Reminding myself why

How do you cram the absurd accumulation of treasures in the Vatican art collection into a 5 hour tour? And then how do you boil that down into a not overly long blog entry?

The question brings me back to why I started doing this. I've always found that my best recollections of trips were letters that I wrote to friends along the way. On one occasion, I wrote letters to the same person every day for a post-college seven week cross country trip with the explicit expectation that I would get a look at them when I returned.

This plan was complicated by my being in love with this person and her not only not loving me back, but in fact had the hots for one of my traveling companions. So I never actually got ahold of all of them, but the ones I saw were vivid and true to the way I spoke and thought about the trip as it was happening, each focused on a single day. They were clearly superior to the general "how was the trip?" kind of bland answers.

The point was further driven home to me just a few years ago when a close friend died and one day out of the blue his sister returned to me a number of letters I sent him from my trips. They offered a level of excitement and specificity that I could never possible attain after the trip was over.

It was in this spirit that I blogged the China trip in 2006. And I really felt that it helped to make my trip more fulfilling at the same time I was keeping in touch with just my friends. So how do I sum up the vast Vatican collection, already condensed to a 5 hour tour? Especially given that I find most guidebooks on this kind of thing to be unreadable? Stay tuned.

Okay, I have a problem

I am officially on overload. There is way more stuff coming in than I can practically process and comment on in a timely fashion, so to save my sanity I'm not going to comment on our trip to the Vatican yet. But here's a quick summary of what we did Thursday, which seems and awfully long time ago right now.

Before I get going, I should say that this is the part where jet lag tends to really hit me. Not that I can't get through the day. My best attribute as a traveller is my stamina. Put me someplace interesting and I never get too tired, and though I get very uncomfortable standing in one place for a long time, I seem to be able to walk endlessly. But after getting over the exhaustion from the plane trip I often have several nights where it's very difficult to stay asleep for any extended period of time, which makes me a bit foggy during the day, even if it's hard for others to distinguish it from my general spaciness.

On Thursday we started with a trip to the Synagogue. In most European cities, there's a Jewish quarter we always like to visit. Here, the main synagogue is very close to the hotel, but as we found out there isn't really much of an area to visit.

The only way to see the synagogue is with a tour, and we were lead by this tiny old woman who spoke good but heavily accented English. The one thing she made abundantly clear on several occasions is that there have been Jews in Rome since the 2nd century BCE. This accorded them a special status, and the ghettoization that was standard in most places with a much more short-lived phenomenon in Rome. Because the Roman Jews were here pre-Diaspora, they are very proud to call themselves Roman Jews, not any other kind. There are 13,000 of them and they are Orthodox.

The main synagogue, which we visited, wasn't really anything special to look at. The old one was burned down by someone who got impatient with negotiations about whether or not it should be torn down and/or moved.

We spent the afternoon just walking around and in the evening, after a violent thunderstorm, went to a nice little restaurant near the Trevi Fountain. I had artichokes (mmm) for an appetizer and sea bass Sardinian style. It was a simple preparation, which was probably as much as the Sardines could handle, which was (with a few notable exceptions) boned tableside.

After dinner we went to the fountain, where we sat and watched a steady succession of people get photographed or photograph themselves tossing or more frequently pretending to toss a coin over their shoulder into the fountain. The fountain is huge and to my eye more ornate and impressive than romantic, but it was still quite a spectacle. Here's some pictures.

July 2- Synagogue and Trevi Fountain

A few photos from Friday afternoon

Forum and Pantheon

We Continue After Lunch

We had lunch in little caffe (local spelling) in one of those places near tourist attractions where for every 50 feet you walk the price drops another 10%. I had a tuna and tomato sandwich which was perfectly pleasant and we did the 'can you top this' travel story routine that people do in these kinds of circumstances. Then it was across the street to the Forum.

There were lots of interesting factoids in this part of the tour. First of all, this was only the first and biggest forum. There were many others where the current piazza's now stand. It reminded me a bit of a plaza in the Forbidden City that was a couple of walls outside the Emperor's palace. It was the place where most business took place, speeches were made, that kind of thing. Except that area was wide open and this had remains of lots of buildings. Among them is the place where Julius Caesar was cremated. Pretty cool.

We also saw what had been a 4th century chapel honoring Jupiter (or Romulus, depending on who you asked) which was converted to a church and therefore was still standing. There were the remains of a couple of triumphal arches, and 3, I think, are still standing. We noticed, while looking at one of them, that it looked an awful lot like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, even down the the design on the inside of the arch. The guide confirmed that the Arc was indeed copied from that one. There was another arch depicting the victory over the Jews and the sacking of Jerusalem, with a relief sculpture of the triumphal parade carrying the menorah and the ark of the covenant after the destruction of the Temple.

After the walk up Capitoline Hill, through a plaza designed by Michelangelo, we went to the Pantheon, which has nothing to do with the Parthenon because the Parthenon is in Athens, not Rome. They both have columns though.

The Pantheon, built by Hadrian in the 2nd century, is completely intact and absolutely spectacular inside. The Romans were really into symmetry and this building is symmetric in so many ways it makes your head spin. The dome, which has a circular hole in its center, is spherical and if you stand directly below its center (right on top of the drain under the hole) you would be standing on what would be the side of the sphere precisely opposite the hole. Considering I had trouble conceiving of how they got the dome up there, this was a little much to take in.

After the Pantheon we had some gelato (!) and back to the hotel. Our dinner was at a restaurant called Sud in what the guidebooks describe as a "well-heeled neighborhood" which it was. It was outside the ancient city walls on a handsome block of highrise apartments. The food was glorious. I had an appetizer sampler of caponata (absolutely delicious and I don't even like eggplant), a fried chickpea cake with spicy sauce, two tiny meatballs and cherry tomatoes stuffed with ricotta and pesto. Ronnie had octopus salad, which put all fears of chewy octopus to rest. Our pastas were also great. I had something that looked kind of like little twisted tubes in seafood broth with teeny clams and good-sized mussels. Ronnie had gnocchetti with pancetta. Great stuff.

We got back and I wanted some snacks for later, so I asked the guy at the desk if there was a market open and he said it was dead in our neighborhood (which was true), but if I went across the river I'd find plenty of things open. So I walked across the bridge and OMFG! I stumbled into the place where every attractive twenty-something person in Rome hangs out on a Friday night. It was mobbed and in a happy uproar. I walked for a half a mile through crowds of these people and didn't really find a market, but got some snacks and came back, promising myself we'd return to have dinner tomorrow.

Turning Left Until Lunch

Every time we'd gone out of the hotel so far, we'd turned right and I'd begun to wonder what was to the left. I knew the Colosseum was over there somewhere, but I knew it wasn't just around the corner.

So today we turned left. We had a guide today, Rob, a guy from Palmyra, New Jersey of all places, who's lived in Italy for 11 years and teaches art history in Temple University's program in Rome. How's that for a small world kind of feel. The next thing we learn about this guy is that he likes to talk a lot. This is a good quality in a guide and he was very knowledgeable.

Rob is also a seriously left-wing, anti-corporate atheist. When you combine that with an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient cultures, you get a really entertaining take on the origins of Christianity. We learned all about the pagan resurrection holiday revolving around a goddess' lover who was hung (with nails, not a noose) from a tree in late March and resurrected 3 days later. And about the long history of pagan rituals that had a special celebration on December 25 where gifts were exchanged. And how as these pagan "resurrection cults" maintained their appeal as Christianity was beginning to take hold, how the priests and politicians (often the same people) crafted the Christian holidays to build on these rituals, to incorporate them, rather than to fight against them. And also how to move Christianity away from its Jewish traditions.

He admits that obviously this is only his interpretation, but that there's a lot of historical information that backs him up. He's telling us all this stuff while he's also giving us a well-informed tour of Palantine Hill, where the Emperors lived and the place where Romulus, founder of Rome, supposedly lived and where the word "palace" was derived.

As a sidebar, I should mention that there's something about being in Rome that makes me constantly aware of the language that I'm using. I don't mean swearing or English versus Italian or anything like that. I just keep hearing the derivations of all the words I'm using as I say them. It's weird, but I guess somewhat natural in a place where so many words come from.

If you've studied Roman history you might remember the "Seven Hills of Rome." Well, this was one of them, (as is, we found out later, Capitoline Hill, where the original Senate building which is now part of Rome's City Hall stand- see sidebar above) and it must have been a nice place to live. One of the challenges in imagining these places as they looked 2000 years ago is that the Church used the buildings as quarries to build their own big buildings, so all the marble and decorative stone has been stripped and all that's left is bricks (a Roman invention, by the way, as is concrete). Nobody has any idea what materials went to which church, but there are fragments here and there that give you a sense of what might have been, and there are also a couple of buildings that were converted to churches and so retained some of their original grandeur.

And speaking of grandeur, out next stop was the Colosseum. Again, it's been stripped of its original marble facade and the 120 foot-high bronze statue build by Nero was melted down by the Church. But it's still a huge, impressive, and surprisingly modern design. The Colosseum is so famous that I won't go on and on about it, but what kept grabbing me was that I've been seeing pictures and hearing stories of this thing since I was a little kid and actually being inside it felt really strange. Good strange, but a little disorienting. I also found out it had a retractable roof. Or at least a retractable sun shade, made of sail material and hoisted by sailors during their time on shore.

At this point we broke for lunch and I'm going to give my hands a break too. Before I get back to today I'll do a quick entry on what we did yesterday. Hopefully that'll come later today. Here's a few pictures:

From Palantine Hill and Colosseum

Still Here

When traveling with someone you get a sense for what a person is like in that you get to see what they do at times when you wouldn't normally be observing them- when they're alone and have unstructured time. If you live with someone you probably get a representative sample if you happen to notice what they're doing when you return from having left them alone, but you never know everything for sure. It's hard to keep secrets in a hotel room.

This is yet one more reason to be truthful in your relationships. Not that you're going to end up traveling with everyone you're close to, but you can rest assured that most anything you've been trying to hide is going to get found out if you spend 3 weeks in a hotel, of if I go back to some close college friendships, 5 or 7 weeks in a car with someone.

Oh, and good luck hiding stuff from yourself too. That's, to me anyway, one of the great values in traveling alone for an extended period. You get to see yourself in a variety of situations, great and awful, routine and spectacular, and see what you do. Are you brave? Cautious? Opportunistic? Flexible? Are you good at planning, improvising and enduring? Forget about college applications, this is when you find out what your strengths and weaknesses really are.

I'll throw some old stories at you a bit further down the road, but here are a few pictures from the trip to date:

Rome Day One and around the hotel

Day 2 Random

The universal language is not Esperanto. It's whining.

When you're traveling, you always need to think about when and where you're going to eat. Ronnie compares it to a camel filling its humps before crossing the desert. Or is that dessert? Sorry.

If you check e-mail frequently enough at home, it takes going away and checking only once a day to really give you a sense of how much junk mail you get.

The Buffet Two-Step

I love the whole breakfast thing in European hotels. There's usually breakfast included and everyone goes to some dining room and helps themselves, sometimes with waitstaff bringing coffee and such.

The best thing is that with a bunch of anonymous hotel guests, nobody knows what language anyone speaks, so you get this great, hesitant, mix of English and here at least, French and Italian. When you approach someone you automatically give them a look and try to size up whether you should speak English to them or try something else. The guy at the table next to me asked me if he could take a sugar packet in American English and then said "grazia" when I said, "sure."

First Day, kind of

Rome is a kind of OMFG place, and it's kind of a shame to first experience it when you're woozy, but that's what we've got. After we took our recover nap I went out to try to get some cash. This hotel doesn't have a reception desk, so there's no place to change money, so I had to go to an ATM (or Bancomat as they call it here- like most things, it's more fun to say it in Italian). Our hotel is in the ancient area, which unfortunately means there are no ATMs among the ruins and restorations (this isn't the US, after all). So you have to walk well over half a mile uphill to get to an ATM. The walk was incredible though, because of the incredible, beautiful ancient sites everywhere around. There an old theater (and by old I mean 12 BC old) across the street and a palace and all kinds of other ancient Rome stuff. I remember being in both France and Spain and marveling at the ancient Rome stuff and here we are in the middle of these amazing architectural and aesthetic achievements.

We waited out a thunderstorm and then ventured out. I didn't take many pictures because we didn't get out until after 6, but I'll upload what I've got tomorrow. We just kind of walked all over and finally stopped for dinner at the Piazza Campo de Fiori. It was nice eating outside and the food was very pleasant. I'd heard that to American tastes the pasta is crunchy here, but I'd have to say that the pasta with mushrooms I had was cooked perfectly. I also had some swordfish, which wasn't prepared the way we normally do it at home. It was a kind of thin slice, sauteed in butter and while wine and sprinkled with herbs. It was better to my taste than the thick steaks you normally encounter in the US.

The experience was somewhat spoiled by a loud, strident right-wing American guy at the table next to us expounding on how Obama is turning us into a socialist country. I knew some people actually buy that ridiculous story line, but I've never heard anyone go on about it like that. There are only so many straw man arguments and sentences beginning with "Well let me tell you..." you can hear before you want to leap across the aisle and strangle someone.

Then we made it back to the hotel and found the same TV frustration we often find in Europe. Three English channels, being CNN, BBC News, and Bloomberg News. I know I never watch anything except news news news and 1 or 2 channels just isn't enough for me. It's not like I'd want to see some sort of entertainment program or anything. Okay, time to watch The Shawshank Redemption dubbed in Italian.

Getting There is Half The Fun

In a moment of indulgence I decided to fly business class on out way to Italy. It was a splurge, but it just makes the whole experience halfway pleasant instead of onerous. One of the fun things about traveling business class is that everyone has these little personal video screens, so you can watch several movies at once, only without sound on a seven inch screen from 10 feet away. Still, I can't let that stand in the way of my reviewing some of these films, so here goes:

He's Just Not That Into You

A bunch of impossibly attractive young women enjoy each other's company but find men to be totally exasperating but inexplicably irresistible. For reasons that remain unclear, they continue to strive for some sort of satisfactory relationship with the man of their choice.

Men are very self-centered and rarely communicate with each other or anyone else. They scowl and grumble a lot, only to occasionally emerge in pursuit of a little nookie.

The movie's conclusion seems to be that relationships are pointless, and I think I'd have to say the same about the movie.

Marley and Me

I think Marley is the dog, but he's really just a sideshow in a relationship story about a young couple trying to overcome hardships and have a satisfying relationships. Quite a bit less cynical than the other move, and it looked like it would have been a real tear-jerker ending if we hadn't approached the airport and ended video entertainment with about half an hour to go. My best guess is that the dog eventually dies and the whole experience makes the couple's relationship more fulfilling.

If you can emotionally connect to a movie with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston (also in He's Just Not That Into You) and 23 different dogs playing Marley (really), then you might find this moving.

We've made it to Italy

We are at out hotel in Rome. Everything was pretty uneventful, aside from the suspicious-looking red substance on the wheels of Ronnie's suitcase.

An annoying thing about traveling to Europe is that you leave in the evening, get a couple of hours of sleep on the plane, then arrive at your hotel anywhere from 2-6 hours before check-in time. This is maybe okay if you slept a bit, but if you hadn't those are the longest 2-6 hours of the entire trip. This is a small hotel and it has absolutely no place to lie down somewhere. We found a couple of every uncomfortable chaise lounges in the fitness center in the basement, but I need to give Hotel FortySeven props because they hurried the housekeeping service up and got us into a very nice room in about 45 minutes.

We slept for about 3 hours and now it's 4:00 and we're kind of ready to go out. The first day is always kind of a waste, but since there's cool stuff just outside the window I'm sure we'll find something worthwhile.

Memories of Airport Lounges Past

We're sitting in the US Airways lounge, trying not to hear the TV blaring on about Mark Sanford. The lounge in Philly is at the top of a very long escalator and offers a superb view of both the roof of the floor below and the huge number of planes in line waiting to take off. Our plane's supposed to board in an hour or so, but, curiously for a place where people are waiting for scheduled things, there are no clocks to be found.

This lounge is similar to others we've encountered in that the goal of the seating array is to ensure that you do not fall asleep. There are hundreds of upholstered chairs, all with arms and low backs and totally devoid of lumbar support. The only place you could conceivably lie down is on the window sill, but you'd probably want to bring an air mattress.

We were trying to remember the last time we were in a place like this where we wanted to sleep and were completely thwarted by the interior design. We stayed in a lot of weird lounges in China, some of the very nice and some of them almost unbearable, but I think the one we're thinking of was in Japan, where we had to wait for hours when our flight home got cancelled and the plane we were shifted to was 5 hours later than out original flight.

I have found that the last few times I've packed for trips that I do it almost completely absently, as in with a total absence of thought. It's not something I seek to do, but I seem to be unable to focus on the task at hand. I rarely forget anything important, but it's still a bit disconcerting to know that I've not been able to make any connection to what we're going to be doing for the next 3 weeks and all the stuff I lay out on the bed to go in the suitcase. It's just all my regular stuff. Am I going to need something in Italy that I don't need at home? I guess we'll find out soon.

You're Only As Old As You Feel

Or maybe you only feel as old as you are. Of something like that.

When I see old people now, I can't help but think, that's me in 20 years. And I try to think of what kind of old man I want to be. My father is and his father was the gruff sort of old man. My father is big and intimidating looking, so it works for him. For me, I go back and forth between wanting to be a wise old man, like a sage or a guru, and an ornery old codger who yells at kids if they walk on his lawn. They both have their attractions. Ornery is easier, but people are nicer to the wise old guy type.

The one kind of old guy I don't want to be is the kind I just saw, wearing a t-shirt that says "Don't smoke near me. I have gas."