mi è sbagliato

one of the greatest things about living with a family who speaks another language is the inevitable moment in which one makes a subtle but grievous error. switch some letters around, confuse your vocabulary, experience some maschile-feminile discordance in a high pressure situation: languages can be minefields. but with the right attitude you can also turn yourself into a source of entertainment for those generous enough to invite you into their home. briefly, my top two.

last monday, when i moved in to my new digs in the apartment of i Signori Gallo, i put all my stuff down in my room and then, during the tour, asked if they would prefer if i took off my shoes when i came into the house. or at least that's what i intended to ask. my clothing vocabulary is a little rusty, so in actuality i asked these wonderful retirees if they would prefer, upon entering the house, if i took off my pants. good one.

just tonight - monday is apparently my off-day: at dinner we were talking about varieties of local sausage and i proudly recalled a type that we had shared the week previous - the complex and delicious san budello. but, again, the disconnect between the tongue and a mind overtaken by hubris: what i ended up saying was 'san bordello,' which, after a period of collective and prolonged laughter, my host sister informed me by less-than-subtle circumlocution to mean 'holy whorehouse.'

london, paris (part III)

allora, i'm going to be a little more brief for this second half of the spring break highlights, i'm exhausted.

after visiting the arkitektur museet and moderna museet in stockholm i jumped on a bus to the airport, where i jumped on a plane to london. one hour after touchdown, i arrived at my buddy ted's flat with chilled guinness in hand. it was fantastic to see him - ted, my other soulmate tom and i were roommates on the theatre in london program, and ted has remained in london with an internship at parliament. not too shabby. the next morning, we enjoyed together a full english breakfast, which attentive readers may recall had become a veritable institution for room 14 during our january stay in london. with such rocket fuel in my blood, i finished up and mailed out my take 5 application (take 5 is a u of r program that allows students to pursue a course of study novel to them for one year, tuition free - i'm hoping to study german history in the early 20th century). ted and i went for a nice walk in hyde park and shared our deepest secrets. the rest of the day we caught up with other people from the u of r in london and went to various pubs and clubs with them and theirs. we were lucky enough to catch some live irish folk music, which i must say is almost on par with a full english breakfast in capacity for circulatory acceleration.

thursday i went over to the national gallery for the morning and took in the sights of many of the paintings we have been studying in my art history course, specifically piero della francesca and other quattrocento masters. in the afternoon, ted and i went to the novello theatre and saw the royal shakespeare company in a production of As You Like It. it was simply delightful - on the theatre program we had seen the same company in productions of Twelfth Night and A Comedy of Errors and i couldn't have enjoyed more the opportunity to soak in the thematic correspondences with those productions in this, the final play in their comedy season. plus we sat front row centre for 5 pounds. yeah bud. rather, yeah bud. the use of italics is an art i have yet to master.

ted and i left his flat at 03:45 the next morning to walk to waterloo station; from hither we took the train to paris nord, otherwise known (in this sentence) as 'yon.' we strolled around in the morning (arrived at 09:30 local time), including a peak inside sainte chappelle - stained glass like you've never seen, and notre dame. we had a humorous moment of self reflection on our american identities when we overheard a large woman's grotesquely nasal southern drawl resound within the otherwise silent sainte chappelle: y'all wanna go see that big church naow? by big church i can only assume she meant the nearby notre dame, among the world's most recognizeable and well-known monuments to human capacity when creating with an intention toward the divine. i did not appreciate very much this insertion into the silence. oh well, we chuckled about it later.

ted and i then walked through les jardins des tuileries and up the champs-elysees to l'arc de triomphe, where we met our friend rachel. equally fantastic to see her. we bought a quantity of wine and cheese, several baguettes, and spent the afternoon consuming said gifts of gods. that night rachel's friends from her study abroad program in paris came over and then we went to a bar called le piano-vache (the piano-cow - i have no idea, apparently it's famous) for a st. patrick's day pint and then had crepes on the way home. crepes are also gifts of the gods.

the next morning we got up, ate granola, yogurt, baguette, and cheese, and headed out for a stroll. our destination: student protests against the current french legislation that creates an extremely 'precarious' situation for new graduates. as much as i sympathize with the cause and hope that the french government will pursue a lasting solution to these issues, i must admit that if one is going to write a popular polemic, one should find a more forceful title than 'against precariousness.' the article and bulletin that was pressed into my hands several times through the afternoon might have as well been titled: 'yeah, so, like, the way we feel right now - it's not great. we'd prefer to feel otherwise. can we do something about that?'

a brief note on this to put the american post-grad job market into perspective: under the current french law, if you're under 26 it's very difficult to find a job that isn't of a specified and very brief length, for example, 6 months. when you're hired, you know you'll be fired. with an unemployment rate of 20-25% in the 16-26 age demographic, that can't feel great. more importantly as a cause of dis-ease (one might say a feeling of 'precariousness') : if you're under 26, as it stands right now in france you can be fired at any time, and your (former) employer is under no legal obligation whatsoever to give you a reason. i just realized that sentence contains an unintentional but a propos sad face. i was glad to add my presence and voice to the number of protesters. there was some violence and about 100 arrests later in the afternoon, but we had long since gone to experience other aspects of french culture besides popular revolution. namely, montmartre and sacre coeur. on that note, mosaic is the artistic method that is currently most impressive to me.

that night we hung out more with CIEE paris people and did a little dancing at a fun club where the bartenders played cymbals and empty glasses in their spare time. i'm thinking of making that a career goal, but for no more than 6 months. sunday we laid pretty low - ted and i went to a park we thought was closer than it really was (actually in le banlieu - danger will robinson!) and wrote some things down on pieces of paper. on route to the train station, we visited with rachel's family, who had just arrived for a 7-day visit. it was equally lovely and surreal to get together with friends and family in a paris apartment.

i headed to the train station for the final leg of the journey - paris-florence overnight. i spoke a frightening creole of french and italian to the other passengers in my couchette and read the night away. arrived back in arezzo at 09:15 - just in time to wash my face and head to class. va bene.

20 minutes was not nearly enough (spring break part II)

i have to move on from santa maria degli angeli, but here's a link to a picture of the doors: ready, get set, be moved.

in the afternoon i met up with joe and we ate lunch next to the colosseo. then we walked up towards villa borghese and took pictures of each other overlooking la piazza del popolo and the rest of the roman skyline in the late afternoon sun. in the evening we went out to a lovely dinner with my friend robyn drucker (studying this semester in rome) and mike higgins (among other things: my friend from rochester, fellow fairport alum, member of intramural volleyball powerhouse team discovery channel, robyn's boyfriend). then we hung out a bit at robyn's sweet pad and headed back to the hostel, where we promptly lost consciousness. we had a nice bonding experience with the other 8 people in the room when one of our number was snoring so loudly that everyone else woke up. but, being a hostel, we all chuckled about it until we were able to rouse him long enough to get him on his side. later we learned his name was jason and he is in the 5th month of an 8 month european tour - solo. the thought of that scared me.

saturday i went to the vatican museum, and can i just say, that was bitchin'. i was very excited to recognize and name many of the paintings from our art history class, and i spent most of the morning strolling around documenting the various symbols that accompanied and identified various saints. one of my favorites, san girolamo (st. jerome), is usually pictured with a book to signify that he done learned real good (if memory serves he was the translator of such famous and influential works as...the vulgate), a wide brimmed red hat (to symbolize his leadership role within the church) and a third image, seamlessly linked to the other two - yes, you guessed it, a ferocious lion. i read in one of the little commentaries that san girolamo kindly removed a thorn from a lion's paw - i'm serious, that really happened. i feel like one of aesop's fables treats a similar subject matter, but i can't remember if at the end the lion eats the mouse who helped him or if he sits for a portrait with some cardinal in the desert translating the bible while occasionally beating his breast with a rock.

two images from the sistine chapel: michaelangelo's self-portrait, just down and to the right of the barrel chested Christ the Judge, is holding in his hand a deboned, gutted, and yet entirely preserved human skin. it creeps me out thinking about it. secondly, everyone is ripped. if all goes well with my forearm exercises, this is what i'll look like doing my italian homework by the end of the month. speaking of ripped, i was blown away by Laocoon. even with that resolution, can you see the veins in his quads? from the moment i first saw that picture in a latin book with the caption 'vatican museum,' i was pretty much on my way.

i spoke with my parents on the phone from the elliptical piazza in front of st. peter's, and while i was doing that 4 nuns came up and sat down next to me and busted out 4 pizzas. they were so excited about it!

in the evening joe and i were walking around and happened upon a large demonstration protesting the recent intensification of italian drug laws - specifically, the criminilization of marijuana. we walked along with it for a while and joe took pictures. it was in the national newspaper La Repubblica the next day, but the front page was taken up by a demonstration that had happened simultaneously in milan. neofascists had gotten a permit to have a parade, and a corpus (disjointed, naturally) of anarchists crashed the party. by crashed, i mean arrived in a large number and started throwing rocks. when the police showed up, both youthful extremes of the political spectrum turned their aggression against them. the picture in the paper was of a young man in a ski mask hurling a rock at a police barricade - tear gas in the foreground, car burning in the back. oddly, it was impossible to tell if this young person wanted an all-powerful state or no state at all - it seemed that the political spectrum we usually think of as a straight line with distant poles had horseshoed around so the points nearly touched. these skinheads and 'no global' had more in common than i think they realized. unfortunately, that commonality was violence.

so yeah, back to the idea of home on the road - after we got back from the pot protest we had a little dinner and started talking to these two girls at the hostel. their names were jennie and ulrika, and they were and are beautiful swedish psychology students. we quickly discovered we would be on the same flight to stockholm the next morning. i, never having been to stockholm or flown out in rome before, was extremely excited to have found beautiful natives with whom to travel. we left the next morning and on the flight i read all about the riots in milan, the upcoming debate between berlusconi and his challenger prodi in the april elections, and students in paris taking over the sorbonne. more on that to come.

jennie, ulrika, and i arrived in stockholm around 3 in the afternoon and immediately ate indian food. it tasted good. then we walked around the central shopping area for a while, took a picture in front of the palace, and strolled around the old town. it was 5 below zero, celsius. i was glad that i had brought the stocking cap my mother knit for me last fall - first because it is warm, secondly because it was knit out of love. seriously, love was the raw material carded, spun, and woven into hat form. with a tassel.

i parted ways with the beautiful swedish girls (they were taking an overnight bus north to umea, where they had class in the morning) in the early evening to find my hostel , which was furnished entirely by ikea and was essentially a 3 star hotel for €17 a night. i wrote some things in my journal, read some of the introduction to Ovid's Metamorphoses, written by my latin literature professor here in arezzo, and turned in.

in the morning, i walked around the city of stockholm - saw some beautiful churches, an entire island that is a park (swedish urban planners love green space - white space last week), and the national history museum, which included a large exhibit on vikings, who i like to imagine as my ancestors as they travelled around putting northern europe in its place. i also walked across two frozen rivers and felt like a bad ass. yeah, that's right. i'm a descendent of vikings. i do what i want.

tuesday, prior to departure i visited katarina kyrka and the beautifully designed and linked moderna museet and arkitekturmuseet.

this last 40 minutes has not been enough either. this spring break is apparently serialized. stay tuned for london and paris, losses and gains.

20 minutes of spring break

hello all, it's been too long. i've got 20 minutes before class starts, so i thought i'd pump out a quick overview of what went down on my 10 day tour of european capitals, also known as spring break '06.

my buddy joe bell and i left arezzo at 6 am on friday morning 10 march, hopping a train to rome. we arrived at termini station around 08:30 and went directly to our hostel to check in and drop off our stuff, which for both of us because as americans we understand well that stuff is baggage. not only in the literal sense that would seem most appropriate in this travel context, but in the spiritual sense. i was carrying the weight of exactly one black jansport backpack (in italian, zaino - great word) upon my soul. while giving our information to the proprieter and taking a look around hostel freestyle (now apparently closed), a tall redheaded youth stepped out of one of the hostel rooms in regal pyjamas and rubbed his eyes. it was none other than reid williamson, a friend of mine and my sister ellie's from our community college italian courses last summer. i had known that he was in perugia this spring and had been trying to set up a time to get together, but apparently our destiny was to meet rather at 08:30 in a 4 room hostel in rome. such meetings, i have come to believe, are beautiful reminders that the idea of 'home' rests much more securely in people that crop up along the way than in a concrete locale. home can come on the road with you; home can sneak up behind you; home can duck under a doorway in pyjama pants and rub its eyes, then rub its eyes again in surprise that you have found it.

after a communal caffé and catching up, i spent the morning at Santa Maria Degli Angeli e dei Martiri, known to its previous occupants (roman citizens, also women and slaves) as the Baths of Diocletian. the history of this place is simply ridiculous. originally built as an enormous bath complex, a feat of roman engineering perhaps yet to be duplicated in the last two millenia, it was ridiscovered (still standing in beautiful condition after nearly 1200 years of total neglect) by Michaelangelo, who suggested to the pope that the frigidarium (the largest, fairly cavernous room with a fantastic triplex vaulted roof) be transformed into a place of worship, which it had most certainly been for its original designer. the transition from pagan/political to christian(/political) was executed masterfully.

but i spent most of my time meditating on the new bronze doors of the church (installed 28 february). the enormous doors, which were the essence of gravitas, were designed and sculpted by igor mitoraj, whose previous work dealt primarily with the use of classical themes reinterpreted along existentialist lines. this personal artistic history, included and transcended in the sacred subjects depicted on the doors - the Annunciation and the Resurrection - had a fascinating and moving resonance with the tranformation of the structure itself from temple of intellectual mastery of material by the inbreathing of spirit. and the doors themselves are challenging - challenge those entering to reconsider of their understanding of their faith: the annunciation pictures a fractured, headless Virgin and the resurrection has a Christ striding out from the plane of the door, the cross carved into his very chest.