World Travels

December 13, 2011

Grand Cayman Island

Grand Cayman is a mixed up place. Its a British Island, unrecognized as a sovereign state since its an overseas territory, but Brits need visas to live and work there. They have the Union Jack in their flag and the queen on their coins, but their Caymanian dollar is pegged to the US dollar at a 1.25 exchange rate. Apparently Americans and Canadians don’t need a passport to travel to the Cayman Islands, but Im not sure I believe that since it doesn’t quite make sense. I showed up with my Canadian passport, which they stamped, and counted it as my 78th country, because I certainly can’t say I just spent the last 2 weeks in the United Kingdom.

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Marieke on the beach – not your typical British scene

The slow-paced, easy going “island time” battled the hectic bank scene; the income-tax free laws gave George Town a rat-race feel you’d be used to in downtown Manhattan, since a 9-5 work week and traffic rush hour reminded you what line of work many come to Cayman to do. But as soon as you got to the beach, everything slowed down again, and then you met the other half of Caymans working population – expats from the US, Canada, and other British countries who work the restaurant, bar and nightlife scene.

shaking hands with Copernico

There’s also a booming tourism scene, with cruise ships dumping thousands of passengers into George Town for 8 hours of crazy consumption -mostly  souvenir and jewellery shopping, eating and drinking. There’s also a turtle farm and a dolphin park, where I got suckered into going because I wanted a kiss from a dolphin and to cuddle some turtles.

The culture there is also an interesting melange. You hear a mix of Jamaican, British, and North American English accents, plus a lot of Spanish and Spanglish from the large community of Hondurans living there. The food ranges from American BBQ to creole, west-Indian cuisine, with good jerk chicken and seafood available almost anywhere.

baby sea turtles

The cost of living is abnormally high, especially when you’re expecting a cheap, Caribbean vacation. Food, alcohol and gas are the most noticeably overpriced, since those are necessities I’ve gotten used to comparing between countries.

I spend ten days in George Town couchsurfing with a girl named Marieke, who was also an interesting mix. She was a British nanny, working once or twice a week for a couple of hours for her fulltime salary, yet had lived there for 2 months without ever going out or making any local friends. She was great company, always a bundle of giggles, and provided me with endless entertainment by the silly things she did and said. My favourite was when I had to convince her that stop signs are not optional, since she had been blowing them all without realizing why people kept honking at her.

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beach volleyball players training

In our week together, we went out every night and literally met everyone in George Town. Our most memorable friends included a salsa dance instructor named Kirk (the name Kirk is very famous and used in so many business names), a Caymanian/Honduran named “Ish” (short for Ishmael), a Scottish bartender named Jamie, a friendly Canadian named Marty, and the best male beach volleyball player from the Cayman Islands who advanced to the next round of Olympic qualifier games at a beach volleyball tournament we watched. Its such a small place, that you feel you can get to know everyone and everything on the island very quickly, and the island starts to feel smaller and smaller.

But, with 50,000 people, I wanted even smaller, quiter, slower island time, so we booked a trip to Little Cayman, the sister island with 120 residents.

(to be continued….)

December 8, 2011

Road to Zion

I’m not quite 25, but Clio is, and though she’s probably the worse driver, we decided to rent the car under her name since there’s a $25 surcharge per day for drivers under 25. To save more money, we named our own price on priceline, and got a car for $16 a day. Then Clio lost her drivers license card before our trip started, and we had to cancel that booking. Since it was Thanksgiving weekend, other companies were out of economy cars, so we rented a no-name car from some no-name company, for closer to $60 a day, under my name, and got extra insurance. T’was just a minor speedbump in our roadtrip plans.

our car, on the road to Utah

We left Vegas Thanksgiving day in our shiny-red, brandless hatchback and headed to St. George, Utah. We drove through deserts, canyons and red rock scapes that made me feel like we were pioneering an expedition through the wild wild west. From inside the car, the sun looked scorching. But when we stopped for pictures and got out of the car, it felt cold enough to snow. We took a jumping picture by the “Welcome to Utah sign,” and made it into St. George by sunset.

Welcome to Utah

Everything was closed except a few gas stations, but the Cracker Barrel restaurant was open and serving Turkey dinner for $6.99. Our couchsurf host Mason worked there so we asked to sit at the bar to wait for his shift to finish. “We have no bar” said the host.

“Oh, but you serve beer?”

“No” she said, with a sneaky smile that meant she knew we hadn’t been in St. George long enough to learn how rare liquor licensed establishments are. The turkey dinner was still delicious, and the pumpkin and pecan pie desserts included with our meal more than made up for the lack of beer.

We spent our evening having deep philosophical debates, talked travel, and discussed complicated medical terminology. Mason was a retired mormon, and shared his PBR’s with us at home while explaining only a couple bars exist in the city of 73,000. The highlight of the visit was a little off-road experience, when he “jeeped it up” in his yellow truck and almost crashed the car only because I grabbed his steering arm while he was trying to get the car back on the road. Silly me.

Zion National Park

We visited Zion National Park the following day, a beautiful canyon tucked between the Colorado Plateau, Grand Basin and Mojave Desert. We drove the 15 mile scenic road through the canyon, stopping for 3 hikes to an emerald pool, a weeping rock, and a riverside trail. The sandstone cliffs were red and beige, and all the deciduous trees were half way between turning colours and losing their leaves, creating a picture perfect autumn day.

We had another turkey lunch at Mt. Carmel Junction, then visited Jacob Lake, a small community at the northern entrance to the Grand Canyon. We assumed the road was closed to the North Rim, but when we got there, realized it was still open, despite the ice-covered patches and snowy, skeleton forests. We drove 45 miles to the park entrance, when we realized we were out of gas and all services in the park had been shut since October 15. But, a ranger saved our butts when he told us about a self-service gas station we could use.

North Rim

We got to the North Rim in time for sunset, and had an incredible view over the canyon. It is so much bigger than you can imagine, so immense and far-reaching that you can’t really see it in three dimensions. It looks like a painted picture, without any scale or point of reference to understand its depth.

The following day we visited the South Rim and had a similar experience. We spent the whole day there, getting as many different perspectives of the canyon as we could, taking too many photos that couldn’t quite capture what we were seeing with our naked eyes. There was no snow at the South Rim, but I was still cold under my toque, gloves and Cintamani layers.

South Rim, with Clio and couchsurfers for scale

We had company at both rims. In the North, a couple Russian-speaking tourists followed us around with a crazy canon lens, taking pictures on the ends of cliffs that made you feel like you were floating in a space above the canyon. In the South Rim, our couchsurf hosts joined us, one being a tour guide for the park that snuck us past some ropes and down some unmarked trails to have more intimate canyon moments.

We stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona, couchsurfing with a couple different hosts. Sam and Carl were a couple living in a house with a revolving door of awesome young folk coming in and out, including another couchsurfer from France. There was room for us all, and it felt totally normal to show up as strangers and then feel like regulars seconds later. We also stayed with Jack, a local brewmaster and outdoor enthusiast. His house was heated by a wood-burning fireplace, had a kitten curled up beside it, and 4 or 5 strewn bodies on the wrap around couch who became our second group of local friends. We heated ourselves some more in his hottub, and realized we had to come back for some of his tourguiding expertise, as we learned more about Havasupai falls and the local skiing mountains he regularly frequents.

the last sliver of sun at sunset, with the Colorado River behind

This is a common ‘problem’ with travel and couchsurfing alike – I never seem to stay long enough in the places I visit, as wishes of extending my trip constantly tempt me to postpone my next travel plans. I never stay long enough with my stranger-turned-friend host to feel like I’ve gotten to know them well enough, and invitations to stay longer make me feel rude to turn down. I used to think of traveling as a to-do list to tick off – go down the list til I’ve been everywhere. But, every place I visit, I leave with the intention of going back, so my travel list grows bigger the more places I go. And the more couchsurfers I meet, the more people I have to visit, and to host, so I’m not sure how I’ll manage being in two places at once to visit and host all these new friends.

 

December 6, 2011

Sin City

Two of my very bestest friends in the world live in the states, so to see them we meet “halfway” somewhere, which is never really half way between us. To get my fill of Clio, who lives in Minneapolis and has already come to Iceland twice, we decided Vegas was the most “central,” not geographically, but financially. Flights to the Caribbean were too expensive, Vancouver was too cold, and we’d already met in New York before.

We’d also met in Las Vegas before, but that didn’t matter. We roadtripped there for my 21st birthday and spent the majority of our 3 days there waiting for me to turn of-age, so couldn’t really say we experienced “adult” Vegas. We didn’t want to gamble, we just wanted to experience some nightlife in one of our world’s most renowned party cities.

the Volcano show at the Mirage

There was also culture tourism to enjoy. American culture is a strong and unique super culture, a mix of very different states, accents, and skin colours, but still a unified, identifiable place and people. But, Sin City is a specific sub-culture of Americans on holiday in a place built for gambling, girls and getting drunk around the clock. However, I don’t overlook the amazing shows and sights, including the crazy casinos you can never find our way out of or what time it is, and the themed hotels that can temporarily transport you to Venice, New York or a treasure island full of battling pirates.

Me and Clio joined my mom to see Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Ka,’ probably my favourite cirque show, based on a story of oriental warriors orchestrated to rock-n-roll on a stage that rotated 360` in every direction. Sand, sea creatures and warriors slid off it whenever it overturned, unless they grabbed onto one of the hundreds of spikes that could pop out of the ground, miraculously without impaling anyone. There was an underwater scene that captivated me so fully I didn’t realize until after that I had held my breath the entire time I watched the girl swim to the surface, even though she was just moving up a black backdrop with projected bubbles.

the fountains at the Bellagio are my favourite

We also got tickets to the Lion King, a show with the most incredible costume designs. People were convincingly dressed to look and move just like giraffes, hyenas and warthogs. Although the Lion costume for little Simba was leopard patterned and the baby Simba in the opening scene looked more like a plastic monkey than a furry cub. But that was kindly forgotten with the captivating songs and sounds transporting you to Eastern Africa’s wild plains.

Our nightlife touring we did mostly without my mom, although she joined in for some ladies nights and wristband all-you-can-drink events. We had our first night at XS in the Encore, a club appropriately named after the excessive glitz and glamour décor. Steve Aioki dj’d, with a big yellow blow up duck mascot. It was poolside, with an outside area big enough to host thousands of people, which apparently happens on the regular. We ended up at a VIP table with AFL football coaches from Australia, who kept us entertained with peculiar behaviour – like the guy in the toque who kept scooping icecubes on top of his head for no apparent reason.

Our second night got a little bit more ridiculous, after we ended up at Pure nightclub in Caesar’s palace with 5 or 6 different stamps splattered up our arms to get all access to every corner of the roped-off club floor. There we met a couple beautiful girls, who may or may not have been hired by the older, uglier men with them, who actually made it rain in the club. Me and Clio stood under a shower of dollar bills falling from the sky and filled our fists with exactly $26.  We ended up at an afterparty in a Bellagio suite with what I suspect was French royalty, but I can’t confirm for sure.

Dada Life!

The last night we were back at the Encore for a Thanksgiving eve party at Surrender. Dada Life was disc jockeying, and I ended up dancing with the tallest German man I’ve ever met. He was staying at the MGM too, so we split a cab back, and Clio wanted to play more penny slots on our last night. We had a difficult time waking up a few hours later, and the morally conflicting decision whether or not I was ready to pick up our rental car at 11 am when I was potentially still inebriated. I was worried about going to Vegas and overeating, but with only 1 buffet in 3 days, we were more ready for an alcohol diet, so sobered up and headed to Utah and Arizona for a roadtrip. And, when we arrived in Mormon-ridden Utah to find out almost all the liquor licenses are bought out by the church, we knew we wouldn’t have a hard time keeping our diet.

(…to be continued)

 

December 1, 2011

2 weeks in Vancouver

As of late, my travel plans have been slightly more spontaneous than usual, since I was expecting to move to France, then substituted that with a euro trip for 3 months, then cut it 6 weeks short to go to Miami where I had 2 unrelated obligations. Then from Miami I basically flipped a coin between St. Croix or New York.

Heads. New York. But I didn’t really have anything to do in New York. But I did just find out my little sister got engaged, so I used it as a stop-over to get back to Vancouver. I could have just changed planes at JFK, but a few days in New York never hurts. I had some relatives, a best friend, and a friend who just visited me in Iceland who owed me some tourguiding hospitality. He lives in the financial district, a stone’s throw away from the World Trade Center Site, and works near Grand Central Station. My other friend there is a male supermodel. Both very clichéd Manhattan careers I’d say.

So Vancouver. I lived there for nearly 4 years but every year that passes since, going back to Vancouver makes me feel more and more like a visitor. With every visit, I know fewer people living there, as all my UBC friends graduate, get jobs, or marry elsewhere. Walking around the UBC campus makes me feel like an old creeper. Downtown even seems less familiar, with all the construction and development disguising familiar streets.

I don’t miss the rain, the long, dark, dreary nights, or how expensive it is to drive (parking, gas, insurance). But I miss the cosmopolitan feel of the city, the vibrant, young, international mix of faces you see, not to mention noticeably beautiful faces. I love the cheap, easily-accessible and readily available sushi everywhere. I love Stanley park, English Bay and the surrounding, snow-topped mountains. I really miss Whistler – the feeling of riding the gondola to the very top and knowing you can take up to 2 hours to get back down without riding another chairlift.

I spent my 2 weeks there wedding dress shopping with my sisters. Ruth didn’t know what colour her bridesmaid dresses should be until our second outing, and still came out with a slightly indecisive choice. “Off-white. Or cream. With or without a pattern. But no one should wear the same dress.” We didn’t get very far with that for me or my older sisters dress hunt, but she managed to find her dream wedding dress. It was a whopping $1200 plus 12% HST and $200 for a belt wrap. She didn’t feel right about the price, so instead bought 2 wedding dresses she liked a little less each, but in total only cost $150, and together, could tailor into something perfect.

During the day, every day, I worked with an old-time friend and long-time professional colleague, Yashar. He hired me full time to work as his campaign volunteer leader in the North Vancouver municipal elections. This job consisted of me sitting between 8 – 10 hours a day in an office where only other Persians worked, organizing his Farsi-speaking only parents to lead volunteer events, and then distributing a handful of about another 20 volunteers (also, all Persian) for random, miscellaneous jobs to help market Yashar as a city councilor. I realized how much I love Persian hospitality, and how alienating it is to be the only person not speaking the common language of your immediate surroundings.

I also spent quite a bit of time with a traveler friend named Murray, who calls me the girl version of him. We seem to lead parallel lifestyles, both insatiably wanderlusting, and irresponsibly quick to pack up and go at the flip of a coin. We lamented about how hard it is to keep relationships, but how inconsequential this seems when we realize how much we appreciate the lasting friendships travel has given us instead. We empathized how lonely travel can get, but without referring to any negative connotations of the meaning of the word. We wondered out loud how we stay so busy doing nothing, and joked about the endless moneytree that people seem to believe feed our travel funds. But, we concluded that our lives are somehow less expensive and more sustainable than our alternative life-options, and also decided we weren’t abnormal, since 2 people living the same lifestyle simply defines a different normality.

 

November 12, 2011

Miami, from the water

I flew from Italy, to Madrid, to Miami, which seemed like a natural transition, between languages, climate, culture, even food. Spain was close enough to Italy, only an hours flight, and the people and place not unsimilar. Then a slightly longer-haul flight to Miami, where the unofficial first language is still Spanish, but the culture a mix of Spanish colonial heritage and raging latin sexiness.

Sunset from the marina

I think Miami resembles Venice, but Venice on steroids – a bigger, shinier, newer city built on invisible islands, surrounded by much larger canals and super-bridges. The city is ten times taller and ten times wider, with probably a hundred times more people, but boats and bridges still connect everyone and everywhere. The boats are also on steroids – instead of romantic gondolas leisurely floating past, you have super-turbo yachts with 800 horsepower zooming by.

The boat

I was visiting five friends, who I suppose you could call sailors, and we had a 30-something foot speedboat to play with for 3 days. We circled around Key Biscayne and traversed the dirty rivers around downtown. I learned how to drive a boat, which was definitely not my idea – not because I didn’t want to, but trusting a female to competently drive a boat around 5 trained sailors can never make you feel like you know what you’re doing.

Captain Katrin, with downtown Miami ahead of us

We docked at the restaurants we wanted to have lunch at, which is probably the only form of free parking between 9-5 in downtown Miami, and lets you get service without shoes or a shirt. We unintentionally took the boat out to jelly-fish infested water, but luckily for everyone else only I was in the water then. I didn’t get stung since my friends inside the boat could see them and direct me where to swim around them and get back safely in the boat. But then moments later, they convinced me to get back in and try surfing behind the boat.

This is something I’ve never seen done before, but you take a regular short board (5’10” or so), sit on the back of the boat to one side, and put your feet on it to hold it steady. Then the boat speeds up to about 2500rpms, and you stand up on it while hanging on for dear life to the boat, mostly for balance. Then there’s a rope attached to the boat that you ease back on, and continue to get dragged behind. Eventually, you find your niche on the wake of the boat, and you can throw the rope away and continue to surf behind the boat as long as your legs can hold out. I think it’s the perfect type of surf – no need to paddle or battle any waves, and when you’re down, the luxurious speedboat comes back and picks you up out of the water, and in my case (I only got up once), congratulates you with a cold beer.

How I wish surfing could always be

It threatened to rain every day we were on the boat, but the grey skies stayed dry until my last day in Miami, when it all came down at once. It was Halloween night, and it poured and poured and poured. The fashion  scene is already quite scandalous, so seeing loud and colourful half naked girls wasn’t out of the norm, but no one could stay dry, so seeing everyone dressed up and soaked down gave an interesting spin to all the costumes. I was a party pooper and didn’t even have a costume, but I was just glad to be off the boat and in enough clothes to stay warm since I started to feel the inkling of a flu coming on – the first I’d had in almost a year. I just don’t understand how a body survives a whole summer, filthy in the frigid Icelandic mountains surrounded by horses and bad hygiene, but gets sick in the tropical heat of Miami beach.

 

November 9, 2011

Venice: the floating city (?)


canals and bridges between stone islands

growing out of water

I don’t get Venice. They call it an island, or rather, a series of islands, but where is the land? It just looked like houses were growing out of the water, stone and water separated only by some green algae. The water was pretty murky, so you just saw walls disappear under the surface, and one could almost be convinced the houses are ten stories deep underwater. There has to be land, or else what do the trees grow out of?But, I didn’t get it because it looked like the houses were floating. And I always thought the gondola drivers used long rods to push off the river bottom, but I noticed they were actually paddling them, unable to reach any sort of ground. Are the buildings floating? I remember watching a James bond movie where some air-balloon things exploded and the whole building crashed into the water. Does that mean you can swim under them? If they’re all floating, how do they keep them from floating away? If they’re anchored, they must be reaaaally big, heavy anchors.

And, how do the anchors adjust for rain fall? Because a floating city would raise with more water. Does the city’s GPS location adapt to metres above sea level when it rains a lot?  I noticed they sell boots with ‘cm’ measure markings on the side, and after seeing a picture of Julia Roberts walking on water, I realized that the city actually floods. So, maybe it rains and the heavy stone houses sink.

a quiet "Street" with ample parallel parking spots available

So, the city can’t be floating, or else it would never flood. If they’re not floating, then they did a really good job of covering every piece of possible land with a building, since the buildings literally go straight into the water – no shore or anything, just maybe a couple steps. Or maybe the island was really tiny or only a couple feet under water and they just did a lot of land reclamation, and from digging all the land they made so many deep canals. I can’t imagine the foundation for a city made of stone can be that deep… or floating.

The canals weave around the smaller islands, none in straight lines, connecting island to island with pedestrian bridges that are always over-arched to make a high enough midpoint for gondolas to pass under. Some canals are wide enough for taxi-boats and motorized ferries, and others only narrow enough to fit one gondola.

San Marco

Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute

They create a city-sized labyrinth, a maze you could easily get lost in, if it wasn’t for all the arrows pointing you to either the “Ferrovia” (train station), “San Marco” (the most famous piazza and basilica) or “Rialto” (the most famous bridge with shopping all around).

I think Venice, like Bavaria, should also be made into a Disneyland theme park. It would look like Las Vegas’ Venetian hotel park, and the pretty princesses signing autograph books would wear renaissance ball gowns and the princes would wear extravagant masks. All of Venice was an attraction, and it felt like I had arrived into one big theme park. Maybe Disneyland could even buy the city of Venice, privatize it, and just make it the Venetian Disneyland… but I guess noone would want that, even though it wasn’t far off from that already.

dizzying glitzy masks

None of the ways they direct you are the most direct, but instead loop you around through the main streets and past every store front in Venice. They all sell the same thing, mostly masks any Burning Man festival go-er would dream of having, or someone throwing a Renaissance-themed masquerade. If you wander off the main way, you find yourself in totally deserted, silent alleyways, like you’ve stepped into a scene from the movie “V for Vendetta.” It’s a pedestrian only city, and not even scooters or bicycles exist since the bridges would pose a serious barrier to their usefulness. Taking a water taxi is the only other option after walking, so I learned to always give myself 45 mins to get anywhere, and to keep following the signs even if I thought I new a quicker way, because I kept running into stone walls or canals without bridges and didn’t feel like swimming under any buildings.

 

November 4, 2011

Pompei Viva

I knew I couldn’t visit Naples without going to Pompei, but I had no idea how big or interesting it was. Showing up at 3 pm, an hour before the gates closed, then proved to be a bad choice, but then the guards told me that no one gets let in after 4, but people don’t get kicked out until 7. So I set off to get lost in the excavated city.

Mount Vesuvius as seen from the main square "Foro"

Pompei (sometimes spelled Pompeii) was a thriving Roman city until 79AD when the nearby volcano Vesuvius unexpectedly exploded. In only 2 days, the entire city was buried under 6 metres of ash and pumice. Up to 10 km away, people literally melted dead, dying from surges of hot air, but most suffocated to death before they could escape. The city was almost buried alive, keeping it perfectly preserved, so that walking around its ruins today seems like you’re eerily walking around a city that was deserted yesterday.

The main entrance, showing the bath halls outside the city wall

I battled through tour group after tour group. Each had a dozen or more tourists, with a tour guide holding an umbrella or a stick tied with a scarf to lead them. Some had identical hats or lanyards, even tshirts, so they wouldn’t lose eachother, and some had earphones in their ear which were connected to the tourguide talking constantly into a microphone. German, French, Spanish, English, Japanese and Chinese… but no Italian groups. I would get lost in the midst of group after group, struggling to escape, since overtaking them was hard but getting stuck behind one wasn’t an option – since I wanted to get around the whole city in 4 hours.

As I was wandering around, I passed a few other couples and backpackers, with handy guidebooks or talking headsets, and started regretting my choice not to join a group or hire a guide. There were so many things I didn’t understand, and hundreds of questions I wished I could ask a Pompeiian who was still alive.

At one junction, when I was trying to find Villa de Misteri, a tall, thin Italian with slicked back white hair jogged up beside me. He was wearing yellow short shorts and a matching tshirt, and asked me if he could help me find something. I lied and said no, that I wasn’t looking for anything, and looked lost since I was trying to get lost. He smiled, then said “Perfect. Let me show you something then.”

An immaculately preserved painting

He first started at the city boundary wall that we happened to be standing right beside. He explained the markings on the wall were from the first Roman invasion, when the city was still a Greek colony. The invasion came from the north, another enlightening discovery for historians.  To our left began the above-ground tombs, since dead people couldn’t be buried inside the city walls. He explained who was buried in each one, reading the legible Latin engravings on every stone, which told us who their father was, what their occupation was, and how much the burial cost.

My fascination and obvious ignorance probably began to bleed through my smile. “Well, I don’t really need to go for a jog today anyway. Im the head tour-guide of Pompei and have lived and worked here for 35 years, so why don’t I show you around a little?” He went on to give me a 3 hour personal tour guide, through all of Villa de Misteri and back into the city walls around the most interesting sights. We stayed in the park well past dark, and he told the guards to let us be until 7:30 when we had all of Pompei to ourselves. He got keys from another guard to sneak me into inaccessible rooms, and showed me the bathing hall and the only chariot they unearthed, perfectly intact.

A beautiful mosaic

We wandered around like kids, both partaking in a game of imagination that the city was thriving around us and I was a Roman princess courting Apollo. We walked into the Temple of Jupiter, which he refused to climb since he wasn’t Apollo’s love interest, and made sure I saw the brothel rooms which I never could have seen if I was really a Roman princess. He showed me the bodies of people, frozen in the position they were when they took their last choking breath. He pointed out the phallic engravings of penises in the weirdest places – on cobblestones on the ground, on the sides of pillars, in beautiful paintings – and assured me over and over they were signs of good luck, not perversion.

He read every bit of Latin he could see, translating it into English word by word, and explained in great detail all the contested meanings of paintings.

The urns for wine and fishsauce

He pointed out original graffiti on the walls, of Roman emperors with big noses, and picked leaves off the Laurel trees to make me sniff and imagine them as my headcrown. We walked over mosaic floors and looked at Egyptian decorations, as he got more and more excited about teaching me about the cultural complexity of the town and how much borrowing and trade there was between empires.

He could never walk and talk at the same time. So we’d walk a few steps, and then he’d have to stop and explain something, and then we’d walk until I asked another question, which he would have to stop and answer. It was hilarious, and everytime I laughed at him, he laughed louder and harder until he abruptly saw something else to talk about and became totally serious, starting another fascinating lecture.

The main street with chariot wheel tracks

He told me the population was probably 15,000, and explained which streets were the main streets, and even what they were called. During heavy rain fall, the streets flooded into small streams, and big stepping stones were used to get across the streets. The high traffic of horse-drawn chariots actually left wheel tracks in the massive stones, which were supposed to be fixed by taxes collected from the people living on each street. He knew who lived in what house, and what they did. Many made wine and fishsauce, and kept them in big ceramic pots, and others were artists or bakers. There were athletes too, and gymnasiums where they trained for Olympic events – which they always competed in naked.

The Temple of Jupiter after dark

The entire city came alive to me, and even as it became night, the cloak of darkness let me run wilder with what I thought I saw or heard. I felt like staying until the next morning to see the city return to life, since it seemed to real, so normal, for it to be exactly as I imagined it. I never did go back the next day, even though my guide invited me, but perhaps its best I didn’t, since I may not have turned out to be a real Roman princess in the living Pompei.

 

November 1, 2011

How to speak Italian

I didn’t manage to learn Italian in 2 weeks, but I did try and disguise my Spanish to sound Italian-ish. I learned quickly that Spanish does work somewhat, and works even better if you wave your arms and use your hands a lot. Italian is more body language than spoken language, especially in Naples, where I felt conversations could be muted and still completely understood if you just watched.

I had this image of loud Italian women yelling at eachother across the street, perched up in their balconies laden with clothes-lines full of colourful clothes. I first arrived in Milan, where they have a municipal by-law against clothes lines on your balcony, so I didn’t see it there. The streets were also full of loud traffic, and the city center had mostly business and commercial offices filling the buildings. But in Naples, the historical city center is mostly apartments, full of this scene – narrow streets that you look down and see balcony after balcony with clothes that must never dry. In the morning and the evening, bickering ladies come out and yell, waving their arms a lot, and it always sounds like they’re arguing, but I’ve been told they’re saying very affectionate things.

The little streets, which I would have gotten totally lost in if I wasn’t following my Napolitan host, ring with the sound of scooters, driving just a little too fast and taking every corner and overpass just a little too close. Noone wears a helmet, and sometimes 3 adults squeeze onto one seat, bottoming out on every big cobblestone. You yell in Italian, with your hands, while youre driving too, which made me slightly uncomfortable when I was the passenger. Luckily my friend Adriano didn’t have a scooter, but while driving his hatchback, would let go of the steering wheel and flail his arms around, yelling something at everyone that cut him off. Even though the windows were shut and no one could hear him, they could see him, and thus, message communicated.

I picked up some pointers on speaking Italian with your hands and figured this much out: always move your arms about, even if you’re talking on the phone and the other person cant see you; move your hands in straight lines, up and down, or left to right; switch between having your palm faced upward or downward, but keep you fingers frayed; roll your forearms around eachother alot. To make a point, pout your middle and index finger to your thumb and shake your hand infront of your chest. If your boasting, tilt your head back, jut your jaw out and puff your chest up pompously. Tilt your head up and jut your jaw out while nodding your head if you agree with someone. Tilt your head up and jut your jaw out and shake your head if you disagree with someone, and if you have something to say to correct them, shut them up by grabbing their hands – since they can’t keep talking if you stop their hands from moving. If you want to make them stop talking a little more politely, or make your point more poignant, put the back of your hand on their chest and push a little til they stop.

The most important thing was to smile and laugh a lot, touch eachothers hands and arms a lot, and never stop communicating with your hands since they wont hear you if youre just talking with your lips… atleast they’ll stop listening or understanding you, whether or not you’re actually speaking Italian.

October 30, 2011

Italy's Big Cities

Milan

Milan is in northern Italy, the capital of Lombardy Province. It was my first Italian city, but I was warned that it isn’t very ‘Italian.’ The couchsurf host I had there listed front page on his profile that he’s happy to host couchsurfers who want to see Milan, but hoped that traveler’s carried on to see the ‘real’ Italy.

Whatever the case, I tried to see the ‘real’ Milan, spending 3 days there living in the city center. I spent one day walking to the most beautiful parts of Milan, mainly the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, San Lorenzo Maggiore, and the Sforzesco Castle and surrounding gardens. There were other palazzo’s and museums I just glanced at, and at the Santa Maria delle Grazie I just checked out Leonardo’ da Vinci’s painting ‘The Last Supper.’

The shopping gallery, adorned with glass arches designed and built in a time when it was considered such an architectural marvel that the architect commited suicide before it was finished from fear that it would fail

San Lorenzo Maggiore is a beautiful church fronted by roman columns, rare for this part of Italy, and floods with a buzzing nightlife every weekend. Here was where my couchsurf host lived, so we ate pizza and crepes and drank chianti and pinot grigio whenever he came home from work. One evening I saw a ballet at the Teatro alla Scala, and sitting in the red velvet seats inside that glitzy theatre house made me feel like Italian royalty. During the day, I absorbed as much fashion and aesthetic beauty as I could, checking out every beautiful person that walked passed me and all the glamorous window shopping. The ‘real’ Milan definitely kept its expected reputation as one of the world’s fashion capitals.

Florence

Florence was smaller, quainter, without the cosmopolitan bustle of Milan. Yet it somehow felt more international, more touristy, and although it looked like a ‘more’ Italian city, it felt less like Italian life. Every third person I passed spoke American English, and a plethora of immigrants ran the tourist shops, pizza stands and café’s.

 

Ponte Vecchio, a bridge full of houses

The city is cramped but cosy, with narrow, pedestrian-only streets made of big cobble stones crookedly-winding around stone buildings. The whole city is made of stone, with not a patch of earth or dirt in sight, but the little windows poking out of buildings and tiny balconies are usually adorned in flower pots.

Tourists come here since it’s the capital of Tuscany (where they want to explore more of), and because they’re interested in visiting since its considered a culture capital and birthplace of the renaissance. I couchsurfed with 2 American brothers, and hung out with their extended American friends/colleagues, to get a glimpse of Florence that was not very Italian, but probably a more accurate experience of the touristy city.

Rome

The saying ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’ never made sense to me because I don’t know what Romans do.Rome is huge, overwhelmingly big when compared to Florence or Milan, and has too much to do and see since the whole city is one big tourist attraction.

All of the Roman ruins compete with the still-standing Roman artifacts, which compete with the newer Roman buildings since they’re soon-to-be Roman ruins. Everything is big and grandiose, which made me think “how the heck did they build that 2000 years ago?” My Romanian-Italian friend explained “I think people used to be smarter, so there’s no way for us to know how they did it since we people have gotten stupider since then.”

 

Coliseo de Roma

Rome is so clustered with ancient artifacts and impressive buildings that you actually start to get numb from their awesomeness. Friends giving me some tour guiding just started to point at pretty things and explain ‘that’s also old and important’ but not sure what things actually were.

I think I took fifty pictures of the Trevi fountain, but I didn’t throw a coin in it since I can’t jinx my luck of going back since I’m just trying to make sure I can leave. The Roman Coliseum was one of my favourite places, along with the topless Pantheon. Vatican City was somewhere I really looked forward to going, but once I waited an hour to see St. Peters Basilica packed like a sardine can and shuffled 3km through the (inescapable) Vatican Museum like a herd of sheep, something was lost in my enjoyment of the experience.

Naples

Naples was my favourite. It was the most ‘in-your-face’ Italian, and had the best weather and the friendliest people. It was also the grungiest, dirty around the edges but shining in the middle, vibrant with energy and a colourful nightlife. It helped that I was there over a weekend, staying with a hip Napolitan guy and welcomed into his group of friends for my whole stay. He was a vintage-clothes dealer, and most of his friends worked in vintage fashion too, and none of them took life too seriously.

Adriano ordering drinks in the street from a blessed bar, from a bartender who could be my grandmother

I stayed in Portici, a suburb closer to Pompeii than Naples, but spent every night in Naples til the wee hours drinking wine and rum in crowd-filled piazzas. I ate the best pizza in Naples, which happens to house the best pizza in Italy, which is known for the inventing the pizza, so I guess I can say I ate the best pizza in the world. I went to a reggae/dub concert one night, and also spent one day in the historical city center. The rest of my time I wandered south, to Pompeii and the Amalfi coast, but ill have to write a separate blog post for each of them, since its impossible to give a paragraph summary of either.