Really, Really Early Morning

hiya

i'm at the airport and they have free wifi at the gate, so i'm going to try and post some pictures.

okay.  i wrote that on wednesday morning (in vienna, so tuesday night here).  they started boarding right after that, so it just didn't happen.

after about 20 (yup, count 'em, 20) hours, i was back in lovely LA on my way home.  the trip went smoothly, although however much i hate to say it (being a committed anglophile), heathrow airport kind of sucks.  it's possible there's just no way to do it better, but i had to take two buses and a train to get to my connecting flight, as well as any number of trips up escalators to get to the line to wait in to go down the elevator.  honestly, it just shouldn't take 25 minutes to switch gates for the same airline.

all right.  enough bitching for the moment.  here's a last round of pictures:

 this one's for you and dad in particular, in  memory of my greece 'cat period'.  this is the ruins of three old temples (which are actually right in front of the theater that stands on the spot where caesar was murdered.  turns out, the forum was under construction or something that week, so they were meeting in a different spot.)

anyway - they've fenced off these ruins and turned them into a preserve for the cats of the city.  it's crawling with 'em, and they're all clean and healthy and adorable.  you should have seen megan's and my faces - you'd have thought we'd never seen a cat before.  seriously, i have about eight pictures of it.

flowers at the market in rome.

a view of rome from the top of castel sant'angelo (where hadrian is buried).  our guide assured us that if you ask anyone who studies roman emperors, they'll tell you hadrian was the best.  so there.

i forget what this monument (in rome) is called, and i'm sure he's someone very distinguished and important, but i swear the guy has a duck on his head.

as i said, venice looks pretty much just like it does in the movies.  they really have taken genteel decay to a whole new level.  i don't know how they maintain it.

this was a window in the chapel at dachau.  they have a bunch of religious monuments there, as well as a very simple, small chapel.  it's made of grey concrete, and very spare.  i don't know yet if i liked it or not, but the window was amazing.

megan and i saw this while out walking in munich.  it's on top of a six-or-eight-story office bulding, hanging over the street.

it rained most of the time we were in munich, but we did get one spectacular afternoon.  the blue kind of reminded me of van gogh's cherry tree painting.

and, last but not least, here's a signpost somewhere between the freud museum and the mozarthaus in vienna.  apparently it looked cold, so someone knitted (knit?) it a cozy sweater.

and i think that's about it.

for those of you who have been with me on this journey - thank you for sharing it with me!  i've felt you with me every step of the way, and it has been a truly extraordinary trip.

i'm not sure yet how it will change my life, but i can feel all these places rumbling around inside my head and heart, and like i've been so enriched (that word feels so cliche and silly, but it does describe the feeling) by this time away.

thank you for being my family, and my friends.  you make my life extraordinary.

Goodbyes In Vienna

dear erik,

i can't believe it's almost over!  megan just left a few minutes ago for her week-long sojourn in istanbul, and i have the rest of today here, then off to the airport tomorrow morning (i have to be at the metro stop when it opens at 5am.  really looking forward to that.)  it seems so crazy that it's been a month and a half already!

it will definitely be strange to be back in regular old life where i need to have a job and pay my bills and grocery shop (theoretically) and clean up after the cat and have more than three options for what to wear each day.  i know everyone says that they just couldn't BEAR to not have anything to do, and even if they won the lottery they'd get a job, etc.  i'm pretty sure i'd be okay living a life of leisure, as long as there were interesting things to see and do, beautiful parks to sit in, friends to talk to, art museums to visit...

still, it will be nice to be back in my life.  i'm just feeling sad at the moment because it's been such an incredible experience and goodbyes are hard.  megan was a fantastic co-tripper on this trip of a lifetime.  it was wonderful to have someone to experience all this with who was equally excited and interested and who is such a kindred spirit in so many ways.  i was really lucky to have her with me!

so.  that's how things are feeling right this second.  i should really get up and go to a museum or something, but at the moment that's just not happening.  it's been pretty gray and cold here, with sleet and snow the night we arrived and yesterday.  neither of us brought winter jackets, since mostly we were in warm climates and didn't want to have to carry them around with us, but i gotta say it's pretty chilly to be walking around in a sweater or a sweatshirt when it's sleeting.  even though we both have scarves.  strange.

we spent the first day here at schonbrunn (sp?) palace, which is where the hapsburgs used to hang out.  that was pretty interesting, and made me definitely want to learn more about them.  then we went to a museum that was doing special exhibits on klimt (it's his 150th birthday year, and he's from vienna, so he's kinda everywhere at the moment, which is fun) and schiele, who we both like.  happily, the security guards here in vienna didn't get the memo from the munich folks, so we were able to examine the art unmolested.

then yesterday we spent the day going to the mozarthaus and to the sigmund freud museum, which is in his old offices.  i'm sad to say that both were really disappointing.  this trip has been a wonderful education in how to design a museum.  it's something i never thought about before, but you can have exactly the same objects in a museum and have it be interesting, or have it be deadly dull.  (fine art museums have their own issues, but in their case it's a little less important how the information is presented.) 

the freud museum was interesting because they had some of his furniture, and a lot of his objects and things he had on the walls, but mostly it was just pictures of things.  the audio guide gave some info on some of it, but you didn't get much of a sense of him in the space itself.  i apologize for my bias, but it definitely felt like a museum created by psychoanalysts.  don't get me wrong - i've met many amazing people who are analysts, but everything needs to be so Intellectual.  nothing can ever just frickin' be What It Is. 

for example the audio tour starts off with a loooong explanation about why the space hasn't been set up to look like it did when freud had his offices there.  partly it's that they just don't have enough stuff, since most of his things (including the magical couch) are at other museums.  anna freud donated some things to them, which is how they were able to set up the furniture in his waiting room (for example).  however, on the audio guide there's this long speech about why they Chose not to recreate the rooms.  to be honest, i didn't really listen to it, so i don't remember what the rest of the explanation was. 

i feel like, if you're going to set up a museum, then have someone help you who knows how to set up a museum.  don't have all the members of the freud analytical society (or whatever) set the thing up, since the majority of people coming are not gonna be analysts, and are gonna want much more pedestrian information.  we wanna know about what kind of person he was.  his family, his life, his cocaine use, his friends, etc.  we want to look at a picture and have someone tell us "this is a picture of his friend joe.  joe thought psychoanalysis was bogus, until he met freud in person.  then he became a true believer and the two were lifelong friends." or whatever. 

all right.  i'm not explaining myself well at all.  i'll skip the rest of my thoughts on the matter, but we'll have to discuss at some point.

as far as the mozarthaus, it made the freud museum look like a goldmine.  again, we mostly went because it's located in his old apartment, so i was hoping to see what his home looked like, and to get some idea of how he lived.  the museum is on three floors, and the apartment section is the last part you visit.  here's the great part.  they have no idea what the apartment looked like, and there's nothing in there.  when you first walk in, they tell you "we have no idea what the apartment looked like.  when mozart died, there was an inventory of furniture, and this is what he had.  try to imagine how that furniture would have looked in these rooms.  where would they have put it?  what was each room used for?  we don't know." 

then you walk through the mostly empty rooms, and they tell you what they think maybe that room was used for, and give you some boring information about something, and then there is an object in each room that has Nothing To Do with Mozart, but is from the same (economic) status household around the same time in vienna.  so basically it's saying "here's a fruitbowl that other upper-middle class people in vienna had that decade.  imagine: maybe mozart's household had a fruitbasket like it!" 

the majority of the museum (95%) was bad art and art installations having something to do with mozart (like a ceramic mozart head with music coming out of it.  for real.) and then reproductions of pictures of people from the era (mostly his patrons or other composers), maps of vienna, pictures of places he went to once, stuff like that.  then there are copies of his music scattered about.  seriously - in the mozart museum, they don't have the originals.  they're photocopies.

there were two rooms with actual objects in them, and they were things from the freemasons that again, as far as i could tell, had nothing to do with mozart, except that he was a freemason and would have used objects like them.  still, by that point it was so exciting to have actual objects to look at. 

now, don't get me wrong.  i love places that try to recreate a time or place.  if they had filled up his apartment with objects that were probably similar to objects his family would have used, that would have been totally fine and interesting.  however, that's not what they did.  they gave you a single object that had nothing to do with anything.

again.  i'll skip the rest of the rant, but it really was a kind of cap on the lesson that museums are amazing institutions.  and i love that it really made me think about why we go to them; what we're hoping to get out of it; what kind of people go; are we all looking for the same thing or are some audiences so specific that you should just gear the info toward them and not worry about the rest of us in the hoi polloi?

still, as usual, i was happy we had gone, even if it didn't turn out to be quite what i hoped.

the good news is that we ended our day at the vienna state opera house, watching a night of music (brahms, tchaikovsky, chopin, stravinsky) with ballet pieces choreographed by balanchine, neumeier, and jerome robbins.  then we went out for a fancy italian dinner.  it was a fabulous night. 

the opera house was amazing.  we sat in a box (pretty high up and close to the stage.  i mean, we're not Rockefellers or anything, but we were in the front row, so the view was still good.)  the opera house itself is striking - it was inaugurated in 1869 with don giovanni, and then a good part of it was destroyed by fire (maybe during the war?  i may have made that up.) and then it reopened in the 50s.  anyhoo - we felt Very Grown-Up and Cultured to be sitting there in our box at the opera/ballet.  some of the dancing was wonderful, and when the performers are talented, even the pieces i don't like are still interesting to watch.

i have to admit, while we were watching we both had the exact same thought:  does ballet have to be So Gay?  i mean, for real.  it's really, really Gay.  i feel like you have all these beautiful people up on stage with these amazing bodies in practically no clothes, and everyone looks sort of weirdly androgynous, since the woman have no boobs and the men are all tossing their heads and running around with 'delicate fingers' or whatever.  it just seems like what they're doing up there is so Intimate.  not that it has to be coarse or crude or whatever, but both megan and i felt a little thrill whenever anyone on stage actually Looked at anyone else. 

now, i really enjoy ballet, and i realize that there are lots of conventions of the art that people love.  i think in general i tend to like a tiny bit more modern dance thrown in with my ballet.  there were two pas de deux in the neumeier piece where you felt like there was a story being told, and like the two dancers' characters had some kind of relationship to each other.  it made it much more poignant, rather than just a kind of beautiful display of ability.

just after the intermission (excuse me, the pause.  i am a world-traveller now) a guy came out and made some announcement.  it was in german, so of course we had no idea what he was saying, but it seemed to be a little upsetting to the audience, and it ended with a man's name, so our guess was that someone had been injured and would be replaced with an understudy.  there was a pas de deux a few movements later, and i was sure that it must be the understudy.  i actually really liked it, and thought both dancers did a really good job, but the guy definitely had a brief flash across his face in moments that he was in the middle of a nightmare.  happily, he did a great job, and i could hear some of the dancers backstage applauding as he ran off. 

it got me thinking, though, of how scary that must be.  i've been an understudy for a play before, and i spent my nights just praying the woman would be able to perform, since the idea of going out and doing a play that i had never even done a run-through for was terrifying.  can you imagine if you're the guy who has to go out and do a performance you've never done before, and there's another person counting on you to physically support them through the whole thing?  that if you miss a moment and aren't in the right place at the right time, some woman might be flying through the air waiting for you to catch her and you don't and she breaks her leg?  lordy.  too much stress. (yes, i imagine that ballet understudies rehearse more than actor understudies, but you take my point.)

all right.  i gave megan my converter to take to turkey with her, since i wouldn't be needing it.  i think i should probably shut the computer down, since i'll have to check my email a few times before i go and i need it to have a little juice left.  i hope you are having a great week!  what are the girls going to be for halloween?  send me a picture if you get a chance.

love you,
murph

Marvelously Modern Munich

i have to admit it, we're having a lovely time in munich, and i think it's in large part due to the fact that munich is a lot more like america than venice, or strasbourg, or pretty much any of the other places we've been so far.  the fact that megan and i aren't always the tallest people on the metro is deeply reassuring.  also, it really helps that there are lots of good looking men here, and they're not dressed like extras from a 1989 video. 

i fear all that makes me a shallow person, but i'm dealing with it.

today we went to some museums.  our plan was to go to neuschwanstein (sp?) castle, which is about 2 1/2 hours outside munich.  it's ludwig II's place, and it's the castle disney based the sleeping beauty castle on.  however, by the time we got ourselves together, and got some laundry done, the soonest the train could get us there was 3 and it closes at 4.  and there's a long line.  and there's scaffolding covering the entire west side of the castle, and the main reason to go see it is so you can take lots of pictures of how awesome it is from the outside, since you're not allowed to take pictures inside.

i could go on, but you get the gist.

so we went to 2 museums in town instead, which was really fun, and then we tried to go to a restaurant called 'hofbrauhaus', which is a famous place, but we couldn't find it and were cold and hungry, so we went to a different beer haus, which had terrible food but good strudel.  so - not the day we planned, but a very nice day nonetheless.

i'll tell you something about german museums that's  annoying (you're welcome), or at least at the ones we've gone to in the past few days.  we've been to 3, and each one was a really nice museum, nicely laid out with amazing art and not too expensive.  but they have a security guard in each room, who just stands there and stares at you.  on the rare occasions that one guard has to cover 2 rooms, they follow you from room to room and stare at you. 

also, about 8-10 inches in front of each painting/statue, there is some kind of laser alarm, so if you get too close to it, the guards come in and act like you've tried to spray paint a smile on american gothic.  now i get that they don't want people touching the art, but there are a lot of paintings that we wanted to get close to to see what medium they were using, what the textures were like, etc.  in one case, there was a dog in the painting and i thought its head was turned one way, and megan thought it was another, so we were pointing at it trying to explain what we were seeing to each other. 

the security guard came in and stood Next To Me and just hovered until we moved on to the next room.  it is NOT a pleasant or relaxing atmosphere in which to view art.  megan and i left feeling like they were gonna send out a memo to all the other museums about the two close-art-standers.  i don't know if they've had a rash of art vandalism or what, but if you really love art and want to get up close and see what's going on, apparently munich is not the spot for that.

that being said, we had a grand time.  we have very different taste in art, so it's fun to see what the other person sees.  she loves contemporary, non-representational art, and i love hyper-realism and the pre-raphaelites, and all the sparkly religious art.  we both pretty much agree that klimt is super-cool.  i think there's a klimt museum in vienna, which i'm very excited to go see. 

let me share with you another dirty art secret.  i think cy twombly is full of crap.  i never heard of the guy before this trip, but there were a few of his pieces in peggy guggenheim's gallery, and there were entire floors of him at one of the museums here.  to me he represents why people hate 'modern art'.  he scribbles some stuff, and then sells it for millions. 

they had one room full of paintings with various blobs of color, and then paragraphs about how it's a metaphorical representation and exploration of a famous turkish sea battle...blah blah blah.  here's a link to his work:  http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=cy+twombly+images&qpvt=cy+twombly+images&FORM=IGRE#x0y689

i'm not a fan. 

also, ironically, at the guggenheim gallery, there was a painting that i had seen about 25 years ago at the philadelphia museum, after which i wrote a short story that ended with the character going to the museum and seeing this painting, and feeling like she's totally out of step with everyone, because she just can't understand it.  the painting is called either 'the rose' or 'rose', and it's a cream colored canvas about 5x5 with narrow black lines creating a grid on it.

that's it.  it's basically graph paper on a canvas.

makes me grit my teeth.  then i get over it.

tomorrow we leave for vienna.  i can't believe we're in our last few days.  it's been such an amazing trip, and though i'll be glad to get back to my everyday life, i'll be really sad when it's over.  it has definitely been a celebration of life tour, and i've continued to feel family and friends with me SO much throughout. 

there's been a lot of missing mom, which seems to be getting a bit more intense as november creeps up, but although there've been lots of tears, i always end up feeling grateful and happy.  happy that i knew her and had her for almost 40 years, grateful for our family and friends, and grateful that i was able to be back there with her and all the people who love her those last few months.

a few times i've missed her in the past few days:

watching megan braid her hair when it's wet, and remembering mom sitting and braiding my hair for hours when i was in middle school so it would be kinky the next day.

drinking coffee or tea

eating fruit and yogurt and granola for breakfast.

looking out the window on the train

using the writing paper at the hotel because mom would never let such nice stationary go to waste

looking at all the icons in the museums

looking at all the pencils in the museum gift shops

putting on my fabulous flowered socks from a shopping spree years ago

looking at my hands (mom was admiring my hands years ago, and was shocked when i put them up to hers and showed her that they're exactly the same)

going past a window with lots of beautiful germanic-looking knit sweaters she would have loved

a hundred thousand other moments. 

it's great - there are so many moments where i'll get really teary and then i'll picture her rolling her eyes and laughing and saying "oh, mer!" at how silly it is that i'm getting teary over a croissant because i remember mom liking croissants. 

reality-checks are important.  :o)

well - it's taken me significantly longer to write this than i expected.  (as it has Every Time i write something.)  we're on the train on our way to vienna, and there's free wi-fi.  we just had a very mediocre meal in the dining car, which was made wonderful by the fact that we're sitting on a train, having a beer and eating lunch while we look out the windows at the beautiful countryside rolling by. 

life can be so good!

i hope all is wonderful on your end and that you're having a glorious weekend!

(Sorry, but) Kind of Dark Thinking

dear erik,

(reading back over this, it's awfully depressing.  sorry about that.  i promise in the next one i'll do my best to describe some wacky hijinks...)

we arrived in munich last night after a 7 hour train ride.  it was actually a very nice ride - we had a little compartment to ourselves (for the first 5 hours - then some other people came in).  it's two rows of 3 seats each, facing each other, and then a big window on one side, and a sliding glass door on the other that leads out into a little hallway that opens onto other compartments. 

as the embarrassingly loud american child in the next compartment exclaimed - "It's just like Hogwarts!"  and indeed, in a less magical-gothicky/more functional-airplane-y way, it is a lot like the compartments in the train to Hogwarts. 

at any rate, we arrived at the main station, and were promptly assisted by a nice german fellow in a VERY bright red shirt who helped us figure out how to take the Ubahn to our hotel.  he was clearly someone in the service of some company, which unfortunately will never rake in the benefits of his gracious help because we couldn't read his shirt, which i imagine told us the name of the company that had kindly provided an english-speaking helper to all lost-looking tourist-types.

the hotel keeper assured us that their breakfast is famous, and he didn't lie.  the breakfast this morning was not only extensive and delicious, but also served until 11am, which made it even more wonderful.

on a side note, venice was beautiful - our last day there we just rode the vaporetto (water bus - see how international i am!) up and down the grand canal at sunset.  we were pretty much church-ed out by the time we got to venice, so we mostly just wandered around the city and looked at the architecture.

anyway - back to munich.

today we took the train out to dachau to tour the site of the concentration camp and see the memorials/go to the museum there.  it was a cold, gray day, which felt just about right.  it was strange to be there, since so much of what is there is not original, but has been re-built to give tourists a sense of things.  

while it's definitely a very intense experience, as it is now the place is mostly wide-open space, surrounded by beautiful trees in their fall colors.  it feels horrible, because the buildings that are there are cold and gray and utilitarian, but for me at least it is impossible to imagine what it must have been like.  barracks built for 200 with 2,000 men in them, typhus raging, continual insane brutality, starvation... it just doesn't matter how many books i read or how many pictures i look at or films i see - i can't seem to wrap my head around it. 

i admit it sounds grotesque, but megan and i were feeling like it would be worthwhile for someone to recreate a barracks as it actually was.  mannequins to show how the people were crammed in to sleep, bedding, clothes, their personal items like bowls or spoons.  i feel like the smell alone must have been almost unbearable.  a lot of the accounts talked about the ludicrous, over-the-top requirements for cleanliness - like the ticking on the mattresses had to line up, and if there was a single piece of straw on the floor you'd be beaten, etc.  so does that mean that the barracks actually looked spotlessly clean?  how is that possible if they're full of (in this case) men who are being worked to death and fed nothing? 

at any rate, we were both glad we had seen it, but it's pretty insane that it ever existed at all. 

the thing i liked best about the movie the reader was that it had honestly never occurred to me before what it must have felt like for that first generation of germans after the war.  to be a kid and have to look around and know that your parents and every adult you know or love was complicit in such a thing, or at the very least refused to see it.  i worry that someday the world will look back on abu ghraib and gitmo and think the same thing about all of us.  people being taken away and tortured or killed, but "we don't know anything about it.  i'm sure those people are probably criminals/ terrorists/bad people."

as you can see, it definitely takes your mind into some dark places.  plus, for me at least i feel like it inspires a kind of hysteria.  we were going through the crematorium- not the original one, but one that was built when there were just too many bodies to be dealt with using the small crematorium.  they're very clear that dachau was not an extermination camp, and this crematorium was never used for mass killings. 

however, i couldn't stand to be in there.  you go in through the 'disinfection rooms', where they would pile up people's clothes, and through a waiting room, and then into the 'shower room', and i swear i couldn't stand the smell in there.  i got totally overwhelmed and had to go outside and breathe for a minute before going in again.  it's embarrassingly purple prose, but it smelled like Evil in there.  just thinking of the terror of all those people pushed into this tiny room not being sure what was going to happen, but being pretty certain that whatever it was, it was gonna be horrible. 

i went back in but just sped through the rest of it.  the thing is, though, that it's likely that in the case of that particular building in that particular camp, none of that ever happened.  all those people i was envisioning didn't go through that in that space, but i swear, i could SMELL it.  all that to say - who knows how much of the power of these places comes from a truly sinister energy and history, and how much comes from whatever history we're carrying into them with us?

oy.

enough horribleness.  we were actually hoping to end the day on a nice, light note by going to see looper at a nearby movie theater.  the way it was listed in the paper led us to think that it would be in english.  anyway - we got to the theater and the woman (and the guy next to us in line, who spoke better english) told us that in fact nothing in that theater was playing in english, but there was another theater just down the street where it was. 

we got to that theater, and the woman told us that no, it wasn't playing there, but there was another theater nearby where it was.  she gave us muddled directions, which we tried to follow but were unable to find the theater.  on our way back to our hotel, we realized that in fact, she had been trying to direct us to the first theater. 

it was a less than successful outing.

i'm pretty sure this is the longest i've ever gone in my adult life without seeing a movie.  even if i'm somewhere where i don't go to the movies, there is always netflix streaming or movies on tv or whatever.  happily up until now it's been mostly the dark season at the movies where they just dump the crap that they know isn't gonna win any awards or bring in big money.  but i do really want to see argo and looper (and a bunch of other stuff, but those are the two biggies).  still - i'll probably make it another few weeks if i have to.  :o)

all right.  it's well past midnight, so i'm gonna go attempt some sleep.  i hope life is wonderful with you all, and that you liked looper, which i assume you've already seen.

much love,
murph

Pictures? Pictures!

the outside...

the inside.  they put a part of the floor on so you can get an idea of what it looked like.  all those walls and columns below the wood part are where they used to keep the animals and where the gladiators came through.  they had lifts and stuff under there, so they could just push the animals/people up directly into the arena.  kinda sucked for them, but otherwise that's pretty cool, given that it was 2000 years ago...

this is the hill where all the emperors used to live.  it's good to be the emperor.  (until your heir or wife or coworker kills you.)

under all these people are the spanish steps.  still not real clear on why we needed to see them.  from what i can gather they're steps.  and they're spanish.  however, the good news is that right next to them is the keats/shelley house, so we went in and saw the room keats died in, and they have an amazing library and collections of letters.  they were also doing an exhibit of illustrations from various publications of his poems...very cool. 

the trevi fountain.  what i thought was coolest about this was how it was incorporated into the building.  if you look on the right hand side, you can see they way the building looks like it's growing out of the fountain.  (maybe the picture's too small?  don't worry - i have a 14 hour slide show in the wings for when i see you next.)

this is a cool sculpture that was in the courtyard at the vatican. 

i loved this.  whoever hired the sculptor had a crest with a lion on it, so when the artist carved this huge (not terribly interesting) naked guy with a jug, he put the lion in the jug as a tribute to his patron.

the pathway that connects the vatican museum area (i don't remember the proper names for the various sections of vatican city) to st. peter's church.  it looks kind of like an optical illusion, but it's not - that really is the ceiling receding into frickin' infinity.  it's a really long hallway.  or maybe it connects to the sistine chapel?  can't remember. 

anyway - there are maps of italy all along the walls, but they were created for a pope who was really pissed off that he didn't control more of the country, so they are all made to look like what that part of the country looks like From Rome, so say you're looking at something on the west coast of the southern part of the country, the water will be on the right side of the map, because that's where it would be if you were looking at that section while standing in rome.  i'm explaining it poorly, but it was kind of hilarious and terrifying.

this was an absolutely Uh-MAY-zing mosaic on the floor of one of the papal apartments, or a library or something.  it all kinda ran together after a while, but i took about fifteen pictures of this floor.

a matisse crucifix.  we ran through this room at the vatican museum without stopping, but i grabbed a picture.  the glories of being a tourist...

all right.  i'm gonna lose my mind if i have to keep watching the "picture loading" bar inch across the screen, so here's one last shot.  this is part of the ceiling ot of st. peter's.  it's a fairly run-of-the-mill-spectacular-cathedral, except it's bigger. 

it's pretty funny, they have these medals set into the floor that show you how big other cathedrals are in comparison (honestly, they might as well be 8-year-olds on a playground.)  if it gives you some idea how big the place is, the letters in this picture are 6 feet tall.

couldn't resist one more.  this is the real pieta (the one behind glass).  apparently, it's the only piece of work michelangelo ever signed.   (according to our tour guide) he carved it when he was 23, and no one who saw it in the church believed that such a young sculptor could have accomplished it. 

the way she told it, he basically broke into the church one night and carved "michelangelo buonarroti carved this" across mary's sash.  apparently he felt stupid about it later and swore to never sign anything again.  who knows how much of that is true and how much is the fancy of historians.  still - it makes a helluva good story. :o)

Venice is Nice(r) Than Nice.

dear erik,

how 'bout that title, huh?  just wanted to bring it all full circle with the wordplay.  dazzling.  i'm considering a new career.

we arrived here in venice yesterday evening.  i'm not sure what would inspire someone to build a city ON the water, but it's pretty amazing.  it actually looks exactly like it looks in every movie.  what's weird to me is that the whole city is built on wooden piles - they say that they've petrified from hundreds of years underwater, which seems counter-intuitive.  still - no one's asking me to build a city, so i'm guessing they knew what they were doing.

we took the train from rome yesterday morning.  the first day we arrived in rome we both did big loads of laundry, but then it rained for two days, so it took forever for the clothes to dry.  on the first re-wearing, we discovered that the second a single drop of sweat happens, you immediately smell like a big wet dog.  it's not pretty.  anyway - lugging my suitcase from our apartment to the train station on the metro, you can imagine what a glamorous travelling companion i was.

our plan for today is to walk around the city a bit and go see peggy guggenheim's gallery.  when i was working for penny, someone wanted her to do a one-woman play about peggy guggenheim, so i remember doing lots of research about her.  she was kind of a nutter, but her gallery is supposed to be amazing.  however, it's about 11:00 and since we got back from breakfast we've both been sort of sitting around not accomplishing the 'shower and dress' portion of our day.  i suspect we'll get there eventually.

we haven't seen too much of the city so far.  we arrived yesterday and wandered around for a while trying to find our hotel (it's hilarious - in the reviews for this hotel everyone said "it's a great hotel, but it's really hard to find and the map they give you is totally useless." we found that to be 100% true.  you would think that after a few reviews, the hotel might consider rewriting its map, but, apparently, no.) we also went out and got some dinner and walked around a tiny bit trying to get our bearings. 

anyway - it's crazy here, because the buildings are SO close together.  things that look like a tiny alley are actually streets.  also, the italians seem to be huge fans of re-naming streets every few blocks, so we often look at a map and the part of the street that has the name listed is ten blocks away, and you discover that in actuality that street is named something else on the block you're on.

there are also little bridges everywhere taking you over canals (according to wikipedia, venice is built on 117 small islands - or 118 if you're looking at a different part of the article.  and people wonder why i don't trust wikipedia!) but then you find that under the bridge is a little alley with whatever building you're looking for.  all that being said, i find it hard to get oriented, since there are no open vistas anywhere, and so far i haven't been able to pick out any landmarks that are tall enough to see from different parts of the city.  it's strange to only be able to see the square you're in, and nothing else.

i have managed to get Another F#$^*g Cold in the past few days.  i still hadn't gotten over my cough from the last time i was sick.  i find it doubly frustrating, because in my regular life i've gotten really good about not getting sick.  granted, i work from home, so it's considerably easier to not catch every bug going around, but also, the second i feel a tiny scratch in my throat, i take a day and sleep and drink a thousand gallons of water and eat citrus all day, and it almost always keeps me from getting sick. 

i just couldn't bring myself to do that on this trip (although in paris i ended up having to take almost 2 full days anyway, since i ended up getting really sick).  at any rate, i'm continuing with the hope that happy thoughts will make me well, since i don't want to take one of my days to just lie in bed.  from here on out, we only have about three full days in each city, so i want to get as much as i can out of each day - even if it's just walking around looking at the buildings.

the rest of our time in rome was great.  i feel so lucky that we were able to take so much time in paris and rome.  it really helped me feel (especially in rome) like i had a sense of the city's layout, and how to get around.  megan and i were discussing that feeling when you realize you just come out of a building and know which way to walk, rather than that moment where you stand there saying 'okay - if i'm here, and that street is to my left, i'll need to cross the street and go left so i can get to that spot...'  it's a very nice feeling.

i'll try to post some pictures today or tomorrow.  as i said, a lot of the places in rome didn't allow pictures (jeez - just 'cos it's a piece of fabric that's two thousand years old, that's no reason not to let me use my flash...) and honestly, most of the pictures i did take kind of annoy me, simply because they're Exactly The Same Pictures that every other tourist on the planet takes at those spots.  still - i'll try and find something.  and, even if they are predictable, the places themselves are so amazing, the bourgeois nature of the shots can hopefully be overlooked.  :o)

sending lots of love to all!

Weather Reports Are Really Pretty Useless

dear erik,

sorry it's been so long.  i've been Very busy being a tourist since we got to rome.  so far i've seen

the colosseum
the roman forum
the palatine hill
the basillica san clemente
san giovanni in laterano
the borghese gardens and gallery
san pietro
the vatican museum
sistine chapel

there's just so much amazing stuff here.  still - sleep hasn't been great for the past few weeks, so yesterday and today we've just taken the mornings off and not set an alarm and slept in, had a leisurely breakfast, etc. 

it rained a lot when we first got here (and the clouds are lookin' a little ominous right now) but the weather reports have been hilarious.  two days ago i had tickets for a tour of the vatican/s.peter/sistine chapel, and the weather people were all like "Officials are suggesting that people stay in their homes.  A deluge is expected.  If you have plans to travel, consider cancelling them..." etc.  

on my way to meet the tour group, there was indeed a huge downpour that lasted about ten minutes.  then it got super-warm and sunny, then it started raining a little bit, but was still hot and sunny.  it was very weird. 

we were standing in the courtyard, looking at pictures of the sistine chapel so the tour guide could give us lots of background info before going in (apparently, you're not supposed to speak at all in there, although everyone absolutely does.)  anyway - i had my umbrella open because the sun was super-hot and i wanted a little bit of shade, and because i was hoping to dry it out before i folded it up and put it in my purse.  i kept hearing little things hitting it and couldn't figure out what it was, since the sun was pouring down and we were standing in an open courtyard, so it couldn't be things falling off trees or something.

(wow - this is a really long story.)

turned out it was raining while it was really sunny, the end.

all this to say, the whole 'deluge' thing wasn't happening.  then yesterday the weather reports told us we should all be careful because the rain was gonna be so crazy they were expecting flooding in many sections of the city.

sunny and warm all day.  not a drop.

the ominous clouds have moved on for the moment, so here's hoping the trend continues.

i wish i knew more of the history of all these places.  here more than any of the other cities it feels like so much of what is so amazing about all of this is just the age of these buildings/ruins and all the history that has happened.  just imagine - when you take all the popes, emperors, and caesars (sp?) into account, the insane amount of world-changing events that happened in these places. 

i know a little bit of the history of some of them (the borgias, julius caesar, augustus, a few of the artists) but as with most places, most of of my 'history' comes from biographical movies or historical fiction (well researched historical fiction, but still).  i have to go on the assumption that the vast majority of my history is made-up, or altered for dramatic tension.  although in my defense and cynicism, i have to admit my belief that the majority of most peoples' history is made-up or altered, even when they think it's not.

i figure that the beauty of the popes and the emperors is that the behaviour was so outrageous you don't even need to make it up.

after seeing the colosseum, i did a little light research online ('cos online is such a great place to find thoughtful, well-researched facts) and after all the usual 'there's no way to know - anybody giving you a number is just guessing' caveats, people always throw out a number.  conservative estimates for the number of people killed at the colosseum is 1 million.  that's just crazy.

down the street from our apartment is the basilica of san clemente.  it's a very cool little church with a beautiful tree of life mosaic behind the alter, but the really cool thing is that the church was built on top of a church from the 4th century (which was built from a roman nobleman's home), which in turn had a basement from the 1st century that was a mithraeum (which was a kind of cave-like space where people would gather to worship mithras, who as far as i could gather is some pagan god who killed a bull at some point.)

it's just too cool.  you can go through the church, and then if you pay a few euros you can go down into the underground levels, which they've excavated.  it's this huge labyrinth of rooms, and they've uncovered a lot of the frescoes from the 4th century church (including one with some guy shouting 'pull, you sons-of-bitches - pull!' in italian.  very holy indeed.  the story is he told his men to kill st. clement but they threw the ropes around a column instead...something like that.  don't quote me.)

then you go even further underground and you can see the altar room for the mithraeum.   it's this long, narrow cave-looking room with benches along the sides and an altar in the middle.  i guess for this particular cult they would get together and recline on the benches and eat.  i swear i'm not making this up.

great stuff, this history.

another highlight was bernini's sculpture of apollo and daphne at the borghese gallery, which was absolutely Amazing.  i could have sat in there for an hour and just looked at it.  that bernini sure did know some stuff. 

the tour of the vatican museum was really interesting - the woman leading it must be an art historian of some kind.  she took us past a copy of the pieta at the beginning, and told us to take pictures if we wanted, because the real pieta is now behind a huge wall of glass and you can't get anywhere near it.  apparently some guy came in and attacked it with a chisel at some point and broke off parts of mary's face and arm.   it's a crazy story, but you should have seen the look on her face.  "and then this Madman comes in and Attacks the sculpture with a Chisel!  Just Attacks it!" 

we all have our weaknesses.  :o)

it was a fascinating tour, but it was also frustrating because we would walk into a room that is just Packed with insanely famous paintings that i've seen my whole life, and we wouldn't look at a single one, because we would be walking into the next room to look at some alterpiece to discuss the ways it was different from the last altarpiece we looked at.  i was really happy i took the tour, but i was sad to not get a chance to really look at some of the other art we passed.  for example we walked past the entire wing of contemporary art without even glancing in the rooms. 

if it gives you an idea of the scale, it was a five-hour tour and we maybe looked at 1 piece out of every hundred.  never let it be said that the popes were afraid to take what they wanted.  that being said, it was spectacular. 

after all these days in italy, walking through room after room with paintings all over the walls and ceilings, it makes me even more curious about why the sistine chapel is so gobsmacking amazing to people.  i get that it's an amazing achievement, especially for a man who wasn't a painter, and the fact that it's a fresco (i forget the exact number, but i think she said it was done in 450 individual patches) which is crazy; but to get to it, i've just walked through three hundred rooms with religious paintings all over the ceilings and walls, and then i walk into this chapel with religious paintings all over the ceiling and walls, and everybody gasps and talks about what a masterpiece it is. 

there.  now i've offended the catholics and the artists.  a good morning's work.

i'll try to post some pictures again soon.  lots of these places won't let you take pictures at all, so it's been a slow few days, kodak-wise.