Sure, we could have spent our Houston, Texas weekend seeing the well-regarded Menil Collection artworks or the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, but no….

I want my artistic experiences to have a tad more funk, so instead we went to the ArtCar Museum, aka “Garage Mahal.”

Houston is a huge city that’s full of surprises, especially for those who have never been to Texas and have, shall we say, less than accurate opinions about what the state is like.

There is a lively arts community here, with a particular interest in contemporary and folk art.

Every year since 1988 (normally in April or May) Houston’s Art Car Parade draws hundreds of vehicular entrants and thousands of cheering spectators, but visitors can view a few of the more amazing cars year-round at this small Museum.

From the Museum Web site:

“The Museum has its conceptual origins in the 1984 Collision Show at the Lawndale Art Center which saw the unveiling of Larry Fuente’s Mad Cad….the Museum showroom celebrates the spirit of this post-modern age of car-culture, in which individuals have remolded the factory-model sameness of their automobiles to the specifications of their own idiosyncratic images and visions.”

The intricacy of the artwork, the imaginative use of every bit of available automotive real estate, a friendly, knowledgeable staff and the great price to get in (free!) makes for an unbeatable combination.

We got a little turned around finding it (going past the well-regarded Star Pizza in the process, if you’re looking for a place to eat nearby) but once you’re on the right street, you can’t miss the bizarro, Mad Max-ish metallic Museum exterior.

I found a slide show of 18 amazing autos and another site with photos of almost every car in the 2008 parade.

For those who want to learn more about this art form, look at the comprehensive and enthusiastic Art Car Central blog.

(ArtCar Museum 140 Heights Blvd. Houston, TX 77007 (713) 861 - 5526. Admission is free, open Wednesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm. Post title partial credit to the Beatles’ “Drive My Car.”)

The other day I was walking through my local Barnes & Noble bookstore and saw something that made me realize I’m getting old. Or at least older. That’s what happens when something you used regularly in your childhood suddenly becomes a vintage/retro cool collectible.

Gear from the defunct airline Pan Am (Pan American World Airways) suddenly has the hip retro factor akin to the Cool Brittania phase of just a few years ago. Barnes & Noble is selling cards, notebooks, journals, and tote bags featuring Pan Am’s stark blue-and-white logo, and plenty of other sites are selling a new line of luggage featuring the airline’s graphics. I’ve even heard that Marc Jacobs, a high-end designer, has designed one of these bags.

One site peddling the gear had me laughing my head off this morning. “These bags remind us of a better day when air travel was elegant,” it says enthusiastically. Maybe. But I traveled Pan Am a number of times in the years just before it went bust, and while the world-shaped logo might remind others of days when you dressed up for flying, the same logo was slapped on the cramped, overcrowded, smelly flights my family took back and forth to the Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s.

Seeing the Pan Am logo in my local bookstore, selling with all the hype of hip, did remind me of really awful airline food when you could still get it, but it also sent me back to those first heady days of living overseas when I was still a kid, when everything was absolutely fascinating and new and fresh and no matter how bad the transatlantic flight was, it was still the coolest thing on earth to be doing it. Sometimes we don’t know how lucky we are.

Traveling around cyberspace this week, I came across two articles that reminded me that there’s a lot of weird out there worth exploring.

The first article, 7 Bizarre Tours You’d Actually Sign Up for … Maybe highlighted some truly interesting tours that you never would have thought existed. For example, how about the Illegal Border Crossing Tour in Mexico, a ‘night-time guided hike and you’ll be chased in the dark, shot at by (fake) police and you may or may not make it under the fence’. Sounds like something the PC police might have a problem with but I’ve just added it to my list of things to do on my road trip next year. (note to self: make sure I pack some old clothes). Other intriguing tours include the Karaoke Ghost Tour of Sydney and the Scandal Tour of Washington DC.

The second article, Top 10 weird attractions around the globe, offers a list of ‘one of a kind’ events and places. From the Cockroach Race in Brisbane, Australia to the Hakone Kowakien Yunessun Wine Spa in Hakone, Japan, there’s enough weird here for everyone. If I had to choose one, I’d definitely be heading for the wine spa.

And if that’s not enough weird, just yesterday I was reading a short article in the recent Wanderlust magazine that listed ’sewer tours worth a visit’ ranging from the sewers to Paris to New Dehli.

It sure is a weird, weird world.

Welcome to Rome’s most interesting sight. No, it’s not the Colosseum, nor the Pantheon, nor the completely overrun and overcrowded Spanish Steps. These ruins are crowded by low-impact residents and humans are only allowed in once a day.

The Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary has got to be one of the coolest ideas I’ve ever heard of. Excavation in the early 1900s uncovered ruins of a sacred temple or two (who needs to be exact in Rome, the city that has pretty much stopped building anything because projects so frequently unearth ruins in need of protecting?), structures dating back to about 200 BC. These are the Sacred Ruins, supposedly the temple where Brutus stabbed Caesar.

Now they host an even older sacred being: the Cat Sanctuary is home to about 250 abandoned or ill cats who are fed, fixed, healed, and often sent out for adoption by two pretty visionary women. After all, it takes a lot to stand up to Rome’s stubborn government and demand that ruins be cut off from tourists and made to do something useful.

You can troop down the steps to visit the actual underground sanctuary any time during working hours, but you can only have a guided tour of the ruins once a day. The rest of the time, you can only look on enviously as some pretty happy cats enjoy sleeping on Caesar’s glories.

(Photos copyright Antonia Malchik 2008)

I’ve just come back from nearly three weeks in Rome, Vienna, and a couple places in between (thanks to Sheila and Liz for holding the fort!), where I expected my 8-month-old, plus stroller and diaper bag, to hamper the routine. Instead, being a mother suddenly became my primary travel experience. It drew interactions that a loner introvert like me would usually have had to work at.

It’s no secret that the Italians love kids. Groups of Italian teenage girls dropped their boyfriends’ arms and turned their backs on the Colosseum to take pictures of my little boy, who smiled away and took it all in stride. I left his legs bare much of the time and once a woman ran out of her shop as I was passing, not to lecture me about covering him up, but to kiss his bare little feet while he was slumped over asleep in his stroller. Elderly people made a point to play with him in restaurants when he got fussy during dinner time. It all made me want to move there immediately, because, frankly, the US doesn’t do a good job of making you feel like the coolest person in the world for being a mother.

What really struck me was the middle-aged woman I met in passing, or simply passed on the street. They melted when they looked at him, of course, maybe thinking of their own grown-up children or grandchildren to come, but there was something else, a kind of pathos and patience in their expressions that gave me the odd feeling I was constantly passing retired goddesses who spend a lot of time doing dishes.

There was wisdom in those faces, adoration of this new human and knowledge of everything I am to experience over the next decades of my life: the joys my son will give me, but also the heartbreaks. Their expressions of pleasure and sadness said everything anyone needs to know about life. It’s simply here to be lived, every little part of it.

For almost as long as civilization has been around, literature, history, and current affairs has focused on the meetings and clashes of great minds and overblown egos. It has focused on the activities of men, ignoring the activities of women who were simply at home making life happen. The trials of bringing up children and making food and creating a home-space have been ignored as trivial.

But last week, while George Bush took his ego on a trip to Jerusalem and Gordon Brown frantically tried to save his political career, I was standing in various places talking with other women about teething, and I knew, suddenly, that there was nothing more important in the entire world than two women from different cultures, neither of them speaking the other’s language, waving their hands around to talk. We gestured to demonstrate methods of alleviating teething pain; we rolled our eyes and laughed ruefully to show how exhausting and frustrating it was to have a baby at all, and how wonderful. We didn’t need words or trade deals or peace treaties or conferences.

Even elderly women in Vienna, a city not known for its love of children, smiled at him. “Hold onto it,” said one 80-something-year-old on the U-bahn as she was getting off. “Hold onto every minute.”

I could, I realized, go anywhere in the world and have something essential to talk about with knowing anything about local politics. Motherhood is universal. And if you think discussing teething and sleeping habits and pooping is trivial, consider this: how many despots, dictators, and paranoid egomaniacs are running the world right now because their mothers were too harassed, tired, uninformed, or incompetent to hold their babies when they were crying? If you believe that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects the weather of the whole world, then how do you think the world is affected by how one single mother deals with her teething baby when he’s screaming?