Saturday, July 30, 2016

On turning twenty



I spent my last day as a nineteen year old getting lost, which I think as quite a good metaphor for life thus far.

I was supposed to go down along North Bridge Road to find a bike shop so I could measure a tricycle (yes, you read all that right) but I underestimated just how long North Bridge Road is. Google Maps estimated a 26 minute walk, but after an hour of walking, I still hadn't seen it, and instead saw the looming structure of the Jalan Besar Stadium.

Like the almost-adult that I am, I called my Dad. Because truthfully, that is the best thing to do whether you're grieving or celebrating or just plain anxious and confused. I was so tired and sun sapped and afraid that I had walked too far to get back. But Dad reassured me I was near the place, gave me directions, and guided me there. I was shaky and tear stained (I must admit, I got so anxious that I had a little cry) but I got there, got the job done, and on the walk back to the office I saw a mango tree, a golden oriole, and a beautiful building with a statue of Atlas holding the Globe on his shoulders.

There's so much I don't know, there's so much around me that makes me feel lost, there's so much my Father in Heaven will guide me through, if only I call to Him.

On the day of my birthday, I woke up

and walked into a chair.

And the rest of my day got steadily better from there.

I was quite distracted at work, because the realisation that I've had such an immense amount of time on earth would suddenly come upon me (what have I done to deserve twenty years?) followed by the equally sobering realisation that twenty years is just a tiny pip in universe time. These two thoughts kept circling in and out, like the ebb and flow of a wave, and to still their dance in my head I had to reconcile my life with the knowledge that although I am nothing, nothing, to the world, God's love, the love of the people around me, and the beauty of this world have made this mere moment in time something really special.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Everyday Animisms - nests and shadows


http://migrantecologies.org/Birds-Photographs-from-Railtrack-Songmaps-Exhibition

On Sunday morning (I am still getting used to the fact that church is in the afternoon) decided to go to an art exhibition - 'Everyday Animisms', which featured two series of photographic work from the "Railtrack Songmaps" project and a series of human bird 'nests'.

The world was recovering from a storm, and everything was still and I felt compelled to move slowly and stop often.

Fragile, that's how I felt.

The art pieces in the exhibition consider ‘humans and birds, placemaking and memory in a patch of urban Singapore facing considerable social and environmental change’.

The artist is Lucy Davis, and because this show is partly a last exhibition before she moves out of Wilton Close, her house is bare, apart from a chair here and there for visitors to sit on and look at the art work, and the garlands of white jasmine that are hung over door frames, and windows and mirrors and give the entire house a sweet scent.

Even before I stepped into her house I was already entranced, by a mandala made with fallen red, pink and yellow flowers on her lawn. I took off my shoes (the old sneakers I’ve been wearing almost every day, that Mum despises because they make me look ‘messy’) and walked into her house.



In the first room on the ground floor, you are faced with black and white photographs of bird nests that Davis has made, human size, and photographed at various location along the rail tracks and demolition sites at Tanglin Halt. She called it ‘Nest Invasions’. I remember trying to weave sticks together to make a nest when I was younger, but my efforts would fall apart soon after. For some reason, looking at the nests and how raffia string, bits of  old plastic bag, twigs and leaves had all been pieced together with such balance and accuracy, I felt like part of me inside was knitting together somehow. The odd thing is I don’t even know what was torn within me, or why I was sad, but that exhibition was necessary at that moment – God guides my feet on paths only He knows.

In one room, one of the photographed nests lay on the floor. I bent down to take a closer look, and nestled inside was a real, tiny bird’s nest.



Up the stairs, there were photographs of bird-shadows – computer images of birds that were printed out, and merged with Davis’ prior experience with shadow-puppetry to make transparent puppets of these images. The images were then brought back to the sites that those birds had been seen or heard, and their shadows were cast on leaves/trees/pathways/power inlet boxes… a means of ‘rewilding’. These were meant to ‘represent the fleeting magic of birdsong or the flash of a birdwing, and the ways that such everyday interventions break through the species barrier of human cities, taking us momentarily outside of ourselves.’

Monday, July 25, 2016

The Great Europe Gallivanting Adventure: Venice and Zell Am See

20 June 2016



We woke up at the crack of dawn (4.20am) intending to eat breakfast and walk to the Napoli Centrale to catch the 6am Alibus to the airport. But Giovanni met us before we left, and told us it wouldn't be safe to walk Naples when it wasn't yet light. So instead, we got a taxi, which gave us precious time to contact our parents before we left.

By some miracle, neither of us were stopped at airport security, and we sat in the departure lounge laughing at the too-tight t-shirts that Italian men seem to favour and the surprising number of men wearing suits. Nat started calling out 'SUUUIIITTT' whenever a man in a suit walked by. We were having so much fun that we had a slight scare about missing our flight, and had to run to our gate, arriving there shaking but relieved to see a long queue of people all on their way, like us, to Venice.



In Venice, we put our suitcases in the Deposito Bagagli, behind a father and son pair (the son walked very straight and tall, like a ballet dancer) who asked us, 'How long are ya'll in Venice?'

'Just a day.'

Venice is stunningly beautiful and expensive. We walked around, wandered into a garden, bought bread, apples, muesli and rice milk form a super market, and then popped into a few churches. The churches required one to have your knees and shoulders covered, and  since I was wearing a short skirt Nat and I had to fashion a makeshift longer skirt out of our cardigans.

'This is going to be a new trend, just you wait and see.'



We were entranced by the Murano Glass Pendants we saw in shop windows everywhere, for prices ranging from 5 to 7 Euros. I was overly ambitious and set my heart of getting one for 3 Euros, and it became our mission to find one for the lowest price possible. In the process, we bought an ice lolly each, and had our bread - Nat was thoroughly disppointed when she bit into her loaf and there was a gaping hole in its center! Also, for future gastronomical experiences - bread and ice cream go together so well.



At one point, we saw a beautiful window display of the Murano Glass Pendants in a shop window. Entranced, Nat leaned in for a closer look and... 'Bump!' hit her head on the glass of the shop window! We laughed and laughed. Then we entered the shop (the shop keeper had seen it all) and looked at a few more, and then asked if it were possible to get one at a lower price.

The man behind the counter looked at us in exasperation, '5 Euros is too much? If you can't pay 5 Euros, what are you doing in Venice?'

We left the shop, and they laughed as we left, which I felt was uncalled for. Nat was furious at how rude the shop keeper had been, and our mission changed from finding a pendant that was 3 Euros to finding one that was less than 5 Euros. And we did, in another shop where we got one each for 4 Euros, and left the shop with both our pockets and our pride satisfied.



The area we'd been walking in was not yet so touristy, a paint-peeling, smaller canals, and window boxes of flowers area. The houses were not large, and there were spacious squares with wells in the middle and drinking water fountains. As we got nearer the Rialto, the crowds thickened, and the buildings became steadily grander. St Marco's square was incredibly crowded, since it has the pink and white Doge's palace, St Mark's Basilica, the cosmological St Mark's clock and three buildings (now museums) with more windows than I could count. Oh, and lots of pigeons.

Around the corner is the famous Bridge of Sighs, which for some reason is less impressive to me than the imitation one in St John's College in Cambridge, but of course this original is not meant to be beautiful, since it was used to take prisoners from their trial in the Doges Palace into their prison cells. It's called the Bridge of Sighs because it would be the last time one saw the light before one would likely die in prison because of the unsanitary conditions of the cells.



I wish I could properly capture the pearlescent, pastel, intricate beauty of Venice in words. It deserves the same intense description found in 'The Waves' but I am no Virginia Woolf and I was also running out of paper.




We discovered that our tour was not in St Marco's square but in another, smaller one, and so we had to run - over bridges and through alleyways - to our destination, and we arrived just in time for the beginning of the tour.

Just as the tour began, another tour guide approached out tour guide, claiming loudly that our tour guide was acting without license and illegally. Apparently the free tours have become so popular that they threaten the businesses of licensed tour guides who then try to sabotage them with claims of legal illegitimacy - which are of course untrue.

The tour was fantastic and informative, and made Venice transform from just a beautiful place to a city of such rich history, culture and quirks that it is no wonder that so many flock there.

Venice is:

- made up of 124 islands, connected by 438 bridges

-sinking 4 cm every century, but because og people, global warming and the city itslf, it now sinks at a rate of 25cm per century

-where policemen ride on boats, and hide in between buildings with speedometers to catch the boats that speed, because the waves they create from speeding erodes the soil and accelerates the city's sinking

-home to its very own leaning tower

-a place where once upon a time, your family name was distinguished form other identical family names by what people remembered you by. For example, there was a Contarini del Bovolo (Contarini of the snail) for the family that owned a building that reminded people of a snail's shell. There was also a Contarini of the nose, for a Contarini who punched the Doge in the nose, and was executed on the same day

-where Cassa Nova escaped from prison by climbing over the roof, through the bridge of sighs, into the Doge's palace where he convinced a servant he was attending an event that was happening in the palace at the time but was feeling sick, was let out through the main gate of the palace, where he had a cup of coffee in St Mark's square before waltzing off

-where they made up their own miracle in order to make St Mark the saint of Venice, claiming that St Mark sailed into a Venetian lagoon in a fog, and the face of a lion burst through the fog, saying 'Don't worry, one day you'll be buried here and people will pray to you' (or words to that effect). The Venetians then stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria in Egypt to 'prove' it.

-where the first example of Palladian architecture, the Church of St George, gleams a brilliant white when the sun hits it, and turns yellow, then orange, then pink as the sun sets

-home to one of the world's most beautiful bookshops, where books are kept in gondolas, bathtubs and boats for when the water floods in, and cats roam freely





Halfway though the tour, we were given a toilet break in St Marco's square - the catch was, however, that to use the toilet in the cafe our tour guide had led us to, you had to buy an espresso, and use the receipt as an access ticket. Neither Nat nor I drink coffee, and the prices in the cafes in St Marco's square were extortionate. Nat was very hungry, so she thought perhaps she'd buy a sandwich from another cafe, and use their bathroom. However, every sandwich had cheese or meat, and when Nat asked if the lady could possibly make a simple vegetable sandwich, the lady was so rude. She used her bare hands to pick out the cheese from a sandwich to leave just the vegetables, and then said 'See? No cheese!' Not wanting to eat a sandwich manhandled by the server, Nat asked again politely if t was possible to make another sandwich, like that, but fresh. And the woman grew more and more irate 'No cheese! No cheese!' Nat and I left empty-handed, and ruffled by her rudeness. We managed to walk in to the first cafe unobserved and use their toilets, no espresso needed. But Nat was still hungry, and angry at how rude the shopkeeper had treated us. 'If not for the tourists, Venice would be an abandoned city,' she said, echoing what she'd said earlier about Venice seeming 'empty' despite the hordes of tourists. I understood what she meant. Venice, for all its beauty and grandeur, has an eery feeling. It is so expensive that I've heard that most locals live outside the city and commute into it for work - which is dominated by the tourist industry. Even the black gondolas with their little gold decorations look like coffins floating down the river.




But not everyone in Venice is hostile. Earlier on in the day, while treading a narrow street, Nat spotted the Museum of Carlo Goldoni, Italian Renaissance Playwright (1707-1793) who reformed Italian theatre, making it enlightened, bourgeois, and modern. We entered the museum shop, hoping to grasp slightly what the museum and the man it venerated, was about, but not intending to pay for the ticket. In the museum shop, however, suddenly the cashier and another man asked where we were from. They guessed Spanish, American, and even 'from the moon!' We told them eventually that we are from Singapore, and explained our mixed backgrounds. They laughed and laughed and asked how long we were in Venice for adn where we were going next, and we began a lovely conversation that ended in them telling us that we could go into the museum free of charge!


The man brought us around, pointing out the original murano glass chandeliers, costumes and portraits, and distinguishing the originals from the 'Cheena' (those made in China), like the mannequin and the fake fruit. Despite his difficulty with English, the man tried his best to explain the museum, giving us English leaflets and himself flipping through a corresponding one in Italian and showing us the relevant pages. He also taught us that 'bellissimo' is for a man and 'bellissima' is for a woman, and 'bellissime' is plural - and then called in the cashier and (as assigned) Nat and I proclaimed her 'bellissima!' on his behalf.



After the free tour, we ran back to the train station in fear that we would be late, but we were early, and sat with out oats and muesli dinner, washed our bowls in the public restroom, and headed to the train for our overnight trip to Zell Am See. We have beds, and spend a good few minutes doing all sorts of calisthenics on them, rolling here and there to stretch out our tired, tight muscles from all the walking we've been doing.




I change, listen to Ola Gjeilo, and fall asleep to the clackety-clack of train wheels on track.




21 June 2016

I slept well on the train, but had a strange but most vivid dream that I was a child again. Perhaps it was the rocking of the train, like a baby's cot lulling me to sleep. Nat wasn't feeling well at all, and on the train between Salzburg and Zell Am See, while I was sprawled across two chairs asleep, oblivious and bleary, she was having a terribly uncomfortable time. We arrived to cold, crisp air and a view of the beautiful placid lake, slightly misty in the morning air. We checked into Junges Hostel, into a cosy room with wooden furniture and white sheets, and a view of the mountains, including the Kitzsteinhorn which Nat pointed out.

Nat needed to rest, so she slept while I caught up on journaling. She woke up still feeling ill, and we were worried it might be food poisoning since her symptoms were very similar to what I had in Burma. I immediately thought of charcoal pills, rehydrating salts, and smecta. We called our parents and updated them, and then walked to the apothecary. Despite being ill, Nat tried her best to tell me about this beautiful place that has been her family's place for the longest time. She told me about traditional Austrian clothes - lederhosen and dirndl (we see some people wearing these!), Lufthansa Breakfasts, the bakery she and her Dad frequent, the plans for her new house, the Arabs who think of Zell Am See as a paradise and flock to it every summer. I could see why - Zell Am See is beautiful.



We got charcoal pills and anti-vomiting medicine at the Apotheke, but Nat had to sit down there because everything went black and dizzy. She didn't make a scene, just apologised to the Apothecary and asked to sit down. I was amazed at how dignified she was in such a frightening situation. The apothecary gave her water, administered some of the medicine to her, and gave us the name of a doctor close by. We managed to walk there, and discovered it was not food poisoning as we feared, but a stomach virus. Thankfully, the doctor gave us instructions, new medicine, and the hope that Nat will be better in a couple of days.

Back in the hostel, Nat went to bed, and I headed out to buy us some food, stopping on the way to get a pretzel at Nat's bakery. It had sesame seeds on it, and I kept the paper bag to show Nat, to remind her of the times there with her Dad.



Nat was adamant that I should manage to see some of the lake, and so I decided to jog around it, with her camera so I could snap some pictures. The run started off alright, although it was a little too soon after lunch to be completely comfortable. I saw a tiny pony cropping grass, and what might have been a foal beside it, but the grass was too long and wispy to see. On my right, the hills were lush and green and speckled with houses; on my left, the lake, large and dark blue and speckled with boats.



Halfway through my run, I realised that Nat might not have been the only one not completely one hundred percent, although my problem was the rather more embarrassing urgent need to go to the toilet. By the time I was 2.7km away from the hostel, I realised I Really needed the toilet.

And so, red and sweaty as I was, I ran into the poshest hotel in Zell Am See, the Grand Hotel, that happened to be just on my left.

'I was running and I think I have tummy trouble do you think I could use your toilet?' I managed to gasp out.

Downstairs to the left was the toilet, thank goodness!

Nat was still asleep when I got back, and we packed, had dinner and I caught the most beautiful sunset, the last light glinting off the peak of the Kitzsteinhorn before sinking beneath the horizon.

One lady and many bananas



I go to Cold Storage for three reasons only:

1) To get dragon fruits on sale

2) To get Adam's Peanut Butter

3) To get bananas that are selling for half-price because they are brown and spotty

In other words, when they are perfect for nice cream.

Today after dinner with Toby, Chris, Rachelle, James and Christy, I dropped by the Cold Storage at Holland Village to see if they had any bananas for sale. There was an old Auntie busying herself over the bananas, and I asked,

'Auntie, are there any old bananas on sale?'

It was like someone had switched a light on inside of her. She turned around, smiling, and said, 'You want old bananas? Auntie get for you! How many you want?'

'Quite a few,' I said, thinking of all the nice cream I could make.

She bustled over to the baskets, got a big green one, thrust it into my arms and begun piling bunch after bunch of bananas into it.

'Auntie... I think that's enough'

She was so excited that she didn't stop, and only after I said once more (after a few more bunches made their way into my basket) that it was enough, then she took the basket from me, and walked merrily away to put the half-price stickers on the bananas.

There were 10 bunches of bananas. They were so heavy they broke the strap on my tote bag.

Nice cream for days!

Sunday, July 24, 2016

The Best Thing I've Seen All Year


Credit
Every now and then in Cambridge, I like to curl up on my bed with my laptop, usually wet hair, my pillow propped up behind my back, and watch a movie. Once I tried to make a blanket fort, but it definitely didn't work. Other times, I treat myself by cycling down to the Picturehouse to watch a movie there.

In my last week in Cambridge, I went to watch the first screening of Embrace of the Serpent. Directed by Ciro Guerra, who was present at the screening, the film blends fact and fiction to create an incredible, dreamscape of the adventures of Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, and two scientists (Theodore Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes) and their search for the sacred Yakruna plant. It is the first Colombian film to feature an indigenous protagonist and one of the few fiction films to be shot in the Amazon itself.

When asked why he shot the entire film (apart from a short dream sequence near the end) in black and white, Guerra said: 'All the cinematographic elements, we used them to create an altered perspective on life ... another way of understanding the world. So you see a world that you can recognize, but everything is slightly off. Everything is slightly different. From the sound design to the black-and-white to … the way the film is told and structured, everything is taking you to a different logic. It's a way of bringing an audience into a different perspective on the world...The explorers' photographs were the principal influence, images in black and white, plate photography, almost daguerreotypes that they took. What you see is an Amazon that's completely different from the one now. You can see all the exoticism, all the exuberance. It feels like another world, another time. Being there I realized it wasn't possible to reproduce with any fidelity the color of the Amazon. There's no filter or camera or oil that lets you reproduce its significance. I felt that to do it in black and white, to get rid of colors, would activate the audience's imagination. Viewers would add the colors in their mind and these imagined colors would be more real than whatever we could reproduce. This imagined Amazon is more real than the actual Amazon."

In Cambridge, he also said the black and white erases the differences between man and nature, which was so clear in the first scene, where Karamakate crouches beside the river, quiet and blending into the jungle behind him.

On other sites, I read that the decision to use 35mm film, in black-and-white also harks back to the photographs that the journals of Koch-Grünberg and Schultes would have used. In this way, Guerra meddles with time, taking us away from the psychedelic colour and vivid sound of modern film to the black-and-white of older films. Time itself is one of the films central concerns, since the 'time period' of the film is split between the younger Karamakate's journey with Koch-Grünberg and the older Karamakate's journey with Schultes. This, in part, was because Guerra sought to highlight how modern perspectives of time as linear is different to indigenous perspectives of time.

“Time to them is not a line, as we see it in the West, but a series of multiple universes happening simultaneously... It is a concept that has been referred to as ‘time without time’ or ‘space without space.’ I thought it connected with the stories of the explorers, who wrote about how one of them came to the Amazon following the footsteps of another explorer before him, and when he would encounter the same indigenous tribe, he would find that the previous explorer had been turned into myth. To the natives, it was always the same man, the same spirit, visiting them over and over again. This idea of a single life, a single experience, lived through the bodies of several men... gave us a perspective of the indigenous way of thinking, but also connected with the viewer who could understand these men who come from our world, and through them, we could slowly begin to see the vision of the world of Karamakate.”

Another concept in the film that intrigued me was the idea of the Chullachaqui. A Chullachaqui is a person who as lost himself, an Amazonian version of the German myth of the Doppelganger, a ghost of yourself. Chullachaqui becomes a metaphor for the erosion of Amazonian culture, and in the film Karamakate says “Hear the song of your ancestors...Don’t let our song fade away.” Every person has a Chullachaqui, a hollow, empty copy of yourself. I've seen Chullachaqui in my life and I wish I didn't have to and I wish these people were fixed.

Friday, July 22, 2016

Some work things


I'm in the office, drafting a publicity write up, and my latest google searches are 'Quotes about Salsa' and 'Names for Polar Bear'. They were for the publicity write up.

In the course of this week I've written a lot of publicity write ups, been to Lasalle twice to deliver agreements, eaten a lot of edamame, had maki-san for the first time, been to my first 2.5 hour long meeting (urk), been to SAM, gone around the History Gallery in the National Museum, taken pictures of ponding in a field, discovered I wasn't meant to take a picture of that field, taken pictures of ponding in the correct field, and gone to Real Food twice, meeting the same smiley waiter both times.

Other google searches this week;

'Vegan Chocolate Hazelnut Cake'

'SAM closing hours'

'Kartoffelbrot recipe'

'provocateur definition'

'Is prata vegan'

'Peranakan Museum Exhibitions'

'XXX (undisclosed band name) singapore band interview'

'gifts that give back'

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

The Great Europe Gallivanting Adventure: Naples Part II


18 June 2016

I remember writing this on the ferry back from Capri to Naples, my eyes wilting with tiredness. It was a long day, but so good and full of adventure. 


Despite waking up on time, we were slightly late leaving the hostel and had to run, amazing race style, bags bumping on our backs, down to the harbour.When we got there, there was a panic over the tickets which we had printed without realising those were the receipts which we then had to convert into real tickets. I waited in the line while Nat went to change our receipt into tickets, but the ticket office didn't recognise the receipt. And so we missed our boat.


That was worrying, since the entire days plan happened on an island called Capri, accessible only by boat from Naples. We went back to the ticket office, and asked again for a ticket. The man behind the glass screen was grudging at first, and said that he didn't know how to find them, but after repeated asking, he made a call, found our tickets, and printed them so that we could take the second ferry out.


We sat next to a Chinese woman who took a selfie with us on her selfie stick, before I fell asleep for the rest of the ride, lulled by the boat's gentle rocking, and was awoken by Nat when we pulled into the Marina Grande Port. Marina Grande was touristy and crowded, and we squeezed through the crowds to get tickets for the funicular ride up the mountain to Capri. After we walked down a couple of alley ways and left the crowd behind us we had the space to appreciate the beautiful white buildings of the island, buildings which Nat said were reminiscent of the postcard pictures of Santorini. 


I caught the smell of pine as we walked up and down the steep steps along the slopes of Capri, the hills on our right and to our left, brilliant blue sea as far as the horizon. Giovanni did say Capri was just a pretty toy for tourists, and I can see why, because it really is beautiful. But I don't think it is just a toy - it has beautiful hiking trails and gardens, a wonderful church, a historic villa, and a perfumerie with little pots of scent outside the shops so that the pavement beside it is suffused with gorgeous scent. 


We had bread and plums and an apple and a Valencia orange each under the shade of a tree for lunch. Despite the hordes of tourists, it is easy to find quiet on Capri, and despite the intense heat, I felt such a peace, a contrast to the panic of the morning. 


We got a bus from Capri to Anacapri, standing at the back and resting our chin along a platform at the back of the bus to catch some of the breeze because the bus rounds the bends of Capri at a hundred miles an hour it seems and yet still the air is still.

In Anacapri, we see the quirky church of San Michele, which Raph recommended we visit. He had taken refuge there when his friends took the chairlift up the mountain in Anacapri, because (bless him) he is afraid of heights. We avoided the chairlift for a different reason - our student budget! The floor of the San Michele church is its masterpiece, made of painteed tiles that fit together to form a depiction of the Garden of Eden. Some of the animals looked a bit funky - I swear one of the crocodiles had a human looking ear!


Then we walked to Villa San Michele, home to Axel Munthe, author of The Story of San Michele, philanthropist, animal activist and physician. He built the Villa to be 'open for the sun and the wind and the voices of the sea - like a Greek temple - and light, light, light everywhere!', perhaps because he also believed that 'the soul needs more space than the body'. 

Nat and I decide to peruse the museum shop rather than go into the Villa itself because of a prohibitory entrance fee, and inside the shop we dissolve into laughter because a man and the cashier (at separate times) both fart, which reminds us of how Nat had heard Lajoc fart loudly and pointedly in the direction of the girls dorm the previous night!

We had to take a bus ride back to Marina Grande, which was an exhilarating whirl of dust and light and the fear of the door between my shoulder blades. We had some time to end the day at the beach, which we walked all the way along, watching people sun bathing or swimming or children clambering up the rock pier that was at the end of the beach.


On the ferry back, we go out through a door marked 'private' onto the boat's deck, where it is loud with the roar of the engine and the rush of the wind. You can see the foam-trail the motor leaves in the water, like a lace pattern on the ocean, and if you look over the front of the boat, Naples grows closer and closer. I felt so free and exuberant and I waved to the people in a cruise ship that we passed, and they waved back! Small moment of connection.

We ended the day the best way - with a Gino's pizza each. As we carried the boxes back to Giovanni's, we passed an elderly Italian man who, spying the pizza boxes in our hands, piped 'Buon Appetito!' in a thin, high-pitched voice.

'Grazie!'

We walked into the lounge in Giovanni's to see Lajoc reclining in a chair, and remembering his fart last night both of us burst into laughter! He looked bemused, and we tried to stifle our laughter and eat our pizza, but suddenly the strangest sound began, a 'brrrzzt brrrzzt', which just triggered another bout of laughter. It turned out to be Lajoc's chair, which was a massage chair. He left that night, that funny cartoon boy, and the minute he stepped out of the house, it began raining!

19 June 2016

Last night was insane. I had been sleeping peacefully, when suddenly I heard the sound of stumbling, retching, and - oh dear god - splattering as vomit hit the floor. One of the North Carolina girls in our room was being sick, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut, afraid of what I'd see if I opened them. I heard another of the North Carolina girls come in, and take her sick friend out. She came back in with a mop and cleaned up after her. I needed to use the bathroom (excellent timing, as usual) and so I unpeeled my eyes. Thankfully, none of the sick had gone on my book stash under the bed, my suitcase at the end of the bed, or our chargers at the plugs. The girl mopping explained that her friend, who had already been ill the day before and hadn't eaten anything, had had too much to drink.

The next morning the sick girl apologised, and all the girls left, without telling Giovanni. Another girl in our room let him know, and he got the cleaner to come in and give the place a thorough wipe down. My heart hurt for him, because the North Carolina girls had betrayed his trust - his only rule for his hostel is that you shouldn't get drunk on hostel premises.

Both Nat and I were tired from the past two days and from our disrupted sleep, and decided to stay in Naples and take it slow. When I told Giovanni that, his face crinkled into a smile and he called us 'bella bella'. He also calls us 'spice girls'.



We walked down to the Molo Beverello pier, posted our postcards, tried the challenge of walking in a straight line between the horses in Piazza del Plebescito (Nat managed but in my two tries I was way off, due to the imperceptible slope of the piazza).



It was nice to just have a slow day - no running for ferrys or hiking up mountains, just seeing the people of Naples, the accordion man we'd seen playing enthusiastically on the first day, sifting through the market, peering into windows and stopping often...



We got back at around 1.30pm, and Giovanni had new guests. He was delighted that we  were back in time for lunch, and made an incredible pasta lunch for us, like the first day, but this time it was Penne Arrabiatta, whipped up in 10 minutes.




We wrote a card for Giovanni after lunch, and gave to to him, our hearts heavy with the knowledge that the chances of seeing him the next morning before we left were slim. He read it, a smile spreading across his face, and hugged and kissed us and called us 'bella bella bella' and told us to come back in the future - and to bring our babies! He truly is so kind.




We spent the rest of the day indoors, except when we decided to go hunting for bananas - just as a storm started brewing. (Excellent timing again!) We ran to the corner shop, partly to out run the storm and partly because we wanted to catch the German guys before they left. The Indian minimart wanted to charge us 3.50 Euro for 4 bananas, and we thought that Carrefour express was closed, so we ran back empty handed but in time to say goodbye.

After dinner, we were in our dorm room when we heard a knock.

'Can I come in?'

It was Giovanni, who had gone out to the shops, and had brought back bananas for us!

It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by - Great Expectations, Charles Dickens


Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The Great Europe Gallivanting Adventure: Naples Part I



16 June 2016

Florence at 5.15am is blue and quiet and beautiful in a graceful way that is different from the grace of Renaissance statues.



We took two more photostrips at the Fotoautomatica machine - we did much better this time! Our 6.50am train was 20 minutes delayed, but to be in the train station with the dawn light breaking and the excitement of moving on was not a bad thing - for from it. Our train went up to 300km/h, 5 times faster than lava flow from a volcano, but that pace was still slow enough to look at the Italian landscape outside of our window. The two speeds - inside and outside a train, within and without a heart or mind or person - always amazes me.

Naples is supposed to be rainy and cloudy today, between 24 and 31 degrees (all taken from a helpful screen inside the train), and we pull into the Naples Station at about 10.15am. At first sight, Naples is grey but hot and humid, very dusty, reminiscent of Malaysia or Vietnam in the hectic nature of its traffic and the abundance of street shops selling mostly pizza and cheaply made textiles and goods. Our suitcases really struggle with the cobblestones and we squeeze to the side of the road to avoid the motorcycle cars that speed past. Giovanni's house is on the third level of an apartment block, and we set our suitcases down and are offered cups of cold water and a hour long quick summary of the rich history and attractions and its surrounding regions. Giovanni is fatherly (Nat's theory is that it is because he has no children of his own) and bald, apart from a little patch of hair sticking out of a crease of skin at the back of his neck, and when he smiles you feel like you've come to a real home amidst the nomadic life of travelling. He plays the song 'Singapore' by I Nuovi Angeli, which he first introduces to us with an animated 'da dun da dun da dun da dun!'



He is evidently proud of Naples, pointing out the incredible sunken city of Baia, the amphitheatre of Pozzuoli which he insists rivals Rome's, Naples' own gems of architecture, art, and of course, food! The finest pizzeria in Naples is Gino Sorbillo, which Nat and I can certainly attest to, and the best gelato is supposed to be Fantasia Gelati, which we didn't manage to try. He was scathing of other cities, calling Sorrento a 'shit place' that is only 'beach, horse, kiss, tits', and similarly pooh-poohing Capri and the Amalfi coast, which he says are simply toys for tourists but don't hold the real substance of Italy.



After that Italian welcome, Giovanni brought us (us being Nat, myself, 4 Germans and 1 Hungarian) into his kitchen to teach us how to make 'the easiest Italian pasta' - garlic aglio olio. His rules were:

1. The garlic must be sliced very thinly, tissue thin.

2. The garlic must be put into the olive oil cold (i.e don't heat the oil in the pan before putting in the garlic)

3. The pasta water must be seasoned only with salt, and kept to thicken the sauce.

4. The pasta must be of good quality - not Barilla, as he was very quick to point out. To Giovanni, Barilla is not pasta.

5.The time taken for the pasta to cook perfectly is the same time one takes to smoke a cigarette in the sunshine on one's balcony.

6. Dried red pepperoncini, a sweet and slightly spicy Italian pepper, is sliced in at the last few seconds.




As someone who generally prefers tomato based pasta rather than oil based pasta, Giovanni's Aglio Olio might have been one of the best pasta I've eaten in my life. We all ate out on the balcony in the sun, and were more formally introduced to the others. There's Adrien, who has a eternally anxious expression, Torben who is quiet with blue eyes, Arber, who asks all the wrong questions but is good fun, and Michele, who has foxy eyes and 2 scratches on his cheek. They are from Hamburg, in Germany, and consider Southern Germans (like those from Munich) arrogant, which annoyed Nat. We also met a Korean, Tae Yong, who I didn't see much for the rest of our time there, and a Hungarian, Lajoc, who joined Nat and I on a walk in the city, to see Naples' architecture.



It was quite grim and grey, but Naples didn't disappoint. It had church after church, all of which Lajoc seemed very keen to enter, but when we got inside he would promptly sit down, and often seemed to fall asleep. Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps not. Nat and I found it highly amusing. The most stunning thing we saw were the sculptures in the San Severo Church.

One is called the 'Veiled Christ' sculpture, by Giuseppe Sanmartino, which has the figure of Christ, dead, beneath a translucent veil. All of it is sculpted in marble, which makes it impossible to be translucent, but that is the magic of the sculpture. It convinces you to believe that rock can be sheer, which complements both the sacred and sculptural themes of the work as well - can a veil sculpted from immovable rock move up and down in breath, can a dead man come to life again? Is the figure permanently fixed in his stony posture, or, like a sleeping person, could he move if you defied all rules of the church and touched it? Would the cold, hard rock be the warm, soft skin of a person, once-dead, come to life?

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We then took the Naples metro to a station called Toledo, designed by Oscar Tusquets Blanca, where its walls and floor have been covered in shades of blue bisazza mosaics to give one the feeling of being deep in the sea or in space.

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The last part of the day was an underground tour, 119 steps down into an old underground quarry dating back to the 4th Century BC when Greeks used it to extract building materials from the bay of Naples. This underground quarry was then used for water, until after 1885, when it became a dumping ground for the city's inhabitants until WWII. In WWII, the city folk needed to use it as a bomb shelter - and they had to clear out 60 years worth of garbage. So they covered it with concrete for a quick fix instead. It was a good thing they had that bomb shelter too, as in 3 years of the war, more than 28000 bombs were dropped on Naples, and up to 2000 people stayed within that vast underground cavern. You can still see remains of the life people lived underground, including an art project of students who used old car parts to make a tank.

We emerged briefly above ground then to walk to another underground site - an ancient Roman Theatre, now buried under houses in the new city of Naples. The Roman Theatre was discovered in a woman's wine cellar, which was located under her bed through a secret trap door.

After that, we parted from Lajoc, who was after Gino's pizza. We wanted something a bit more familiar, and went on a cereal hunt and discovered the strangest thing - oatmeal seems not to be eaten in Naples, as we couldn't find it anywhere!

17 June 2016

We discovered why our oatmeal pilgrimage yesterday was in vain - Italians rarely eat breakfast, and usually just have a cup of coffee to begin their day! We, however, are not Italian, and so we enjoyed our cereal, bananas and rice milk.

The day before, we'd arranged with the German guys to go to the Herculaneum, Vesuvius and Pompeii together. However, there was no sign of them and so we left for the train station ourselves. On the way to the station we talked about the childhood stories, and I mentioned 'You are Special' by Max Lucado.

"The stickers only stick if they matter to you. The more you trust my love, the less you care
about the stickers."

Words to always remember.




We took the Circumvesuviana train to Ercolo Stavi - Ercolo is what the Italians call the Herculaneum - and listened to 'Everglow' by Coldplay on the way.The first thing I noticed when I stepped off the Circumvesuviana train were all the brightly coloured flowers, brilliant hues of pink against dark green, reminiscent of frangipani. In fact, this was a recurring theme in Vesuvius and Pompeii as well. In places of such death, life sprung more vibrantly than ever from the volcanoes fertile soil and ash. Like nature's wreath to the dead, out of the ashes in all three sites rose beauty that made it impossible to feel utterly morose.

It made me think of how I've come to see Italy as a city of contrasts: Death/life, roaring traffic/a slow pace of life, grit and grime/high Italian fashion, contemporary art/Renaissance art...

The ticket to the Herculaneum was going to be 11 Euro for me and 5 Euro for Nat, since she is an EU student under 25 years, and the ticket to Pompeii would have been another 11 Euros. But the man at the cash register was our Michele, and let us both have a combined ticket for Pompeii and the Herculaneum for 12 Euros!



The Herculaneum is incredibly well preserved, since, unlike Pompeii, it was buried by mud rather than ash, which sealed out oxygen and moisture. Some of the things we saw included a woman's bath house, a mill stone, a baker's oven, urns for wine and grain and the grisly remains of skeletons.




A bus took us to Vesuvius, climbing up the twisting paths of the mountain and showing us the gorgeous views of the Bay of Naples below. A man beside us kept exclaiming 'Bellissimo!' and took pictures of the view furiously.




The climb was steep, and the route was rather unsteady, but we had the view of Naples on our right and with that, you can't really complain. At the crater, we went on a rather garbled free tour - during which I struggled to pen down what the guide was saying while suppressing a rising tide of giggles, which occasionally erupted. We walked halfway around the rim and peered into its 330m deep crater, and then began our descent, skittering over the loose rocks and just managing not to twist our ankles.




As we reached the bottom, we spotted a few familiar figures in the distance. 4 figures, to be exact. 4 German figures, if you want to be particular. And if you want the whole story - the 4 Germans had overslept after having a little too much to drink the night before, and hadn't woken up till past ten! They'd bypassed Herculaneum and come straight to Vesuvius instead.




We took the train to Pompeii next, where I forgot to listen to 'Pompeii' by Bastille, but instead listened to a man playing an accordion in the carriage. Pompeii was much bigger than the Herculaneum, and by then we were sun sapped. But we kept going, stopping often to look at her beautiful mosaics and frescoes, and the breath-taking theatre, where we heard a group of Latin students practicing their Latin. We also stumbled upon what must have been the cemetery outside the old city walls, and I thought how strange for Romans to fear death so much they wanted to separate the dead from the living, when all the time they were living under the shadow of the mountain that would one day turn the entire city into a cemetery. And then I thought how presumptuous of me to think it was just the Romans that were ignorant of mortality, when really, the whole earth is one big cemetery and also one big cradle.

We who were living are now dying. With a little patience. 



It was a long train ride back to Naples, and oddly we met the Germans at the station when we got back! I spoke briefly to Michele and discovered that his cheek scars are from an accident involving a bicycle and a fence and a field of cows.



Nat and I had Gino's pizza for dinner, and ate it while Michele played a Traci Chapman song on his guitar.

In our room, a girl did a headstand and explained how breathing through your right nostril increases excitement while breathing through your left nostril increases calm.

Nat as still hungry so we went for some cereal, and met Lajoc, who launched into a lament about how he had arrived at the Herculaneum, and spent 3 hours there (we had spent just an hour and a half) and in consequence had missed his bus and didn't manage to get to Vesuvius as he'd hoped! Nat and I felt terribly cruel, but Lajoc is such a cartoon that we couldn't help laughing.