Diary

So many things go just right, and I  hardly notice that. There’s the lecture that goes perfectly. The notes are there in front of me, neatly printed, and matched perfectly to the slides, the slides pop up on the big screen without a glitch, it ends up just the right length, and people say nice things afterward. When all that happens, I just move on to the next thing without giving it much further thought.

It’s the unexpected that can really dump rain on a perfectly good day, like the time my screen went black because my computer ran out of battery mid-lecture.  Mind you, I always have it plugged in, because it is a victim of Apple’s planned obsolescence and doesn’t hold a charge well. This time I plugged it into a power bar that, unknown to me, was not connected to a power source backstage. Adding to the snafu was the fact that the technician had slipped out of the booth and couldn’t be located for fifteen minutes (probably down wherever the crew are allowed to smoke, from what was whispered afterward). Meanwhile, I went to Plan B and lectured until he got back to fix it, with no slides or audio. No one walked out, so I guess it ended up  okay, but since luxury cruise ships demand a lot from their crew, I don’t think the tech will last long.

I can easily shrug off other people’s mistakes and shortcomings, but I am so much harder on myself.  I hate making mistakes because I hate the impact this brings down on me— time wasted solving self-inflicted problems, occasional embarrassment, lost opportunities for something better to do with my time, energy, and—occasionally—money.

I have been very mad at myself a couple of times this part of my Year of Living Travelly,  and (except for carelessly letting myself get pickpocketed in Barcelona and leaving my favorite European adapter in the wall socket in Corfu), mostly this has been caused by  my lecture preparation.  No doubt about it, being able to deliver cruise lectures is what is making all the rest of this possible, so they must go well.

The last of my Mediterranean cruises for this year starts tomorrow, and my anxiety level is a little higher than usual (after more than five years doing this, it is usually close to zero). Most  of the lectures are substantially new, focusing on the specific ports. The anxiety isn’t palpable, but is a soft drone in the background that will only be resolved by giving the lecture, and of course by a little extra forethought.

So far, since I left home in March, I have had three problems I brought on myself, which means it has gone without a hitch almost all the time. As for the rest,  first , I brought the slides for a very old lecture on Pompeii, and the notes for the revised one. No go.  Second, I didn’t have the slides at all for the lecture on Carthage.  I guess I just didn’t migrate them over from my desktop to my laptop, and I don’t have the hang of the Cloud yet.  Both of these glitches were easily solvable, since I can always find  an alternative lecture that fits the itinerary.

The third was another thing that, with all the balls I was juggling when I left home in March, just got overlooked.  When  I went to review my lectures for this upcoming cruise while I was in Rome, I discovered that the segment for one whole port was just nowhere to be found.  Fortunately, I had printed out my notes so I had the text I had prepared, but it took all afternoon with a really pokey hotel internet to recreate the slide show for about 20 minutes of lecture.

Having a lot of experience is very helpful to maintaining peace of mind, as is a willingness to go to Plan B without fuss or fury. If I always get Plan A right, there won’t be a part two to this post, but calling it “part one” is my way of telling myself to keep a sense of humor about my own imperfection and the inevitable bumps in the road. As my favorite fridge magnet says, “Always Make New Mistakes.” If I want the life less ordinary, I have to accept that this inherently means things will not always go according to plan.

 

There are places I really want to go to, places I have no desire to go to, and places I had no idea should have been on my bucket list all along. I found one of those  last ones in Albania, which may sound exotic but is actually an easy day trip by ferry from Corfu.

The site is called Butrint, and it has a history to compete with any in The Mediterranean, and that is saying a lot!  Ruins  have been found at Butrint dating back to prehistoric times, but what is visible begins with what is usually called pre-Greek, referring to the civilizations before the Classical period.  It is characterized most notably by Cyclopian masonry—walls and structures made from rocks so huge it seemed as if only a gigantic creature could have made them (See wall below).  Testimony to the skill of these builders is that these structures were made without mortar, the rocks shaped to fit so tightly that necessity never needed to become the mother of invention.

Butrint is on a low-lying island favored by the Greeks as a major pilgrimage site to honor Aesclepius, the god of healing.  Parts of the shrine are still visible, as are remains of the ancient version of a ticket office, where pilgrims paid for the privilege of sleeping near the shrine to promote their healing and be permitted to approach to leave their votive offerings.  Nothing has changed, I guess. Tourists need to be housed and fed—and occupancy taxes obviously have a long pedigree.

The Romans built a theatre and expanded everything with their unparalleled passion for engineering bigger, better, stronger, higher.When the empire lost its base in Rome and moved to Constantinople, becoming Christian in the process, they built basilicas and baptistries  in their colonies, and Butrint received the best of both.  Its baptistery was the largest of its time and contains a mosaic floor in nearly perfect shape . Unfortunately for us,  the floor, and another one in the baths elsewhere in the site, have been covered with sand except for one week a year, our guide said, because exposure to the elements was destroying them.  Hopefully a solution will be found soon. Here’s a photo I found online of what it looks like.

The lower part of Butrint was abandoned in the later years of the Roman Empire because sea level rose, turning the markets, streets and shrines of the low-lying areas into marshes that are now home to turtles who couldn’t care less about any of it.

The Venetians  favored  higher ground and built fortifications, as they did everywhere in their Empire, in their efforts to keep the Ottoman Empire at bay. Their walls, guardhouses, and citadel atop Butrint are great photo ops, but have never moved me in the way the ancient ruins do.

Albania hasn’t been free that long of the stagnation and hostility to history and religion that characterized the Soviet era.  They are playing catch up now, starting businesses, rebuilding crumbling towns, and turning their attention to their own amazing history.  I felt good about what I saw on my one-day visit (always suspect), but—warning! political  commentary ahead!—I had to smile when the guide said their biggest problem right now was corruption and nepotism in government.  I will leave you to guess who on the bus struggled not to laugh. Hint: she was one of the few traveling on an American passport and she’s Living Travelly.

 

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!

 

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