Master Landscaping
http://www.masterlandscaping.net

An Urbandale resident’s interest in creating overwhelming beauty in small spaces landed his yard among the featured stops on the eighth annual Extraordinary Gardens by Ordinary People tour set for Saturday.

The event includes gardens in Des Moines, West Des Moines, Urbandale and Clive. Each site was designed by a Polk County Master Gardener.

“My backyard has been in constant transformation since we moved here in 1979. I add things, move plants if they aren’t doing well and play with the landscaping. One of the main features of my yard is the retaining wall I added,” said King.

The two dispel the belief that good fences make good neighbors. Friends since Borchardt moved to the neighborhood in the 1980s, the two share plants and ideas, and they collaborate on landscaping to be sure it complements the other’s yard.

Krogulski’s yard boasts a garden filled with nearly 125 hosta varieties. Adding to the beauty is a rock-water feature and a dry stream bed that creates a natural divider between the two gardens.

For Borchardt, who volunteers for the Urbandale Demonstration Garden, the thrill of gardening comes from its maintenance.

“I hope people take away from our two gardens that gardening is enjoyable, that it should be an addition to your life and not a chore. For me, it is my little bit of reverie; it’s a stress relief to go out and pull weeds,” Borchardt said.

Tags: county master gardener, demonstration garden, des moines, dry stream, fence, fences, good fences make good neighbors, hosta varieties, Landscaping, master gardener, natural divider, ordinary people, overwhelming beauty, plants, polk county, retaining wall, reverie, rock water, s yard, small spaces, stream bed, stress relief, urbandale, water feature, weeds, west des moines
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CAERNARFON, Wales — The smiling couple striding toward our van didn’t know us. But that didn’t stop Dilys and Dafydd Jones. Their welcome was warm and genuine.

And before we had crossed the sidewalk and the Joneses’ meticulously tended front garden rioting with a mild September’s many-colored flowers, we were immersed in amiable conversation.

Strangers no longer.

One of the frustrations of travel is that you see a nation’s sights, but its people remain out of reach on the other side of a car, train or bus window. You meet locals in shops and markets, smile at them on the street and observe them across a restaurant, but seldom are you invited into their homes and given the opportunity to see how they live.

Programs offering home-hosted dinners in North and South Wales open those doors for travelers. For a fee about equal to the cost of a restaurant meal, visitors can arrange to dine in a home on traditional Welsh fare.

Hosts are carefully chosen for “their warm, friendly personalities and their passion for Wales,” says Donna Goodman, coordinator in Caernarfon.

Guests choose themselves.

“We were interested in meeting Welsh people and being in the tiny Welsh homes,” recalls Don Payne of Garland, Texas, who with his wife, Elsie, ate with the Joneses in July. Among options available as part of their Grand Circle Travel tour, the couple selected a home dinner.

“The evening was delightful,” the retired Air Force major general recalls. “Not only was the food good, but it was an interesting venture into Welsh culture, which I would not have gotten otherwise. It was interesting and educational and enjoyable.”

We now followed in the Paynes’ footsteps: my husband, Travis; Idwal Jones, our guide; and I.

“We’re just ordinary people,” Dilys tells me as I pad after her into her roomy kitchen, past the dining table set with cloud-white linen, gleaming crystal and her treasured Royal Albert china.

Now retired, she previously worked as a secretary at a hospital. He’s a retired truck and bookmobile driver, a town historian and an avid reader about aviation, especially World War II-era planes and pilots. For fun, they answer casting calls for movie extras. Even Gelert, their aged dog, gets parts.

Their home is half of a duplex in what once was “council housing,” government-subsidized rentals for families who couldn’t afford to buy property. Thirty years ago, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decreed that longtime tenants could buy their units at a reasonable cost, and the Joneses did.

Their pride in ownership is obvious in the splendid front and rear gardens, the small but pristine rooms cleaned to within an inch of their lives, and the well-chosen and sturdy furnishings.

In this space about the size of a modest condo, they raised a son and two daughters and now welcome three grandchildren. Dilys had babysat her 12- and 4-year-old granddaughters all day before our visit and still had energy for us. Amazing.

Or, maybe not.

The Joneses are veteran hosts. Offering hospitality on Wednesdays and Fridays between March and October, they’ve welcomed more than 300 Americans to their table since 2006.

“I’ve really enjoyed every single one,” Dilys says. “We’ve had rocket scientists here, Vietnam pilots, teachers, psychologists, psychiatrist, an architect …” She stops and apologizes.

“You must excuse my English. We only speak Welsh unless we are with English speakers.”

I find her accent charming, her vocabulary broad, her ideas well expressed. No apology is needed.

She stirs a pot of potato and leek soup and sets out bowls. In the background, I hear the men deep in conversation about wartime aircraft. They pass around a bent and weathered piece of a Mosquito fighter plane that crashed in adjacent Snowdonia National Park.

Dilys serves small glasses of Irish cream liqueur. (Idwal’s driving; he sips water.) Our appetites sharpened, we’re then called to the table. Dilys places before us mint-colored soup with an ivory swirl of cream, and we begin a feast.

I help her clear the bowls. (It isn’t required, but it’s a grand way to have a chance to talk.) As the wide-ranging conversation rolls on in the dining room, Dilys in the kitchen gradually fills the dinner plates with generous slices of tender Welsh rib of beef, “dirty” (organic) carrots, red cabbage she has poached in pineapple juice, roasted potatoes, a pouf of Yorkshire pudding and mushy peas, which she pronounces “MOOSH-ie.”

Americans love the big green version of peas with their creamy sauce, she says. For the Welsh, this was the heart of many Sunday dinners, mixed with bits of “a cheap piece of shank” (pork).

The plates fill. And fill. Until the bounty threatens to spill over the roses-and-gold rim of each dish.

“I’ve got a regular routine, you see. This is how I do for my own family,” Dilys says. When she entertains, she adds, she saves a meal for the 87-year-old man up the road who has “nobody in the world” and very little money.

She sets a heaping plate drizzled with brown gravy before Travis, and he exclaims, “Holy moly!” Everyone laughs, understanding.

She serves herself last, and as we eat and sip red wine, talk roams from history to family to work to their label-making enterprise and beyond. All of it is peppered with Dafydd’s gentle jokes.

To our “mmmmm-ing” and “ahhhh-ing,” he declares, “It was me who taught her everything she knows about cooking.” Then, gesturing toward his face, he adds, “and I’ve got a nose like Pinocchio.”

Googan, a smoke-colored half-Persian with big eyes like new doubloons, soundlessly approaches Dafydd’s chair and looks up. The man’s big hand descends, and the cat wallows its head into Dafydd’s palm. Sated by the affection, Googan slips from the room.

The phone rings. It’s their son thanking Dilys for baby-sitting.

Out comes the couple’s album containing photos of each group they’ve entertained. They speak fondly of the folks behind the faces as each page is turned.

“They’re lovely people, every one,” Dilys says of the Americans. “It’s as if they’ve been cloned. They’re all lovely … so natural, and so gracious and thankful.”

She seems filled with wonder: “They thank me very much for coming into my humble home … and I’m sure they have massive big houses and loads and loads of money.”

Dilys sets goblets of trifle before us. “This is what we used to get on a Sunday with tea.”

The dessert is layers of custard, sponge cake and juicy strawberries and peaches. “With a drop of sherry, of course,” Dafydd says.

Coffee and sconelike Welsh cakes are the epilogue to the epic meal. I feel as full as Santa Claus after all of those cookies.

The men go up the narrow staircase to Dafydd’s office to see online photos from the space shuttle, and Dilys and I chat. She tells me about losing her mother when she and her sister were young, and being adopted by an aunt, poor but loving.

In time, the good woman came to visit the Joneses at Christmas — and stayed 35 years. Not to worry. “Dafydd loved the bones of her,” Dilys says fondly.

She has put a Rod Stewart jazz CD on the player, and the melodies are irresistible.

We laugh and begin to dance in the living room. Idwal descends and cuts in, gently whirling Dilys through a song.

The Joneses stand at the curb waving as we drive away, our thank-yous echoing in the twilight.

Dilys has given me a key ring decorated with the figure of a Welsh woman in traditional garb. She says it’s to remember her by.

I finger the gift. Forget these good-humored, good people? Not in this lifetime.

IF YOU GO:

BOOKING A MEAL: Donna Goodman coordinates home-hosted dinners year-round in Caernarfon and the Bangor area in North Wales. She can arrange lunch, dinner or afternoon tea. A three-course evening meal with wine, beer and coffee is about $50. Reserve at least a week ahead. Contact: 011-44-1286-677059; infoturnstone-tours.co.uk .

In an unrelated program, Marianne Barrett arranges dinners in the Cardiff area in the south and in County Conwy and the Colwyn Bay area in the north. She began offering meals through Home Dinners in Wales in 1988. She advises booking on the program’s Web site (www.homedinnersinwales.com ). Dinners cost about $70 per person. Meals are available year-round. Contact: 011-44-2920-226680.

RESOURCES:

Wales tourism: 1-800-462-2748; www.visitwales.com .

U.K. tourism: 1-800-462-2748; www.visitbritain.us .

Train travel, passes in the United Kingdom: 1-866-274-8724; http://britrail.com .

Tags: fridays, locals, minis, money, ordinary people, rta
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ABOARD THE QUEEN VICTORIA — The stock market ricocheted and U.S. presidential candidates bared their knuckles, but aboard Cunard’s newest ship, Queen Victoria, in the southern Caribbean, this was water off a duck’s back. In fact, except for the daily “programme” (this is a British ship), which announced the day’s activities, it would have been almost possible to forget the date.

Bookended by fiery sunrises and dazzling sunsets, tranquil days on calm seas gave way to moonlit nights. “On a cruise,” said marine historian Bill Miller, one of Queen Victoria’s lecturers, “all you have to decide is what to wear and what to eat.”

QUEEN VICTORIA STATS

Length: 964.5 feet

Width: 106 feet

Gross tonnage: 90,000

Number of passengers: 2,014

Number of passenger staterooms: 990

Number of crew: Approximately 1,000

Staterooms with balconies: 712

Top cruising speed: 23.7 knots

Original cost: Around $522 million

And which ship to go on — because they are different. Cunard’s ships are noted for their history, their British traditions and their formal evenings. I wondered how Queen Victoria would measure up to her distinguished predecessors and sister ships, which currently include Queen Elizabeth 2 and Queen Mary 2.

I boarded Queen Victoria in Aruba for the second leg of her 105-day world cruise. We were bound for Acapulco via the Panama Canal.

My first impression was of Queen Victoria’s bulk. She has 16 decks and carries 2,014 passengers and about 1,000 in crew. Though smaller than the QM2, this is not a small ship. However, my balcony cabin was smaller than I expected, with a tiny bathroom. No matter, as it turned out. The balcony was large enough, and here I spent some absorbing hours, listening to the ship cut through the water, observing the changing light, looking at the constellations and photographing the moon, which seemed to be full three nights in a row.

That must have been illusion, but why not? A cruise is part illusion. Grand staircases, mahogany paneling, stained glass, inlaid wood and custom-made carpeting, which the QV has aplenty in her stunning public rooms, lull passengers into forgetting that they are on a big sea, which sometimes can get rough. Once, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the QE2 in tandem with the QM2, and even that huge ship, as I looked back at her, was dwarfed by the mighty ocean.

Another illusion is of upper-crust elegance. Royalty, movie stars and billionaires may have traveled on ships at one time, but if and when they’re there now, most passengers aren’t likely to run into them. They would be in their suites, tended by their butlers.

SAMPLE ITINERARIES AND FARES

(All fares are per person, double occupancy)

May 6, 2008: 14-day Mediterranean Delights. From $2,975 (inside stateroom) to $25,175 (Q1 Grand Suite). Balcony fares from $4,175.

July 6, 2008: 12-day Voyage of the Vikings. From $2,2995 (inside stateroom) to $22,895 (Q1 Grand Suite). Balcony fares from $3,895.

October 12, 2008: 12-day Classic Mediterranean. From $2,445 to $22,345 (Q1 Grand Suite). Balcony fares from $3,345.

2009 World Cruise Fares: Fares for 105-day cruise (includes the trans-Atlantic crossing aboard QM2 from Southampton to New York at the end of the World Cruise), from $20,955 to $229,970 for a Q1 Grand Suite. Balcony fares from $29,140. Segments of the World Cruise can be booked at varying prices.

Extras: Liquor is extra, of course, but so are other beverages such as canned soft drinks ($1.75), bottled mineral water ($2/small; $3.50/large) and coffee outside of regular restaurant service ($1 for regular coffee and tea; $1.95 for cappuccino). Wine tastings, when offered, are $35 a person; whiskey tastings are $25 a person. Shore excursions usually cost between $39 and $199 per person. The spa’s hydrotherapy suite, with its heated pool, relaxation room, steam rooms and multi-headed showers costs $35 for a one-day pass. Group yoga and Pilates classes are $45 a week. Internet access is 50 cents a minute, with packages available.

Though the Queen Victoria has two or three formal nights a week, they’re more Swarovski than Harry Winston — and that’s fine. Cruises, I realized, give ordinary people a chance to dress up and explore sides of themselves they usually keep submerged.

On the Queen Victoria, for instance, I met a woman who lives outside Sydney, Australia, who said that after she and her husband signed up for the cruise, she worried for six months that she would look frumpy among all the sophisticated, stylish women. She was relieved to find out that she looked fine. That was useful information.

I also met an accountant from Colorado who was on for the whole World Cruise and who said that her divorce would become final while she was away. She was rethinking her life, wanting to explore creativity that she had previously neglected.

A long cruise provides the opportunity to do that, not only through lectures and classes but through conversations with people from all over the world.

You don’t eat on a cruise ship. You dine — and on the Queen Victoria, the dining options are legion. Passengers are assigned a dining room according to their cabin class, with the Queens Grill for the Grand, Master, Queens Suites and Penthouses at the top of the pyramid, followed by the Princess Grill for passengers in that category.

Both Grill dining rooms are single seating and passengers can order off the menu. In fact, said executive chef Jean-Marie Zimmerman, “when they use our menus, we’re shocked.” Caviar, lobster and truffles are readily available. In good weather, Grill passengers can dine outside in a charming courtyard with an Italianate fountain and lighting fixtures that resemble old-fashioned gas street lamps.

The two-level Britannia Restaurant, where most passengers have dinner and sometimes other meals as well, accommodates 878 people in each of two dinner seatings, with open seating at breakfast and lunch. The food is ample but not inspired — not surprising considering the numbers served. Provisioning and cooking for the 3,000 people aboard the ship is a job of staggering complexity, requiring seven kitchens and mammoth storerooms.

Passengers who want an alternative to their assigned dining room have several options. For an extra $20 at lunch and $30 at dinner, they can try the Todd English restaurant, whose menus were developed by the celebrity chef, but whose kitchen is in Chef Zimmerman’s jurisdiction. The Lido on Deck 9 serves cafeteria-style breakfast, lunch and dinner. At lunch, pasta and pizzas are made to order and are excellent. Another lunch option is the Golden Lion Pub, where large TVs play sporting events and the menu consists of such items as steak and mushroom pie.

Though passengers could compensate for some of these calories just by walking from one end of the ship to the other (Deck 3, which goes almost all the way around, is one-third of a mile), the Queen Victoria has a well-equipped gym and offers a variety of exercise and stretching classes, including yoga and Pilates. Fencing classes, a shipboard first, build stamina and balance. There are paddle tennis and shuffleboard courts, where the action can be far from decorous. Two outdoor swimming pools are seldom too crowded for swimming laps.

While Queen Victoria’s spa, billed as the Cunard Royal Spa and Fitness Centre, doesn’t have the name-brand cachet of the Canyon Ranch spa on the Queen Mary 2, it has a large variety of treatments and experienced therapists. Services under the spa’s jurisdiction include a beauty salon, an acupuncturist, a physiotherapist and a dentist who is equipped to do tooth whitening and emergency repairs.

QUEEN VICTORIA’S STATEROOMS

Queen Victoria has eight kinds of accommodations: Grand Suites, Master Suites, Penthouses, Queens Suites, Princess Suites, Balcony, Oceanview (no balcony) and Inside.

They range in size from 2,131 square feet to 151 square feet. All passengers in the Grand, Master, Queens and Princess Suites eat in the 142-seat Queens Grill or the 132-seat Princess Grill and have their own indoor and outdoor lounges plus an outdoor dining area.

Most passengers eat in the Britannia Restaurant, which serves 830 of the ship’s 1,007 staterooms. The Britannia accommodates 878 guests in two dinner seatings, with open seating at breakfast and lunch.

Most of the staterooms on the Queen Victoria are in the Balcony category and range in size from 242 to 472 square feet, including the balcony. They are attractively furnished in blonde wood with a small desk and sofa and two single beds that can be pushed together or separated. They have small bathrooms with a shower but no tub. (Princess Grill staterooms and up are tub-equipped.)

Storage space in the Balcony staterooms is tight, especially for a ship that takes passengers on long cruises and has many formal nights. Most passengers found the drawer and closet space inadequate and improvised. One woman and her roommate on the World Cruise asked that the sofa in their room be removed so they could place a clothes rack in that space. Another couple brought S-hooks and hung some of their garments outside the small closets. Some people who planned to be on the ship for months went to Wal-Mart and bought a set of plastic drawers.

Cunard says that the cabins will be fitted with more drawers after the World Cruise ends in April.

In a hydrotherapy suite, guests can assuage their backaches under strong jets of water in a heated pool, and then recline on contoured, heated lounges between steam room sessions and play time in a hydra-headed shower.

Among the treatments, the dry flotation bed looked particularly inviting. After a massage, spa director Mark Nel explained, the dry flotation bed turns into a water bed. “The body is weightless in water and you relax. You’ll fall asleep within minutes!”

The dry flotation bed costs $119 for an hour’s treatment. For a less expensive version, life-stressed passengers can sprawl on one of the cushioned teak lounge chairs on Deck 3.

The ship has a casino for those who want it, but it was far less popular than the library, which has 6,000 books and periodicals.

There’s also a supervised playroom for children but few were aboard.

Most passengers were retired or semi-retired. Many had the time and money to book the whole World Cruise from New York City to Southampton.

Among them was Irma Klindt of Pasadena, who has made more than 105 trips with Cunard. She has an apartment in Pasadena but said that she hadn’t opened her Christmas mail yet.

She has been aboard Cunard ships since Dec. 11 and won’t get home until the end of April.

Ms. Klindt, who retired from Pacific Bell more than two decades ago at the age of 55, isn’t an heiress. She travels as inexpensively as possible in an inside cabin. “The world comes to me when I’m aboard the ship,” she said.

The Queen Victoria isn’t perfect and has already had its share of problems. An outbreak of norovirus on the maiden voyage afflicted about 100 people and kept the well-equipped medical center busy.

Stormy seas off Gibraltar prevented the ship from docking. Some of the Britannia dining room service has been spotty. And the staterooms don’t have enough drawers.

Stirling and Clare Kenny of Stratford, Ontario, and Naples, Fla., said they had read the negative criticisms of Queen Victoria’s Christmas cruise and didn’t know what to expect. The Kennys boarded in New York and plan to get off in Sydney, Australia.

They have cruised on most lines operating from North America and this is their 70th cruise. “This is way better than we thought,” Mr. Kenny said. “It meets all my expectations and exceeds them.”

Then he shrugged off comparisons with other ships. “The best cruise is the one you’re on right now,” he said.

QUEEN VICTORIA’S FIRST PANAMA CANAL TRANSIT

On January 21, Queen Victoria approached the Port of Cristobal on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. Huge cranes towered against the dawn sky, ready for the ships that carry grain, cargo containers and petroleum between the East Coast of the United States, Asia, and the west coasts of both North and South America. Without the canal, the freighters would have to make a long, treacherous journey around Cape Horn.

The 50-mile-long canal cuts through the Isthmus of Panama at one of the narrowest points between North and South America. Three sets of locks raise ships 85 feet to Gatun Lake and then lower them again. The 90,000-ton Queen Victoria would just fit in a lock, with two feet to spare on either side and just under 18 feet front and back,

On the day before the transit, lecturers Diane and John Stockman had referred to the Panama Canal as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Seventy-five thousand people worked on it; around 32,000 people died in the effort. It took decades to build. A French team tried, starting in 1880, but were defeated by mosquito-borne diseases and a flawed plan. In 1904, an American team began work on the canal and succeeded. Without fanfare, on Aug. 15, 1914, a freighter, the SS Ancon, became the first commercial ship to make the transit.

At 6 a.m. on January 21, three Panamanian pilots came aboard the Queen Victoria to assume navigational authority for the ship. The morning sky was fiery red, illuminating the dense jungle that borders the canal. Magnificent Frigate birds soared overhead.

Two men rowed a boat toward the Victoria to throw the lines needed to hitch the ship to small locomotives called “mules” that would guide her through the locks. Over the years, more complicated technology has been tried, but the rowboat-toss method has proven best. Then the ship nosed her way into the first of the Gatun locks and the gates swung closed behind her.

It takes 52 million gallons of water to move a ship through the Panama Canal. The concept is simple. As a ship ascends, water flows from Gatun Lake at the crest of the system into the locks below, raising the ship in steps to the level of the next lock. When that level is reached, the forward gates open and the ship proceeds into the next lock to repeat the process.

At 23-mile-long Gatun Lake, the ships pause to await their turn to begin the downward journey. There, water drains from each lock until the ship is level with the one below. The descent is especially tricky on the Pacific side, where there are 18-foot tides.

For passengers and most crew, it’s a splendid spectacle. For a ship’s navigation officers, a Panama Canal transit is a long, tiring day. Scraped paint is probably inevitable, and Queen Victoria got her share.

But after nearly 100 years, there is a matter-of-fact quality to this remarkable journey. Around 14,000 ships go through the canal every year, and everyone knows their job.

To appreciate what this eight- or nine-hour crossing really means you would have to know that Gatun Lake is still one of the largest manmade lakes in the world, that the Panama Canal was the most expensive construction project that the United States had ever undertaken until that time and that the canal was dug with steam shovels removing enough earth to circle the globe four times.

Though the locks were so well built that they have never needed to be replaced, dredging and construction go on continually, especially at the Galliard Cut, which crosses the Continental Divide and is prone to landslides. Near the Centennial Bridge just north of the Pedro Miguel locks, a new channel is being built that will accommodate larger ships than can get through the present locks. It is scheduled for completion in 2014.

The cost to transit the canal is by tonnage. Traveler and adventurer Richard Halliburton swam the canal in 1928 and paid 36 cents. The Queen Victoria paid $275,000.

In late afternoon, she reached the Miraflores locks and was released into the Pacific. Hundreds of people on shore waved and cheered as this great ship completed her first Panama Canal transit. People on the ship waved back. Some had tears in their eyes.

So many large ships are built every year that we might take them for granted, but they are amazing feats of engineering as is the canal itself. One of Queen Victoria’s lecturers, Ben Cameron, recalled a line from Shakespeare that seemed appropriate to the moment: “What a piece of work is man!” Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet.”

There are times when humanity’s best shines through. This was one of them.

– Terese Loeb Kreuzer

Terese Loeb Kreuzer is editor of Travel Arts Syndicate; TravelArts-Syndicate.blogspot.com.

Tags: advent, amp, apartment, balcony, coffee and tea, construction project, containers, decks, dining rooms, late afternoon, money, neglect, ordinary people, pool, rta, Services, square feet, west coast
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Tranquil days on calm seas gave way to moonlit nights. “On a cruise,” said marine historian Bill Miller, one of the ship’s lecturers, “all you have to decide is what to wear and what to eat.”

And which cruise line’s ship to go on %26mdash; because they are all different. Cunard’s ships are noted for their history, their service standards, their British traditions and their formal evenings.

I boarded the Queen Victoria in Aruba for the second leg of its 105-day world cruise. We were bound for Acapulco, Mexico, via the Panama Canal.

My first impression was of Queen Victoria’s bulk. It has 16 decks and carries 2,014 passengers and around 1,000 crew. Though not as large as sister ship the Queen Mary 2, this is not a small ship. But my balcony cabin, which I shared with my aunt, was smaller than I expected, with a tiny bathroom.

No matter, as it turned out. The balcony was large enough, equipped with two chairs and a table. I spent hours there, listening to the ship cut through the water, observing the changing light, looking at the constellations and photographing the moon, which was brighter than I had ever seen it and seemed to be full three nights in a row.

That must have been illusion, but why not? A cruise is part illusion. Grand staircases, mahogany paneling, stained glass, inlaid wood and custom-made carpeting, which the QV has aplenty in her stunning public rooms, lull passengers into forgetting that they are on a big sea. Once I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Queen Elizabeth 2 in tandem with the QM2, and even that huge ship, as I looked back at her, was dwarfed by the ocean.

Another illusion is of upper-crust elegance. Many passengers choose suites, tended by butlers. And the Queen Victoria has two or three formal nights a week, though they’re more Swarovski than Harry Winston %26mdash; and that’s fine. Cruises give ordinary people a chance to play dress up.

A woman who lives outside Sydney, Australia, told me that after she and her husband signed up for the cruise, she worried for six months that she would look frumpy among all the sophisticated, stylish women. She was relieved to find out that she looked fine.

The layout of the Queen Victoria is conducive to sociability. The lovely, high-ceilinged Queens Room, where afternoon tea is served, and which is also used for classes and for ballroom dancing in the evening, is centrally located on Deck 2, not far from several bars and lounges.

Afternoon tea is flawless. White-gloved waiters bring pots of tea followed by trays of little sandwiches, scones with jam and clotted cream and pastries %26mdash; all accompanied by a harpist.

You don’t eat on a cruise ship, you dine. On the Queen Victoria, passengers are assigned a dining room according to their cabin class, with the Queens Grill for the Grand, Master, Queens Suites and Penthouses at the top of the pyramid, followed by the Princess Grill for passengers in that category.

Both Grill dining rooms are single seating, and passengers can order off the menu. In fact, said executive chef Jean-Marie Zimmerman, “when they use our menus, we’re shocked.” Caviar, lobster and truffles are readily available. In good weather, Grill passengers can dine outside in a charming courtyard with an Italianate fountain and lighting fixtures that resemble old-fashioned gas street lamps.

The two-level Britannia Restaurant, where most passengers have dinner and sometimes other meals, accommodates 878 passengers in each of two seatings, with open seating at breakfast and lunch. The food is ample but not inspired.

Provisioning and cooking for the 3,000 people aboard the ship is a job of staggering complexity, requiring seven kitchens and mammoth storerooms. Bakers work around the clock. Fifteen pastry chefs make pastries for each day’s consumption. Separate kitchens are devoted to vegetable preparation, meat and fish.

Passengers who want an alternative to their assigned dining room have options. For an extra $20 at lunch and $30 at dinner, they can try the Todd English restaurant, whose menus were developed by the celebrity chef, but whose kitchen is in chef Zimmerman’s jurisdiction.

The Lido on Deck 9 serves cafeteria-style breakfast, lunch and dinner. At lunch, pasta and pizzas are made to order, and are excellent. Another lunch option is the Golden Lion Pub, where large TVs play sporting events and the menu consists of items such as steak and mushroom pie.

The Queen Victoria has a well-equipped gym and offers exercise and stretching classes, including yoga and Pilates. Fencing classes, a shipboard first, build stamina and balance. On paddle tennis and shuffleboard courts, the action can be far from decorous. Two outdoor swimming pools are seldom too crowded for swimming laps.

While Queen Victoria’s spa doesn’t have the name-brand cachet of the Canyon Ranch spa on the Queen Mary 2, it is well run with a large variety of treatments and experienced therapists. Services under the spa’s jurisdiction include a beauty salon, an acupuncturist, a physiotherapist and a dentist who is equipped to do tooth whitening and emergency repairs.

In a hydrotherapy suite, guests can assuage their backaches under strong jets of water in a heated pool, and then relax on heated lounges between steam room sessions and play time in a hydra-headed shower.

Among the treatments, the dry flotation bed looked particularly inviting. “You have your standard massage,” spa director Mark Nel explained. “Then you then climb on the dry flotation bed. It gets filled with water beneath you. You’ll fall asleep within minutes.”

The ship has a casino for those who like to gamble, but it was far less popular than the library, which has 6,000 books and periodicals and spans two decks, joined by a spiral staircase.

Although the Queen Victoria has a playroom for children, few were aboard. Most passengers were retired or semiretired. Many had the time and money to book the whole world cruise from New York to Southampton.

The Queen Victoria isn’t perfect and has already had her share of problems. An outbreak of norovirus on the maiden voyage afflicted around 100 people and kept the well-equipped medical center busy. Stormy seas off Gibraltar prevented the ship from docking. Some of the Britannia dining room service has been spotty, and the staterooms don’t have enough drawers.

Stirling and Clare Kenny of Stratford, Ontario, and Naples, Fla., said they had read the negative criticisms of Queen Victoria’s Christmas cruise and didn’t know what to expect.

The Kennys boarded in New York and plan to get off in Sydney. They have cruised on most lines operating from North America, and this is their 70th cruise.

“This is way better than we thought,” Stirling said. “It meets all my expectations and exceeds them.”

Then he shrugged off comparisons with other trips they had taken. “The best cruise is the one you’re on right now,” he said.

IF YOU GO

About the Queen Victoria

The ship has eight kinds of accommodations: Grand Suites, Master Suites, Penthouses, Queens Suites, Princess Suites, Balcony, Oceanview (no balcony) and Inside. They range in size from 2,131 square feet to 151 square feet.

Most of the staterooms are in the Balcony category and range in size from 242 to 472 square feet, including the balcony. They are attractively furnished in blond wood, with a small desk and sofa and two single beds that can be pushed together . They have small bathrooms with a shower but no tub. (Princess Suite staterooms and up are tub-equipped.)

Storage space in the Balcony staterooms is tight, especially for a ship that takes passengers on long cruises and has many formal nights. Most passengers found the drawer and closet space inadequate and some improvised by removing the sofa in favor of a clothes rack, using hooks to hang some of their garments outside the small closets or buying a set of plastic drawers at a port stop. Cunard says that the cabins will be fitted with more drawers after the world cruise ends in April.

Ship stats: Length, 964.5 feet; width, 106 feet; gross tonnage, 90,000; number of passengers, 2,014; number of passenger staterooms, 990; number of crew, about 1,000; staterooms with balconies, 712; top cruising speed, 23.7 knots; original cost, about $522 million.

Sample itineraries

%26#8226; May 6: 14-day Mediterranean Delights. From $2,975 (inside stateroom) to $25,175 (Q1 Grand Suite). Balcony fares from $4,175.

%26#8226; July 6: 12-day Voyage of the Vikings. From $2,295 (inside stateroom) to $22,895 (Q1 Grand Suite). Balcony fares from $3,895.

%26#8226; Oct. 12: 12-day Classic Mediterranean. From $2,445 to $22,345 (Q1 Grand Suite). Balcony fares from $3,345.

%26#8226; 2009 world cruise fares: Fares for 105-day cruise (includes the trans-Atlantic crossing aboard QM2 from Southampton, England, to New York at the end of the cruise), from $20,955 to $229,970 for a Q1 Grand Suite. Balcony fares from $29,140. Segments of the cruise can be booked at varying prices.

%26#8226; Extras: Liquor is extra, of course, but so are other beverages such as canned soft drinks ($1.75), bottled mineral water ($2 small; $3.50 large) and coffee outside of regular restaurant service ($1 for regular coffee and tea; $1.95 for cappuccino). Wine tastings, when offered, are $35 a person; whiskey tastings are $25 a person. Shore excursions usually cost between $39 and $199 per person. The spa’s hydrotherapy suite, with its heated pool, relaxation room, steam rooms and multi-headed showers, costs $35 for a one-day pass. Group yoga and Pilates classes are $45 a week. Internet access is 50 cents a minute.

Information

1-800-728-6273, www.cunard.com

Terese Loeb Kreuzer, editor of the Travel Arts Syndicate, is the author of “How to Move to Canada” (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006).

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MUMBAI: The Rahul Roy, Rakhi

Sawant and Carol Gracias-starrer Big Boss on Sony Entertainment Television,

which managed to become a talking point for the Hindi speaking audiences last

year, is now on the verge of a legal storm.

Format owner Endemol

International, which owns the internationally-renowned format Big Brother, which

was adapted for the Indian audiences as Big Boss, has decided to sever ties with

Sony.

Sony had a volume output

deal with Endemol on the back of which Endemol decided to set shop in India. The

deal with Endemol India and Sony was two pronged: a volume agreement (which is

estimated to be close to Rs 15-25 crore per format for a single season), that

came to a close in 2006 coupled with format agreements, such as Dance Dance,

Fear Factor, Fame Gurukul and Big

Boss.

“In lieu of the

volume deal struck with Sony, Endemol had assured Sony of the rights to a season

two and three of Big Brother (Big Boss in India) and a right of first refusal on

various other format shows,” said Albert Almeida, EVP %26amp; business head,

Sony Entertainment Television.

However, it is learnt that

Endemol India, in a letter sent to Sony, stated that it was under instruction

from its headquarters not to produce a second series of Big Boss for Sony due to

no official written

confirmation.

Mr Almeida said,

“Yes, while we did receive such a letter, the discussions for the second

series was well underway with Endemol India and creative decisions like casting

options of splitting the house with six celebrities and six ordinary people,

location of the Big Brother House and anchor options were all being discussed.

Further, all other deal terms for production of second series were already

buttoned up, with the exception of a launch date.”

Industry sources say that

Endemol India received no commitment on the renewal of the volume deal which is

estimated to be Rs 250 crore across multiple years. For a production like Big

Boss, the estimated cost for the broadcaster would be about Rs 25 crore.

Sony could not look at a

renewal, according to insiders, due to the heavy monetary commitment that needed

to be made. It is now understood that Endemol India is using its driver format

(Big Brother aka Big Boss in India) to clinch another volume deal with another

broadcaster. The names that are doing the rounds are Viacom as well as NDTV

Imagine which launched its channel earlier this month.

Tags: amp, ordinary people, rta
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Another festive season of fun and merriment much awaited by the Children and adults alike has come for the jubilation of all. Now is the time to be with the family. No place is sweeter than home for most of us.

As I write this article Christmas and the Season of Joy is celebrated all over the world.
I am going to miss a great deal of fun. Currently, I am away from my family in a far away country. I feel the distance from my family this Christmas time more than any other time. Imagine being away from home at the best time to be with your family. And this incidentally is the first time that I happened to be away from home at a Christmas time. Yes, now I am on an official visit to Bangladesh engaged in some work. I am getting paid to be here. But missing the home and family during Christmas is hard to bear. Yesterday my ten year old son telephoned me and demanded me to return stating he misses me a lot.

I thought to myself that next year for sure I have to be at home for Christmas. Why I am here in a distant country now is because I need to earn money on my job. Next year I need not be here or any where else on a job because I will not be working next year. Then how are you going to earn money to live? You might ask.

The answer is simple. I launched online money making home based business a couple of months ago. The progress so far seems good and the promise is there for a full time business. I have automated my new online income streams. So, I know next year by this time I would have definitely achieved Financial Freedom. Therefore, I will be able to be at home with my kids and family and celebrate Christmas better enjoying the life fulfillment that money brings. Life fulfillment is the ability to afford all that you want to have in life. I have come to realize that the state of life fulfillment can be easily achieved by been a full time online marketing entrepreneur.

The online marketing entrepreneurs are a new breed of fast money makers. They are known as ordinary people who make extra ordinary money having started with small budgets. These pioneers of online business keep making more inflows with fewer outflows. It is a business strategy that you and I too need to follow to get to the heights that they have reached and to remain there. After reaching the financial heights staying there is not that difficult as top of the ladder is never crowded. You too can do what I am doing. Like me you too can start an online home based business. Yes, what you have to do to achieve what they have accomplished is to follow the trail that they have set like I do. To start you have to make the decision as to what is your aim going to be. It has to be your financial freedom that helps you to achieve life fulfillment. This is a fact because the life fulfillment cannot be realized when there are financial burdens.

So your first objective will be to end all financial worries. For this decide how much income you need to generate in the New Year to reach your goal of Financial Freedom. At this point you have to be specific as to how much income to target? Is it $5,000 or $10,000 per month? You have to decide and fix the target. Then you have to know what action is required to set up steady income streams. Your next task is to make these just like streams of water flowing down a hill, to flow towards you gushing, flushing and rushing towards you. This will appear to you as the most difficult part of the whole exercise but there are ways of setting automated income streams to be attracted twenty four hours a day towards you if you set things to correctly function.

If you believe firmly that you will some how get there, then nothing can stop you and things will begin to happen. Then you will get the right ideas, tips and support from unexpected sources as you keep on trying with persistent and full focus on your set goals. In today’s technology driven world, the technology itself makes it possible for any one to succeed in life. Three main tools to use being, technology, correct focus and organized effort. Today, there are many ways of achieving life’s objectives. The internet too has been instrumental in bringing the products and markets within easy reach of every body at a clicking distance on to our laps.

The internet offers vast business opportunities today and like ‘Aladdin’s Wonder Lamp’ it has the ability to fulfill many of your wishes. There are large numbers of ordinary people like you and me who have become extra ordinary income earners with the help of the internet. The technology has so improved that the internet millionaires of today are able to automate their income streams and run their business with e mail communication too on autopilot systems. The internet marketers have flourished by reaping big harvests in terms of profits like making hay while the sun shines. The internet millionaires have set the trail that took them to Financial Freedom. Thus, you have only to follow their path. You too can do it by knowing the paths they tread and proven methods they applied

Home based business online is undoubtedly the best and the surest way to achieve your life’s fulfillment through Financial Freedom. And as a result you will have more time for your family because you need not go to an office. Not only can you work at home choosing a home business opportunity, you can also start with a shoe string budget like the internet millionaires who have done the same and succeeded speedily. To know more about the proven methods and online money generating secrets, used by many internet entrepreneurs, visit our website http://www.chanano.com

Tags: amp, money, ordinary people, target
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Niemeyer has had quite a life. Fifty years ago, he began work on the first of his eye-catching civic monuments for Brasilia. This was the stunningly beautiful Alvorada Palace, the official residence of the Brazilian president and a building like no other in the modern world. Newly restored, this diaphanous structure sits on a peninsula overlooking the yacht-studded, artificial Lake Paranoa. It shimmers from the far side of an immaculate, perfectly geometrical lawn. A discreet moat, veils of hummingbirds and a polite modern gatehouse are all that separates this colonnaded building from the rest of Brasilia, one of the most extraordinary cities on the planet.

Brasilia remains an amazing feat of architectural daring, radical urban planning and political will. Its futuristic centre - a World Heritage Site today, along with such places as Machu Picchu and Pompeii - was realised in just 41 months, spurred on by Juscelino Kubitschek, the populist Brazilian president who, when he took office in 1956, promised “50 years of progress in five”. The men he appointed to give shape to his dream didn’t disappoint. “JK’s” city, inaugurated in 1960, was planned by the Brazilian architect Lucio Costa, who offered his protege Niemeyer the architectural gift of a lifetime: the design of all the set-piece buildings of one of the most improbable and distinctive cities in the world. Here, a powerfully emblematic Congress building. There, an arcaded Palace of Justice. Here, sleek ministry headquarters. There, a revolutionary cathedral and glamorous, ultra-modern apartment blocks.

As if the building of Brasilia, which continues today, has not been enough to keep him occupied, Niemeyer says today: “I have plenty of new work. The president of Angola has invited me to design a new capital city for his country, four times the size of Brasilia.” Four times the size of Brasilia? So it could take four times as long. “That’s 16 years,” I say, “or could you do it in less?”

Niemeyer smiles. If work on the new Angolan capital were to take 16 years, he would be 115 at the time of its inauguration. The architect turns 100 in December and every day he comes to this penthouse studio, perched atop a curvaceous 10-storey art deco block known, for obvious reasons, as the Mae West building, in the centre of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach. Here he draws, talks to colleagues, family and friends, eats lunch at a table overlooking white sand beaches and the rolling Atlantic, smokes small cigars, drinks a glass of wine and draws some more. He enjoys the company of writers, philosophers, scientists, journalists - and politicians of a certain stature. Castro has been here several times. Not so long ago, the Cuban president said: “Niemeyer and I are the last communists on this planet.” A member of the Brazilian Communist Party since 1945, Niemeyer was presented with the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963.

A few weeks ago, Hugo Chavez, the radical president of Venezuela, came to spend time with Niemeyer. Famous architects drop by on any pretext; none, though, is more famous than Niemeyer himself. He is the last of the “heroes” of the Modern movement. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto were all in awe of this young Brazilian who single-handedly transformed architecture into a wonderful thing of sensuous curves, lightness and unforgettable forms. Even then, they didn’t always understand the ways Niemeyer was transforming Modern movement architecture to suit Brazilian conditions.

“Walter Gropius came to see me at my house at Canoas above Rio. I designed it in a sequence of natural curves to flow in and out of the existing landscape. He said, it’s beautiful, but it can’t be mass-produced. As if I had intended such a thing! What an idiot.”

Today, Niemeyer lives in what he calls “an ordinary apartment” in Copacabana close to his studio. The Canoas House, set among banana and jackfruit trees beside a plunging river with ocean views, is now the headquarters of the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation.

“I don’t like to talk about architecture,” he says. “Life is too short for that, a breath, that’s all - it matters far more than buildings.” This seems an odd thing to say for a man who has not only designed some of the most admired, and beautiful, buildings of the past 70 years, but who has lived and breathed architecture as few others have, and who has outlived his contemporaries. “All my old friends and sparring partners are dead,” he says.

So we talk about life, the universe, books, politics - until, as I thought he might, Niemeyer inches towards architecture. I have thrilled to many of his buildings since I was a teenager, and one of my most treasured possessions is a drawing he once made for me of the Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art, an ultra-modern building, looking out across Guanabara Bay from Rio, that appears to hover over the rock it rises from like some flying saucer. The building, one of the most exciting of the past 50 years, brims with youthful energy, yet Niemeyer was 89 when it opened in 1996. “I think of myself as no more than 60,” says Niemeyer, who married, for the second time, last year. His bride was his long-time assistant, 60-year-old Vera Lucia Cabreira. “What I could do at 60,” says Niemeyer, “I can still do now.”

What I like most about his best buildings is that they seem to have emerged in an instant, as if fully formed from his mind, hand and eye. They are as they are and you cannot imagine them being any other way; they seem to spring naturally from their sites, whether in the blazing civic plazas of Brasilia, or in the mountainous hills above Rio.

Niemeyer’s first fully curved building, the church of Sao Francisco de Assis at Pampulha, appears to be formed from a single flowing line. It is a happily inventive, moving building, seemingly designed all at once, without a single doubt in the architect’s mind.

“This is how it was,” says Niemeyer. “Architecture for me has always begun with drawing. When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since. The buildings do appear on paper the way you say, but they are not the result of gratuitous brushstrokes. The pencil is guided by so many thoughts stored away in my mental library. But, when I have looked at the site for a building, considered its budget and thought of how it might be built, and what it might be, the drawings come very quickly. I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

“Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise. Architecture is invention. It must offer pleasure as well as practicality. If you only worry about function, the result stinks. Many of my buildings have been political and civic monuments, but perhaps some of them have given ordinary people, powerless people, a sense of delight. This is what architects can do. Nothing more.”

When I revisit the Museum of Contemporary Art, I talk to visitors who come from all backgrounds, including the poverty-stricken favelas of Rio; they clearly take pleasure from it. Newly married couples come here to have their photograph taken. Children run up with their arms open as if to embrace this striking, yet welcoming building. A work of art, it exists just this side of a drawing from the Jetsons cartoon.

Sometimes Niemeyer’s instant buildings can veer towards the glib, or the vacuous, as with the brand new National Museum at Brasilia, a white 80-metre concrete dome wrapped around, inside and out, with a twisting, elevated walkway. It’s a fine conceit, but with nothing to show inside - no collection, only one gallery - the building is an exhibition of itself. Truly, a building needs a function, and while Niemeyer is a prolific form-giver, even he needs to be challenged and if not reined in, then disciplined by the demands of a purposeful brief. Which is why the great curves of the principal buildings of the Constantine University at Ain el Bey, Algeria, commissioned by president Houari Boumedienne, or the breathtaking dome of the Communist party headquarters in Paris are so convincing; these are glamorous, signature buildings working hard for their living while delighting everyone drawn into their orbits.

Niemeyer emerged, from obscurity and a lazy education, as one of the most original and talented of all Modern movement architects, with a highly informed and almost intuitive understanding of the possibilities of reinforced concrete construction. In his native Brazil, steel was far too rare and expensive for use in the majority of buildings, while concrete was not only cheap, but it could be stretched to unimagined limits while being poured and moulded by relatively unskilled labour. In concrete construction, Niemeyer could see a way of shaping an architecture that would not only be modern, but would also echo the Brazilian landscape he loved, and which he drew, increasingly, in the guise of curved female forms.

His chance to shine came in 1936 when Gustavo Capanema, the idealistic Brazilian minister for education, commissioned Lucio Costa to design the country’s first Modern building, a headquarters for the health and education ministries in central Rio. Costa and Capanema decided to seek the advice of Le Corbusier, the greatest of all Modern architects. The famous Swiss-French visionary and architect flew to Rio. “In the Graf Zeppelin,” says Niemeyer, referring to the magnificent 237-metre German airship that, between 1928 and 1937, made 143 impeccable transatlantic flights. “I went to meet him,” he adds.

Le Corbusier descended from the air, “a mighty god visiting his pygmy worshippers,” says Niemeyer. Or so it seemed. The result of Corbu’s trip proved to be unexpected. He made two designs for Capanema’s ministry: one idealistic, for an unobtainable site by the ocean, the other a low-rise building that somehow failed to capture the idea of the new Brazil and the new Brazilian. “We wanted to do something very special,” says Niemeyer, “perhaps to show that we were something more than primitive Indians dancing colourfully for visiting Europeans and Northern Americans.”

Working for nothing, and reliant on his family - his father was a graphic artist, his grandfather a Supreme Court judge - Niemeyer transformed the Corbusier scheme into the serene high-rise building that adorns central Rio today. A National Monument, it has since been renamed Capanema Palace. Le Corbusier had been deeply impressed by Niemeyer’s burgeoning talent. Although rigid by Niemeyer’s later standards, the palace abounds with curves inside; its exteriors are decorated with romantic wall tiles, depicting scallops and sea horses, and shaded by deep sun-louvres. Immensely photogenic and a superb fusion of art, engineering, landscaping and architecture, this confident new building was ecstatically received in 1943.

By then, Niemeyer, who had silently encouraged Le Corbusier to introduce curves into his designs, had developed his unmistakable free-flowing style with a wave of new buildings at Pampulha. At Brasilia, 15 years on, he balanced curves - those of the new cathedral and of the domes of the Congress building - with right angles, those of the city centre’s 20 identical ministry buildings lining the city’s Monumental Axis, and innumerable glamorous apartment blocks.

“Brasilia was a wonderful time,” he says. “I designed a wooden cabin for us to live in - me, engineers, visiting friends and JK himself. We called it Catetinho [a national monument today]. JK flew out to join us in the savannah as we built his city. We went to the same dances and bars as the workers. This was a liberating time. It seemed as if a new society was being born, with all the traditional barriers cast aside. It didn’t work. Now, Brasilia is too big. The developers, the capitalists are there, dividing society and spoiling the city. Brasilia should stop.”

In 1964, the military seized power in Brazil. Niemeyer chose exile for many years, mostly in Paris. Here, aside from forming close friendships with Jean-Paul Sartre and Andr%26eacute; Malraux, author, adventurer, R%26eacute;sistance hero and France’s first minister of culture, Niemeyer designed beautiful buildings in western Europe and north Africa. Because he was an architect, above all else - and architects like to build - Niemeyer continued to design projects for Brazilian clients. Most surprising of all is the gigantic and rather terrifying General Army Headquarters (1971), in Brasilia, a structure that would not have looked out of place in Saddam’s Iraq. This, unsurprisingly, is not something Niemeyer likes to discuss. He simply changes the subject.

Niemeyer is a man, as his powerful buildings show, who likes to be in control. Today, although surrounded by his family, who form much of his day-to-day professional team, he has outlived his equals. So who does he turn to today for inspiration? Does he argue with younger colleagues? Does he look at the work of contemporary architects? “No. I argue with myself. Inside, we are always at least two people. So when I draw, I have this very clever man who fights with me. He is a great guy. He loves the beach, women and the sea. He says he wants to live a simple life, fishing, but he knows a lot more than me about architecture. Sometimes I talk to him out loud when I’m alone at my drawing board. And somehow we come to conclusions about what a new building wants to be, what it has to be. The drawings appear. I write a text to go with them, and read it back to make sure it makes sense, common sense. If not, I have another argument with myself, and produce a new drawing. When this reads clearly and simply, there you have the building. This is it. Nothing more.”

Is he aware of his place in the history books? “When people ask me if I take pleasure in the idea of someone looking at my buildings in the future, I tell them that this person will vanish, too. Everything has a beginning and an end. You. Me. Architecture. We must try to do the best we can, but must remain modest. Nothing lasts for very long.”

Except, of course, Niemeyer himself. I still find it hard to think that the man I leave at his drawing board in Rio is the same young architect who went to meet Le Corbusier stepping down from an airship here more than 70 years ago. But when he draws - those simple, perfect, seductive drawings - the old man and the young man are clearly one and the same. It must be hard being a living legend, which is why, despite having created some of the most compelling buildings and monuments of the past 70 years, Niemeyer likes to say that he doesn’t like to talk about architecture. Perhaps he doesn’t need to. Just look at what he has built.

%26#183; The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Friday August 3 2007. The interview above with the architect Oscar Niemeyer made reference to his exile following a military coup in Brazil in 1961; in fact the coup was not until 1964. This has been corrected.

Tags: advent, amp, apartment, apartment blocks, developers, exhibition, famous architects, fingers, fruit tree, landscape, Landscaping, minis, ordinary people, rta, second time, tiles, walkway, work of art
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