Starry night in my head

I am now back after a long and arduous trip home. I doubt I shared any of this, but we were scheduled to leave Denver on Lufthansa on April 12. On April 11 we got an email from Lufthansa telling us our flight had been cancelled. The reason was a pilots strike, but also around that time, there was a cabin attendant strike. A person we met while traveling, a German national, told us that flying Lufthansa can be a problem because they have more than one union, and any of these unions can shut down the airline. So, right around our 4/12 departure date there were two strikes, and the one by the pilots shut down the airline. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, including ours.

So, after receiving the email from Lufthansa on 4/11, I realized that there was going to be an exodus of passengers and that any other available seats on other airlines would quickly be snapped up. I went to my Delta account and entered our dates, and we could fly on 4/12 directly to Lisbon, Portugal rather than through Frankfurt, Germany, as Lufthansa had routed us. I didn’t think too hard about it and grabbed the seats, hoping that we’d get a full refund from Lufthansa.

We got the Lufthansa refund the day before we were scheduled to fly home, 5/3. I sweated that the entire trip.

By the way, Delta Comfort was $600 cheaper than Lufthansa coach. In case you are wondering what Delta “Comfort” is about, it is seats on an airliner with slightly more legroom than regular coach, and where they hand us a hot towel after takeoff. Other than being closer to the front of the plane, that’s about it.

The nice thing about grabbing the Delta flight was that it allowed us to maintain all of our connections. We were scheduled to fly to the Algarve region of Portugal on 4/13. Had we stayed with Lufthansa, we would have lost that connection and our AIRBNB reservation down there.

However, with Delta we had to fly home from Lisbon, and we were scheduled to be in Geneva for our Lufthansa return home. So we purchased tickets to fly to Lisbon from Geneva on 5/4, and booked a hotel room for that night. We were warned to get to the Lisbon airport three hours ahead of our 10AM flight, so we did so. Lisbon is a bit behind the times in terms of dealing with non-EU passengers, and so they had us form a line for herding to our various flights. That line was one-quarter mile long. I measured it by walking it off. There were unhappy people on line. While we stood there and not moving at all, I walked ahead to see what the holdup was, but the line turned towards the end, and I could not see where it was going. I had no idea why were were being herded in this manner.

An hour later, we made it through the line. There was a set of eight gates at the end, but only two were functioning. At each gate was a man who would yell to us to have our passports open to the page to be stamped for Portugal. I realized that this was the problem, that only two gates of eight were being used, which created the long, long line. Also, it appears that Portugal is not equipped to recognize passports electronically. The EU has an app for that purpose, but it does not work in Portugal. So the man at the gate mechanically stamped every passport, making no attempt to identify anybody.

It’s a bit of a messed up system right now, so if you travel to the EU, I would advise avoiding Lisbon.

But imagine this: I have an app called MobilePassportControl (MPC) on my phone, and in it I have stored all of our personal data, including passport information. When we arrived at JFK airport in New York City, after perhaps a half a mile of corridors, we were routed to a room where there were no lines. We were asked to stand in front of a camera that took our photo. That photo was then matched to that on file with the Department of State or whatever agency handles passports. It took two seconds. The man standing there said “Have a nice day.” That was it for entry into the U.S. Contrast that with Lisbon!

Of course at every turn and stop we have to deal with TSA. That’s another story. TSA is not wired to the Department of State, so they cannot match photos. We have to once again produce IDs along with having our baggage scanned for contraband. We left our guns and exploding shoes at home, but I did have a yellow highlighter in my shirt pocket. I had to give it up, that is, they took it from me, I went through the gate again, but never saw my highlighter again.

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And now for something entirely different, how I spent my time on overseas flights:

This is a replication of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, one that I like very much called “Starry Night.” Sorry, but replication on a computer screen is limited. The painting imparts a good feeling on me with its warm colors and distorted images of the effects of starlight. I have a similar one in my office called “Starry Night on the Rhone”, equally beautiful. On that one, I noticed that the stars have inside them various tiny images that appear to be faces.

If you get a chance take a look at Starry Night from a better perspective than a computer can offer. I now understand why the painting is so attractive to me. It contains the following images embedded in the “stars”:

This image appears in a star just to the right of the flowing tree on the left side of the painting. I photographed it, and then ran the photo through my Affinity program to sharpen it and increase highlights. I see a head, perhaps of a boy or man, but looking upward. He appears to be smoking a pipe and wearing a hat.

This image is at the top near the center of the painting. It appears to be an object embedded in a flower, perhaps a yellow rose. The more I look at it, the more the area above the red looks like a head and below that a sword being held and below that two legs, spread.

This is obviously the moon, but in it I see a turban and what appears to be a grizzled face. You might say these are just brush strokes, but under the turban I see two eyes and a nose. You have to look at it from the right to see what I see, or to be, like me, nuts.

Here I have reversed the moon, perhaps making it easier to see the turban atop a head, and the face. Perhaps not.

This is the image that first drew my attention to all the others. I suggested to my wife that there is a face of a little girl contained in it. Maybe this is what imparts the overall good feeling from the painting. In this image I do not see the little girl clearly, but on the larger version, it is very plain to me. If you get a chance …

You might say that due to jet lag my brain is fried. However, if you look at the painting …

We are obviously looking at a fried egg there. How can you not see it? It is not just me with the fried brain. It is Van Gogh too!

Anyway, forget that it took 24 hours to travel from Lisbon to Denver, and that we arrived here in the middle of a giant spring snow storm so that we could not make it home. None of that affects my ability to accurately interpret the works of Vincent Van Gogh, who was certifiably nuts, and probably a genius too.