Europe 2009: Italy, Pt. I

Friday July 3, 2011

Milan—Recco, Italy

At the airport in Milan the woman behind the counter at the car rental was very pleased to inform us that the car they would be providing us with would be the new Fiat 500.  “Fiat-ah Five-ah undred!” Perhaps I should have been suspicious.  Not only did the woman say this twice, “Fiat-ah Five-ah undred! Very Pleased!” but she also had a big black eye.  None of this caught my attention however.  I had seen the new Fiats in Paris and, looking like a cross between a Mini Cooper and a bumper car, I couldn’t wait to drive one. 

Cut to a highway in the middle of nowhere.  In the midst of multiple lanes of fast moving traffic, we pulled up to an automated tollbooth, whereupon I reached out the window, pressed the button for the ticket and then, while waiting for said ticket, pressed the button on the dash to turn on the radio.  The car went completely lifeless.  It just expired right there, no cough, no gasp, nothing.  Back at the airport, when we first picked up the car, I had found two neon-orange safety vests folded neatly in the driver’s side pocket door.  “Like we’d ever wear these!” I joked to Lu, while tossing them over my shoulder into the back.  Now, with traffic bearing down on us, I lunged into the back desperate to find them. 

(This story goes on but a lot of what happened is on the video.  Here is a bit more of what happened that day.)

From the airport in Milan we drove south to Recco.  The driving here is nerve raking. The mountain roads are narrow, twisty as hell and have no shoulders, and Vespa motor scooters, like a never-ending plague of locusts, beep and whine by in total disregard of oncoming traffic or blind corners.  By the time we arrived in town I was soaked through from the stress. 
 

Parking presented its own kind of nightmare.  For starters, there are no free spaces in Italy.  Every conceivable inch of roadside real estate was claimed generations before you got there.  Then, when you do come upon a space that in the right light might sort of look like a place you could fit your car, you have to slide into it sideways at 70 miles per hour. 

After circling the town two or three hundred times (I now really KNOW Recco), I just pulled up onto a curb, left the car and jumped into the sea.  Bliss.     

We had lunch and then checked into our BnB,  Acquerieche [aqua-ree-kay] “rich waters,” a stately old home back up the hill, and then took a nap.  For some reason the soles of my feet had become dark brown with dirt (see photo to the right) and Lu refused me access to the bed until I washed them.  I did as I was told (not happily or silently) but my feet still didn’t come clean.  The brown was from the die of my flip-flops.  Note to self: don’t wear leather flip-flops after swimming.   

Lu is reading David Sedaris’s new book, “When You Are Engulfed In Flames.”  She will be quiet for a few minutes and then break out in this wild peal of laughter.  She tries to read me whatever it was that was so funny but ends up handing me the book and pointing where to start.  Nothing I read is as funny as watching her laugh.

After a long silence Lu turns to me with a very serious and studious look and asks, “Baby, what is twat?”

Insert cheek between molars.  Clamp down, hard.  “It’s slang for Vagina."

“Really?”

“Uh huh.”

“I didn’t know this… Twat.”

Later, she asks, “What is billy club?”

“It’s the stick that policemen carry.”

“Really?  Billy club?”

“Uh huh.  London’s bobbies don’t carry guns, right?  They carry billy clubs.”

“Who?”

“Bobbies.”

Luciana laughs.  “Bobbies carry billies?”

Sunday July 5, 2009

Italian women by the coast are breathtaking at seventeen but look like old shoes by nineteen.  The men are born old.  People here are insane for the sun.  Everyone lies out.  And by the looks of their skin, no one has ever heard of sunscreen. 

Two photos that I regret missing:  One was in Paris of a very pregnant woman in a tight little black dress walking down the street and smoking.  The other was today: a young woman on a Vespa drove in front of us down a wildly curvy mountain road while talking the entire time on her cell phone.  It was so dangerous it was funny.  

I can’t say enough about how much I hate the motorcycles and scooters here.  The way they fly up behind you and then pass regardless of what is coming in the other direction is insane making.  Everyone is playing a perpetual game of chicken with each other.  If you slow down or use your horn you lose points and, apparently, respect.  When we first arrived and I hadn’t yet learned the rules I would pull off to the side of the road to make room for the motorcycles and scooters to pass.  So naive.  Now when they pull up along side me I ever so gently edge them into oncoming traffic. There is nothing more satisfying than denying a Vespa access to pass.  The hand gestures in the rear view are priceless.

Lu has known Ricardo and his family since they were kids.  Like Lu, Ricardo became a dealer by having worked alongside his father.  Ricardo sells very expensive stones that he often goes to great lengths and sometimes great risk to get.  Two months ago in a marketplace in Pakistan a bomb exploded five hundred feet in front of him.  The blast almost knocked him off his feet.  A week after he left the country the hotel where he had been staying was destroyed.  He tells us with a laugh that he has decided not to go back.  “Too dangerous.” 

           

I just said to Lu, “Do you realize that we are lying in bed waiting to hungry?”

“I’m already hungry,” she replied.  

“You are?”

“Yes,” she said.  “I’m just waiting for the sun to go down a little bit so it isn’t so hot when we walk.”

The restaurant is literally a hundred feet down the road.

Monday July 6, 2009

            Breakfast here is a comedy.  Orieta, the owner of Acqueriche, and her assistant, a beautiful Nigerian woman with dreads and an impenetrable accent, serve coffee, bread and cakes in the garden.  It sounds simple enough but the women have absolutely no system for the way they do things and the whole production ends up taking the better part of an hour to complete.  First come the place mats and “Bon journos” all around.   If I have arrived before Lu, which most mornings I do, the conversation ends there.  If, on the other hand, Lu and I arrive together, then all work grinds to a halt while the three women catch up for five or ten minutes.  In time a thermos of coffee shows up but without the cups to put it in.  Then the napkins are brought out, followed by a basket of bread and a selection of teas for Lu.  Two individual trips produce two different jars of jam.  Another trip yields the sugar bowl, and yet another brings us water for Lu’s tea and finally, thanks be to Jesus, cups.  It is now nearly lunchtime.

           

In the little seaside village of San Margarhita a van pulled away from the curb and hit a passing motorcyclist.  The bike and rider went over and skidded for a few long yards.  The guy then popped up to his feet and brought the bike back up with him.  The momentum spun the guy, now sneakerless, to standing on the sidewalk and sent his riderless bike like some ghostly specter down the middle of the street.  The whole city seemed to hold its breath, locked in silent vigil for the bike to stop without anyone else being hurt.  At last the bike veered off the street and, just missing an oblivious guy walking down the sidewalk, crashed into a harbor-side cafe that was, by the grace of God, empty.  Tables and chairs shattered and went flying.  The rider looked like he was in shock but, aside from a pretty severe ass burn, seemed otherwise unhurt.  Had there been oncoming traffic at the moment he went over—it’s a miracle there wasn’t—he would have been killed.  A woman called the police on her cell phone and a waiter stepped into the street and signaled the traffic to slow down, which it did... for about three seconds.  Yesterday Lu had referred to driving in Italy as “beautiful chaos.”  Today it was just chaos.  A few minutes later an ambulance arrived and took the rider away.  

Europe 2009: Paris

Tuesday June 30, 2009

Paris

In the train station in Brugge there is a mural on the wall depicting key moments of the city’s history.  As I looked at them without comprehension I was reminded of a New Yorker cartoon in which a man at the counter of a travel agency says, “I want to go someplace where I don’t have to learn anything.”  In that same spirit, I found myself several months ago in preparation for this trip standing in line at Barnes n Noble on the verge of buying an armload of books about European history.  On a whim, I decided not to do it.  I wanted to enjoy this trip, not turn it into a labor.  Stepping out of line I dumped the books on the New Arrival table and fled the store.  It was a thrill as wonderful as stealing.

On the train an older French couple sat across the aisle from us.  The woman’s shoes were off and she sat with legs folded and facing backward on the bench so that she was turned towards her husband.  Never in all of my years of bus, train and plane travel have I ever seen such a warm expression of intimacy between an adult couple.  Later the woman laid her head in her husband’s lap and the two of them continued to talk and laugh until she fell asleep. 

Lu slept straight through on both trains.  Her throat is bothering her but she thinks it is just from the AC.  God bless Tylenol PM.  I haven’t slept so soundly since the last time I took a sleeping pill. 

At the hotel in Paris the woman at the front desk spoke in halting Portuguese with Lu.  Very charming.  I didn’t understood a word but tried to look like I did.  

3:30 AM

Wide awake again.  There is a heat wave in Paris and the AC in our room doesn’t work.  We walked all over the city today—towards the Arch de Triumph, then over to the Eiffel Tower, to the Rodin Museum, the Leuvre, then back to the hotel.  The women here are without question the most beautiful—the sexiest—in the world.  The clothes, the physical features, the natural sensuality…they’re gorgeous.  Men here wear middle age much better than their American counterparts, especially among the professional class.  Older French men have an elegance about them and a graceful, sort of lived-in masculinity.  By comparison American men are asexual and goofy.  Young French men, on the other hand, while lithe and quite fashionable, look for the most part like they should be selling perfume in department stores.

           

After a day of wrestling band-aids with her flip-flops Lu gave up and put on her hiking shoes.  On our way out she checked herself in the elevator mirror and with real feeling said, “Women were never meant to wear sneakers!” 

She had a rough night last night.  Her throat was still bothering her and it has now become a cough. 

This morning on our way for coffee at Laudree near the Plaza de Madeleine Lu said, “Just get something light because we have lunch reservations at one.”

“We do?”

“Yes.  At a restaurant called Itineraries.”

“'Itineraries.' Indeed!”  

At Shakespeare n Co. my anxiety level shot up so fast that it threatened to blow a hole through the top of my head.  Nothing like a world famous bookstore with its ceiling-high piles and infinite rows of books to bring home the existential futility of one’s own writing ambition. Seriously, what’s the point?  I mean, what could I possibly have to say that hasn’t already been said and forgotten a thousand times before?  I wanted to ask someone, “Is it just me or are these books weeping?”

Lu appeared to say that she was leaving to go exchange money and that she would be back soon.  I tried to beg her not to go but I had lost control of my mouth and only managed to wag my tongue at her.  Alone again I turned back to the stacks and decided to practice a little C.B.T. (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).  I told myself that what I was feeling wasn’t going to kill me and that this was my chance to work it through.  I didn’t have to buy a book, I told myself.  I only needed to find and read something enjoyable.  I looked first at essays.  There was “The Art of the Novel,” by Milan Kundera.  I read the back cover and was instantly overcome with the desire to nap.  Next, I came upon the selected essays and criticisms of T.S. Eliot.  That one I didn’t even pick up, just read it where the poor bastard before me had tossed it before tossing himself in the Seine.  Next I moved on to memoirs and eventually settled on “Unreliable Memories,” by Clive James, an Australian funnyman that I had never heard of.  It was just okay.  I could do better. 

Thursday July 2, 2009

After dinner at the Spanish restaurant Fogon, we crossed the street and filmed Notre Dam.  The plan was to then return to and shoot the lights of the Eiffel Tower but it was already 11:30 and we were tired.

The tapas started with two shot glasses of gazpacho, one almond and the other tomato.  Delicious.  These were followed by bite-sized pieces of white fish on melon, shot glasses of tuna tar-tar topped with some sort of crema mixed with bacon, and a tasty little croquet skewered with another piece of white fish.  The paella was served in a typical flat pan that was set on a rack in the middle of the table.  It had calamari, vegetables (cauliflower, asparagus, zucchini) and was topped with eight little crawfish tails.  Yum city.  Because it was included in the prix fixe we had dessert, crème brulee (good, but a distant second to the one we had yesterday at Mariage Freres teahouse and patisserie), a thimble of sweet wine, a little lemon square with raspberry sauce and a tiny graham cracker with a teaspoon of chocolate with a stewed cherry on top.  After that meal, to hell with the Eiffel Tower. 

Our waiter at Liza, an Arab restaurant Lu discovered, is a French guy named Victor who had been to the U.S. on a work visa.  After working at Disney World in Fla he worked his way up the east coast until he ended up, I kid you not, at The 1770 House in East Hampton.  Victor especially loved Sag Harbor.  “Ze Cornor Bar, yes!  I drank many beer der.”

After dinner, while Lu went to the loo to reapply the band-aids on her feet—fashion won out over function—I went out front and shot some photos of the restaurant.  A group of guys drinking wine on a rooftop pointed to a friend of theirs that was getting on a scooter a few feet away.  The guy posed and I took his picture.  His friends on the roof cheered. 

July 3, 2009

Our one-year anniversary

The woman at the patisserie down the street virtually sings as she goes about stocking the display case with quiches, writing the days specials on the chalkboard and waiting on the handful of tables.  The woman is in her fifties, with auburn hair and gray-blue eyes, and seems to know everyone who orders a croissant through the little window to the street.  I haven’t a clue what they are saying but it is clear from the laughter and body language that it is about more than how they take their coffee.

There was no quiche in the case when we arrived this morning.  The woman told us to have a seat and then called into an ancient looking intercom.  A moment later an equally ancient dumb waiter arrived with two tiers of quiche.  Lu laughed.  “Her poor husband must be down there in the kitchen.” 

Midway through our quiche Lorraine and espresso a teenage boy came from downstairs.  It was the woman’s son who had been at work in the kitchen.  The kid was about seventeen, tall with dark hair and wearing a light blue polo shirt and jeans speckled with flour.  The boy took a seat on a stool at the counter and his mother leaned across, kissed both his cheeks, then touched her forehead to his.  She tussled his hair and said something that made him laugh.  I was amazed that the boy never pulled away, that he seemed to enjoy the intimacy with his mother as much as she did with him.  The hidden cost of a Starbuck's coffee. 

As we wrestled our luggage against a surge of commuters on the metro Lu stopped midstream and shouted, “One year!”  I gave her a kiss.  It was all very French.  Then she said, “It is amazing to think how much we have already done.  How much we have traveled and seen.  I love that!”

"I love you, Lu."

  

Europe 2009: Brugge, Belgium

Sunday June 28, 2009

Brugge, Belgium

Brugge is so crowded you’d think someone left a hose of tourists running.  Man, is it beautiful though.  When you think about it, there isn’t much about humankind that you can’t criticize for having screwed up in one way or another, but the people who built this place really knew what they were doing.  Every street you turn down is lovelier than the one before.  Even the alleys are beautiful.  And clean!  You don’t see dumpsters or trash anywhere.  You don’t see any homeless either.  Hm.  Maybe stay away from the tar-tar. 

Monday June 29

5:30AM

I didn’t sleep again.  We are going to go for a walk.  We will snag some crowdless photos, have breakfast and then come back around noon for a nap.  Oh life. 

           
The city was deserted and quiet.  The footage we got is breathtaking.  On our walk we stopped by the train station and bought our tickets for the high-speed train to Paris tomorrow.  The ticket agent couldn’t have been nicer.  She sold us the last two seats.  The parking lot of the train station was filled with row after row of bicycles.  It seems this entire city bikes to work! 

Passed out when we got back to the hotel.  Lu woke me at noon, forced me to get up.  Felt like I had been tarred over.  Lunched on spaghetti bolognaise at a café by a bend in the river.  The food was fine but the service was terrible.  I tried hard not to generalize but it was pretty clear the waitress was reacting to my being American.  She heard my every request (“Can I have another Coke, please?”) as a demand.

The sun was blazing, bright and hot.  There weren’t nearly as many people as yesterday.  On our return to the hotel we stopped at a charming garden café for coffee and a waffle with whip cream and strawberries.  Now I know why so many people bike. 

Europe 2009: Kortrijk, Belgium

Saturday June 26, 2009

Kortrijk [Core-tree], Belgium

The train to Kortrijk was like the LIRR except that it was fast and clean.  A young woman next to us was reading “The World According to Garp” in Dutch.  Across the aisle a Muslim girl gave her brother a hard time about the noise he was making with his Fanta Soda can.  The boy put up with it because next to his sister he could see his mother smiling at him.  Both women wore burkas. 

Lu’s friend Alice, her husband Floris and their son Daniel drove from Holland to meet us at the Humorologie Theatre Festival.  They were a lot of fun, totally up for anything.  The festival took place in a range of tents that had been set up in a giant meadow beside a stream.  The acts were from all over the world.  We saw a dance performance, a drum show and several clown acts.  The whole reason we had come to Belgium was because Lu wanted to see Yllana, a comedy troupe from Spain that she had seen in Brazil.  The show, called “The Brokers” (I lifted a clip from Youtube and put it in the video below), is a knock on Wall Street.  The whole show was done without speech, just lights, music, elaborate sound effects and physical acting.  It was hilarious.  One moment I will never forget: after the SWAT team stormed the broker’s apartment, found the cocaine he was hiding and, of course, snorted it, the music cranked and the policemen did a crazed hip-hop striptease down to their Speedos.  In the midst of their dance, the music segued into “Thriller” and one of the players broke out and did an amazing impersonation of Michael Jackson.  The audience went bananas.  Then one of the other cops dropped his gun and accidentally shot him.  The crowed roared.  Now clutching his chest, the dancer did a slow-motion fall to the ground and the mood in the theatre turned instantly somber.  The audience went silent.  The show, time, everything, stopped.  At the very last moment, the dancer broke the spell by blowing a kiss toward Heaven.  The audience roared louder than ever.  It was brilliant, a genuinely communal acknowledgement, both sacred and profane, of the passing of a much loved and troubled pop star.

Europe 2009: Brussels, Belgium

In the summer of 2009 Luciana and I spent three weeks traveling to Belgium, Paris and Italy.  On the trip I shot ten hours of video (an insane amount) that I later edited into one, hour-long video.  So that we can share the video with more of you, I have cut the video into six sections and, over the next several days, will upload them to this blog and send them along with excerpts from the journal I kept.  I hope you enjoy them.  JH

June 24, 2009. 

           

The plane to Belgium boarded an hour late.  When we were finally in our seats Lu made a jetting motion with her hand and said that she hoped the pilots, “Really passed the gas.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. 

“What?” she said, and made the jetting motion again. “You know.  Press on the gas.”

“Stomp on the gas.”

“Yes!  That’s it.  ‘Stomp on the gas.’  …What? Why are you laughing?”  

                                                           

I was reading when Lu turned to me and being careful to whisper said, “Dis guy in front of us has a comb-over.  Does this mean that he cannot swim?” 

Brussels, Belgium

At the café in the Grand Place having a coffee.  It is late, after 9PM, but the sun has barely begun to set.  The square is crowded but the atmosphere is relaxed and pleasant.  Lu wants to take a picture of lights in the surrounding buildings when they come on after dark.  I think we are here for the night.  We are both exhausted.  I feel like I am in a dream.  I will be pressed to remember much about Brussels after we leave tomorrow.  

Our bed and breakfast is a tiny slip of a place just two blocks away.  From the street it looks like a storefront, like maybe it was once an art gallery, boutique or something.  The owner, Faldo, wasn’t there when we arrived and we couldn’t get in.  Lu called him on his cell and a few minutes later he and a young guy in a muscle tee jumped out of a cab.  They looked like they had just come from a rave. 

Inside the tiny foyer, the guy in the tee sauntered behind the desk, which doubled as a breakfast counter and bar, and pretended to work.  He half-heartedly wiped down the counter and then tried to make a pot of coffee.  He didn’t know where anything was kept and he didn't care.  Were we being checked-in to someone else’s hotel?  

After we were “checked in”, Faldo eyed our luggage, grabbed the smallest bag, then turned and bounded up the world’s most narrow and vertical flight of stairs.  Lu followed after and I took up the rear carrying our biggest suitcase out in front of me like an obese, quadriplegic child.  I looked to Fake Employee to grab the other two bags and he looked away pretending not to see.  But he did it in this bitchy little way that let me know he knew that I knew.  I reminded myself that douche was a French word and that if I called him one chances were good that he would understand.  But then I thought that if he responded in French, Flemish, Dutch, French…well, any language but English, I would be sunk.  I shouldered the other two bags and told myself to let it go.

As I carefully made my way up the north face of Everest with my retarded child in my arms, the flight-induced fugue state I was in sent a part of me back to the seventh grade when on a field trip to the South Street Seaport we visited a replica of one of Columbus’s three ships that was tied up at the dock.  Even then, when I was myself a child, I remember walking up the narrow stairs from below deck and thinking that the boat seemed to have been built for children.  It was hard to imagine it sailing across the Atlantic.  Our diet in America has made us giants.   
   

The café is closing.  The waiter said that the lights don’t come on at this time of year because it never gets dark enough.  Now you tell me.  Lu was disappointed so I told her that I would buy her a postcard of the lights tomorrow.  No one will be the wiser.  Lu rolled her eyes and said that she wanted a waffle for breakfast. 

The next morning while checking out, a photo of Michael Jackson came on the little television above the bar with a banner that said, “Le morte de Michael Jackson.”

“Must mean his new show stinks,” I said.

Faldo shook a finger at me and then pantomimed someone having a heart attack.  “Ee's dead.”

In the cab to the train station Lu and I were both stunned.  Such a tragic life.  “We will always know where we were,” said Lu.  

Santa Ynez

      

We almost didn't go.  The weather in LA was miserable and more was on the way.  It would only be worse the further north we went; and once we were in the mountains, forget it.  To see anything we would need to Google photos on the iPad.  "Oh, wow.  Look at this picture of a vineyard we're driving past but can't see."

I pulled the covers over our heads and we listened to the rain.  Sleep tugged at the leg of my pajamas and I started after him down the open manhole in the middle of the bed.  Just before ducking out I labored an open eye to check in on Lu.  She was WIDE awake.  "Oh no, Mushush," she said.  "I don't care if it's pouring.  I want to drink a nice glass of wine at a vineyard and I want to see the little horses."  (Apparently they have miniature horses in Santa Ynez.)  Lu then did an imitation of herself standing defiant and miserable in the rain with a soggy glass of wine in her hand while demanding a pony be brought out from the barn so she could pet it.  Then she did the pony, cranky and reluctant, being dragged out to meet her.  I started to laugh and poor Sleep lost his grip and fell to his death.  (Don't worry.  It would only be temporary.)  

We crested the Santa Monicas on the 405 Freeway and the sun burst out and started to punt the rain clouds over Burbank and back out to sea.  That never would have happened had we stayed in bed.  And that wasn't just the caffeine talking.