ROMAN THOUGHTS AND LA DOLCE VITA

What can you say about Rome that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? I could probably think of many things but that would involve my usual themes of supermarkets, travelers’ constipation, TV and politics. I don’t want to do that, not yet anyway. Rome is better than that. Rome is transcendent. It may not exactly be the Eternal City as claimed for publicity purposes, but most places aren’t exactly what they’re claimed to be. New York is not the ‘City that never sleeps’; Bangkok is. Rome in fact was almost entirely depopulated during the Middle Ages, a far cry from its imperial glory days of almost a million souls, wolves finally entering the city walls to take up the slack and see what they could scavenge, just like medieval tourists, just like us modern tourists in fact, crawling through the piles to pass our whiles. Rome is in fact the city that tourists sustained. The Italian Renaissance occurred mostly elsewhere, especially Firenze, as did the growth of cities, Paris and London and Milan and all the rest. The ultimate insult was the Church itself even moving its headquarters out of Rome for a spell. To this day Rome’s only industry is tourism, that and government and religion. It’s NOT the eternal city; that’s Jerusalem.

Rome is a palimpsest, the waves of time washing over it in repeated successions throughout history, leaving silt and sediment and new soil for planting. Like much of Europe its past is its present to us, and it manages to keep re-inventing itself accordingly. With much of space already conquered, at least the easiest pickings, time is the new frontier, and memory is the easiest path. We of European descent know that well, hoarding our souvenirs today and selling them on e-Bay tomorrow. Others have other ideas. For all their past of ancestor worship and vertical blood lines, the Chinese bury all public view of it as fast as they can. You’d be hard pressed to find a traditional district left standing there. They think they ‘gain face’ by emulating las Vegas and turning their country into a Pai Gow pinball machine defined by its bells and whistles rather than its collective soul. Europe doesn’t do that, not much anyway, or at least not yet. Luckily for them America’s already done it, so that’s reason enough to avoid it right there.

Rome is compact. Save that one-day Metro pass unless you want to camp out in the ‘burbs, which is not a bad idea. With e-booking there are some deals to be had out there, since they lack the walk-in traffic of the rookeries surrounding Termini station. How does a room in a sprawling villa for $50 with breakfast buffet sound? TV sucks of course, at least until midnight when the naked girls come on advertising their wares by taking off their wears. That’s reassuring for young boys everywhere. That was always the urban legend growing up- the naked girls come on TV at midnight. Very few hotels of any price will have wi-fi and you’ll be pressing your luck regardless. My place claims to have it in the common areas but no go, ‘local only’, ‘limited access’, etc; you know the drill. I guess that’s the drawback of so much attachment to the past. The present might get overlooked. Maybe they’ll wait and see if Internet passes the one-hundred-year test. Any place that actually has it probably has some other serious disadvantages. I persevere. The time when I can write a travel blog to you in real time is still a ways away. In America it’s pretty standard fare for hotels and easy to find elsewhere for the price of coffee. South America’s not far behind. Elsewhere in Europe and Africa and Asia you can sometimes get lucky, even in places as far-fetched as Phnom Penh and Dakar and Port-of-Spain. I guess Rome figures they don’t need it.

Rome sprawls in time, not space. You can see the Colosseum from almost anywhere, and even the Vatican is not much of a walk. The map makes it look big, but it’s really not. Just walk until your feet get sore, then take a break, and do it again. You can see it all in a day or two. Imperial ruins poke through everywhere, giving the Middle Ages a run for its money. The modern era has hardly made a dent yet. What would it look like if it did? At least supermarkets seem to be making inroads since my last visit five years ago, so that’s good. You don’t have to buy your groceries in bars anymore. The only problem right now is the weather. Europe’s had a rough winter and it ain’t over yet. I certainly don’t remember it being this cold in Marseille at the same time last year. Maybe it’ll be warmer in Tunisia. I hope so. If it is, I may hang there for a while and practice my French. Like any son of Rimbaud worth his verse, I’m just looking for creative derangement of the senses, the better to find some unusual pattern of words or images that have yet to see the light of day. Unlike some others, I’d rather try it without the aid of drugs. I’ve done all that. And I’d like to do it sustainably. Burning out at twenty-two is hardly an option for me now as I close in on fifty-five. In other words, I want to get my trips with trips, hyper-trips to the point of illumination.

The problem with practicing French of course is finding a country I like that speaks it. It’s hard to learn the language of a country you don’t especially like, though Marseille last year was an improvement. If there’s anything more pretentious than Parisians themselves, it’s people pretending to be Parisians, e.g. Bonairenses. And though the Maghreb speaks it often and well, it’s still NOT the first language, and overhearing and understanding a language spoken among native speakers is the final test of fluency. My next option may be Madagascar, which still uses that colonial language, not odd considering it has many competing local dialects. What IS odd is that all those local dialects are Asian in origin, from Borneo to be precise, reflecting an ancient migration of probably humble proportions. Even odder is that English is now one of their official languages also, EVEN THOUGH NO ONE SPEAKS IT, at least not outside the tourist areas. I think they just one-upped Thailand in some category of wackness, though I’m not sure which. Sounds like my kind of place. Stay tuned.

My inability to master French in my two months in French-speaking countries is a sore spot with me. I did study for two years at the university basic and intermediate levels after all. I understand more Italian on TV with no formal study and less than two weeks in-country, at least equal to Portuguese, thanks to my prior knowledge of Spanish. Portuguese pronunciation deviates from the spelling almost as much as French, and if it indeed sounds like a drunk Frenchman trying to speak Spanish, which it does, then French must be like a drunk Portuguese trying to speak English. The Maghreb is interesting from a linguistic point of view, pure Old World, the linguistics of language acquisition, not abstract theory, the language acquisition of a prostitute with her eyes on the prize between your thighs, hot rize plus and the finest buns ever was, i.e. consummation and fulfillment and y’all come back now, dahlin’. The average Moroccan taxi driver probably speaks more languages than the average UN interpreter, though a footnote is necessary. Tourist-oriented vocabulary is limited, and I heard as much bad Spanish there as English.

These European vocabularies are all closely related, mind you, though also notable is their mastery of local as well as classical Arabic. The language they speak to me there depends on their shifting perception of who and what they think I am. That’s not code-switching; that’s chaos. It’s a trip. Sometimes I get so bumfuggled I forget which language I’m speaking myself. Of course English’s only legitimate claim to the international standard is its analytic isolating quality, hard to appreciate unless you’re Asian. People who speak half a dozen Asian languages can’t figure for the life of them why Spanish verbs have several dozen different endings, when only one is necessary. Don’t ask me why, but English is only lightly inflected that way. Other than that its only claim to ascendancy is its imperialistic status. It’s a mess orthographically.

I picked up a bad habit in the Caribbean, i.e. booking ahead. This runs contrary to the backpacker’s credo of spontaneous emission. When it’s time to fly, then fly. That’s a metaphor; flying is the problem actually, that and expensive accommodation. When you’re traveling overland, there’s hardly a reason to book more than a day or two ahead really, unless rooms are tight and dear. You can’t do that in the Caribbean. They won’t let you. They’ll call you on those fake hotels you write in on the landing card. ‘Happy House’ indeed! Then the room they found me was the one I stayed in long term anyway. That’s the nice thing about the slow season- rooms are easier to find and cheaper. Of course this slow season may last a few years. We’ll see how gas prices respond in the next few months. If the speculators get over-anxious they may kill the coming summer season in its infancy. It’s not entirely coincidence that huge gas price surges were followed by the Next Great Depression. Though predatory lending may have been the immediate cause, it’s all part of the gold-pan get-rich-quick philosophy of the son-of-Reagan Republicans.

Big news here is the Japanese finance minister showing up drunk at the G7 economic summit. Did that make CNN? I bet it made Fox. What else is new in Rome? Well they seem to have finally perfected the combination toilet/bidet, so that doesn’t have to take up space next to the bed like in France. This is good for those of us accustomed to the Thai system which has a rubber hose and nozzle next to every toilet. This was probably intended for the chambermaids, but creative minds couldn’t pass on that opportunity to stay clean and green. The Italian bowls even have the water jetting sideways instead of straight up the you-know-what-hole, so that’s even wilder (and easier on sensitive tissues). But I digress. Tunisia’s next on the list, on the other side of the Mediteranean, the crossroads which have seen Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Normans, Romans, Carthaginians and Greeks all claiming pieces of turf in their own good time. To this day Malta, European to the point of Euro currency, even still speaks an Arab dialect, albeit written in Roman alphabet. How’s that for multi-kulti patchwork pragmatism? That comes next after Tunisia. Stay tuned, and pray for sun.

The Long Way Home from Africa to Thailand

This trip as a whole has been basically a salvage operation- initial shock, kicked while down, and arduous comeback. Maybe I was unfair to Africa, with unrealistic expectations. After all Thailand has its share of unsolicited guides and scammers, too. I’ve just long learned how to deal with them. But nothing was what it was supposed to be, just the opposite usually. Africa being dirt poor, it should have been dirt cheap, right? Not quite. That lack of development means that any development will be very expensive. What kind of role model is France anyway, with its monopolies and protections and labor strikes? Paris is retail incarnate, a boutique country for those with time and money. Ironically and conversely Marseille is very reasonable, as if the industrial revolution never really arrived in the southern ‘old’ Europe. Rome certainly has none, but it makes up for that with millions of tourists. Others aren’t so lucky, or unlucky, depending on your point of view. The industrial revolution was not pretty, probably the reason it caught on first in Britain and only later on the continent. Artisans working in their workshops are certainly more romantic than sweat shop assembly lines.

In another example of misplaced expectations the picturesque villages I expected to see in Africa seemed even more so in rural Spain, especially between Madrid and Zaragoza, almost even more African in fact. Those spires look less like Christian steeples than Islamic minarets, and villages seem to be perched high on hills for protection in a futile feudal world. The houses themselves are mud inspired, like negative space, something carved out of block rather than something erected from components, something more feminine than masculine. This would seem to be the connection between the adobe pueblos of northern New Mexico and western Africa including Morocco. The word ‘adobe’ after all comes from the Egyptian via Arabic and Spanish; so did the building techniques I think. The original Indians had to use rock or we would hardly even know of them after five hundred years, like the dirt ‘Indian mounds’ of the Mississippi Culture. Mud’s good but not that good. I suspect the true adobe pueblos of the northern Rio Grande were of later design. Of course the buses all pass these places by, just like they do in Mali and Morocco, so one is left largely to one’s imagination.

In the wildest science fiction scenarios, if the countryside were ignored, it could conceivably cease to exist. Once we’re accustomed to boarding the plane, closing our eyes, then waking up in some strange place, then how do we know that we really traversed all the distance between? One account of Australian aborigines relates how every piece of the landscape has a story associated with it. The researcher was overwhelmed when driving across that some landscape, as the speech was too fast to follow! What if the world were vertical, not horizontal? How would you know if you didn’t physically experience the distances and relationships between your points of measurement? Such scenarios seem absurd, but form the premises of many Hollywood movies of the past decade, The Matrix trilogy possibly being the best example. Like the best conspiracy theories, none of it can be disproved, and that’s the beauty of it, and the danger. By the same token, the most successful scientific theory ever, quantum mechanics, is totally foreign to common sense, and it has been proven over and over and over. Prime time on TV was once devoted to a theory that the moon landing was a hoax, and those people are not stupid, however misguided. I got sucked into the notion myself, for a day or two. But the transition from reality to fantasy is rarely shown in the movies, nor is the act of conspiracy ever revealed in real life. Both depend on a leap of logic to retrofit the past to fit present circumstances. I’ve lost friends to the warm fuzzy logic of Conspiracy. You can’t rescue them. You can only maintain communication and an arm outstretched. It’s up to them to grab hold, or not. They tend to think that we’re the ones who need help. Moral of the story: maybe common sense can’t always be trusted, but solid evidence and double-blind-controlled testing can; and don’t get so lost in a buzz-box that you forget to experience the world for yourself.

But the reason I stopped in Spain anyway was so that I could speak the language in case I needed emergency medical care. Well in Barcelona everybody knows Castellano, but only grudgingly use it, if they’re local. Welcome to Quebec. Catalan is the big deal, and you could get lost if you can’t read it. Appropriately it falls somewhere between standard Spanish and standard French in the spectrum of Romance languages, so it’s not impossible, at least to read. If a local makes you for a tourist, though, he could refuse your Castellano. If some trinket vendor’s got a language erection and wants to stick it in your face, then he’ll do that, to gain the upper hand so to speak. Welcome to psycholinguistcs and ESL, the empire as a second language. So much for Spain feeling like home because of the language; home is more complicated than that. Still I’d rate Spain as probably the coolest place to be in Europe right now, experiencing a renacimiento after decades of Franco’s strong-hand darkness. A cheap country doesn’t necessarily mean a good country, though, right? Right, Mr. Prez? Still, Spain is not too expensive, about like the US. Hostales will even give you the full set of keys, so you can come and go as you please. In Marseilles they lock the doors before midnight. In Spain, the party’s just starting at midnight.

I didn’t see many Gypsies in Europe this time, just one group camped with all their belongings at the Barcelona bus station, giving new meaning to the word ‘furtive’. What’s Europe without Gypsies? In Spain they toss the word around a lot, mostly in connection with Flamenco music, a la ‘Gypsy Kings’. Those guys obviously speak a dialect of Spanish, not Roma, though Iberian gypsies are apparently of Roma ancestry, originally at least. Flamenco music and dance has obvious connections with Arab culture and song; they did have significant cultural inter-mixing over the course of seven hundred years. In Spain flamenco bands are a dime a dozen, but the Gypsy Kings had a hit. That’s the difference. In Senegal a Gypsy Kings video on TV was titled ‘salsa’ music. That sounds like a line item cultural mutation. In East Europe Gypsies are not so highly prized culturally. There are lots of them, and for the most part unassimilated. They’re despised. Music could possibly be a selling point for them, as it is for many cultural minorities. This is one good thing about world music. It might just save the world, if it can save itself. Global warming and over-population can ultimately be solved; it’s just a question of time. Racism is the one problem that can’t be solved by controlling emissions, exhaust or otherwise. It can only be solved by intermixing, culturally if not otherwise. This is the role of America, both north and south, a test tube for societies and environments in turbulence. Europe doesn’t know the half of it. When is the last time Chinese New Year and Carnaval fell in the same week? It should have been a riot. It wasn’t. It was quiet. The parties were elsewhere. Where would be a good place to experience both Chinese New Year and Carnaval? I’d vote for San Francisco.