From the sound of things, we’re in Rome. Cars. The streets are teeming with them, and where in Venice there is water, in Rome there are cobblestones and as many cars as can feasibly fit on them. The entire atmosphere here is different, and I blame the cars. Pollution here is a moot point and largely goes unnoticed, and the same ancient feel of Venice is here, too. What’s different is the noise, the speed, the glint of metal, the persistent chorus of horns. The backdrop to the Eternal City, and perhaps its best reason for that moniker, is the echo of movement that continues to ring in your ears and in your memory long after you’ve escaped from it.
“Escape” is not a term I use in any derogatory way; indeed, it is perhaps the very movement and life of Rome that gives it its appeal and makes even the smallest task, such as finding our hotel room, an adventure. But the pace of the city, and its August heat, did more to manage our itinerary in Rome than anything, except for the unexpected closings of both the Roman Forum and the Coliseum on Monday. All the walking, all the heat—indoors and outdoors—all the logistics, all the frustrations, all the awe of the eternal city.
Our intentions were good: Rome in two days. Our expectations were realistic: hit the major sites, allow the itinerary lots of flexibility. With this plan in hand we hit the streets, but the streets hit back, first with sunlit lines for the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel that framed two streets around the compound; next with packed, airless metro cars; the closures I mention above we discovered only after walking a mile up and back; and, of course, that ubiquitous unforgiving sun that forced us into the hands of kiosk vendors who, no doubt in league with the sun, charged us EUR 4 for a small, cold bottle of Gatorade, of which out of protest we only bought one.
The ancient Roman ruins were impressive, but no more so than the memory of these moments of escape, one of which showcased some pillow talk on our first of two nights in the tiny hotel room. The essence of pillow talk is its spontaneity, the intimacy of its subject matter, and the tacit agreement to keep confidences. As such, no retelling of it as such comes after this introductory paragraph. But it seems appropriate and scrumptiously ironic that some of the more theoretical talk—that which perhaps lead to the opening up and retelling of the past—focused on what topics, if any, are off limits in the writing of biography. And here I find myself censoring details of pillow talk even when my stated position on censorship during that very pillow talk was categorically antithetical. Is categorically antithetical. I hold it out to the autobiographer herself to decide what should and should not make print as I maintain my own right to focus on the fundamental over the constituent details, on the temporal coalescence of two minds, already bound by hereditary and shared history, over the method and medium of that coalescence.
Rome, that big city, all bound up in cobblestones and concrete, at once weighed down and buoyed up by its age, home to layers of life, the new upon the old upon the ancient, the place for all things, as equally for argument as for coalescence. Rome, the midpoint in our travels, the closest we came to experiencing glitches in our nearly flawless itinerary, was the setting for the only friction Mom and I experienced on our trip, a friction with its source more likely in the frustrations of the city than in anything latent in the relationship (except maybe in the complexes nascent in carrying the moniker “baby of the family” long into adulthood). Typical of such general frustrations, the episode is silly. We’ve entered the Vatican Museum after a substantial wait in line under, as I mentioned above, a substantial sun; we’ve made the decision not to spend the six euros each on an audio guide; we’ve changed our minds about the decision not to spend the six euros each on an audio guide; we’ve entered the museum and found ourselves surrounded by countless works of art, sculpture, cartography, tapestry, fresco, and architecture without a real idea of how to operate our audio guides. We are thus lost, surrounded not only by the incomprehensibility of an overwhelming collection of art but also by the sinking feeling that we wasted money we weren’t even confident in spending.
And we each have our own disparate ideas about how to make the audio guides work. Mom doesn’t seem to buy my idea and I don’t seem open to any other ideas, especially hers. Along the process to Mom’s discovery of how it all works she asks questions to which I give, as it turns out, incorrect answers, and she continues to ask questions, the same ones, which seem nothing to me but the tacit incredulity of a parent to the unsubstantiated opinion of a child. And so I respond with the incredulity of a parent to Mom’s yet unsubstantiated opinion.
Mom: Maybe if we input the three-digit number that corresponds to the individual piece we’ll get the description of that work.
Nathan: Whatever, Mom, you’re on your own.
I first tried to mask my shame—the result not so much of being mistaken as of being dismissive—with the compliment, “It looks as if you saved the day, Mom!” though I couldn’t pull it off with much exuberance. Mom’s cordial acceptance of that thinly-veiled compliment made everything all the worse. Now we both knew that I was both ashamed and, now, embarrassed. Still I couldn’t bring myself overtly to admit fault, and so my second attempt at apology and reconciliation went off flatly enough to cause Mom to bring it all finally to a close: “You only compliment me to hide your own embarrassment.” Oh, it was painful! I had had such justification for my dismissal! Years of trying to prove myself smart and capable and accurate, and I choose to play that card when I’m at my most ridiculous, petty, frustrated, and incorrect. At this point I confessed all and conceded the point, and I felt happy to have it a part of this blog and the general cacophony so characteristic of Rome.
This part I may remember incorrectly, but the reconciliation was so sweet for me that I’m convinced it came over gelato, to which both Mom and I, we committed antagonists of all things sugary, opened our hearts and our mouths. Like so many things culinary, sweets have this power to bind people in a certain inexplicable shared experience, and especially for us diet-conscious types, in the complicity of indulging in the sweet, refined forbidden. Call it lapse of conscious, call it the traveler’s allowance, call it escape. Whatever it is, call it memorable, satisfying, and worth every euro.
31 July 2006
29 July 2006
Venice
Theme Music: like a nickname, it chooses you.
The blank page is more faithful than these words to the emotion that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons evoked, wrapped as it was in the columns, stone, marble, sculpture and oil paintings of Chieso San Vidal, the medieval church where nine musicians including the man at the harpsichord rendered the aforementioned and what has come to stand as the soundtrack to our days in Venice, Fritz Keisler’s “Introduzione e allegro.” That run-on simply to say that words fail. The day before, this piece had struck Mom from the corners of another church into which we’d wandered to view an exhibition on Venetian violinmakers. Before she crumpled into a chair to bear the sequential downward progression of major sevenths, she pulled at my elbow to warn me that they were coming, these sevenths, just as they had when she’d accompanied Cindy’s violin on the piano three decades ago.
Sunday night, in the Chieso San Vidal, the sevenths were the finale to a day of, in reverse chronological order, Vivaldi by the ensemble Interpreti Veneziana, green salad under the yellow awning of Art Blu Café, classic and more modern iconography by Carpaccio, Zais and others, the stubborn stucco of ancient architecture lining the Grand Canal, celebratory gelato for successful navigation of travel requirements, eye-witnessing the dying art of glass blowing on the island of Murano, and a two-hour tour through the humidity of St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Doge’s Palace. These last two structures were both adorned with the dark of centuries-old frescoes and mosaics, burdened with the weight of wide stone walls, the papacy, and the responsibility for the Venetian state, and shackled with the irony of imprisonment: the people by the church in Rome, the Doge by his unpaid civic responsibilities, those tax-evaders revealed to the “secret mouth” in the wall of the Palace, and lawbreakers who found themselves in the dank prisons under the palace as the Doge’s involuntary guests.
The bed and breakfast in which we’re staying feels not dissimilar to the dungeons we saw. Though comfortable and spacious, at least in terms of old Europe’s structural confinements, the front doors open into a one-room foyer of ancient brick and the dank smell of perpetual darkness. When we found the light switch on day two we no longer shuffled across the room with our hands outstretched; now we comment EVERY TIME on how old the building is, a phenomenon that alternates between a positive conception and a negative one. It goes something like this:
Nathan: Wow, this building, it’s so old!
Mom: I hope it’s safe.
or
Nathan: Wow, this building is soooo old!
Mom: It has so much personality, doesn’t it?
or
Mom: Imagine how old this building is.
Nathan: The incongruity of our transient presence with its staid insistence is overwhelming.
or
Mom: This building must be hundreds of years old.
Nathan: It sure smells like it.
Age surrounds us, but though Venice has roots going back hundreds of years, in comparison with other Italian cities, such as Rome or Florence, it is relatively young. In a way, the city flouts its centuries, and the presentation of a certain vitality, a vivacity, may account for the pulse of romance that keeps canal waters and tourists flowing through the city’s veins.
2006.07.29
Or, alternately, Venice is the largest outdoor shopping mall in the world, the quaintest and oldest amusement park, a pedestrian’s paradise, a courier’s nightmare, a floating city, a future Atlantis, a Rococo-style painting, the paragon of commodification, a secret for everyone, a manmade maze, a mason’s rendition of a canyon, a grand corroboration of tourist and shopkeeper, foreigner and native, the gospel according to Gucci, the undiscovered among the overridden, a city on life support, a postcard around every corner, a photo op down every canal.
2006.8.23
The blank page is more faithful than these words to the emotion that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons evoked, wrapped as it was in the columns, stone, marble, sculpture and oil paintings of Chieso San Vidal, the medieval church where nine musicians including the man at the harpsichord rendered the aforementioned and what has come to stand as the soundtrack to our days in Venice, Fritz Keisler’s “Introduzione e allegro.” That run-on simply to say that words fail. The day before, this piece had struck Mom from the corners of another church into which we’d wandered to view an exhibition on Venetian violinmakers. Before she crumpled into a chair to bear the sequential downward progression of major sevenths, she pulled at my elbow to warn me that they were coming, these sevenths, just as they had when she’d accompanied Cindy’s violin on the piano three decades ago.
Sunday night, in the Chieso San Vidal, the sevenths were the finale to a day of, in reverse chronological order, Vivaldi by the ensemble Interpreti Veneziana, green salad under the yellow awning of Art Blu Café, classic and more modern iconography by Carpaccio, Zais and others, the stubborn stucco of ancient architecture lining the Grand Canal, celebratory gelato for successful navigation of travel requirements, eye-witnessing the dying art of glass blowing on the island of Murano, and a two-hour tour through the humidity of St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Doge’s Palace. These last two structures were both adorned with the dark of centuries-old frescoes and mosaics, burdened with the weight of wide stone walls, the papacy, and the responsibility for the Venetian state, and shackled with the irony of imprisonment: the people by the church in Rome, the Doge by his unpaid civic responsibilities, those tax-evaders revealed to the “secret mouth” in the wall of the Palace, and lawbreakers who found themselves in the dank prisons under the palace as the Doge’s involuntary guests.
The bed and breakfast in which we’re staying feels not dissimilar to the dungeons we saw. Though comfortable and spacious, at least in terms of old Europe’s structural confinements, the front doors open into a one-room foyer of ancient brick and the dank smell of perpetual darkness. When we found the light switch on day two we no longer shuffled across the room with our hands outstretched; now we comment EVERY TIME on how old the building is, a phenomenon that alternates between a positive conception and a negative one. It goes something like this:
Nathan: Wow, this building, it’s so old!
Mom: I hope it’s safe.
or
Nathan: Wow, this building is soooo old!
Mom: It has so much personality, doesn’t it?
or
Mom: Imagine how old this building is.
Nathan: The incongruity of our transient presence with its staid insistence is overwhelming.
or
Mom: This building must be hundreds of years old.
Nathan: It sure smells like it.
Age surrounds us, but though Venice has roots going back hundreds of years, in comparison with other Italian cities, such as Rome or Florence, it is relatively young. In a way, the city flouts its centuries, and the presentation of a certain vitality, a vivacity, may account for the pulse of romance that keeps canal waters and tourists flowing through the city’s veins.
2006.07.29
Or, alternately, Venice is the largest outdoor shopping mall in the world, the quaintest and oldest amusement park, a pedestrian’s paradise, a courier’s nightmare, a floating city, a future Atlantis, a Rococo-style painting, the paragon of commodification, a secret for everyone, a manmade maze, a mason’s rendition of a canyon, a grand corroboration of tourist and shopkeeper, foreigner and native, the gospel according to Gucci, the undiscovered among the overridden, a city on life support, a postcard around every corner, a photo op down every canal.
2006.8.23
24 July 2006
House and Home
The failure of my plans to blog is not entirely my fault, and in fact I have been writing entries from time to time. I haven’t yet posted them because of the general difficulty of accessing the internet while traveling and, at least for the last two weeks, the unique way in which the Chinese government regulates the internet. For foreigners there is considerably more access than for natives, but restrictions apply across the population and to many internet sites, especially those which search for and find articles that may cause damage or perceived damage to the ethos of the Chinese government.
Like Google.
And Blogger.com, which Google purchased a few years back. Blogger provides its clients with space to post so-called “weblogs” (blogs), which usually include text and pictures and links to other sites, etc. These are personal postings, usually, and so you can imagine how reticent the Chinese government is, with its monolithic tendencies, to allow access for its citizens to a means of publishing concerns, complaints, and a billion little individual truths, which might contradict the official position.
So Blogger.com has been down, and my stop-gap measure for keeping in touch is Facebook.com, a site that provides mostly university students with a means of communicating with friends, finding friends, and making friends. It’s much better than Route Y ever was at researching and stalking crushes. I hope you’ve had a chance to visit the site and view the pictures. If all goes well today at this coffee shop in Moscow, you’ll see pictures from China, too.
Now that I’m in Russia—soon to be in Ukraine—blogging should return as a viable option for general updates on what I’m doing and where I am. In the meantime, here’s that general update:
As you already know, I’m sitting in a coffee shop (coffee “house,” technically, which when transliterated directly into Russian, as many store names are, sounds comically guttural and forced, with no claim to the phonetic warmth that the word’s denotation requires) in downtown Moscow. It’s a rainy day, and a cold one (remember how Italians fly North for August? If they come here, they’ve come too far North), so I don’t regret spending a few hours of my few days in Moscow writing letters and otherwise convalescing.
From what, you wonder. From traveling, in general, I think. Though I feel more comfortable in Russia than perhaps anywhere (because it seems instantly familiar), I’m tired of being a tourist. I’m tired of looking at historical buildings and wandering the halls of museums and, frankly, of taking pictures of everything that presents itself as even just possibly photographable, and of living from out my suitcase, and from asking directions for everything, and from feeling the weight of total anonymity, and etc. I say etc. because the list, though it goes on, already feels somehow repetitive, as if it could all be summarized into one easy sentence, maybe even one economical word, like outsider.
Adam and other expats in China feel most keenly, it seems to me, this particular deficit of living abroad. I emphasize their complaint because it lends itself to the question of home (or the guttural transliteration of house that I find so antithetical to the cozy idea that the word is meant to present). As a temporary traveler, a sense that home is at the end of any itinerary tempers the psychological strain that being an outsider puts on a person. As an expat, that sense of being outside everything, despite efforts, has no such consolation. This conclusion puts sense into some of the gratuitous and superfluous vent sessions that I witnessed expats have in China.
My first ranting occurred in a private room around a table in a typical Beijing restaurant. In the exclusive company of American expats, all of whom had been in China for some time, the conversation in retrospect could not but help turn to the frustrations innate to living abroad. Paul, a usually soft-spoken kid from Kansas and a master of Chinese in his own right, prefaced his criticism of “how they pour concrete” with the disclaimer that he doesn’t really like to complain about China. John, a two-year veteran of living in China, felt no such compunction. He turned his frustrations over the behemoth bureaucracy and the collective mindset into global attacks on Chinese people themselves.
After dinner I complained to Adam about what seemed to me unfair criticisms of China and its people, who no doubt experience the same if not more severe frustrations with the government and the living conditions. But looking back I can see, as Adam attempted to point out, that every complaint had its root in the irremediable sense of being always already on the margin, without the hope of integration. For the Chinese, at least, these frustrations are tempered by the concept of inclusion.
It’s a little different, maybe a little worse, for expats in China because of the immediate physiological distinction as well as the latent insularity of Chinese culture. Here in Russia people don’t stare as much, or at all, until I open my mouth and give away the secret, so closely kept, of being an outsider.
When anyone leaves her homeland for a foreign country, the concept of house takes on that cacophonous, prickly sensation that keeps the expat always to some degree away from home. Any effort toward fluency in the native language is nothing if not an attempt, sometimes a futile one, to mitigate the barrier between the expat and the resident country.
Difference seems at once to be at the heart of a traveler’s intrigue and of her joy in returning home. For the expat, the joy I think of living abroad is in the asymptotic baby steps she makes toward integration. At this point it seems my thoughts should turn toward the immigrant, the exile, the refugee, all of whom have fewer options for returning home than the expat has, but as it is all this thinking of home is making me homesick.
So much for philosophizing. I take the sleeper to Kiev tonight and arrive tomorrow at the main train station, where Oksana should be waiting. Despite the usual doubts about my future and my choice to stay in Ukraine for a while to make a go at writing (or at something), I’m looking forward to returning to Kiev after five years and a lot of personal change. I think the familiar setting will contextualize the trajectory that I’ve taken over the past years and help me plot a satisfying if not successful future. Wish me luck.
Like Google.
And Blogger.com, which Google purchased a few years back. Blogger provides its clients with space to post so-called “weblogs” (blogs), which usually include text and pictures and links to other sites, etc. These are personal postings, usually, and so you can imagine how reticent the Chinese government is, with its monolithic tendencies, to allow access for its citizens to a means of publishing concerns, complaints, and a billion little individual truths, which might contradict the official position.
So Blogger.com has been down, and my stop-gap measure for keeping in touch is Facebook.com, a site that provides mostly university students with a means of communicating with friends, finding friends, and making friends. It’s much better than Route Y ever was at researching and stalking crushes. I hope you’ve had a chance to visit the site and view the pictures. If all goes well today at this coffee shop in Moscow, you’ll see pictures from China, too.
Now that I’m in Russia—soon to be in Ukraine—blogging should return as a viable option for general updates on what I’m doing and where I am. In the meantime, here’s that general update:
As you already know, I’m sitting in a coffee shop (coffee “house,” technically, which when transliterated directly into Russian, as many store names are, sounds comically guttural and forced, with no claim to the phonetic warmth that the word’s denotation requires) in downtown Moscow. It’s a rainy day, and a cold one (remember how Italians fly North for August? If they come here, they’ve come too far North), so I don’t regret spending a few hours of my few days in Moscow writing letters and otherwise convalescing.
From what, you wonder. From traveling, in general, I think. Though I feel more comfortable in Russia than perhaps anywhere (because it seems instantly familiar), I’m tired of being a tourist. I’m tired of looking at historical buildings and wandering the halls of museums and, frankly, of taking pictures of everything that presents itself as even just possibly photographable, and of living from out my suitcase, and from asking directions for everything, and from feeling the weight of total anonymity, and etc. I say etc. because the list, though it goes on, already feels somehow repetitive, as if it could all be summarized into one easy sentence, maybe even one economical word, like outsider.
Adam and other expats in China feel most keenly, it seems to me, this particular deficit of living abroad. I emphasize their complaint because it lends itself to the question of home (or the guttural transliteration of house that I find so antithetical to the cozy idea that the word is meant to present). As a temporary traveler, a sense that home is at the end of any itinerary tempers the psychological strain that being an outsider puts on a person. As an expat, that sense of being outside everything, despite efforts, has no such consolation. This conclusion puts sense into some of the gratuitous and superfluous vent sessions that I witnessed expats have in China.
My first ranting occurred in a private room around a table in a typical Beijing restaurant. In the exclusive company of American expats, all of whom had been in China for some time, the conversation in retrospect could not but help turn to the frustrations innate to living abroad. Paul, a usually soft-spoken kid from Kansas and a master of Chinese in his own right, prefaced his criticism of “how they pour concrete” with the disclaimer that he doesn’t really like to complain about China. John, a two-year veteran of living in China, felt no such compunction. He turned his frustrations over the behemoth bureaucracy and the collective mindset into global attacks on Chinese people themselves.
After dinner I complained to Adam about what seemed to me unfair criticisms of China and its people, who no doubt experience the same if not more severe frustrations with the government and the living conditions. But looking back I can see, as Adam attempted to point out, that every complaint had its root in the irremediable sense of being always already on the margin, without the hope of integration. For the Chinese, at least, these frustrations are tempered by the concept of inclusion.
It’s a little different, maybe a little worse, for expats in China because of the immediate physiological distinction as well as the latent insularity of Chinese culture. Here in Russia people don’t stare as much, or at all, until I open my mouth and give away the secret, so closely kept, of being an outsider.
When anyone leaves her homeland for a foreign country, the concept of house takes on that cacophonous, prickly sensation that keeps the expat always to some degree away from home. Any effort toward fluency in the native language is nothing if not an attempt, sometimes a futile one, to mitigate the barrier between the expat and the resident country.
Difference seems at once to be at the heart of a traveler’s intrigue and of her joy in returning home. For the expat, the joy I think of living abroad is in the asymptotic baby steps she makes toward integration. At this point it seems my thoughts should turn toward the immigrant, the exile, the refugee, all of whom have fewer options for returning home than the expat has, but as it is all this thinking of home is making me homesick.
So much for philosophizing. I take the sleeper to Kiev tonight and arrive tomorrow at the main train station, where Oksana should be waiting. Despite the usual doubts about my future and my choice to stay in Ukraine for a while to make a go at writing (or at something), I’m looking forward to returning to Kiev after five years and a lot of personal change. I think the familiar setting will contextualize the trajectory that I’ve taken over the past years and help me plot a satisfying if not successful future. Wish me luck.
23 July 2006
Blog Introduction
In communist countries people have duties, both official unofficial, and usually voluntary, to society. Having come from Beijing directly to the capital of the former Soviet Union, I feel strongly that abstract sense of duty, of social responsibility, which I’m translating into an introduction to this blog and an explanation for its delayed debut.
I conceived of the blog as a solution to my nascent inability to keep in touch with friends and family in the traditional ways and as an alternative to the infamous mass email. The blog is, of course, nothing if not a mass email but with the significant distinction of providing you the choice to visit or not to visit. No such freedom exists with a mass emailing, which presents its entire self with its imploring eyes directly in your email inbox.
Plans for the blog, however, stalled for several reasons, including that pesky nascent inability to keep in touch with friends and family. Other reasons include the general inaccessibility of the internet for travelers and the censorship of the internet that a certain communist country practices.
That said, the concept and motivation for the blog still exist, and soon the means to put concept into practice will, too, at which time you’ll receive periodic invitations to visit the site and read up on what it is this consummate loafer is avoiding now. Please feel free to comment on, contradict, rebut, or otherwise engage any of the entries. Nothing about the blog excludes two-way communication. On the contrary, I hope it engenders it.
Best wishes to all,
Nathan Rhead
nrc4@hotmail.com
I conceived of the blog as a solution to my nascent inability to keep in touch with friends and family in the traditional ways and as an alternative to the infamous mass email. The blog is, of course, nothing if not a mass email but with the significant distinction of providing you the choice to visit or not to visit. No such freedom exists with a mass emailing, which presents its entire self with its imploring eyes directly in your email inbox.
Plans for the blog, however, stalled for several reasons, including that pesky nascent inability to keep in touch with friends and family. Other reasons include the general inaccessibility of the internet for travelers and the censorship of the internet that a certain communist country practices.
That said, the concept and motivation for the blog still exist, and soon the means to put concept into practice will, too, at which time you’ll receive periodic invitations to visit the site and read up on what it is this consummate loafer is avoiding now. Please feel free to comment on, contradict, rebut, or otherwise engage any of the entries. Nothing about the blog excludes two-way communication. On the contrary, I hope it engenders it.
Best wishes to all,
Nathan Rhead
nrc4@hotmail.com
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