pay in person. You can't pay online. People here accept the lines. Poor service to the public is endemic in government and business.



This little boy comes with his mother every morning as she cleans the classroom building where I'm working these days. Despite her son´s shirt, she is not a graduate of the University of Michigan or a fan of Wolverine sports. Used clothing floods into Bolivian markets from the U.S. and is killing local manufacturers and retailers. The government recently outlawed importing of used clothing, just as Santa Cruz was filling up with street vendors hawking cold-weather gear (it's winter here) from the States.
Cheap shoes made in China, for as little as $2.75 a pair, are another import that hurts local businesses.










Alvaro Garcia Linera, 43, is the vice president of Bolivia and attracted a mob of newspeople when he visited Santa Cruz in March. The newspeople here do act like a mob, especially the television people, who have to get close enough to make pictures and capture sound bites. I decided to watch and shoot from a distance.

Garcia Linera has a reputation as being quite the reader and intellectual. In the 1990s he was part of a leftist rebel group and was arrested and charged with being a terrorist. He spent five years in prison, where he studied Bolivian political history and read Karl Marx's Das Kapital "letter by letter, word by word."

























Eduardo Bowles is the director (we would call him editor-in-chief) of El Nuevo Dia newspaper in Santa Cruz and loves to relax at his house in the country, where he keeps and rides quarterhorses. He is demonstrating the correct Santa Cruz hammock technique, with one foot out for balance, ideal for making quick turns to see what's going on. This photo is from Christmas week, high summer, during a churrasco, or barbecue, at his house.

Eduardo's great-great-grandfather came to Bolivia from Cincinnati, Ohio. He had served in the Civil War on the Confederate side and came to capitalize on a rubber-industry boom in Beni, in the Amazon basin to the north. He started many businesses, including Bolivia´s first ice-making plant. Bolivians pronounce the W in his name like a B, so it's pronounced BO-blase.






A construction supply magnate built this castle as a way to advertise his company. It sits on the third ring road here in Santa Cruz. Note the horse. It´s common to see them out scrounging around, even in heavily traveled parts of the city.