Tripped

Looks Like We Chose the Right Year to Go

Devastating floods have struck many of the places we visited when we were in Peru, almost exactly a year ago at this time.

Untethered

It's been a little more than two months since we touched down on American soil for the first time since January 20th of '09, but it's felt all along as if our trip hadn't really ended: the stops were all temporary, even when they lasted for several weeks, and the daily clothing choice still came down to what was in the luggage.

That's about to change. After interludes with our families, stops in New York and San Francisco, a quick side trip to Boston, a return to paradise for a few weeks, and some holiday visiting, we're back in San Francisco for at least a couple of months. Just yesterday we rented a SOMA apartment on a short-term lease, so by the beginning of the week we should be able to get at least some of our things out of storage and begin re-entering a more "normal" life. Now all we need is some income!

I'm not sure either of us is truly ready to admit that the adventure is over, but the turning of the New Year is helping force that realization upon us. Moving into semi-permanent digs will reinforce it. We're still deferring the biggest decisions - like which city will be our permanent home - until we get further into the job hunt, and yet all of that seems inevitable in a way it didn't a few months ago when we were sitting in a Land Rover in the Sabi Sands Reserve in South Africa watching a leopard on the hunt.

I still have more to say about our trip, as well as more photos to post, so I plan to keep this blog alive, although whether the posting will be as frequent as it was when we were on the road is hard to say at this point. More on that soon.

The Sound the Sistine Chapel Makes

"SHHHHHHHHHH."

The greatest single expression of genius in Western art has a soundtrack that's really a loop, and the first bar of it comes from the Vatican security guards attempting to remind the throng of hundreds in the room, craning their necks to examine the ceiling, that they're in a sacred space and need to respect the many posted requests for silence. The great shushing is often followed by a handclap, which induces a period relative quiet, interspersed occasionally by the other major security admonition: "No photos! No photos!" Then a portion of the crowd shuffles out and new visitors arrive, and the volume of conversation starts to swell and the loop begins again.

This is the most unexpected part of the introduction to the Chapel for the Sistine virgin. The rest of it - and here I'm talking all the works besides the most famous one of God about to give the spark of life to Adam - is both familiar and surprising: familiar because anyone exposed to even an introductory art history class has seen them all already many times (like Perugino's "Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter," a standard in the use of perspective); surprising even with that familiarity becausre you're still overwhelmed by the staggering volume of work, by the way each of the pieces of the ceiling relate to each other, and by the way none of them relate to the masterpieces by other artists which fill three of the walls below the ceiling, let alone to the stunning azure blue landscape of Michaelangelo's "Last Judgment," which fills the wall behind the altar.

The latter work is famous for being commissioned three decades after the ceiling was completed, when Michaelangelo was an old man, resented the commission (but you don't refuse a Pope), and battled endlessly with the pope's advisors over the content. One of the real lessons of it? Don't feud with a cranky old man wielding a brush. Just ask Biagio da Cesena, the then-Pope's Master of Ceremonies, who objected to all the nude figures in the piece and found himself portrayed as one of the victims consigned to hell, preserved for posterity in the lower right corner with a serpent chomping on his balls.

Hey Look, It's the Pope!

Somehow he's the least likely person you expect to see when you show up at the Vatican, at least if it's not a regularly scheduled papal audience or blessing day. And yet there we were at the end of a long afternoon visiting the museums and St. Peter's Basilica, admiring Bernini's piazza, and wondering why the carabinieri were herding people away from the entire south side of it. The motorcycle cops lined up on the street just beyond the piazza cobblestones were the giveaway, although it still seemed pretty low-key - maybe it's just a bunch of cardinals, we thought.

Then the motorcade roared up - too fast for me to capture as anything but a blur, as you can see, but slow enough for us to recognize the distinct face of Benedict sitting in the back of the sedan with the two yellow Vatican City flags perched on the front fenders, and waving at the crowd. Turns out when he doesn't have to ride in the Mercedes-built Popemobile, the old German still prefers a Mercedes, with the same special Stato della Città del Vaticano license plate "SVC 1" affixed to the rear that adorns any car he rides in. No way to tell if the sedan is also adorned with the Popemobile's Natuzzi white leather seats.

An entertaining end to our multiple visits to the site, which were really about the art and the architecture and the history, of which more shortly ...

Finally, the Colosseum

And it only took ten years to see it!

We were last in Rome in 1999, at the tail end of a tenth anniversary trip to Italy which had already included weeklong stops in Venice and Umbria. So the schedule in the Eternal City back then was going to be pretty tight, not much more than a full day available to us before we would hop a flight back to San Francisco. Not enough time to see anything in any depth, but enough time to take in a couple of highlights: the Spanish Steps, St. Peter's Basilica, the Colosseum.

Except for one problem: after a morning jaunt which took us past the first two and a stop for a bite to eat, we had just the late afternoon left to us for the last stop. And Eileen's feet hurt. "I need to go back to the hotel and rest for a bit," she said, and being the exceptionally sensitive and caring spouse that I am, I acquiesced. Only slightly grudgingly.

"A bit" turned into "a bit plus a nap" (that's a bit in a half, if you're keeping track) and we finally launched ourselves out the door shortly before the sun started to set — thinking, based on the closing time listed in the guidebooks, that we would have at least an hour to explore the site. Oops! Turns out that ticket sales end an hour before closing time, something we hadn't recognized. Which meant we arrived at the Colosseum just in time to have the gates swung shut in our face by a friendly guard telling us, "tomorrow, tomorrow." Except for us, there was no tomorrow.

Ever since, Eileen has been dining out on the anecdote of how she denied me a visit to the Colosseum (it also works well as a two-fer with the anecdote about our finding the Louvre closed the one chance we had to visit it on a trip to Paris), an anecdote which (as countless dinner companions over the decade can attest) allows me to sigh heavily and play the role of the victim.

And there's your capsule explanation for why we've undertaken this journey over the past nine months: we both needed new material.

No Stendhal Syndrome

... but maybe some Stendhal Sniffles. A week in Florence can induce them, and we haven't even seen everything yet. Today it was the Accademia and the David. No photo can ever do it justice; only by walking around it can you truly contemplate the mystery of Michalengelo's genius.

And this only a day after visiting the Uffizi Gallery to see all it had to offer. Parts of it can disappoint - thanks to a Mafia bombing several years ago and various crazies who have tried to slay personal demons by damaging masterpieces (including the guy who took a hammer to the David's toes), there are too many great works protected by thick glass barriers that are so poorly lit they reflect more than they reveal - but the sheer wonder of the place can still overwhelm you. The room holding Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and his "Primavera" alone is enough, and then you discover the rooms with the Raphaels and the Da Vincis and the Filipino Lippis and the Giottos and the Rembrandts and you realize you've barely touched the surface of what's there.

D-Day, the Kitsch Edition

"Bong-bong-bong." It's one of the most famous incidents of the D-Day invasion, and one of the most memorable scenes in "The Longest Day," Daryl Zanuck's all-star festival movie about D-Day: Red Buttons, playing Private John Steele of the 82nd Airborne Division, utters that line to describe what his night was like after getting his parachute tangled in the steeple of the church in Sainte Mère Église, playing dead to avoid getting shot while being forced to listen to the church bells ring the night away.

This dummy version of his ordeal sums up much of what you see when you tour the invasion sites, which I was only able to do in a limited way a couple weeks ago thanks to the horrid food-poisoning incident. There are lots of dummies, not only hanging from steeples but filling mediocre museum exhibits, and an overwhelming sense that D-Day, like most battles, was won by the Allies despite an endless series of screwups on their part and with the help of an equally endless series of screwups by the Germans. (Robert Rodat's script for "Saving Private Ryan" captures this sentiment with its joking subplot about FUBAR.)

Take Private Steele, since he was one of hundreds of paratroopers wounded or killed thanks to the panic and outright incompetence of many of the pilots flying them in on planes and gliders that night. Freaked out by anti-aircraft fire, they flew too low, or too high, or too fast, or missed landing markers, or took too steep an angle of descent, with the result that most of the 13,000 men in the two U.S. airborne divisions landed nowhere near their intended destinations.

The other two sites we visited on the same day only reinforce this. Utah Beach, where the American forces faced little opposition coming ashore compared to the units landed at Omaha Beach, is not actually where Utah Beach was supposed to be in the original invasion plans, but two miles away. If they had landed where intended, things might have been much worse for them. And then there's Pointe-du-Hoc, where Ronald Reagan made his famous speech above the cliffs during the 40th anniversary memorial in 1984 - it too was monumentally FUBAR, with U.S. Army Rangers assaulting clifftop artillery emplacements that didn't actually contain any artillery. 

Military histories are filled with chapter and verse on the fog of war, but it's  hard to believe there was ever worse than it was in June, 1944.

Leaving for Tuscany Today

The country house we're headed to with Beth & Jim and several of their friends isn't supposed to have Internet access, so posting may continue to be intermittent. And yes, I'm feeling normal again after my gut-emptying episode.

The Salmon Mousse

I really thought this guy was going to visit me the other night, and I've spent the last two days trying to avoid him since. In my case, it wasn't the salmon mousse, but the moules mariniere on Monday in Port en Bessin. Fortunately for the rest of our party I was the only one to consume them at this particular restaurant. It only takes one mal moule, but this one had a vicious streak. This also meant my part of the Normandy tour ended prematurely: no Omaha Beach, no cemetery, no Bayeux Tapestry. Ah, well, there will be other chances in the future, I'm sure.

Normandy

When in France ... one must visit classic tourist sites like this one. Extraordinary from afar, ordinary and touristy up close - that's Mont St. Michel. 

We're in Normandy for a couple of days with Eileen's brother-in-law Jim to tour the D-Day sites, while Eileen's sister Beth is on a business trip. But one of the benefits of a trip to the province is that you can also see plenty of other history, including Mont St. Michel and the Bayeux Tapestry. One thing you can't fully appreciate until you spend a day driving around here and seeing them firsthand is what the WWII chronicles mean when describing "hedgerow country." Pictures and film do a good job of capturing it, but can't quite do full justice to how confounding and claustrophic some of the fields are that the opposing armies had to fight through, with root mounds that have built up several feet in many instances.