Capri-Land

I made up for my non-tourist behavior at Pompeii with a vengeance by deciding to go full-bore on the ultimate Amalfi/Naples tourist experience: the island of Capri.

My very useful guidebook (a Rick Steves book, which I found in the Daphne) suggested a day trip designed for maximum ground coverage. I took the first ferry from Sorrento at 8:30AM. It disgorged hundreds of tourists into the port town where there were already many hundreds milling around the ticky-tacky waterfront. It’s disorienting and crowded – kind of a Pier 39 experience (pilastro trentanove?). I straight-away fought my way to the ticket counter for the famous Grotto Azzurra. Being as early as it was, I was able to grab the first high speed boat and zipped a few kilos along the northeast shore of the dramatic, cliff-clad island. There were myself and two other passengers on it. I know people queue up by the hundreds to do this thing, so I felt ahead of the game.

As the motorboat roared away from the port, it slowed down for a row boats with single rowing man who approached the motor boat. The rower tossed a line to the motor boat, and got a tow. A few minutes later a second row boat approached the first row boat, as the motor boat again slowed, and the second rower tossed the first rower another line. This continued, making over the next few minutes a small chain of row boats.

When we got to the Blue Grotto, which from the outside is just another section of sheer rock wall in the sea, the row boats dispersed and queued up with the other rowers already there. The Grotto itself is basically a cave – limestone, I think – at the waters’ edge, in which a sea-filled cavern is accessible through a tiny hole only big enough for a single row boat at a time. The gimmick of the place is that the bottom outside edge of the cavern is just below the sea level, and a trick of the sun, water and cavern geometry makes the water and the interior of the cave a brilliant azure. Almost a swimming pool blue.

The rowers take turns entering the cave for a few minutes. There is a chain bolted to the ceiling of the grotto that extends a few meters outside the little opening to the outside and the rock wall. Rowers pull the boats into the hole by grabbing the chain, instructing the passengers to lie low so that don’t conk their heads (you really have to lie on the bottom!) Once inside you appreciate the light for about 5 minutes. The rowers break into strains of “O Solo Mio”, which makes for an incredibly self-conscious experience.

Most people get motored back to Capri harbor, but I knew I could take a bus from this point. I climbed out of the row boat up the rock wall stairs and headed for the bus. While on the stairs, a commotion broke out in the water below. A woman tourist had fallen out of a row boat and everyone was swarming around to pull her out. I maliciously snapped photos of her misfortune. Very funny scene.

At the bus, we waited for the driver cigarette break to end. Our bus driver discovered a dead owl on the ground. He picked it up, and as the drivers all finished their cigs, they passed the stiff bird around for inspection. Cigarette/owl break over, we headed for the second town on the island: Anacapri. Anacapri is charming in a way that Capri is not. It’s still a tourist town, but it’s more understated and with a sense of an actual place to live. I had a nice half hour sketching the main town church over an espresso.

There is another church in Anacapri. Chiesa Monumentale di San Michele. The entire floor is a mosaic of painted tiles. I guess it’s called Napoleatano style? Anyway, it depicts an amazing mural-type image of the story of Eden and The Fall. You can’t walk on the floor anymore, but you can walk around on planks. This floor is of my favorite artworks I’ve seen so far.

I took the tram up to the island peak and had a pretty impressive view of the island and the Amalfi coast. A few hardy (stubborn?) souls hike back. Like me. Another bus ride back to Capri town.

Capri town is a thoroughly touristic place. It has shi-shi shops with expensive designer clothes, watch makers, etc. It also has ticky-tacky souvenir shops. The views are great, amazing, really. You can see azure, clean, rocky, and beautiful waters to swim in. Traveling by myself, I didn’t have an easy way to safeguard my satchel (with my phone, wallet, keys) while swimming. Yet another thing to do when I return with a companion.

Though I didn’t really like Capri-town, I found a way to enjoy it. I sat in the main piazza and nursed beer and studied the skin types and solar exposures of all the tourists ambling around.

I’m sun-phobic myself, by inclination and work experience. I always walk around sun-bleached places like Capri with long pants, tons of sunscreen, a hat with a brim, a neck kerchief, UV glasses and SPF30 lip balm. I look like a dork, I know. Veronica used to make fun of me, as she’d lounge topless on some Mediterranean beach and I looked like an updated Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. Who’s laughing now, huh? OK, well, actually, Veronica probably is, because her skin still looks better than mine.

I think Nina Jablonski’s book (“Skin: A Natural History”) describes how it used to be before the 20th century - the richer you were, the less sun-darkened you would be. White people who were sun-blasted by the sun was an unmistakable sign of your low class, low wealth status and work-a-day life. Over the last century, it’s flipped. Now, rich people are richly tanned. In spite of all evidence to the contrary on how bad it is, or even how bad it looks over time, people still want that tan. Including all the folks wandering in the piazza. I’m not complaining. That desire is indirectly funding this trip. The money I made at Cutera was largely from people trying to reverse the effects of the sun that they once desired. I’ve looked at so many photos of people damaged by the sun who now needed some laser magic. Happy to oblige, ma’am. At least, I used to be.

I got lost in my musings, relaxing with my $10 beer, and I made my second significant traveling mistake, badly estimating the amount of time it would take to walk from Capri town down to the Capri harbor (my first was losing a critical strap for my bags back in Boston, which I immediately had to replace) I began to walk, then run, and finally sprint, in the 35C heat. I thought it was a kilometer or so, but it turned about to be about 5km. I made it with about 2 minutes to spare. As I leaned forward on the edge of my seat to keep from getting the seat fabric wet, the day-trippers near me politely but surely found other places to sit. I looked at the dots of sweat accumulating on my new hiking boots as my face dripped and my heaving breaths turned to sighs of relief.

Professor Grimaldi and I ignore the ruins of Pompeii

Rosa Grimaldi is a professor at Bologna whom I know from a brief stint she did at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor around 2000. Veronica and I met her on a couple of occasions and we became friends. I kept up that friendship when I came to Italy last time, and I met up with her and husband Isacco. On this trip, she happened to be near Napoli. When I e-mailed her with my travel plans, it worked out for us to have a short visit. To meet up, I took the Circumvesuviana train from Sorrento to Pompeii, (her parents live in a small town nearby.)

Rosa picked me up at the station and we headed for the city center. She only had enough time for a drink and a chat. She is taking care of her two little boys and helping her mother with her aging father. Rosa is a little overwhelmed right now.

So, we ignored the famous archeological site. I perversely enjoyed that I had come all the way to Pomeii, but was not going to see the ruins. Instead I was going to visit with a charming Italian friend, sit in the piazza and have a Compari. I did glimpse some ruins while speeding past the site in Rosa’s little eurocar from the road. That’s really the best way to see ruins (see exspectata peregrinvs entry).

We batted conversational shuttlecocks back and forth: her family situation this summer, what’s happening with Veronica, each of our careers, why I’m traveling. But I was distracted by the wicker chairs at the outdoor café. I kept having to change chairs, because they were all broke in some way. I still thought they were preferable to the injection-molded plastic chairs that many outdoor places in the states have. Settling on an acceptable, but still broken chair, I then noticed that the wait staff were constantly tilting and leaning empty chairs on the edges of unoccupied tables. They were so into doing this that the service suffered at times. We speculated. Was it to keep pigeons off the chairs? Were they signaling that some tables were off-limits? Was the café about to close? I got so curious that Rosa finally asked one of the waiters about it. Turns out that the wind blows the table cloths off, and the wait staff used the chairs to keep this from happening. They did this day after day.

It gave me an insight. Italians enjoy celebrating the way of doing a thing. Americans just enjoy getting the thing done.

These Italian waiters had their way and they turned it into a kind of daily ritual. They didn’t care if it was the optimal way, they made it the best way by celebrating the way they did it, with a florish and with style.

A typical American (I’ll include myself here) would see the problem and would change things and consider things to come up with the most efficient solution, or the most elegant, or the least annoying, etc. They’d get out the restaurant supply catalog, order some of those metal clips they use on tablecloths throughout the world, make sure they were the right size, etc. And they’d get the satisfaction of another job well done.

Ideally I would learn to enjoy the moment of doing, the act of whatever it is I am doing, and value that more than either the ritual of doing something or the satisfaction of checking jobs off a list.

We talked about this and related ideas. Who cares if these ideas have any weight? It felt good to have a real conversation, in complete sentences, with someone here in Italy. And Rosa felt good about being able to talk to someone without having to take care of them at the same time. We enjoyed the adult break, but it was over almost as soon as it started. I caught an early train back to Sorrento, and Rosa went home to care for her family.

Positano

To get to Positano from Sorrento, heading south along the Amalfi coast, you can zip on a hydrofoil ferry, drive, or as I did, take a death-defying bus ride. The road, built from stone blocks, clings to the steep Amalfi hillside, with a large drop to the sea that seems almost vertical. At times the drop to the sea exceeds 200 meters, and the road is narrow and winds continuously. Five minutes into this air-conditioned ride, I found myself slick with sweat – palms to skull – but my eyes were popping. The woman in front of me used her airsickness bag, which this particular bus stocked. The bus is tall, and you often can’t see the road through the window, or the low stone wall that pretends it serves to keep you from vaulting over it should the bus driver so much as sneeze. So, you peer out the window, and what you see is the Mediterranean lapping far below you, tilting and angling away from your view every few seconds.

Positano is impossibly romantic. Picturesque buildings built all over a very steep hillside in this natural cove. No cars anywhere except the main road through town, so it is pleasant to walk everywhere. Because it is so small, and so steep, you can pretty much see the entire town from anywhere you are. Cute little shops, trattorias, cafes, more shops, tiny old and interesting church. Lots of people milling about, coming to and from the little and very cute beach and ferry wharf. Seaside outdoor restaurants. After an hour of this, you realize that if you’re not here for romance, there isn’t much to do. So, I made a note to return with someone someday, and took the ferry back to Sorrento.

You think you might have a final dash of romance in that ferry ride, but it’s a disappointment, because since it’s a hydrofoil that goes real fast, they don’t let you out of the air-conditioned cabin. Not at all like romantic San Francisco ferries. The passengers, struck by the heat, fall asleep in the air-conditioned comfort, and wake up in Sorrento.

mantide religiosa

Walking down the streets of Sorrento at night, after dinner. It was a passagero, one of those evening walks that happen in the summer, in the Mediterranean. Sorrento’s is particularly nice, as everyone dresses the part, looks their best, and enjoys the night on the street with no cars or motos. But I felt disconnected, alone. A cipher to the vacationing Italians, the touring groups, the shopkeepers. Only swimming into focus when it looks like I might want to give someone some Euros. I decided to have a gelato, and give someone some Euros. Walking up to an outdoor counter, I waited for service. Looking at the flavors through the gelato sneeze guard, I noticed a large brown praying mantis. No one around to take my order. I started poking at the mantis to see what s/he would do. They react aggressively, so it’s fun to see them rear up and spin around to threaten my finger. An gelateria attendent comes up and sees me and the mantide. She lets out a yelp, calls to her co-workers. They all start telling me different things. Stop! Cool! What is that? Ew! Don’t let it get in the ice cream! Then passersby stop, starting asking me about it. Did I bring it? Why am I touching it? Fractured English. Particles of Italian. Suddenly, I’m connecting to everyone around me. And I hadn’t given anybody any Euros yet.

“In which our intrepid traveler finds his fate in the hands of an Amalfi ice lolly truck driver…”

You could call my style of travel stoic. Or stubborn. I don’t like tour groups, guides or programs very much. I usually prefer to set off either on my own or with my traveling companions, making our own mistakes, discovering what we discover, not what someone else thinks we should discover. Of course, I miss a lot this way. The view I could have had if a guide had led me directly to the overlook. The details of King Herod’s conquests that I don’t learn from the lightweight guide book and the pile of stones it leads me to. Sometime I miss out connecting with other people, getting to know fellow tourists. But, as I say, I am a stubborn traveler.

Maybe I should think about changing that.

Anyway, reading about the Amalfi Coast, and seeing the various enormous guided groups, I started to get itchy. I thought: how about a hike along some of the real Amalfi/Sorrento roads? I’ll plot a course, visit some places and avoid all the tour stuff. I’m not totally independent, of course. I went to the tourist office to get maps, ask questions, get advice. The tourist office staffer in Sorrento thought it would be nice to take a short bus ride to a town in the Massa Lubrense peninsula, hike down from that town to a “green” (environmentally friendly) fishing village turned resort, then hike across the peninsula to another town where I could lay on the beach, have lunch and take the bus back.

At least, I think that’s what he said.

I took a bus to the little town he pointed out (Torca), with some bread, cheese and a bottle of water. Headed off in direction of the sea, with sun protection and good boots. But the Amalfi sun was relentless, and after the first few hundred meters, no shade. The tourist map (or the tourist office staffer) did not indicate the “600 scalino” (stone steps), 250 meter descent to the fishing village of Crapolla. I finished my water bottle and shrugged, knowing I could buy water at the village/resort. At the bottom of the steps, I rounded the corner to a little cove. Sure enough, a secret inlet of the sea, filled with sunbathers and a beautiful setting. But. No village, resort, or… fresh water. Just sunbathers who either hiked in with picnics or were dropped by boat. In fact the “green fishing village” itself was an abandoned dump of a place. Rotting gear everywhere and chunks of Styrofoam on the beach. Maybe I just discovered how “Crapolla” got its name?

So, I turned and hiked back up the 600 scalinos with no water. When I got to the top I was a bit heat struck and dehydrated. Looking at the map, I wondered if I could continue and follow the plan and hike along the coast to the next resort town. The tourist office staffer senore said it was just a few kilometers and that I could easily do it. But, I had no water, and I was a little lost. I set out in what I thought was the right direction, which was soon shaded. But the shade is where the Amalfi biting flies live, by the dry creek bed. I alternated between the baking sun and the biting flies, which swarmed my face so thickly I had to close my eyes most of the time. I staggered on, lost-er, and lost-er.

Dazed, I heard the sound of music approaching. A tiny ice cream truck appeared on the tiny country road, and slipped past me, there being just enough room for me and the truck. After it passed, I realized it represented help, so I shouted and ran after it. The driver stopped and emerged wearing a white pressed uniform like the Good Humor ice lolly truck drivers of two generations ago. No English, but he had water! The cheapest liter bottle I’ve ever bought (0.50 EU).

As we struggled to understand each other and my map, a couple of residents seeking ice lollies came up and joined our “conversation.” Eventually, I understood where I was, and indicated to them that I might want to continue on with my plan to walk to the next resort village. They looked at me and said, “Oh, no you cannot walk there from here – it is more than 12 kilometers.”

I guess the tourist office staffer didn’t quite have all the details right.

to Sorrento!

rimorchio da vendere o affitto,
stanze lasciare cinquanta centesimi,
nessun telefono, nessuno stagno, nessun animali domestici,
non ho alcune sigarette…

Back to being a “King of the Road” again. Italian style.

I decided to make my way to Sorrento. It’s a resort town just north of the Amalfi coast and south of Napoli. Originally, I was going to Naples itself. After spending a week in big-city Rome, I thought it would be better to relax seaside for a few days before heading to Israel.

After completing the short express train trip to the main station in Naples, I am glad that I decided to skip Naples. I don’t like the looks of Napoli, from the guidebooks or from the train. The city appears both gritty and charmless. I’m sure I could dig some charm out of the place, if I tried. Someday, maybe I will.

Sorrento, on the other hand, is charming. But arriving at the “bed and breakfast” broke the spell. My fault. I slapped together last minute accommodations, feeling lucky to get any reasonably priced room. “La Nuit Sorrento.” The name and website should have tipped me. The website (warning!) has annoying smarmy Italian music that cannot be skipped or switched off (website design circa 1999.) The B&B itself is another converted apartment building flat, as was the Daphne [see earlier post]. The young couple running it are well-intentioned, but are clearly amateur hoteliers. It was an OK place, it’s just that nothing quite worked right, or went off without trouble.

We had a misunderstanding about my arrival time. When I got there and stood outside the locked gate on the busy main street of Sorrento, no one answered the gate buzzer or the phone. After standing next to buzzing traffic for 30 minutes, I sneaked in behind someone. I found my way into the apartment building (since it’s a regular apt building, there is no signage for the B&B). While I was standing forlornly in the first floor lobby, an Italian woman said to, “B&B? Mezzo piso.” Or something like that. I took the antiquated elevator to the middle floor. Unfortunately, I opened the interior elevator doors just before the car actually got there. The car shuddered to a stop 10 centimeters below the 3rd floor, and wouldn’t budge. I opened the exterior door, pulled my luggage over the 10 cm threshold, and rolled into the foyer. One of the apt doors had a small sign: “La Nuit Sorrento” Locked, no answer. I leaned against a wall to wait. As the residents slowly cycled in and out of their apartments, they first encountered the broken elevator, and then turned to eye me. They pieced together the story, and with increasingly irate tones complained to each other, gesturing towards me. I couldn’t take the elevator back down with my luggage and I couldn’t get into the B&B. Things were getting a little tense when the proprietors showed up after another half hour.

They let me in, introduced themselves, and used their handheld device to serially decline all of my (perfectly valid) credit cards. Then they insisted I pay cash. In advance. This, I refused. They took this in stride, and showed me my room. My blue, blue, blue room. The theme of the place is a Sorrentino interpretation of a French interpretation of a Sorrento night. Everything painted blue, and dimly lit. My room featured slightly more stale tobacco smell than I usually like, but slightly less than I can tolerate. There are only 4 rooms in the whole place, so I’m sure none are truly non-smoking.

Many little things didn’t work, or weren’t quite right. After a while, I stopped being annoyed, and just started laughing. Here’s my favorite: The bathroom door wasn’t framed squarely, so it stuck in the middle of its swing. You had to lift up on the handle to make the bottom of the door not scrape the floor. The bath was small enough that I had to open and close the door regularly – I couldn’t just leave it open. On my first shower, I got out, and moved the door, lifting up as I swung it. This time it came off the hinges, and I catch the door before it falls over. I successfully put it back on it’s hinges. But now it won’t open at all, and I realize that the critical piece is a coiled piece of paper clip that was wrapped on the hinge pin, and has now fallen off. Dripping wet me, falling towel, door held up in one hand, reaching across floor for bent piece of paper clip wire with the other hand. Ahh, the romance of travel. La Nuit Sorrento. I’m sorry, but I don’t have a sketch of that moment for you.

In that first evening, I had a better experience. Sorrento is mostly arranged along a dramatic series of cliffs, with marinas below. Once section of town is actually down on one of the marinas: Marina Grande. This is a working port, fishing boats, boatbuilding businesses, but also interesting seaside restaurants. I went to one (name?) and had a nice dinner on the water, and met a nice couple who chatted me up. Anthony and Palma. The great thing about our conversation was that they didn’t know who I was, what I did. I talked about taking this trip, finishing my drawing class. I showed them some iPhone pix of my drawing work, and of a woman I really care about. And they spun a whole life for me in which they assumed I would go into art somehow, and probably start a family, become a dad. These aren’t roles that I particularly am seeking out, but it was really wonderful to see a vision of a new life for myself through someone else’s eyes. That other people, not constrained by what they know about me – what I know about me – can imagine a completely different and rich life for me. And that dimensions of my life that haven’t existed before, can.

I spent the next day just lounging around and walking the little town of Sorrento. Taking in the sea and town views, swimming in the Mediterranean, lying in a rental beach chair and umbrella. I sketched distant Napoli and Vesuvius across the Bay of Naples. A good unwinding from Rome.

What I saw in Rome

The list

Roman Forum
Palantine Hill
Pantheon
Coliseum
Museo e Galleria Borghese**
Spanish Steps/Piazza di Spagna
Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore
Castel Sant’Angel
Piazza di San Pietro
Tiber River
Appian Way
Colonna di Marcus Aurelius
Santa Maria della Concezione (the crypt only)**
Quattro fontane
Fontana di Tritone
Fontana delle Api**
Fontana di Trevi
Fontana dei Quattro fiumi
Bocca della verita
Circus Maximus

My favorites are marked with **. They were all in my “neighborhood”

I also tried to shop – this was hard because of August in general, and Ferragusto in particular. But I did buy a nice lambskin leather jacket.


My favorites

The Borghese gardens/gallery/museum was just fantastic. This was really my first cultural activity in Rome. A cardinal in the 17th century become obsessed with collecting art, and so built this galleria and absolutely stuffed it with commissioned and other art of the time. Included in the building are elaborate wall and ceiling painting and baroque decoration. There is just so much to see in this building. The Borghese is most famous for it’s Bernini sculpture. I loved the Apollo and Daphne piece in which Apollo is nabbing Daphne while shes turns into a laurel tree to escape his clutches. Hard to see how Bernini could sculpt these fine, upturned laurel leaves and little branches sprouting from her body out of marble.

The Cappuchin monks from Santa Maria della Concezione built in crypt in the lower level of the church. There, they used the bones from mummified and exhumed monks from previous generations of monks at this church to construct elaborate and baroque art forms on the walls and ceiling of a series of rooms. The art itself is interesting, but it’s also crazy to think of how many dead monks were used in the construction of these art pieces. Thousands. Some of the art consists of simple stacks of hundreds of bones. The motif is to take a particular bone (say, a shoulder blade), and use dozens or hundreds of them to create geometric patterns, often radial or curvilinear. No photographs, please.

In the last room, several mummified months preside over this latin phrase (approximately translated): “What you are, we once were. What we are, you will become.” I found the whole thing transfixing.

And, while there are many great water fountains around, I like best the little one just 50 meters from the Daphne, “Fontana delle Api”. It’s easy to miss, especially since the impressive Fontana di Tritone (Triton Fountain) occupies the center of the piazza. But this fountain is cute – little bees in a scallop shell. Very different than all the classical subject fountains I’ve seen throughout Rome – but it’s also a Bernini, like the big famous ones.

The United Nations of Bader

The nominal hook for this leg of my trip is the 50th birthday party of my friend Bader. Bader lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He and I used to work at companies that competed directly with each other, so we used to be rivals. Somehow, over the last few years, we’ve come to know each other, starting at medical conferences and trade shows, and gradually becoming colleagues, then friends.

Anyway, Bader is Algerian. Though he identifies with Italy and Rome a lot, and lived here for a time. He is so proud of his knowledge of Rome that when some Romans asked him for directions one night, and he told them in fluent Italian how to get where they were going, he looked like a cat that just caught a bird.

Being Algerian, he also speaks French (and Arabic and English) and has many friends and relatives in France. So, his birthday party was to be a world party. Loving Rome as he does, and having celebrated his 20th birthday there, he thought it would be a good gathering place. It’s also easy for his relatives and friends from Paris and Algiers to get there. Not so easy for the Americans, but as I think they say in Rome: whatev!

The first gathering I attended was the night before the party. Bader wanted everyone from his various nations to get to know each other before to party, and to experience a rooftop terrace bar view of Rome at night. Ever planful, Bader had already scoped out a place in one of the large international hotels right on Piazza Reppublica, and had used me and his friend Laurence to scout out alternative rooftop bars. That turned out to be wise, because as we gathered at the piazza Reppublica, Bader discovered that the rooftop bar he had selected had unexpectedly closed up that night. So, he decided that the group would move to one of the alternate sites – as it turned out, the one right around the corner from the Daphne at Piazza Barberini where I was stayed. He put me in charge of leading the mixed group of international folks through the streets of Rome to the terrace bar. I had just been there long enough to do it without getting lost, though I had to look at my map once. Turned out to be a nice couple of hours, with a view of San Pietro (St. Peter’s basilico). I enjoyed meeting some of Bader’s professional friends for Algiers. Lively, entertaining and articulate people with panache. There was a confusing moment when we filed out after midnight, each individual paying for her/his own drinks. When it came to me, I couldn’t understand why they didn’t have a total for me. Finally, someone from another party translated: the bar proprietors noticed that I was the person who led the 30-odd people into the bar, so they decided my drinks were on the house. Così bello!

The actual event the next evening was like a wedding. A lot of activity compressed into one evening. A champaign reception, a sit-down dinner with name assignments, DJ dancing, toasts/speeches, and some final dancing by the hard core dancers.

Fantastic food. Pasta that I don't even know what it was. Some kind of super-delicate thin potato au gratin. Gigantic (a meter tall) chunk of parmesano reggiano formaggi with fist-sized chunks spilling out of it.

The whole thing reminded me of my own wedding in Barcelona. Trying to glue the people from different countries together, translating toasts into multiple languages. Even the dancing reminded me of that, because the Americans at Bader’s party were a little reluctant to dance. The music was infectious though – a kind of North African pop/traditional blend that almost, but not quite, pulled me onto the dance floor. Some of the Americans were bolder than me, though since I am the person here least close to Bader and his tribe, it was probably more that they were better integrated than I was. It was cool to watch the Algerians dance. Sometimes they danced what looked like traditional dance moves, sometimes just modern club dancing.

Towards the end of the evening, I met a dermatologist from Paris who has all the latest lasers and lights treatment machines. What does she like? The Cutera "Titan" infrared dermal treatment device. She was well-pleased to meet the inventor of that Titan light source tonight...

The restaurant where all this took place – “L’Archeologica” - is south of the center, on the Via Appia Antica. (“the Appian Way”) is a the pre-Christian trade road out of Rome. This old road has many archeologic sites along it, and in fact the restaurant site itself is one. The restaurant is built on top of a 1st century A.D. early Christian crypt, and the crypt has been converted to a wine cellar. I guess a limbo for wine bottles now, rather than a crypt for human remains. I’m probably not the first to notice the relationship between wine, the blood of Christ, death and the history at this particular site, though when I remarked on this to a couple of Italians, they seemed surprised at the connection. Probably the symptom of something I noticed in life in Spain – that modern Mediterranean Catholics do not spend a lot of time thinking about their religion compared to many Americans.

The whole evening heightened for me that dislocated feeling one gets while traveling. I didn’t completely understand what was happening around me, though I often understood enough. A foreign traveler often feels like both participant and observer, insider and outsider. No pictures accompany this blog entry, because my camera battery ran out. And that’s fine, because I was struggling to be more of a participant and less of an observer. A camera (I have never really carried my own camera before this trip) would have distanced me more than I already was.

The Quirinale and my immediate surroundings

I’m staying in a central Roman district called the Quirinale and my place is just off the Piazza Barberini. It’s a small B&B called the Daphne Veneto. I’ve rarely done as well in finding a place to stay as I’ve done here. This place is perfect for me, inexpensive, central, clean, stylish in a modern & Euro-boutique-y way. The room is very small and quieter than my top floor flat in Russian Hill. Outstanding breakfasts and a staff that, while not around 100% of the time, are extremely helpful. They make getting around Rome much simpler. I would recommend this place highly to anyone not put off by European-sized hotel rooms. There are only a few rooms in this B&B (it’s not what Americans would think of as a B&B – here the definition seems to be a hotel that includes breakfast and does not have a full service staff or lobby.) So, it’s an intimate place. The Daphne Veneto (there is another down the street called the Daphne Trevi) is basically a couple of floors of a multi-story apartment flat building converted to a hotel. Nothing to look at from the outside, either. Every single thing in this place worked perfectly, wifi, plumbing, elevator, keys, phone, drawers, safe box, shower (!!) I almost always find something to pick at, but not this time. And I spent half of what I did in the drab, corporate Sheraton (“Four Pointe suites”) in the suburbs of Ann Arbor a week ago.

I’m a ten minute walk from the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Villa Borghese, and the train station (Roma Termini). I’m a twenty minute walk from the Forum, the Coliseum, the Pantheon. I’m a thirty minute hike to the Vatican compound. These times apply only if you know exactly where you are going, which no tourist does. Historic Rome is too confusing. Other districts, like the ground-zero Tridente, or the area around the Coliseum, are over-the-top touristic and crowded. Just around the northeast corner of the Piazza Barberini is Via Veneto. This has become kind of lame, with a Hard Rock café and poser restaurants. The US embassy and others are here, but it doesn’t change the character of the piazza much. So, I like the Quirinale as a base.

On my the first night at the Daphne when I wanted to take a couple of beers and fruit back to my mini-fridge. So, I went to the grocery store in the basement level of Termini. This lower level of the train station has a new, vast shopping complex, which seems to serve as the grocery shopping and sundries hub for this area. Italians are not known for their beer. I studied the several Italian beers, and thought: I should not buy an Italian beer. So, I picked a random beer from Denmark.

Travel often consists of new experiences. This particular experience was: the worst beer I have ever tasted. I had purchased three bottles (they came in a linear “3-pack”.) I took one sip and spit it out. I don’t read Danish, but I suspect the label might warn against taking this substance internally. The other two beers I left in the fridge for the next unsuspecting tourist, so that they could also enjoy a novel travel experience. I can still taste the mealy character and the slightly metallic tang of it, if I think about it. And, after I post this, I will try not to any more.

Surgeon General's Report

Americans are fatter than Italians. Italians are fatter than Spaniards.

EXSPECTATA PEREGRINVS

The Romans are gone. August is of course when Mediterraneans leave the cities for the sea. But the weekend near the 15th of August is “Ferragusto”, a Catholic holiday (assumption?) that marks beginning of the semi-official Italian exodus.

In their place, are the tourists, like myself. I thought I would feel out of place in Rome, because I only brought one pair of fashionable shoes. Instead, I feel out of place because I do not have a fanny pack, or a shirt that says something that a typical tourist might imagine that Romans would enjoy reading on their chests. Say, “337th Airborne”, or “Return of the Jedi”.

Even without Romans, Rome is bustling, though I do not think it looks like it usually does. It’s just as well, because Rome is staggering, even without the noisy traffic and crowded streets that I guess it usually has. It’s hard not to feel like you’ve got to try and see everything. I have made a deliberate effort to slow down and have unstructured time or long lunches. It also helped that there was a specific event that I am hanging this part of my travel on – my friend Bader’s 50th birthday party (later in the week.) Having an event like this in place, means I feel like there will be more to experience than sight-seeing, and so, I don’t have to be a 100% sight-seer.

These first couple of days here I have spent getting lost, lifting my head up, seeing some impossibly old ruins next to a nightclub with an obscure street name on a wall, walking 100 meters in what I think is the right direction, and then doing it all again. I usually try and not carry a map or guide book visibly in my hands when I travel, preferring to not be instantly recognizable as a tourist. But it doesn’t matter in central Rome, in August. Everyone is carrying a map. Everyone is a tourist.

Walking through this old city, I occasionally experience feelings of nostalgia, because of all the times Veronica and I walked through European cities. That was a life path I was on for years. In our married life, I’d idly imagining a lifetime of walks with my wife through Mediterranean cities in the summer, exploring the historic centers, the old buildings, the tiny streets. That’s a path I’m not on any more. I guess I will always feel a little of that in any city like Rome. Regret for that life that is no more. Still, I can enjoy it, and even share it with her a little, as I have been. We still have a bond over these kinds of things.

I’ve decided that ruins are best enjoyed at night, from outside, driving around or from a bar. Being inside them, or among them is very interesting, but it’s a bit like the Grand Canyon. The grandness of the Grand Canyon is best appreciated from a helicopter, and not so much by standing somewhere on the trail half way down it. Same with the Coliseum, or the old Roman walls. Lit at night, glimpsed while speeding down some road and having them pop out unexpectedly. Or seen while looking up from a bar or restaurant and seeing a piece of old wall or column.

The old Romans are gone. The new Romans are gone (for the moment.) My European life is gone. But new Rome has risen in the centuries following, and is something to behold. It is distinct from the old Rome, though it has grown up through it, beside it, and is of it. My life is the same.

Itinerary

I use Dopplr.com to track and coordinate travels. I think you can get to my public profile and see my itinerary at: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/gspooner/public

UNO, dos, tres

I’ve known Christian since he was a college kid. 15 years later, he and his wife Hannah have become world citizens, moving easily between the country side of eastern Africa, dance clubs in Madrid, conference rooms in big pharma and biotech companies, and the suburbs of Sacramento. They met in Tanzania, while he was living in Heidelberg and she was in London. I’ve seen them in San Francisco, London, Marrakesh… But visiting them in Boston was the first time I’ve stayed with them both where they live.

And I’ve never had a great time in Boston, or liked it very much. Probably because I’ve only come here for conferences and meetings. But staying with C&H at their South End apt turned me around. They have a great place, recently remodeled, on the top floor of a brownstone. Often these places have a rooftop deck, which theirs did. A 360 degree view of the Boston skyline is accessed through a strange kind of skylight door set in the roofline at about 45 degrees from the mezzanine floor.

The neighborhood has gentrified recently, and is pretty fancy-pantsed now, with many great restaurants and galleries and boutiques. My favorite place there was a small café/bakery/coffee shop called the “South End Buttery”. I think I went there 4 times in 4 days. Great coffee and a heavily trafficked place, so you see who lives in the South End. And all the butter they use in their baked goods is supposed to be good for your coronary arteries. I think. I might have that wrong.

Saturday night they had a party, with the nominal excuse of getting rid of all their half-empty booze bottles (they’re leaving this wonderful place soon, wanderers that they are). I met some interesting folks, though as the good liquor got finished and the group turned towards the bad, the conversations turned largely to how to make bad booze into good. The most interesting person to me was a woman OB/GYN clinician who has a vision of co-opting the porn industry to promote good and safe sex practices through the actual production of pornography. She wants to become a producer, essentially. She did not attempt to recruit me for the project, for some reason. Maybe it was the bad booze that clouded her judgment?

Hannah’s got pictures on her Facebook page of the party (from where I stole some photos for Icelollysforall), and other moments. I looked kind of uncomfortable in some of them. Guess I felt a little bit old at a party where there was a Twister game being played…

But, as the night wore on, and the party got smaller, we decided to play the card game, “Uno”. I didn’t know how to play, but I caught on pretty quickly. An entertaining game in general, but made hilarious for me by Hannah’s friend “C”, who was pure id: alternatively shouting “fuck you” and “I hate you guys” at us when she’d lose a hand, and then seconds later would be hanging on Hannah’s neck, embracing her.

At one point, maybe 2AM, Hannah stopped for a break and offered us all frozen popsicle treats. She called them “ice lollies” (Hannah is from England.) I thought that phrase was so entertaining, I adopted it for this blog. When I registered the name for the blog, though, I didn’t spell the plural form correctly. So sue me. You’re reading this aren’t you?

It rained most of the days I was there, but that made for a great Sunday retreat when the three of us camped out at the Liberty Hotel while it poured. The building is an old city jail, now converted to a luxury hotel. Champaign, oysters, papadam (big discussion over how to spell it), roasted egg plant, New York Times.

I like hanging out C&H, because I often find myself doing things I don’t usually do. I had my first pedicure here. It kind of smarts! Thanks for springing for it, Hannah. My feet will be the talk of Rome, I’m sure. Boston and visiting C&H was a nice springboard for my transatlantic jump, which is coming up next…

Going Blue?

Ann Arbor.

I used to live here, work here. I was a married man here. I bought my first house here and renovated it. It was one of the most intellectually challenging periods of my life. Good things happened here. Bad things too.

Now, I’m back for a day. Once again meeting with ophthalmologists, talking to the University about working on medical things, about another startup company. This time though, I wouldn’t be following a wife. And this time I’d be working on something that matters more to me than what I did here before.

But do I want to repeat an earlier phase of my life? Is there too much here about the past? Is there enough in this new opportunity to spend another chunk of my life here?

I don’t have to decide now. For the moment, it’s fun to play with the idea.

August is a great time here. The fireflies are still out. Nights are so comfortable. And prosperous, downtown A2 is still a privileged island in the rough sea of Michigan. Pretty college girls and interesting international types stroll, and the cafes in the historic buildings are full.

The day is a blur. Hand shakes, meetings, technical discussions, meals and coffees with strangers. I have a nice evening out with my uncle. It’s all fine.

I retreat to my corporate hotel room and draw blind contours of my face. (Blind contours are continuous line drawings made without looking at your hand, while you study and observe the subject of the drawing. One makes an outline of the subject, without shading, detail or perspective. They’re done as an exercise to improve observation skills and to liberate the drawing hand from the eye.) I make many versions of this one drawing so that I can finish my art class obligations before bed. I have an early flight to Boston, and the class ends in San Francisco this week. A late night drive to the local A2 Fedex office ends my class. I’m pleased with the drawings, crazy as they are.

As I left for Boston, I thought of the outlines of my life here in Ann Arbor. Did I just make a blind contour sketch of my past?

the journey of a single step begins with a thousand miles

Am I alone in the world?

My head tells me I am, have always been, will be. My heart doesn't believe it, believes I'm deeply connected to other people and will connect in better ways, more meaningfully. My gut is a bit afraid of the answer. And the youth that still remains in my muscles doesn't care what the answer is, just wants to find out, just wants action, motion.

So, I am setting out. Partly to answer the question. Partly just to take a break, have a journey, live a little differently. The jet plane ticket is for five weeks. I'm hoping I am lucky and the journey will be 40 more years.

I'm traveling a bit across the United States, but mostly in Europe. So far, it's been Ann Arbor, Boston. Coming up: Rome and Italy for sure, Israel and Tel Aviv maybe, and a week in Iceland with a few days sprinkled in transit across Germany and Switzerland.

I'll log some of what I experience these five weeks. Also, I'll just write some. And put in some regular travelogue stuff. If my blog looks lustrous and shiny at the end, I'll continue it in December with my trips to Antarctica, Argentina, Rio de Janeiro.

If I hear from you or you ask me about my experiences, I'll invite you to read along.