It’s been a busy week. Very busy, actually. I’d love to have time to write and rant, but that won’t be in the cards for a day or two yet. Between class and work and travel for work, I’m reasonably convinced I may have passed myself going the other direction pulling into the driveway tonight. My current class wraps up on Monday, so I’m looking forward to a week of relative easy living. I can’t begin to tell you people how much I am looking forward to that.
Category Archives: Travel
Playing Tourist…
I never really stopped to play tourist in the whole time I was working in DC. The Capitol and the White House were sort of landmarks you used when giving someone directions about how to get from point A to point B. They were just sort of “there,” but not something you ever really paid a good deal of attention to. I certainly never toted a camera around town between meetings and I guess that’s why I was so pleased with how some of my pictures from last week turned out. I was lucky enough to find a hotel downtown at 16th and K and had a perfect weather in the evenings for shooting.
The heart of the empire…
It has been years since I have flown directly into Washington. Living in Baltimore, it was always more convenient for me to use BWI. This afternoon was one of those moments that gives even the cynical and jaded bastards among us a moment of pause… following the Potomac north the City spreads out from the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials in the West (ever stopped to think that the two presidents most identified with “the west” have their memorials on the west end of the Mall?) to the dome of the Capitol in the east. It’s later afternoon and the marble of the official city of Washington is catching the last orange rays of the day’s sun. It absolutely glows. Working here for the better part of four years, you grow a little immune to the charms of this place. You never really stop to look because you’re on a mad dash to the next meeting or trying to get home before the rush hour really gets fired up.
It’s good to be back here, in this place, in the beating heart of the American empire. Of course it’s even better to know that all I have to do is walk downstairs and hail a cab in the morning and someone else will drive me to work, too.
No rest for the wicked…
OK gang, just adding a footnote that I’m back on the road for a few days this week. I never seem to end up exactly where Uncle wants me, so I’m heading back to Maryland tomorrow afternoon and will be in Frederick until well before the crack of dawn Thursday morning. Don’t get me wrong, life out of a suitcase can be just fine once you’ve gotten enough practice and a big enough suitcase, but sometimes you just want to sit your ass at home.
Talk to y’all when I get set up back in the PRM.
Seven Hills…
Note: This post is based on notes I made on Wednesday, April 4. 2007 in Rome.
What we had was more an assault on the Eternal City than a tour… a nine hour mad dash across the city that took us from the Vatican Museums to the Sistine Chapel and Mass in St. Peter’s Square, and to the Coliseum, Forum, Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps. There is so much history here… Where republican values were institutionalized in the West as well as where those ideals were lost for a millennium. Where empire was born out of civil war and the words of Cicero moved the world. Into the Forum Romanum, where victorious commanders were awarded their triumph down the Sacred Way into the Forum to the Capitoline. 2500 years of human history have passed this single spot.
The feeling one gets standing at the steps of the Curia, the old Senate house, or under the Arch of Titus looking down over the Forum are simply indescribable. Perhaps it’s simply my abject love of all things old, but it’s something like standing on a beach at night looking out at the dark sky bleeding into the even darker water and seeing the stars. You realize your own smallness against the backdrop of the universe. It’s an overwhelming feeling of awe and mixed with profound sadness at standing on the ruined remains of the ancient world’s sole superpower. It’s a striking reminder that all things pass in their time. Still, there is something overwhelmingly grand about Rome. Eternal City just about covers it.
Portrait of Pompeii…
Note: This post is based on notes I made on April 2, 2007 in Pompeii and Naples.
Pompeii is one of those places that by right really shouldn’t exist. The city was lost to the Romans in 79 BC and forgotten by the world until the mid-18th century. Covered in yards of ash, the city lay completely preserved until the advent of modern archeology. We know more about life in the empire because of Pompeii than any other place that has been excavated to date. Today’s Pompeii adjoins the modern city of Naples, which itself stands in the shadow of Vesuvius. The city itself is remarkable… homes, businesses, and temples all still stand and aside from the roofs which burned off or collapsed in the ash fall look as though ready for their owners, patrons, and priests to return.
We clean up after natural disasters; rebuild after hurricanes and clear away the rubble from earthquakes. New Orleans, one of America’s great port cities, was decimated by a hurricane. Whole sections of the city were lost. Pompeii, on the other hand, would be more akin to the storm surge sweeping ashore and the water never receding back into the Gulf. There are physical reminders of the people of Pompeii; plaster casts made from the void left where they fell on the street in a futile effort to flee. More poignant are those who knew their fate and cowered in a corner to await the inevitable.
The site of Pompeii is huge and two hours is hardly enough time to really take in the magnitude of the city. At every intersection streets stretch away as far as the eye can see and in the distance there is always the clouded shadow of the mountain. Waking up every morning the people of Naples must look up and wonder “is today the day?”
City on a Hill…
Note: This post is based on notes I made on Sunday, April 1, 2007 in Cortona and Assisi.
Sunday, Day 5. One thing I have found is that in traveling, often the side trips are just as good, if not better than the place you were actually planning to see. One of the distinguishing features of the Tuscan landscape is the hill towns that cropped up in the most defensive portions of the countryside. Cortona is actually the town you’ll see in the film Under the Tuscan Sun.” Hill towns are terribly pretty to look at, but they are all hell to walk through. When someone tells me a story about how hard it was to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow, I’ll just smile to myself and think, fuck that man… I’ve walked Cortona.
Assisi is another hill town, but obviously famous for a different reason. The Basically of St. Francis is one of those places you just sort of stand in front of in amazement. It wasn’t the biggest cathedral of the tour. It certainly wasn’t the most decorative or detailed, but there was a quiet majesty to the place. Something I can’t quite place. Construction was underway by the late 12th century and its frescos show some of the first use of perspective in large scale art in European history. St Francis, of course, was the original rebel of the church and paved the way for those who followed such as Dante and Luther. Other than being considered malcontents for much of their history, the Franciscans tenants are a little tough to live by…Poverty, chastity, and obedience… Not so much my strong suit.
My God… It’s full of stars…
Note: This post was lifted directly from my notes on Saturday, March 31st. It is complete and unabridged.
It’s Saturday afternoon now and I am taking lunch on the Piazza della Signoria. Michelangelo walked here in this square. So did Galileo. So did Machiavelli. The Medici rose to power on the business flowing through this square. The Renaissance was born and flourished in these walls. This is the cradle of what is good and right about Western civilization… Of art, of science, of understanding what it means to be men. Someone wiser than I once said “If I see further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” It is how I feel here in this place. My own learning, my curiosity, and the desire for improve constantly find their own root here. In coming Florence and seeing these things and walking in the steps of the ponderously brilliant minds who lived and worked here I have a deeper understanding of myself and a far more humble perspective of my own meager talents.
The Road to Pisa…
Note: This post is based on notes I made between March 30th and I reserve the right to edit this posting for content and clarity at a later date.
…Does not lead directly through Bologna. In fact, it’s more of a detour on the road to any of the major tourist towns. I’m glad we made the effort, though. It’s the seat of the oldest continuously operating university in Europe and with 100,000 students, it feels like a college town. The cafes are plentiful and the food is cheap… as long as you don’t order a Coke with lunch. Raining all morning, it was tough to get a real feel for the town, other than the overwhelming feeling of age. It’s hard to shake that feeling anywhere you go in Italy. The pictures I posted are from the Piazza Nettuno and San Petronio Cathedral.
Back on the road to Pisa, the rain finally gave way to a low overcast. First impressions are important and it’s hard to get past the idea of Pisa as a tourist trap. The vendors are thick along the walls and even inside the main gate, but once you’re past them, the things you see are simply amazing. Renaissance Pisa understood the concept of monumental architecture dead on. Coming through the city gate, you’re sort of surprised by the proportions of the religious center of the old city. Maybe it is a tourist trap, but it is one of those places that you just have to see to really appreciate.
Getting there is…
Note: This post is based on notes I made between March 27th and March 29th and I reserve the right to edit this posting for content and clarity at a later date.
In truth, getting there is really a giant pain in the ass. In our case, the pain was slightly magnified by having only a 45 minute scheduled layover in Munich. Clearing EU customs with 29 people, and getting to the next gate: simply not going to happen in 45 minutes. I’m fairly certain that’s some kind of natural law or something. At any rate, we missed our connecting flight and had the opportunity to spend an extra three hours in the beautiful Munich International Airport. That last part wasn’t actually snarky… The Munich Airport is a pretty nice place to be stuck… and you can smoke inside as long as you don’t mind standing in a small ventilated booth contraption. I wish I would have taken a picture of those. I may want to have one installed in the house if the weather doesn’t improve soon.
Munich is also a good place to people watch. And by people watch, I mean ogle foreign women with the confidence that you are almost guaranteed not to ever see them again. I need to note here that as a group, European women are just plain hot. Their accents are hot… and sweet Jesus, do they know how to dress. I don’t necessarily mean that they’re slut-ified, but hot in an elegant Kate Hepburn kind of way, but I digress.
The first real day of the tour started off with 29 exhausted tourists heading for a 45 minute boat ride to Venice. Most of us probably remember that Venice is the “City of Canals,” but what the history books usually leave out is that canals are, even today, the principle mode of transportation in the old city. Come to think of it, I don’t actually remember seeing any cars on the island. Not that those cars would have had anywhere to go, because as the books also left out, there really aren’t “roads” per se, more like alleys and footbridges. Basically, if you’re not on a boat, you’re walking. The place really is amazing. It’s one of those places where the pictures don’t really do it justice. I think the fact that we were really there hadn’t really settled in at that point, so those first days have a bit of a tendency to blur together. Venice is really something you have to see to believe. More something out of a picture book than a real place.
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