A Night in Perugia

Ok so I am making a pact to myself to start taking more pictures on this trip, because that was one of the main things I envisioned doing and yet I have not captured so many of the striking moments and images of it. One of said moments/images was walking the morning hillside in Perugia, past the silent farmhouses, stone walls and gravel driveways, everything green but covered in frost. 

The hostel that I stayed at was another special sort of place; I was the only guest (I have come to the conclusion that I am one of maybe a handful of tourists traveling through Europe right now), and the two girls who greeted me upon arrival were living/working there, work seeming to translate to hanging out, cooking, and watching MTV, a pretty good deal aside from the fact that they also have to live in the basement of an isolated farmhouse in chilly February. We drank some wine and watched Grease dubbed in Italian, and munched on Perugian chocolate. Then I went to bed, or tried to, considering one of the girls was having a very long-lasting Skype date. I woke up at the crack of dawn, wanting to take advantage of the long hillside driveway for some form of exercise, but when I got out there I found that my legs were having difficulty enough just in walking after lugging my ridiculously gigantic suitcase around the whole previous day. 

My suitcase. Is a topic I don't even know if I have the energy to embark upon. Let's just say that whatever I'm doing is not backpacking. It is not even remotely close to the conception of backpacking. When you are carrying such a gigantic suitcase that people comment or do double takes or ask, "Are you smuggling another person in there?", you should really not be trying to undertake a backpacking itinerary. But I am. And I feel like I'm getting weaker every day. The suitcase is beating me. The other day I fell face first onto a train in trying to shove it on, and this was with people helping me. It took a human pyramid to try to get it onto an overhead luggage rack. 

So Mom, if I don't ultimately come home with my Samsonite, just try to take into account your daughter's physical and mental well-being in proportion to the cost. Because believe me, I love that suitcase. It's seen me through all kinds of adventures. But I think it was the moment where I, dying of hunger and about to set off into the farmlands of Perugia, seeing no other option but hitting up the supermarket next to the train station, and had to lug the behemoth in with me and then try to communicate, in Spanitalian, my need for temporarily leaving the suitcase while I collected my groceries, the ensuing spectacle being one that I will leave you, dear readers, to imagine....  it was that moment where I saw my fate of traveling in Europe very clearly, and that fate did not involve the suitcase. 

I actually took a taxi to the hostel, and it was a damn good thing, because I couldn't imagine trying to lug the beast over gravel, through the darkness, over what was basically a mile of mountain, to a farmhouse I wouldn't even know how to recognize. The girls couldn't imagine it either, and they stared at me as if I had super-human strength. 

"You brought that all the way here?" They gasped. They had not seen the taxi, and for one reason or another I was embarrassed to tell them I had taken it. Actually, I know the reason. The reason was that the taxi had cost as much as one night at the hostel. But whatever... it had been well worth it for the luxury of riding in a car, listening to music on the radio, and I hadn't had that experience in at least a month. So anyway, I did what I tend to do a lot, which is lie. 

"Yeah!" I said. "It was pret-ty challenging. Could you pass the wine?" 

The only problem was, I was worried about how my story would hold up if I tried to do the walk the next day only to collapse in a gravel rut halfway down the mountain. Thankfully, it wasn't a problem. I hitched a ride with an old Italian farmer, driving one of these miniscule contraptions. My suitcase went in the back and the two of us squeezed in the front, him leaning over me to change the gears. Every so often he would say something unintelligible with a cheerful wizened smile, and I would nod and smile back, and on we would go. At the end of the driveway, he tried to get his hands on the suitcase, but I shouted "Io! Io!" And practically pushed him away, but only because I didn't want him to die. 

So that was all very pleasant, and I felt rather optimistic as I waited for the bus amidst the slowly melting frost. And waited. And waited. A countless amount of cars had passed and stopped at the intersection, passengers staring in disbelief at the Samsonite. I waited and waited some more. I checked my clock. It was 10 minutes after the bus was supposed to have arrived. That's when I started to get a little less optimistic. I couldn't call a cab; I didn't have a number. I was not about to walk all the way back up that hill to the hostel. So I just said a little prayer and continued to wait. 

By and by a man came along and gave me a funny look. 

"You do know there's no bus today, right?" He said first in Italian, then in English. "It's a Perugian local holiday. You have to take line C, but it will come very infrequently." 

Really, Universe? I thought, Really??!

But I am working very hard on being Flexible and Open and Trusting, so I thanked him very nicely, and dragged my suitcase down a few more blocks of road to the stop for line C. I waited another half hour, during which another little old Italian man came by and tried to tell me that I was at the wrong stop, because it was Friday, and this was a line for Sundays and holidays. 

"It is a holiday," I tried to tell him, "A Perugian local holiday, to be exact!" But it came out more like a lot of  "Spanish, Spanish, intelligible" and finally he gave up, waved his hands dismissively, and moved on. Whatever. It's not my fault he doesn't know his county's ways. And finally, FINALLY, two minutes before schedule, I saw the bus rounding the bend, and my suitcase went on ok and I didn't even pay (like lying, not paying for public transport is a thing I tend to do a lot of in Europe), and I made it just in the nick of time to my train to Rome and then Napoli. 

Oh yes, and I fell trying to get my suitcase on the car again. But I'm sure you're smart enough to know by now that that goes without saying. 

Next stop: Pisa to see the tower, and what do you know, it really does lean. I allowed myself the luxury of being a shameless tourist, and even asked a pack of Spanish girls to take my picture in front of it. I wanted to be ducking as if afraid it was going to fall on me, but the Spanish girl taking the photograph would have none of it. 

"No, no! You're too SMALL!" She yelled. "Move that way and pretend you're propping it up!" 

"That's too CLICHE!" I yelled back. 

But she was, after all, the photographer, so I finally sighed and somewhat begrudgingly put my hands where she told me to, and afterwards we went over the results together and giggled, and I went away basking in the afterglow of my first legitimate Spanish conversation in a very long time. 

I had to power-walk back to the station to catch my train, but did manage to get a few pictures on the way... I loved something about the dirty, gritty, pastel colors of the houses overlooking the river. Then I was back on the track again, going farther into the depths of Tuscany to stay overnight at a farmhouse in Perugia.  

My Italian Altar.

Complete with pine-cone that almost fell on my head, and newly purchased fairy and wild boar. The man at the Italian toy store asked if I wanted them gift-wrapped, and I said yes, not because I was embarrassed, but because it made them even more of a special present to myself. 

Bread, Ham, and the Courageous Quest for the Vegetable

After the long day of exhibits and 48 hours of a significant amount of walking in my cowboy boots, I was starting to feel maybe like I wanted to die. I bought an Italian phrase book, sat with it a while and learned how to say "I need a plumber, urgently" and "I'm mad about you, kiss me!" and then embarked upon the long walk home toward Fulvia's. I was absolutely starving, but planned to wait until I got close to her house where I knew there was a supermercado that might offer at least some greenery. 

I always think France is bad with the ratio of bread to everything else, but then I get to Spain or Italy and find myself longing for the days of being in a country where there is a general acknowledgement of the vegetable. I had two restaurant salad experiences in Spain during the four months that I was there; in one, the vegetables were covered in rock salt. In the other, our friend Edgar the waiter laughed for 10 minutes at my friend and I who had ordered the salads, until he realized we weren't joking. Then he repeated all the ingredients in the salad with a great air of disdain.

"It's basically just a lot of vegetables, you know," he concluded. But we were adamant. Finally, he brought us two bowls of lettuce with the occasional tomato, and bread, of course, on the side. My friend Lorena was so jealous that she decided to order a salad, too. But Edgar was back in two minutes. 

"We've run out of lettuce," he told Lorena. "Sorry." 

And that was my second salad experience in Spain. 

Now, I had technically only been in Italy one day, but I was already having terrifying flashbacks to that phase in my life where I felt like I was turning in to one big slab of ham, with baguettes of bread for arms. I consoled myself by saying that surely at the supermarket I'd be able to purchase my staple healthy meal; prepared couscous and grated carrots, and maybe some fiber wafers, laughing cow cheese, and/or tuna to make things really exciting. But when I finally reached the supermarket, feet feeling on the verge of falling off, the woman inside looked at me like I had bugs crawling out of my ears when I mentioned couscous. As for vegetables, the only options were frozen, and in a big plastic bag. I scanned desperately around the whole market, but the only thing I could find that seemed mildly healthy was yogurt, so I bought one and drank it down as I searched the streets for other possibilities. I went into a bar/restaurant where a group of locals were hanging out... all conversation stopped when they overheard my horrid attempts at Italian. 

"Insalata?" I said, and then felt like an idiot. The bar looked like the last place in the world that would offer salads. So then I did what always gets me into trouble, I mumbled a mix of Spanish and made up words that in my head translated to, "Oh never mind, I see you only have sandwiches." 

"Sandwiches?" The Indian man behind the counter perked up. "I can make you a sandwich! What kind?" 

"NO!" I stopped him quickly. Anything but another goddamn sandwich. "No importa," I said, and began to back away, but as usual, that got me nowhere. 

"Wait, wait!" He said, in English now. "What is it that you want?"

"Insalate," I said, "Es posible?" And I pointed at the street and moved my hand back and forth to try and indicate other restaurants, but he wasn't about to lose business. 

"I can make you a salad," he said. "Mixed salad? To go?" 

And I must have looked so relieved that he knew to seize the opportunity, and came out from behind the counter and took my arm. 

"No, to stay," he said. "You come back here, into the restaurant. I will make you food." 

And so for the second time that day I was led into a back room by an old man, because going along with it was simply easier than saying no. 

But once I sat down (the only person in the "restaurant," since it was about 5 pm), I started to have severe second thoughts. He was offering me formulas, and various options of pork and liver, and I was trying to find the best way of communicating my desperation for vegetables, short of running into the kitchen, gathering them up in my arms, and weeping with joy. For the first course, at least, we reached a mutual consensus that I would have lentil soup. As I was waiting, he of course brought me a full bread basket, most of which I devoured after a brief battle between my stringent mind and physically starving body. And then I sat feeling sorry for myself, and guilty for eating the bread, and fat and hungry at the same time, and stupid, and lonely, and wanting to go home. I worried about the outcome of the meal; would I just end up getting meat and bread after all? And be charged an astronomical sum for it? There had been no prices shown to me, and he knew I was an idiot, Italian-illiterate American... anything was possible. 

It was all very dramatic, and I may or may not have been sitting with my head in my hands when he came out with the soup. 

"Here you go," he put it down with a concerned look, "Nice food."

And it was actually quite delicious, and came with more bread of course, but I ate it all and started to feel marginally better. He came to take it away and ask me about my second course, and I said "vegetales" for about the 200th time that evening. There was mention of a salad, and then mention of grilled vegetables, and it wasn't quite clear which one I was getting. When I received a plate of grilled vegetables drizzled in oil, I stared at it in dismay. 

"I'm bringing you a salad right after this, too," he said quickly, and so I perked up. I ate a few of the grilled vegetables, with more bread, and while I was waiting another customer was ushered in, a man with a certain sort of vibe. At first I felt safe, so to speak, because it seemed like he was the boyfriend of the lone waitress who flitted in and out. But before long, I wasn't so sure. 

"Does that please you?" He asked, of my plate of grilled vegetables. I wanted to throw the bread basket at his head. But instead I just said "Si," curtly, and then ignored him. It's a little more than disconcerting to have a lone and lecherous man sitting behind you as you eat, not to mention are simultaneously feeling fat and low blood sugar and vulnerable, but I think I handled it pretty well considering the circumstances. I didn't cry, nor did I stab him with my fork. And I was as happy as a kid on Christmas when the Indian man brought out a big bowl of fresh, raw vegetables, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, and no dressing. It was perfect, and afterwards I was feeling so good that I even responded a little to the man's consistent efforts toward conversation. I learned that he was Cuban, and he had seen Maine, from a boat, when he was on his way to a "job" in Canada. 

"Interesting," I said. 

"Can we keep in contact, after this?" He asked. 

"No," I said. And I went to pay for my lovely three course vegetarian meal, which had only come to 12 Euro, and I thanked the Indian man profusely and went to buy another yogurt for later that night, and then I felt wonderfully justified in hanging out on my comfy bed at Fulvia's for the rest of the evening, surfing the web. 

And that was the end of my stay in Genoa. 

In Which I Enjoy the Works of Ohne Title, and Get Trapped in a Quentin Blake Exhibit (Part 3)

My feet were dragging (dogs were barking!) by the time I passed this banner for a Quentin Blake exhibit, and I thought, "Well, that looks great, but I have to draw the line somewhere." In my mind I was headed to the Genoa aquarium, since it's the most famous one in the world (so they say)... but of course, I don't think anything could ever compare with the experience my mother and I had in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, home of the REALLY BIG SHARKS. 

So anyway, when I was wandering around the port and getting lost and eventually found myself right directly in front of the doors for Quentin Blake, I thought, oh why not? I figured it would be cheap, or maybe even free for estudiantes. But when it turned out to be 4 Euro, which is, no doubt, cheap, I still suddenly had a change of heart. I had two twenties that I didn't want to break and a lot of spare change that didn't quite tally up to 4 Euros. 

"Oh well," I told the man at the front desk, holding out my change purse. "No importa." I shrugged and was about to turn on my heels, but he was suddenly more determined than I was that I get to see the exhibit. 

"Wait!" He said. "Count your change. Count it carefully!" 

I did, and arrived at 3 Euro exactly, and held it out as evidence. He took it from me, and counted through it again. He actually counted through it a few times, each system more inefficient than the last. He scratched his head. 

"No importa," I insisted. 

"Si, Si!" He countered. He held up a finger for me to wait a moment, and ducked behind the screen standing behind the register. When he returned he was carrying his wallet. I groaned. 

"No!" I said. 

"Si!" He told me. 

He counted up my collection of Euros again, before adding his Euro to the mix. 

"Mille grazie," I said, with an air of relief that made me sound much more desperate to see the Quentin Blake exhibit than I ever had been. During the whole interchange, I had made sure to keep my wallet placed in a way that assured he did not see the two twenties sticking out of it. He gave me my ticket, and told me all about the order I should view things in, and what was included, and where to go (the exhibit consisted of a few stands of illustrations placed in the lobby) and then I was finally free to peruse at my leisure. It was all very fun to see, especially the video of Quentin Blake working in his studio, and I ended the walk feeling very inspired to finally have one location to work in once I get to California, and excited to wander around the port some more, writing in my journal and planning the future. 

"Mille grazie!" I yelled as I made my way out the door. But he wasn't letting me go that easily. 

"Wait!" He said, running up to me and holding the door closed. "There's a video to watch!"

"I know, I watched it," I said, pointing toward the tv stand. 

"No, another video," he said, beckoning me into a back room. 

"Oh boy," I said, and followed. 

The room was one of those meant for children, with coloring books and interactive activities. There were also chairs and a large screen tv on the wall. He pulled out a chair for me and put a DVD into the player. While that was happening, I made the mistake of asking something along the lines of, "How do you say "where" in Italian?" Only it came out, "Spanish, spanish, intelligible," and he looked very confused and I said "No importa" again, but he insisted that we follow through with the interaction. Thirty minutes of mangled French, Spanish, and Italian later I had learned that the post office was in the center of town, there were restaurants nearby, and the phrase for "Where is" in Italian is "Do've." 

And then I sat down to watch the video, which was animated, and long, and all about a singing frog. It was painful. After about fifteen minutes in, of trying to be positive and thinking about how, after all, he had lent me a Euro and so I was obliged to get the most out of the exhibit, the frog broke into song for the sixth time and I decided to get the hell out of there. I said no goodbyes this time as I tried to slide silently out the front doors, but he had been lurking behind an illustration stand and intercepted me again. 

"You didn't finish the movie?!" He asked in dismay. 

I apologized, in Spanish of course, and mimed being tired. 

"It was all bellissimo," I said. "Mille grazie."

"But there's another video," he said. "This one is even more bellissimo. You have to see it!" 

I believe I groaned outright, and sent a look of distress toward the door. But he paid no attention, beckoning as he marched toward the back room. Head hung in defeat, I followed, wondering if I would ever see the light of Genoa again. At the entrance to the room, he took something from his pocket and offered it to me. 

"Drinkable yogurt?" He asked. Figuring that refusing would probably turn into much more of an ordeal than simply accepting, I shrugged and said ok. Depending on how many more movies were on the agenda, it might be necessary to stabilize my blood sugar. He started the movie and proceeded to tell me all about it as it played, and I made the mistake again of trying to ask a question in response to what he had said, and then the whole choppy Spanish-French-Italian rigamarole started up again. 

"At least this has gotten me through a good portion of the movie," I thought to myself. But before he left the room, he did an about face and pushed a button on the DVD player. 

"I'll rewind it to the beginning for you," he said. 

"Oh, Grazie," I said, wanting to scream. 

And so I suffered as long as I could through the latest animated video, which was, I admit, more beautiful, and might actually have been quite pleasant to watch if I did not have the distinct sensation of being an animal trapped in a room. I paced back and forth a little, and when some other exhibit-goers wandered in and started to watch, I felt that I was justified in leaving for once and for all. The man was back behind the desk now and therefore could not get to the door quick enough to stop me. He did, however, try one final resort, responding to my decisive "Good-bye" with a question in Italian. 

"No comprendo," I said, even though I was pretty sure I had. 

"What... are you doing... tonight?" He said slowly and clearly in French. 

"Ah... I don't know... I walk myself!" Was the literal translation of what I yelled back, as I shoved open the doors and went free, FREE, into the glorious sunshine of afternoon Genoa by the sea. 

confetti on the street in Pisa

Next I went to an exhibit of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who I have just learned all about through wikipedia, haha. Like Hofmann, he was also taken prisoner during World War 2, by the Germans, and spent 35 months in prisoner of war camps... he finally managed to escape and worked with the underground resistance in France. He also dug up his camera, which he had buried on farmland. News had reached the U.S. that he was dead, and so MoMA started preparing a posthumous restrospective of his work. Oops. Anyway, wikipedia also informs that Cartier-Bresson was the first photographer to photograph the post-war Soviet Union, and that's what the exhibit was focused upon. 

I would love, not surprisingly, to learn about and do more photography. Right now I just have an old cheap Canon camera that is slow and runs out of batteries every five minutes, and takes... adequate pictures. I guess it's good because I wouldn't want to have to worry about a really expensive camera getting lost or stolen right now. But I'm looking forward to someday having the knowledge and equipment to go through a true photography phase... wandering, pondering, zooming in. It kills me to see absolutely gorgeous ideas and compositions, only to have the batteries die or the camera capture something ten times less sharp, less vivid. I can see how one might develop a whole relationship with their camera, once they found the one that was right, one whose perception of the world they agreed with. 

This is one of Cartier-Bresson's quotes on the moment of photography: 

"There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."

Really, Diesel?

Although I guess the fact that I am posting this in the blog is a testament that the campaign works in getting people's attention... 

In Which I Enjoy the Works of Ohne Title, and Get Trapped in a Quentin Blake Exhibit (Part 1)

On my second day of Genoa I was feeling ambitious, and ended up doing another triple-whammy of museums. First was the Otto Hofmann exhibit at the Palazzo Ducale. Otto Hofmann was part of the Bauhaus school, and I'll tell ya. Well, actually, I won't, because I'm trying to think of a metaphor for the experience of walking through 8-10 rooms of Bauhaus paintings, and words are really failing me. All I can say is that on the eighth room I envisioned a scene where two characters are walking through a junkyard, and one almost gets impaled by a tv antennae or something sticking out, and their reaction as they shove the antennae away is: "Jesus, I feel like I'm in a Bauhaus exhibit!" So that's how I feel about that. 

Far and away my favorite part was a room full of saved and salvaged letters by Hofmann, sent to friends and loved ones while he was fighting in World War 2 in Russia (he was actually taken prisoner for a long time). But the letters. were. GORGEOUS. It was the only time in the whole exhibit I felt moved to take pictures, and luckily the Italian security guard understood the emotion and waved her permission. "No visto niente," she said afterwards, with a wink. I went from letter to letter in a state of awe and inspiration, such as usually falls upon me when I see beautiful images combined with words. Hofmann had brought his pens and watercolors to the front, and in the margins and headings of the letters were vivid illustrations of the Russian countryside, the houses and towns, and later, those same towns going up in purple, red, orange flames. 

"The colors are like a Grunewald; the horrible is so close to the beautiful," he said in one of his writings. I have been google imaging him, trying to find one of his later paintings based on the Russian villages in flames, but to no avail. At least it's somewhat refreshing to have seen works obscure enough so that they are not all over google image... 

Another point worth mentioning from the exhibit is that it may or may not have taken me eight rooms to realize that Ohne Title was not, in fact, another artist very similar to Otto Hofmann ("I like some of his work," I thought to myself, "but my God, there's a lot of it considering it's someone else's exhibition!") but the German word for Untitled. Ahem. 

I blame spatial issues on the wall placards for this misconception, and for the fact that I'm still trying to reconcile in my mind that there is not an artist named Ohne Title, whose works and biography I was for a short time very interested in learning more about. 

The Blue B & B in Genoa

On my blog Life and Other Absurdities, you'll find stories about my utter-character of a Spanish Senora, "Chiqui," who smoked and wore leopard print ensembles and refused to eat, and lived in a rather glamorous apartment filled with chandeliers and art. As for Fulvia, the Italian senora who ran the "Blue Bed and Breakfast," neither her character nor apartment were quite so extreme, but they were still both enough to take me back to those grand old days of staying with Chiqui.

Another posh, trim, middle-aged smoker, Fulvia called me "Elizabet" with exactly the same lilt, and like Chiqui she was always popping her head around the corner to ask about my day and determine how my language skills were progressing. We had an agreement; she would only speak Italian to me, and I, with the aid of an enormous Italian dictionary, would do my best to respond. I usually had to abandon the dictionary altogether in favor of miming things out, and Fulvia would shout her guesses in Italian, and when I thought she had it right or was getting tired I would point and nod, and so I got to play charades every day in addition to learning Italian. 

At nights she offered me tea and on the second evening she called me out to see the spectacular sunset on the balcony... not to mention, I had a gigantic comfy bed and a delicious spread of breakfast set out every morning. We gave each other a hug good-bye, and I left her a little cartoon of me with my gigantic suitcase saying, "Mille Grazie," and I am already looking back on my brief experience at the Blue B&B fondly!

Hello, Genoa!

I have been having my fair share of existential crises during this trip, especially since arriving in Genoa, where I was immediately forced to come to certain fundamental facts of life, such as: 

1) Cities alongside the Mediterranean are not always WARM. 2) It's usually good to look up the address of your hotel BEFORE you start walking in search of it. 3) Italian is not, actually, Spanish. I do not, actually, speak it. 

So there was a quick and effective learning experience that took place, and soon I had arrived somehow at the Blue Bed and Breakfast, which is actually a room in an Italian woman's apartment. More on that later. 

I have since been wandering and musing and being very, very cold, and being pleasantly surprised by how beautiful the city is, and confusing many a citizen and shop owner with the language that I have basically invented out of my sheer refusal to speak English. Nobody knows what it is or what I'm trying to say, me included, and the most basic of interactions turn into 20 minute long miming rituals with head scratching, picture drawing, and the occasional phrase in French or Spanish. ANYTHING BUT ENGLISH. This is the extent to which I am scarred from living in countries and feeling the obligation to perfect the language. 

And so of course, I am already missing France, just two hours away-- where they embrace the power of the vegetable, and nobody asked me where I was from in every interaction since I am now so obviously a tourist, and where I could have extensive dialogues about everything from buying glasses to shipping my leather jacket home, with discussion of rates and insurance and debates upon whether to roll or fold. For the record, Mom, the woman at the post, who calls herself La Reine D'Emballage, insists that it's fold. Anyway, the emotions go up and down so many times a day I can't even keep track of them anymore, and venturing into more unknown territory at least provides the necessary fuel for more stories... 

Uh oh. I should probably be careful what I wish for. 

Good-bye, Villa Saint-Exupery hostel with your stained glass windows and bar in the chapel and blasts of Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga and sometimes the Macarena! Good-bye, delicious array of cereals in the morning! Farewell, hostel crowd with your red-bull vodkas and f*ck-laden conversations and angst and guitars! Not to mention delicious sound-bytes such as: "Don't you know Australia Day? It's like... the most celebrated day in Australia!" I will, at least, miss the cereal... 

  

My Perfect Day (Part 3)

I'm not always sure how I feel about Matisse, and the surrounding hooplah.  I mean, he draws a confident line. And of course, he was innovative and avant-garde and I do enjoy a lot of his works, but there's also a large portion that fail to inspire me. It's just kind of that Matisse style over and over again with nothing behind it. And I got especially jaded when I was reading a book about his cut-outs, and it had all these typical philosophical quotes by the artist like, "cut-outs are the window into the soul" and "each time you cut away the paper, you enter a new layer of perception," and actually I'm totally making those up, but it was enough to make me to roll my eyes, shut the book, and say "Oh, Matisse." 

So that's just the current stage of cynicism I'm in with him, and really, I shouldn't say anything that I'll regret because nobody knows anything anyway, whether it's me or Matisse, and it's nice that he brought more color into the world and I'm just jealous because at the moment I'm incapable of doing the same. On another note, it was fun to see some of his earliest works, which were basically indistinguishable from any other (talented) French art student's of the time- still-lifes, landscapes, portraits of dead martyrs. 

So that was the Matisse museum, and once I got back to the hostel I made friends with a Turkish pop star and we went to go get delicious Indian food and there were hilarious Bollywood music videos and lots of wine and later, a live blues/rock and roll band, so all in all, from the run along the hillside to Chagall and Matisse and wandering and archaeological ruins, to Indian food and wine and live blues, it was basically my perfect day and I was truly sad to see it end! 

Ah well... on to the next!

My Perfect Day (Part 2)

Next was the Matisse museum, conveniently located amidst archaeological ruins. As devoted readers of this blog will know (that was a joke!), I recently developed a passion for Vertebrate Paleontology which extends into the archaeological realm. Corresponding dreams include visiting Pompeii and other sites in southern Italy (coming up soon, hopefully!), participating on an archaeological dig in Mongolia (stay tuned!) and marrying a dashing archaeologist. 

Unfortunately, due to a current bout of excessive cynicism I am unable to bring myself to make any flippant commentary about that last goal. But what I am attempting to say is that I felt that the mesh of fine art and archaeology perfectly reflected my inner state, and here are some pictures of what was once a Roman town with splendid baths and sewage system:

      

I got a little teary standing between these two works- huge- and such good vibes radiating off of both of them! : )