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In many ways this Year of Living Travelly has been about gaining perspective on myself and my life in ways it is hard to do when rooted in the safety of a home base.

Today I had a new experience in Rome, or perhaps I should say not in Rome. I have been on my own since Dan left for home yesterday. The main reason for choosing Rome post-cruise was because Dan, despite being very well traveled, had never been here. I, on the other hand, have been here many times, especially in the context of  both a sabbatical and teaching in Study Abroad a decade or more back in Florence, which is only ninety minutes away by high-speed train.

I love what Rome has to offer in terms of sites, but I have decided on this trip that don’t really like Rome. It’s too noisy and grimy, and gritty, and congested for me. So today, I woke up for the first time since leaving home in March, thinking “I don’t want to be here.” That is, of course, far different from “I want to go home,” which in all honesty, I haven’t thought once.

So I am doing what I do sometimes on cruises. Sea days are days in transit from one port to the next, and sometimes I do what I call “declaring a sea day,” even when we are in port, if I am just not up to going ashore. So today I decided to declare the equivalent, a “I’m Not in Rome” day. No guilt, no pressure. I have stayed in the hotel, going out only for lunch, and reviewing my talks for the next cruise, starting in less that a week.

Today I am between adventures, in a holding pattern before flying to Corfu and the start of something different. But somehow this granting of permission not to be in Rome today has made me think maybe I will do something later after all.  Spanish Steps, perhaps? A walk in the Borghese Gardens?

Or not.  A nap sounds pretty perfect too.  I’ll just have to see what happens. Or doesn’t.

 

 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
William Faulkner

Something that makes European travel complicated for me is are the places haunted by spirits who peek out from windows and follow us down streets looking for anyone passing by who will look up, or turn around, and see them.

A few places hum and crackle with this energy, perhaps because so many of the dead still cry out to be heard. Last night I was in one of those places, the former Jewish Ghetto of Rome.

The experience left me troubled and conflicted. My first sensation was a subtle lifting of some barely felt pressure, a glimmer of the feeling when one comes home from a long trip and steps inside one’s own front door. It was nice to be there, Dan and I agreed. Look—there’s a sign in Hebrew! Look—there’s a Jewish elementary school! Look, there’s a kosher restaurant—wow, there’s another, and another.

We had come down for an evening stroll along the Tiber, an exterior circuit of the majestic synagogue, and dinner at a restaurant serving traditional Roman Jewish food.

The main street of the Jewish quarter makes a favorable impression. It’s a wide, cobbled promenade, with interesting traces of Ancient Rome in some lower walls with carved inscriptions, repurposed as part of more modern buildings. Attractive young people hawk flyers for restaurants, including one with a menu that said, “the only one with a true Roman Jew inside,” and quoted Anthony Bourdain’s brief, vaguely favorable comment about THEIR Jewish-style artichoke.

As we relaxed at an outside table, however, my eyes gravitated toward the upper floors of the buildings and the conflict began. In the sixteenth century a pope declared that the Jews had to live separately (of course in an area prone to flooding and waterborne diseases that kept others from settling there) and made the Jews pay for the cost of the walls that would keep them prisoner at night. Their homes are gone, and there isn’t much sign of a wall, but is any place, once haunted, ever free of it?

And this place was the scene of a genocide in World War II, when Jews were ghettoized again and then systematically deported to the camps from which few returned. Elsewhere in Rome are the stories of survivors from all over Europe (including Leizer and Zenia Bart, whom I wrote about in my St. Martin’s book, Until Our Last Breath), who came to the displaced person’s camp set up at the film studio Cinecitta and then found new homes in Rome, Israel, and elsewhere.

As we sat eating heartily and enjoying a lovely wine on a warm evening, something in my spirit said, “this is not right.” Tourists in tank tops eating gelato ambled by, oblivious to the spirits looking on from the upper floors. How crowded were theJews behind those windows? Did they have any more than the bread I spurned at the restaurant for their daily nourishment? Surely, when they thought of what lay ahead next in their life, it wasn’t a quick flight to Corfu to continue a life adventure of their own choosing, as I will do in a day or two.

I don’t know what to think of this. It’s good to have an acknowledgment of Jewish history in Rome. It’s good to see Jewish bakers and restauranteurs thriving ( at least they are Jewish in the kosher establishments). It’s good to feel a sense of affirmation with the spirits in the windows. Still, a little less of the feel of Disneyland and a lot more concrete acknowledgment of those who lived and died here would feel a lot better.

It seems as if wherever I travel I can count on most if not all of these sounds:

church bells

motorcycles

the bell sound before a public announcement

the whoosh of subway cars entering and leaving stations

the clatter of dishes and silverware in restaurant kitchens

police sirens

elevator doors opening and closing

voices through the walls of hotel rooms

hawkers selling tours or junk

people talking on their phones

exhausted children crying

the cacophony of voices from a crowded bar

But there is one sound  unmistakably associated with travel for me.  There’s a particular way luggage zippers sound  it’s not like jeans or jackets, which are lighter and higher in tone, but a deeper, more resonant sound, almost like a sudden intake of breath.  When I am packing up, there are so many zippers on my bags and backpack that it seems like a repeated call of a bird. I guess it’s  the  song of the migrating traveler.  First that, then joyful flight to whatever is next and new.

 

Yesterday I visited Herculaneum, the other city destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii. It’s much smaller, having been buried not by ash but by volcanic mud, which dries like concrete and makes excavation much more difficult.  It’s also smaller because it is under a suburb of Naples, and enlarging it would require tearing down the structures above it.

It’s a sobering place, especially for the heaps of human bones found in the boathouses along the old sea wall—people caught by toxic gas as they frantically tried to escape by boat—Or perhaps just made a futile attempt to hide.

The excavation goes down thirty meters or so below the current ground level of the city built over the centuries atop the cooled and solidified mud.  Since it has been a very wet spring, rain water has pooled, forming a temporary moat in the space between the restored site and the unexcavated mud rock.

As I stood looking at the bones and skulls protruding from the chalklike substance in each of the boathouses, at my back from the moat, I heard the mating calls of thousands of frogs that hopped and swam among the grasses of the moat.  Such a strong disconnect between the living and the dead, although, of course, the frogs have no idea of the significance and gravity of the place they inhabit.

As well it should be.  Their world is the water and the grasses.  Their sense of time does not go much beyond the desire to mate as soon as possible.  Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Italy—none of it matters, nor do these brightly clothed creatures (including me) watching them.

I was reminded of one of my favorite writers, naturalist Loren Eiseley, who once wrote of hearing frogs at night while camping. “Every spring in the wet meadows and ditches I hear a little shrilling chorus which sounds for all the world like an endlessly reiterated ‘We’re here, we’re here, we’re here.’”

That’s exactly what the frogs were singing at Herculaneum. Eiseley adds,  “I suspect that to some greater ear than ours, man’s optimistic pronouncements about his role and destiny may make a similar little ringing sound that travels a small way out into the night.”

The frogs have their song and I have my own, which sounds much like his.  The people whose bones we honor at Herculaneum, whose world we do our best to uncover, were once intensely here, making their calls into their world, to be noticed, cared about, chosen. Their desire to matter went out as wishes into the universe, as ours do.

“From the heights of a mountain, or a marsh at evening, [the frog song] blends, not too badly, with all the other sleepy voices that, in croaks or chirrups, are saying the same thing.”

Like the Ancient Romans. Like me. Like us.

I visited Florence yesterday for the first time in fourteen years. I so appreciate the opportunities life has given me to live there for five months at a time—twice!— once on sabbatical and once teaching in an education abroad program.  Still,  Florence has very mixed memories for me, since I was rocked by some of the lowest moments of my life there.

I hadn’t really been thinking about the significance of Florence in my life until I set eyes for the first time on the bus stop where I stood late on a freezing December night in 1999, pummeled by the worst news any parent can hear, news that even today I cannot bear to put down in words here.  On my second stay, I dealt with several days of news that pales by comparison, but is still awful to remember—the wildfire that seemed certain to destroy my home thousands of miles away. That time, I got luckier.

I am indeed blessed to have the life I have now, but sometimes, like yesterday, one gets ambushed with things that seem safely put away, but are never as far from bursting out again as we may think.  All we can do is acknowledge what we cannot change, and honor our memories, even the ones we most wish we did not have.

 

 

it ambushed me

 

Here is the final ( for now) installment of my observations about travel—the kind that never make the guide books.

—Looking at one’s phone on a busy street causes pile ups just as  it does while driving, although the matter is usually resolved with an apology rather than a hospital stay and lawsuit. 

—Animals don’t realize they live in a country. They have stayed out of a lot of trouble that way. 

—Nationalities have less to do with politeness than does setting. Paris gives the French a bad rap, but in truth it is a lot like New York or Rome. Nice is a lot like Mykonos or Sorrento, or tourist areas of San Diego (I think—hard for me to judge). Urbanization leads to indifference and impatience. Tourist areas lead to superficial pleasantry .  Outside those areas one has a better chance of authentic glimpses of people’s true personalities, and perceptions of you. 

—Some restaurants in Europe still don’t provide WiFi. My better self says “good for them.” My living-in-the-present self appreciates this because I actually do some high quality looking around and people watching .  The rest of me wishes they would join the modern era  because I want to check my mail.

Wine over lunch on my own makes me quite the travel philosopher.  Here’s some more things about travel you probably won’t see in guidebooks:

It is very hard not to see foreign currency as play money. Retail in France?  Oui, bien sur!  Retail at home?  Almost never. 

It is easy to spend more than you need to when you aren’t familiar with a place, because you are usually just so glad finally to find what you want.  

Your GI tract won’t always be happy, since it is more of a homebody than the rest of you.

When you address someone in a foreign language and you get a torrent of really fast words in reply, you probably sounded more fluent than you actually are. Flattering, but usually the reason you spoke was that you had a question, and you still don’t know the answer.

If when you say something in a foreign language, and you get a compliment about how well you  speak, that’s probably not what they’re really thinking. When people stop saying that, you are doing much better. 

 

Relaxing over lunch today, I started thinking about some of the axioms of travel I have picked up over the years  Here are a few:

The longer you stay somewhere the fewer photos you take

Despite how much you have packed, if you don’t unpack you will wear the same thing until you can’t stand it any more

It is much easier to find  a place for coffee when you are not looking for one. Likewise gelato.

It is amazing how much shorter return trips from unfamiliar places will seem.

There is a huge difference between what you need to bring and what you bring.

You will bring too much of some things and not enough of others. Unless you are Carol, a friend I met on a recent cruise, who brings next to nothing and manages just fine.

It is a learned skill not to see a nap as a waste of time when you are in a new place.

That’s about half what I came up with.  The rest next time.  Feel free to use the email link to tell me what I should add to the list!

 

Sent from my iPhone

I am resting in my hotel room in Nice after a trip by train to Monte Carlo today to visit the enrichment manager for Silversea. I find bus and train stations more stressful than airports for some reason I can’t quite put a finger on (Fewer information kiosks? Poor signage? General grimness? I’m not sure. ) But how  utterly luxurious it was to travel somewhere without my suitcases, and with a ticket that worked not just for a specific train, like airlines do for planes, but for any train between Nice and Monte Carlo that day.  Easy?  Travel can be easy?  I had forgotten.

That appointment was the only thing I had to do at a specific time while in Nice, except go to the airport to pick up my partner, Dan, on Sunday night, when he joins me for our long-awaited cruise from Monte Carlo to Venice.  Until then,  there’s no need to watch the clock, or put together much in the way of a plan for my time.

My “breather,” as usual, includes work, since I am not quite done with all my lectures for the Baltic in July.  Here’s my plan:  work until late morning, play through lunchtime until  mid-afternoon, then work again until I don’t want to anymore, sometime in the evening. That’s about all the structure I need.

So tomorrow, I will jump into the roughly half-hour segment I need on Copenhagen, then go poke around Old Nice, then back to work on Copenhagen again. Two days, and that talk will ( I hope) be ready to go.  Then if I do the same for the next two days, Stockholm will be in the bag just as Dan arrives.  That would be perfect, since those  cities are the last two things I need to finish up for the Baltic.

Breathe then? Well, a little, but those really deep breaths, the ones that turn into happy sighs and melted limbs, will have to wait till the bags are packed up, transported, unpacked again, and the ship has set sail.

 

UPDATE:  Got all the work done. Drove myself pretty hard, but ready  for the Baltic!  Dan arrives this evening. Let the vacation begin!

 

Alzheimer’s is the source of both the greatest fears and the most frequent jokes in my generation. Any time we forget something, we laugh (sort of) and claim brain fog. 

Yes, in my case, it’s true that my complete inability to remember numbers is as bad or worse than ever, and when I was really on top of things, I often remembered people’s names the first time around. Though my numbers thing I suspect really is a brain mis-wiring, the lessened ability to remember names is largely laziness on  my part.  I think if you actually listen when people introduce themselves, you are more than halfway to remembering, and if you repeat it to yourself while looking at the person, or play a name association game, you are up to way more than a 75% chance, which will rise to 100% if you repeat the above when you have to ask a second time.  

I am thinking senior brain has some positives to it as well. A few years back, when I was traveling in Italy and France, I found I couldn’t “code switch,” as linguists refer to it, meaning turn on the French in France and the Italian in Italy the way I used to do.  I used to be pretty good at both languages, being able to carry on fairly lengthy and complex conversations, and rarely having to work around words, idioms, or grammatical constructions I hadn’t learned yet. I thought those days were over, and I would be reduced from now on to asking for the bathroom or the bill and little more,  so it came as quite a surprise to me in Marseille yesterday that I was handling everything in French with ease. 

I don’t know what to attribute this to, but I think some of it might be that my brain has cleared out whatever it was that was keeping me from code switching. It used to be that a couple of glasses of wine could do the trick, but apparently aging has the same effect. Maybe it’s that I care a lot less about being perfect, and will settle simply for being understood. Maybe it’s that I am not trying to solve the world’s problems in a foreign language, but just want to deal with hotels, restaurants, and shops. And drink wine too.  Let’s not forget that!

Whatever the cause, I hope it lasts in both languages, and if it does, I am going to have so much fun, since I love the way it feels to sound words through the nose with a barely open mouth (French), or just let it rip from the chest and throat (Italian). Chissa’.  Je ne sais quoi.  It’s still rock and roll to me.