A lot of wordy posts pouring out right now. I must see a doctor.
Here are some notes on this late voyage abroad, especially re: the actual travel itself— I think there may be something wrong with me that I enjoy the doing of it almost as much as the obviously wonderful things we saw/did/ate. You have to enjoy the process and the place, you can’t just go there to gawk at the faymas painting and be bored, impatient, and let down the rest of the time.
It was significant that the personal tech is finally mature, and economical to use. As much as I hate “smart phones”, they were highly useful, numerous things were made better and easier.
So… it’s not just an unneeded vampiric fascist suckbox leech on the ass of society. I mean, it is, but it’s also somewhat useful. The damnedest things happen.
Some things of note:
Unlimited data
Get it. Having unlimited roaming data on my phone was huge— I’m used to having to ration it, and seek out wifi— eliminating that aspect substantially contributed to our ease and enjoyment. Happily, cell phone providers are providing cheap unlimited dated SIMs or services. I use Mint Mobile, and they have a “Minternational Pass” that costs $20 for ten days. See what your provider offers, or buy a cheap SIM to do the same thing.
Having that, the only thing you have to worry about is keeping the thing charged— we carried a couple of little battery packs to plug into, and did use them.
Useful apps
Citymapper was invaluable— it gives multiple ways of getting somewhere, with times and prices, and based on different criteria— cheapest, fastest, simplest, most accessible.
Google Maps – The actual navigation on Citymapper seemed a little flaky, Google is better for that. Do use it, all the time— getting around unfamiliar places looking for things can wear you out. Physical reality is startlingy larger than it appears on the little 3″ screen. And a lot of people have phones out, so you don’t feel like a conspicuous jerk walking around Rome or wherever that way. You can proceed with confidence to your destination without getting in people’s way and looking/feeling like a big dumb lost idiot. If you worry about getting robbed/pickpocketed, it will also make you a less inviting target for your many unseen predators.
Uber – The company Uber is a vile erupting chancre on the pustulating nether crevices of capitalism, and quite handy for getting around Berlin economically. You have to manage your fatigue on these trips, and all the extra walking dealing with public transportation adds up, and will wear you out. Over the short time frame of a vacation, it’s worth it, especially for two or more people.
It was a little flaky in Dresden, and totally worthless in Rome— a simple 1.5km trip from the hotel to the car rental place was something like 40€. Hohohoho scaREW that.
BVG – Tickets for public transportation in Germany. I previously would get a tourist pass at the airport, so I don’t have to mess with the machines in the station, but the app is almost as easy, and probably a little cheaper. Mooneygo (???) is for public transportation in Italy, but didn’t have much chance to use it. We also had Flixbus and DeutscheBahn apps. Openferry was good for ferry tickets in Italy, at least.
Tripadvisor – Recommended places, hotels, restaurants, and sites. A critical mass of people use it long enough for there to be useful reviews for most things, even quite obscure things. We found great restaurants on the fly in Berlin (Gaffel Haus) and Rome (Ristorante Leonetti) and Vietri Sul Mare (Somare pizzeria).
Booking.com – Why aren’t any of these people paying me? We use Booking for our hotels, and for our car rental. Actually for our flights, too. Again, lots of users, so lots of useful reviews, and the app/service itself has been quite functional, over the last ten years I’ve been using it.
Rome
I’ve been there many times since the 90s, but not in the last ten years, and I had forgotten how art-dense the place is. After adjusting to the experience of being in normal cities, even normal very beautiful cities, Rome is like Star Wars, it’s like getting hit by a tidal wave.
It seems to never truly gentrify— parts of the city became upscale in the 80s, and it has cruised along at a steady level of grunge ever since. Put on Jim Jarmusch’s movie Night On Earth for a sample of the vibe. It’s exactly the place it has always been, full of immigrants, priests, pilgrims, gawkers, beggars, bureaucrats, scholars, and decried the whole time as barely livable.
The first thing I always do in Rome, is to take the Metro to the Collosseo stop, and walk down Via Dei Fori Imperiali— you exit the station and take a right at the staggering historical edifice. Often I’ll do this at night, this time we did it at dawn. There’s no one out, the birds are relaxed and enthused about the day, the light is beautiful, and you have some space to actually absorb what you’re seeing, where you are, without being crowded. This time we were on a mission to get a picture of Casey posing like Oscar Wilde in front of the statue of Marcus Aurelius, and visit the Santa Maria in Aracoeli Basilica, built on the site of the ancient temple of Jupiter.
And I always go to Formula 1 Pizzeria in San Lorenzo— in 2015, and 2006, and this year— loved the hell of it the same way every time. It’s just a low key pizza place, and I was so overjoyed to be there, I think the waiter noticed, though he was mostly impassive the whole time, pure working class dignity— we had an amaro after the meal, and were getting up to go, and he appeared with the bottle and headed us off, backed us up to our table, and poured us another one.
Ristorante Leonetti, also, was close to the tourist hotels near the train station, but a quintessential Roman dining experience— being there virtually could have been any time in the last 75 years. The food was typical unpretentious hearty Roman fare, guests were Italian, waiters were all middle aged men, the owner/host impossibly dignified, looking something like Don Barzini in The Godfather. Our waiter nudged me and said “John Wayne” when Casey forgot to take her hat off. We’d have clear scholars or bureaucrats, clearly regulars, dining alone near us. They put crushed ice in our Negronis, and Amaros, I think because we were American, which was funny.
Driving in Italy
We rented a car for a week to drive from Rome to Salerno and back, via Tivoli. We got the comprehensive coverage through booking.com— the rental people in Rome try to get us to get their coverage too, but I kept my wits and didn’t get it. I picked our lodging partly for ease of parking, on the edge of the center of their small town— Tivoli and Vietri Sul Mare. Just outside or inside the walls.
Having not driven in Italy in a long time, but with many memories of chaotic traffic, I was apprehensive, but it was fine. Fun, even. Even driving across Rome on the normal streets, or through downtown Salerno on a jumping Saturday evening. It was intense, but traffic generally moved smoothly and copascetically, with very little drama— little honking, little flashing of the brights (which drivers do when they feel they need your attention), very little actual conflict. Very few actually impatient drivers. Again, the GPS was mostly very helpful. You do not want to be looking for street signs in that situation.
The main difference is in attitude— you have to pay attention. Americans like to zone out when they drive, and take a general proprietary attitude about their space on the road. It’s a microcosm of capitalism, the feeling that you’re not going to get there unless you’re passing somebody else. And when someone else passes/merges against you, they’re stealing from you, diminishing you. You cannot be that way in Italy, you can’t attach any ego to any of it, and you can’t zone out.
First, don’t panic. Even if you’re slow, there are other slow drivers, they’re not all maniacs. If you miss a turn, the GPS will save you, so relax. A little bit.
And don’t compete— if you try to drive like the fastest Italians you will die and/or kill somebody. Drive the speed you want, and be generous about making way— on two-lane roads pull to the side and let people pass, frequently. In town, be ready to let pedestrians cross when they look at you and step into traffic. On the freeway, stay out of the left lane altogether, unless you’ve got 1 km plus of white space behind you.
But be assertive. You can’t wait for an engraved invitation to pull into traffic. People will give you an opening, but it will be much more brief than you’re used to. If you’re in a line of traffic and someone needs in, give one car an opening, and keep moving. Drivers there are used to dealing with things, and will generally not smash into you if you accidentally do something dumb or rude.
On the autostrada, extend your awareness— especially behind you, know what’s happing in the kilometer behind you when making lane changes, someone may be coming up on you very quickly. Signal all lane changes, for the people 500 meters back— both when you’re about to get in their way, and out of their way. Don’t be offended or pressured if someone goes around you.
I always try to take care for my passengers’ comfort when driving, and it is rather hard to do that there— there are a lot of unexpected things that interrupt easy, consistent movement, and we were in a little manual Fiat 500, which is a little jerky. My wife uses Sea Band wrist bands for comfort, and they work very well for her.
Also note that online navigation can get pretty flaky driving in smaller Italian towns— when it’s practical, you might preview your route in street view.
Get there at opening time
We went to a few different major sites this time— Paestum, Hadrian’s Villa, Pompeii, and that walk by the forum in Rome— and were virtually the first people in the door at all of them. It was an entirely different experience than later visitors had. Do yourself a favor, do it that way.
First, we had the sites almost to ourselves. You have a minute to reflect on what you’re seeing without one of your countrymen going KUHL COLUMNS DUDE in your ear. And the light is better. And the people working there are more relaxed, less likely to deal with you as an undifferntiated part of a throng.
The exception was Pompeii— we were literally the first people admitted, and it was still a lot of people. It’s like seeing the Mona Lisa the whole time it’s open— swarmed with dimly-interested undeserving masses. We did have a few peaceful minutes walking into the site, though, with a little local wiener dog following us.
Speaking the language
I was more fluent with my Italian than ever, which is not to say I’m fluent, but all the basic words I needed were available to speak instantly, in a reasonable accent. There were many exchanges I was able to conduct in Italian without resorting to English or to gesturing like an idiot. If you make the effort and make things easy for people, they like you more and treat you like a human being. Which is one of the reasons to travel, to comment on the parking guy’s fantastic looking dog (Pompeii), and have him be cool in return. I really need to get my French and German up to that level. It’s not just knowing the words, but having them instantly available, and your mouth able to form them, unselfconsciously. It takes some drilling.
High point (for my wife at least, I don’t remember saying it) was me responding to an impatient driver (within our car, not actually to him), telling him to leave sooner next time— parti piu presto la prossima volta, something like that. Also fun dealing with people in a very sleepy “supermarket” in the farm country south of Salerno, getting bulk wine from the barrel and whatnot.
I’ve gone through the Michel Thomas and Pimsleur CD programs. MT teaches you to think through building pretty grammatically complex sentences, Pimsleur teaches you a lot of ways of saying ordinary things in context, and is probably ultimately the better program. Watching movies in the language helps a little bit, I watched Johnny Stecchino about a hundred times.
When to fly
Listen: leaving in the morning sucks. It’s stressful, hard to rest the night before, adn there’s no time to deal with all the things you forgot to do. And you usually arrive in the morning, and so are guaranteed to fall asleep for several hours in the afternoon, and totally wreck yourself with jet lag.
In recent years, I have left in the afternoon, and arrived in the afternoon— you get there, get settled, and go to bed reasonably soon at a reasonable hour, and you adapt to the time change quickly.
Beware short layovers and terminal changes
Especially in massively over-capacity places like Schiphol (Amsterdam) and Heathrow (London). We had approximately 90 minute layovers at Heathrow this time, and it was barely enough time, even within the same terminal. With a terminal change, forget it— you need 3+ hours.
Airport hotel
There’s always some amount of stress getting to the airport, and a few times now, before our trip home, I have gotten a room basically in the airport, so I can simply walk to my gate when it’s time to fly. By that point in the trip you’re getting a little worn out, and being in that saccharin but well appointed transitional environment is kind of nice. I recommend it.
Engage
The whole experience becomes a lot richer when you treat people like people, and they do the same to you— you have these momentary exchanges, it doesn’t matter with who, or where. You don’t beat the situation to death trying to “connect”, you just see people, and they see you, and there was some kind of living exchange between human beings, and not just another mechanical transaction between anonymous entities. Take a minute and like somebody, love somebody.
You can’t always do it— some people you clearly don’t want any part of, others are detached, and are really not interested in anything but getting onto the next thing and finishing their shift, and there’s no place for you in that. It’s fine. Some people, start out basically brusque, but you pay some slight bit of extra attention to your time with them, and they warm up. This is over the course of a brief exchange, maybe ten words, getting a coffee and paying for it, asking for some small piece of information.
It takes a light touch. This isn’t shmoozing, or being over-personal, over-familiar, it’s just giving people the impression you’re pleased to be there, and happy to have the chance to deal with them, because you are.
Feeling like an idiot
Look, you’re in a foreign country, the people speak a strange language, and you don’t know any of the particular ways things work/are done. You’re going to feel like an in-the-way idiot. I’ve spent a good part of many trips abroad feeling like omg I’m sorry oops oh no was I in your way? omg sorry oops!
Many deal with that feeling by becoming, shall we say, assholes. Extra belligerent that things are not done the way the are in Tulsa, and deciding that it is the people who live there, who did not ask them to come there, who are the assholes. I’ve seen many of them in my day, imagine living in Paris and seeing hundreds of them every year for your entire life.
Let’s not be that way. I can’t teach anyone how to handle feeling like an idiot gracefully, I’m barely keeping it together myself. I think it helps to cultivate the skill of not feeling pressured, even when you have good reason to feel like an idiot— because, though you are a guest, you do actually have a right to the space you occupy. Assholes use that as fuel for their hostility, you use that understanding to relax a bit as you figure things out.
There was one instance where Italy gave me a big scented invitation to be an asshole, which I declined, when someone actually laughed at me for being a foreigner. In the Rome airport, ordering due caffe doppio— exactly what you say when ordering two double espressos in Italy— and a junior employee— subaltern sandwich man, to all appearances— instantly bursts out laughing, and says something to his fellows about my attempt to be “sofisticato.” I looked at him levelly, feeling a mild quizzicalness, and after a moment he wandered back over to his sandwiches. It was fine, he was a weenie, and it was fine. I got to deal with a weenie. What am I supposed to do, get mad at him?
Casey got the “Maus”
Like everything
Conclusion, I think the deal with travel, finally, is that you have to be into every part of it. Enjoy everything, including shopping for groceries, all the mundane transactions, going to the laundromat. We met a great man at the laundromat outside Rome. Dealing with a weenie, parking the car, getting stopped by the police (happened), getting gas. The Polish techno played by the driver on our jetlagged night time bus ride from Dresden to Berlin.
There were very few boring/tedious/not fun parts this time. This time we went so easy on ourselves in the above ways, that things that would normally not be fun were fine.
More coming, there was a lot to share about this trip…
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