A week and a half ago, I flew to the east coast of Sicily to see what was there. The plane arrived in Catania, the "other" major hub of Sicily, (Palermo being the one most of us probably think of first). I'd planned to take a bus directly to Siracusa, namesake of the American college basketball team that won the national championship a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, at the time the bus was scheduled to depart, a heavyset man with slick hair and glistening sunglasses strolled through the crowd at the bus stop and murmured, "Siracusa?" over and over in a low voice like a drug pusher in Washington Square Park. When enough of the passengers were paying attention, he then announced, in the same impassive tone, "No bus." No bus? Why no bus, demanded several irate passengers. "Problem," was the answer.
The next bus was an hour later, giving me ample opportunity to get to know the Catania airport, basically a giant shed which is being replaced by a glass cathedral next door, still under construction. After wilting in the shade of a giant rock for a while, I went back to the stop where there still wasn't any bus. Just as I was on the point of a nervous breakdown, it ambled up to the pavement, fifteen minutes late.
We were dropped off on an island called Ortygia, Siracusa's historic center, where the 17th century buildings are packed together in no discernible order, a bit like Venice without the canals. Most of the facades are crumbling apart, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone living on the island. I spent most of my first day wandering in the narrow alleys, eating delicious seafood, and visiting the Duomo, which is actually a Greek temple with a roof over it and a statue of the Virgin Mary where a statue of Athena used to stand. I also took a bike ride around the island and went for a swim at the local beach, a big rock underneath one of the battlements, from which people leap into the clear blue water. Unfortunately, many of the museums were closed or partially closed for renovations. This included the famous archeological museum, two-thirds of which was closed, though they were still charging the full price for a ticket. "Why is it closed?" demanded an indignant German tourist. "Problem," was the answer.
For dinner I went to a local trattoria and ate one of the most disgusting foods I have ever tasted: pasta with sardines, wild fennel, capers, and olives, a local specialty that I saw several other tourists enjoying. The waiters were very disappointed in me because I didn't manage to finish the whole heaping plate of the stuff. Afterward, I strolled to the main square, where in front of the city hall, embarrassed schoolchildren in togas performed Greek dances for a crowd of delighted parents toting handheld video cameras.
My next stop was Catania itself, a dark, bustling city of noisy, unfriendly people. I loved it, though I'm not sure it loved me. The architecture is high Sicilian baroque with lacy facades that warp and curve above wide boulevards with narrow sidewalks. In the markets, the vendors scream out their wares at passersby. I was bullied into buying a kilo of delicious fresh cherries by an ebullient grandmother with a set of lungs that would put Maria Callas to shame. Everyone in the city seemed to be the star of his or her own TV show.
And then there are the clothes. Having visited Catania, I now realize that Dolce and Gabbana are not fashion designers; they are documentary filmmakers who are simply reporting to the rest of the world how people dress on the streets of Catania. This particularly true of the men, who wear skin-tight T-shirts in day-glo colors (wearing bright pink doesn't make you any the less masculine in Catania) drizzled with gold, silver, and bronze paint, rhinestones, spangles, and extravagant stitching that matches the sparkling gel in their hair and their silver sunglasses and their gold and silver sneakers. Strutting around in their dizzying finery, they reminded me of giant lollipops. The next morning, I stopped by a clothes market and bought a few cheap silver-drizzled T-shirts of my own, which will probably remain at the back of my drawer for several years.
The last stop on my tour was Taormina, a town beautifully situated on the side of a mountain that heads straight into the Mediterranean Sea. This was where I took my best photographs, and had my worst misadventures. Getting off the bus, I managed to dodge the parade of flabby tourists from northern countries to get to my pension, where the old lady in charge informed me that due to technical difficulties in the reservation system (nobody had written it down in her notebook), I had no reservation. She sent me to another pension down the street which had a surplus of rooms (in fact, I was the only guest), probably because they had no air conditioning and were located across the street from a construction site.
The fun was just beginning. On my way to the justly famous Greek theater (which like almost everything else in Sicily that's called Greek is actually Roman), I paid an inflated price for a pair of batteries that turned out to be dead. After confronting the shop owner, I was told the fault was mine for wanting to use these batteries in such an unusual item as a camera, but if I paid two more Euros, I could have more powerful batteries. I asked to try them out first, and indeed, these more powerful batteries also turned out to be dead. At this point, I asked for my money back, and the shop owner invited me to bring the police, which I did, and after heaping much abuse upon my head for wasting his time and opening his packages of dead batteries which because they were opened he could no longer sell to credulous tourists, he returned the money.
The next day, tired of waking up to the sound of jackhammering, winding my way between enraptured tourists, and paying on average thirty-five Euros per meal, I was more than glad to get on the bus back to the Catania airport, which departed on time. All seemed to be well until about a mile from the airport, our bus sideswiped a machine that was paving the road. We pulled over and our driver got out to perform an operatic scene with the construction workers. One of the passengers got off too, flagged down another bus, and hopped on, leaving us to our fate. Finally, a second, empty bus arrived to take the rest of us to the airport, where our plane arrived an hour late, causing the old man sitting behind me and a flight attendant to get into a heated discussion over whether the airline was engaged in a conspiracy to deceive its passengers into believing its flights ever arrived on time.
I can't wait to go back to Sicily.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Monday, May 15, 2006
Adventures in Italian Travel
In a month and a few days, I'll be going back to New York, so lately I've been scrambling to see various things in Rome and Italy before I leave. Last week I traveled with a group from the American Academy to the Veneto region, near Venice, to see several villas designed by the Renaissance architect Antonio Palladio. (Unfortunately I also stupidly left my passport at an Internet cafe there, but I'm getting it back this afternoon.)
There's something solid and impressive about these villas, a something that proved pretty difficult for any of us on the trip to define, maybe because Palladio's designs have been copied so much that the effect they must have had on his contemporaries is probably lost on us. From what I could glean, his innovation was to use Greek temples as models for residential buildings, a choice that apparently seemed shocking to viewers in the 1500s, though not for a Michigander like me who's seen his share of Ionic columns in suburban subdivisions.
The day after I came back from up north, I went with an Italian friend to Naples, the city where he was born. The trip began with a hot, airless ride on an inter-city train crowded with noisy Neopolitans slurring their words and adjusting their glittering sunglasses and flashy silver belt buckles. That night, I stayed in an area called the Spanish Quarter, a tightly-packed neighborhood of buildings decorated with endless lines of laundry and improvised shrines to the Virgin Mary. Mopeds zip and swerve at dangeriously high speeds through the back alleys where kids play in dark, garbage-strewn puddles. The buildings were so close together that everywhere I walked through the streets I could hear ghostly voices echoicing out of the windows, though I could never tell where they were coming from. My room was a shed built on the roof of the building, from which I took in a magical view of the Bay of Naples lit up by night.
This week, a friend of mine is here to visit, and so the two of us have been exploring corners of the city I've haven't yet gotten to. We wanted to go for lunch on his first day, but the indignant waiter at the first restaurant we walked into reprimanded us, "We're closed. It's 3:00!" Apparently in Italy one is not allowed to be hungry after 3:00 because we tried several other restaurants with the same result. In the end, we settled for a take away joint serving the inevitable "pizza al taglio," or pizza by the slice.
Yesterday we rented bikes and rode down an old Roman highway that is closed to traffic on Sundays, except that yesterday it wasn't closed to traffic because of a wedding party taking place there. We've also visited a Christian catacomb, several churches with dazzling mosaics, and a market in Rome's immigrant neighborhood where you can get Arabic couscous, Indian spices, or Chinese pears. If I had my experience to do over again, I'd have spent much more time with Rome's immigrant community. I can only imagine the rich stories I might have uncovered.
The day after my friend leaves, I'll be going to Sicily to see the eastern tip of the island, and the cities of Syracuse, Catania, and Taormina. I called an inn in Taormina to make a reservation, and as I started to say my name, the man who picked up the phone interrupted me to ask, "Where are you from? England? Germany?" I told him I was American. "One American, the night of May 23rd," he said. "See you then. Bye."
How all these sights and sounds are going to impact my work is not immediately clear, but I'm glad to have had the chance to take them all in.
There's something solid and impressive about these villas, a something that proved pretty difficult for any of us on the trip to define, maybe because Palladio's designs have been copied so much that the effect they must have had on his contemporaries is probably lost on us. From what I could glean, his innovation was to use Greek temples as models for residential buildings, a choice that apparently seemed shocking to viewers in the 1500s, though not for a Michigander like me who's seen his share of Ionic columns in suburban subdivisions.
The day after I came back from up north, I went with an Italian friend to Naples, the city where he was born. The trip began with a hot, airless ride on an inter-city train crowded with noisy Neopolitans slurring their words and adjusting their glittering sunglasses and flashy silver belt buckles. That night, I stayed in an area called the Spanish Quarter, a tightly-packed neighborhood of buildings decorated with endless lines of laundry and improvised shrines to the Virgin Mary. Mopeds zip and swerve at dangeriously high speeds through the back alleys where kids play in dark, garbage-strewn puddles. The buildings were so close together that everywhere I walked through the streets I could hear ghostly voices echoicing out of the windows, though I could never tell where they were coming from. My room was a shed built on the roof of the building, from which I took in a magical view of the Bay of Naples lit up by night.
This week, a friend of mine is here to visit, and so the two of us have been exploring corners of the city I've haven't yet gotten to. We wanted to go for lunch on his first day, but the indignant waiter at the first restaurant we walked into reprimanded us, "We're closed. It's 3:00!" Apparently in Italy one is not allowed to be hungry after 3:00 because we tried several other restaurants with the same result. In the end, we settled for a take away joint serving the inevitable "pizza al taglio," or pizza by the slice.
Yesterday we rented bikes and rode down an old Roman highway that is closed to traffic on Sundays, except that yesterday it wasn't closed to traffic because of a wedding party taking place there. We've also visited a Christian catacomb, several churches with dazzling mosaics, and a market in Rome's immigrant neighborhood where you can get Arabic couscous, Indian spices, or Chinese pears. If I had my experience to do over again, I'd have spent much more time with Rome's immigrant community. I can only imagine the rich stories I might have uncovered.
The day after my friend leaves, I'll be going to Sicily to see the eastern tip of the island, and the cities of Syracuse, Catania, and Taormina. I called an inn in Taormina to make a reservation, and as I started to say my name, the man who picked up the phone interrupted me to ask, "Where are you from? England? Germany?" I told him I was American. "One American, the night of May 23rd," he said. "See you then. Bye."
How all these sights and sounds are going to impact my work is not immediately clear, but I'm glad to have had the chance to take them all in.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Prague, 10 Years Later
Ten years ago, I got off a train at the main station in Prague with an overstuffed backpack and duffel bag and began a yearlong adventure that ultimately resulted in my first book of stories, The View from Stalin's Head. Last Monday, I booked a last minute ticket on Czech Airlines and flew back there from Rome.
As I took bus 119 from the airport to the center, I was struck by how clearly I remembered so much of the landscape. Here I was again on Europe Avenue (which used to be Lenin Avenue), passing the Esso gas station that made a cameo appearance in one of my stories (with an inflated tiger on the roof who is no longer there). There was the Delvita supermarket, the path I used to climb uphill to my friend's house and my gym in Petriny, tram 26 that I used to ride to work every day, my old apartment.
In the city itself, I was glad to see so many of the little cafes where I used to go to write were still open, and even though they're smack in the middle of prime sightseeing land, they've somehow avoided being taken over by tourists. On the other hand, Dunkin' Donuts, which had staked out several posts in the city including prime territory on Wenceslas Square, is now out of business in Prague.
A lot has changed. Everywhere, prices are higher, even in state museums that used to charge Czechs lower entrance fees than tourists. Now everyone pays the same inflated price, which is still pretty reasonable by Western standards. There's a new museum of Communism, a period that is beginning to feel like ancient history. (I went in and stopped for a while in front of a display about the Stalin Monument that inspired the title of my book.)
Cinemas show American movies almost exclusively, and tickets that once cost two dollars are now up to seven. The food culture is also very different. Before, there were pretty much only Czech "hospody"--pubs--to choose from, all serving the usual national staples of pork, cabbage, and dumplings. Today, however, Italian restaurants, particularly pizzarias, have taken the country by storm, and you can find cappucino, tiramisu, and pizza margarita even in the most remote suburbs.
On a more serious note, I was glad to hear that the cause of gay rights had just scored a major victory when the Czech parliament overrode the veto of the conservative President Vaclav Klaus to legalize civil unions for same-sex partners. I was pretty disappointed in Klaus, who'd been the prime minister when I lived in Prague and whom I'd always liked because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus, minus the beard.
The biggest change I noticed was the omnipresence of commercialism. Sometimes it seemed as if every last inch of free space had been plastered with advertisments. Drive a little ways out of the city, and you'll see the highways are lined with office buildings for Western companies, new apartment complexes, shopping malls that look as if they'd been airlifted from American suburbs, or megastores like Ikea and Bauhaus (the German version of Home Depot). A friend told me that the new Czech dream is to move to the suburbs, commute to work in town, and on weekends take your family for a stroll through a shopping mall. (Sound familiar, anyone?)
What made me happiest, though, was the most important thing that hadn't changed: friendship. Once again, I was chatting with my friend Milan about the latest squabbles in Prague's tiny and endlessly subdividing Jewish community, talking politics over tea with my friend Ivo, and communicating with a mixture of broken English, ersatz Czech, German, and hand gestures with my friend Pavel, who still has his same old earthy charm. I couldn't help tearing up when I visited Milan's "maminka," who as ever bubbled over with her infectious warmth. After cooking us a hearty lunch, she carefully wrapped a plastic box of cookies to take with me for the flight home.
Revisiting all these familiar people and places made me turn inward, to ask myself how have I changed since those days? I'd imagined that after living in Prague, I would come back home with a surer sense of my own identity, a strong drive to go after the things I wanted out of life. And it's true that since then I've accomplished quite a lot. I've been in a serious relationship for more than five years, I've moved to New York, I've gone to graduate school and written two books. And yet as I waved goodbye to Pavel and Milan at the airport, for a few dizzying seconds, I couldn't go forward, past the passport control and on to the security check. I still felt like that same scared kid who'd gotten off the train ten years ago and wondered, what next? What am I supposed to do now?
As I took bus 119 from the airport to the center, I was struck by how clearly I remembered so much of the landscape. Here I was again on Europe Avenue (which used to be Lenin Avenue), passing the Esso gas station that made a cameo appearance in one of my stories (with an inflated tiger on the roof who is no longer there). There was the Delvita supermarket, the path I used to climb uphill to my friend's house and my gym in Petriny, tram 26 that I used to ride to work every day, my old apartment.
In the city itself, I was glad to see so many of the little cafes where I used to go to write were still open, and even though they're smack in the middle of prime sightseeing land, they've somehow avoided being taken over by tourists. On the other hand, Dunkin' Donuts, which had staked out several posts in the city including prime territory on Wenceslas Square, is now out of business in Prague.
A lot has changed. Everywhere, prices are higher, even in state museums that used to charge Czechs lower entrance fees than tourists. Now everyone pays the same inflated price, which is still pretty reasonable by Western standards. There's a new museum of Communism, a period that is beginning to feel like ancient history. (I went in and stopped for a while in front of a display about the Stalin Monument that inspired the title of my book.)
Cinemas show American movies almost exclusively, and tickets that once cost two dollars are now up to seven. The food culture is also very different. Before, there were pretty much only Czech "hospody"--pubs--to choose from, all serving the usual national staples of pork, cabbage, and dumplings. Today, however, Italian restaurants, particularly pizzarias, have taken the country by storm, and you can find cappucino, tiramisu, and pizza margarita even in the most remote suburbs.
On a more serious note, I was glad to hear that the cause of gay rights had just scored a major victory when the Czech parliament overrode the veto of the conservative President Vaclav Klaus to legalize civil unions for same-sex partners. I was pretty disappointed in Klaus, who'd been the prime minister when I lived in Prague and whom I'd always liked because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus, minus the beard.
The biggest change I noticed was the omnipresence of commercialism. Sometimes it seemed as if every last inch of free space had been plastered with advertisments. Drive a little ways out of the city, and you'll see the highways are lined with office buildings for Western companies, new apartment complexes, shopping malls that look as if they'd been airlifted from American suburbs, or megastores like Ikea and Bauhaus (the German version of Home Depot). A friend told me that the new Czech dream is to move to the suburbs, commute to work in town, and on weekends take your family for a stroll through a shopping mall. (Sound familiar, anyone?)
What made me happiest, though, was the most important thing that hadn't changed: friendship. Once again, I was chatting with my friend Milan about the latest squabbles in Prague's tiny and endlessly subdividing Jewish community, talking politics over tea with my friend Ivo, and communicating with a mixture of broken English, ersatz Czech, German, and hand gestures with my friend Pavel, who still has his same old earthy charm. I couldn't help tearing up when I visited Milan's "maminka," who as ever bubbled over with her infectious warmth. After cooking us a hearty lunch, she carefully wrapped a plastic box of cookies to take with me for the flight home.
Revisiting all these familiar people and places made me turn inward, to ask myself how have I changed since those days? I'd imagined that after living in Prague, I would come back home with a surer sense of my own identity, a strong drive to go after the things I wanted out of life. And it's true that since then I've accomplished quite a lot. I've been in a serious relationship for more than five years, I've moved to New York, I've gone to graduate school and written two books. And yet as I waved goodbye to Pavel and Milan at the airport, for a few dizzying seconds, I couldn't go forward, past the passport control and on to the security check. I still felt like that same scared kid who'd gotten off the train ten years ago and wondered, what next? What am I supposed to do now?
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