A Taste of Eastern Europe in Denver

Upcoming food and cultural festival in Globeville spotlights 120 years of history

While researching the Orthodox Food Festival & Old Globeville Days for Mile High on the Cheap, I found out that the Globeville section of Denver is a 120-year-old community with deep roots in Eastern Europe. Located in the shadow of the elevated sections of Interstate 70, it is mainly known as the site of of the National Western Stock Show complex.

Globeville might not have gotten much respect in recent times, but its history is long by Western standards and represents a tapestry of the American experience. Immigrants from Russia, Poland, Romania, Serbia Ukraine and Greece settled there and found community through the shared Eastern Rite religion. Later, they were joined and often replaced by people from such different places Mexico and Eritrea, and African-Americans too. Workers lived in the neighborhood was an important part of Denver's industrial landscape, and when industry and commerce changed and when Interstates 70 and 25 were routed by it, Globeville suffered. But as happens so often, houses of worship that cannot easily be moved provided a bit of a counterweight through good times and bad times.

According to Father Joseph Hirsch of the Holy Transfiguration of Christ Orthodox Cathedral, "since Globeville's incorporation as a town and subsequent annexation into the City and County of Denver, there has been a Summer celebration of some kind or another. For most of that time, the main Homecoming event has been the annual Picnic held by the 109-year-old [now 110] Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Cathedral. In recent years, the District Attorney of Denver, Bill Ritter, now Governor of Colorado, promoted a Globeville Community Day which positively impacted the neighborhood but did not involve much participation from those outside of the neighborhood. In 2004, the Orthodox Community agreed to combine the Annual Orthodox Picnic with the Community Days celebration and to provide a free public celebration both for the residents and friends of Globeville as well as an opportunity to reach out to and inform the entire Front Range."

And that's what's coming up on Saturday, July 18, 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. and Sunday, July 19, 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. when the the sixth annual Orthodox Food Festival & Old Globeville. Admission is free to this event that will feature ethnic foods, music, folk dancing international crafts and for the first time, an art show. There will also be inside tours of the historic and elaborate cathedral, which from the outside looks like a modest church. "Boogie Under the Stars" takes place Saturday evening from 7:30 to 9:30.

9News' Susie Wargin, whose own Denver pioneer heritage is anchored in old Globeville, wrote, "Inside St. Joe's, beautiful stained glass windows align the east and west walls. However there is one window on the west side, featuring the mother Mary with her mother, that shows exactly where I came from. My great, great grandfather Jan Wargin's name adorns the bottom of the stained glass. The word in my family is Jan was a founding member of St. Joseph's and helped fund construction while working at the Globe Smelting and Refining Company. It's a church that has always been very special to our family even though we are all in different locations now."

In the classic American tradition, some stalwarts like Father Hirsch, members of the Globeville Civic Association and Margaret and Robert Escamilla, the successful plaintiffs in Escamilla vs. ASARCO that has been called a landmark victory for environmental justice never give up on their community and just when a neighborhood is thought to be down and out, it is "discovered" by artists and urban pioneers who appreciate history, diversity and low prices, and the process of renewal begins. Globeville is on the rise. New sidewalks, undergrounded utility lines, zoning changes that favor local businesses and other quality-of-life enhancements are in place. The first major sign of gentrification is the multi-use TAXI development, an ambitious project whose first phase includes 43 residential lofts with 130,000 square feet of commercial and office space on an 18-acre site. Globeville's new second identity is RiNo (RIver NOrth), and the incipient arts district.

The festival is in large part a tribute to those who held on and made a historic community better, and all are invited to help celebrate. The event appropriately will take place at the Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Cathedral and Globeville-Argo Park at 47th and North Logan, Denver. For more information, call 303-294-0938.

2008 is the Year of the Volcano in Chile

Two major volcanoes eruptions since January impact national parks and resort towns

In January, the central Chilean volcano called Llaima began breathing fire, sporadically emitting lava flows that turned the snow that covered upper slopes into steam and sending an ash column more than 10,000 feet into the sky, as was dramatically captured in filmed reports from National Geographic and CNN. The 10,252-foot volcano is reportedly one of the country's most active, having erupted as recently as 1994. It is some 422 miles south of the capital of Santiago. The nearest town, Melipueco, was evacuated, as were visitors and rangers in Conguillio National Park.

Chaiten, some 400 miles farther south near the Chile-Argentina border has been erupting since May 2, forcing evacuations first from the nearby eponymous town of Chaiten, then the larger and then more distant community of Futaleufo and even moving out military personnel. This was far more surprising. "The long dormant 3,280-foot (1,000-meter) Chaiten volcano began erupting on Friday for the first time in thousands of years, and the huge plume of volcanic ash is clearly visible on satellite images cutting a swathe across South America's southern tip," according to a Reuters report. Airlines have canceled flights to southern Patagonia, because of the potential danger of volcanic ash being sucked into jet engines.

Chaiten's eruption is still going strong (NASA satellite, photo right). It is located in what vulcanologists refer to as the Andean Arc that stretches from Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. "It is home to 2,000 volcanoes, 500 of which experts say are potentially active. Around 60 have erupted over the past 450 years," Reuters noted. While Argentina is not usually listed as part of the arc, ash has been reported in the Argentine resort of Bariloche in Nahuel Huapi National Park and even as far away as the capital of Buenos Aires. The region is famous not only for skiing at Bariloche but also for Tahoe-blue mountain lakes. As ash, which soared into the stratosphere, continues to fall over a wide region, it could impact the ski season that begins in June, and the lakes might no longer be so pristine.

10th Mountain Huts are a Robert McNamara Legacy

McNamara and Margy's Huts established by the late Robert McNamara

Obituaries for Robert McNamara, who died today, in the national media understandably focus on his years as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, as the "architect of the Vietnam War" (which he later admitted was a mistake) and as president of the World Bank -- as well as his previous big job as the first president of the Ford Motor Company whose last name was not Ford. These high-profile positions earned him a place on the international stage, but Colorado backcountry skiers also know of him as the benefactor of two early huts in the 10th Mountain Trail system.

Both the McNamara Hut and nearby Margy's Hut, a memorial to his first wife Margaret, were built above Aspen in 1982. They were the impetus for the creation of a larger system that now spiders across the high country in the non-wilderness whose rough periphery is Aspen, Leadville, Edwards and Vail. The McNamara Hut is set in an area between the Hunter Creek Valley and Lenado in a high valley called the Burnt Hole. The McNamara and Margy's huts, which are shown on the map near the lower left corner of the map above, are both owned by 10th Mountain and are only open during the winter season to protect the summer range of a nearby elk herd.

The high-country treasure provided by olorado's 10th Mountain Trail system and its backcountry huts is high in my consciousness these days because I am among a goup of a dozen women hiking up to Uncle Bud's Hut near Leadville, which is open in summer as well as in winter.

Addendum: "McNamara Had Strong Ties to Aspen" was a July 7 memorial feature in the Aspen Daily News with a lot more details than I had known about. I'm not the only writer who made the connection after hearing he news of his passing.

Britain Travel WrapUp

Northern England and Scotland, on a budget but home with an emptier wallet

I've been a negligent travel blogger. I actually started this wrapup of our week a bit in Britain at the Sheraton Skyline at Heathrow Airport, but I didn't get a chance to finish -- but now I am. We took full advantage of the flexibility of our BritRail passes. Our only pre-planned time was in the Lake District, and after that, we tried to go where the rain wasn't. This was easy call, because it rained and rained and rained in most of the British Isles during our time. We had lots of clouds and a few sprinkles and one true sunny day in Edinburgh.

Here's where we went and what we did -- some of which I have posted here or on my Nordic Walking blog and on my food/dining blog:

Windermere/Lake District - April 23 (afternoon) to April 26 (morning)

Walked private trail on property belonging the the Famous Wild Boar Hotel.
Hiked from Ambleside to Troutbeck over a mountain called Wansfell with extremely limited bus service from Troutbeck to the highway at Troutbeck Bridge, we walk an additional 2 1/2 miles down a lovely country road to catch the bus back to Windermere, from where we walked an additional 1 1/2 miles or so back to Bowness.
In the process, explored the towns of Windermere and Bowness -- and a bit of Ambleside.


Carlisle - April 26 (afternoon) to April 28 (morning)

Guild Hall
Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery
Carlisle Cathedral - evensong rehearsal in progress when we visited
Hiked along Hadrian's Wall


Edinburgh - April 28 (afternon) to April 30 (morning)

Edinburgh Castle, including the Honours of Scotland (Scottish crown jewels), National War Museum, the Royal Scots Regimental Museum and
Museum on the Mound (Royal Bank of Scotland museum)
National Museum of Scotland
St. Giles Cathedral
City Art Centre
Ad hoc sightseeing bus ride (public bus, not tourist bus) that including a good look at the Royal Yacht Britannia, albeit from a distance
Sir Walter Scott monument and
The Royal Mile

We spent the last night at an airport hotel, the four-star Sheraton Skyline, which we booked at a good rate via priceline.com ($125 plus assorted taxes and fees). This American-style hotel is complete with expansive lobby, conference facility, swimming pool in a covered atrium, over-priced restaurant and somewhat less overpriced sports bar -- from which we watched Liverpool and Chelsea duke it out to face Manchester United in the upcoming European Football Championship. The Sheraton was the only hotel we stayed at that did not include breakfast. The add-ons: 24 hours of Internet service for £15 (that's almost $30) and airport shuttle for £4 per person (£8 for the two of us -- or more than $15.

Bottom line is that our trip was more expen$ive than we had anticipated. We tried to be thrifty, but due to the dismal state of the dollar, even thrift was not enough. We had a fine time and saw a lot that neither of us had seen before. We're glad we went, but we'll have to think out our destinations more carefully until the dollar begins to rebound against other currencies.

Travel Slogans: Good & Bad

Quest for bad slogans make me think the best one I've heard lately

I've long enjoyed Doug Lansky's irreverent views of travel, but until my colleague Christopher Elliott alerted me (and other readers) to it, I didn't realize that Lansky has a great, also-irreverent blog called The Titanic Awards, subtitled "Celebrating the Dubious Achievements of Travel." Today he posted "a few contenders" for the dubious honor of the worst slogans to promote tourism to countries, states, provinces, cities, travel companies and so on.

My favorite of his nominees is Wales. Lansky spotlighted the slogan, “Wales. The Big Country,” and commented, "No, Canada is a big country. So is China. And India, Brazil, Australia. If you’re going to start making shit up, why not say Wales is a tropical island with white sandy beaches and attractive, well-tanned natives who serve free beer around the clock."

Lansky is inviting readers to nominate other slogans that are lousy, misleading or both. I'm going to try to come up with something, but meanwhile, the first thing that popped into my mind was a long-ago, hopefully tongue-in-cheek proposal for this advertising slogan for Panasonic: "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor." It famously became the title of a book by Jerry Della Femina about the ad business in the days now dramatized on the TV series, "Mad Men."

Reading bad slogans brought to mind a clever, simple one that I recently encountered. The small city of Manhattan, Kansas, with a population of 51,000 +/- adopted the nickname, "The Little Apple."

Security Procedures at Heathrow

Airport security is so annoying and probably so flawed that all I can do is blog about it to vent. While we were in Britain, we heard the news report about a 73-year-old man who managed to drive through a security gate at Miami International Airport and ended up on one of the main runways, fortunately, not when a plane was using it. Authorities speculated that he may have been disoriented. Duh!

With this in mind, we steeled ourselves for the security gauntlet at London's Heathrow Airport. Fortunately, there were no lines on Thursday morning, because if there had been, the many redundant procedures would have taken forever.

1. Before we could enter United's check-in area, someone examined our passports.
2. The counter agent who gave us our boarding passes and checked our baggage also looked at our passports. She also asked whether we had packed our own bags, whether our bags had been in our control since we packed them and whether anyone gave us anything to take along -- particularly pointless questions that are no longer asked in the US.
3. At the main security screening area itself, where two more people checked our passports and our boarding passes, we were astonished that we did not have to take our laptop out of its case nor did we have to remove our shoes.
4. But wait! There was more. We went from that screening area to a second screening area where we again had to show our passports and also to remove our shoes. We sent them and them alone through another device that might have been another Xray or perhaps some kind of explosives sniffing instrument.
5. Somewhere along the line, someone asked us whether any stranger had given us anything to take on the flight -- airport shop personnel presumnably excepted.
6. When we entered the waiting room for our United flight, we again had to present our passports and relinquish our boarding passes, which only returned to us when the final multi-phase screening took place. We again had to remove our shoes, which a security agent turned over to look at the soles. Was she checking whether we might have stepped into something unpleasant? Then we were frisked, not just a casual wanding but a real, hands-on pat-down. And then screeners unzipped every compartment of our carry-on bags and riffled through them. Finally, we were handed our boarding passes and permitted to wait until it was time to board the plane.

Some of these steps are standard and have been for a long time. Others might be required at all Heathrow terminals, or perhaps only for international flights, but I suspect that the final step is special treatment accorded to passengers bound for the US. I'm trying to remember the details when I flew out of Heathrow on British Airways last fall. I am quite sure that there was no separate shoe screening -- and I don't recall quite so many steps in the final pre-boarding security check. Then, the big deal was that the British Airports Authority was claiming to permit only one carry-on per passenger, but that was not enforced and has since been dropped.

When we landed at DIA, cleared immigration, finally got our bags that were so slow in coming up that they must have been put on the conveyor by a one-armed baggage handler and passed customs, we entered the main terminal. There was that recorded announcement from the Transportation Security Agency alerting everyone over and over and over that "the security level has been raised to orange..." blah, blah, blah. I think it's been perpetually on that announcement since the color-coded system was introduced -- except shortly before the last election when it was raised to red.

Staycationing on Independence Day

We don't tend to go anywhere on Independence Day Weekend, but a lot of people come to Boulder, as well as Denver and the Colorado Mountains. Boulder celebrates its Sesquicentennial this year, with a ceremonies and patriotic music at Chautauqua Park. It is capped off with a great ground show and spectacular fireworks at the University of Colorado's Folsom Field. For a list of free or low-cost daytime events in the Denver/Boulder metro area, click here, and for local fireworks, click here.