Bristol is a medium-gorgeous city. IT's kind of whatever-jawdropping. I give it a C+ for making me want to live on a boat there forever.
England has been incredibly grand. The return to an Anglophone land has felt a great relief, it's been gorgeously sunny (by UK standards but also in comparison to Berlin) and most importantly of all, I've been able to spend time with some of my best and oldest friends. Last week I stayed with Kate, my friend since the start of undergrad, and her husband Stuart, who I've known just about since he and Kate started dating. I couldn't have asked for better hosts - Stuart kicked off my stay with a selection of English cheeses and charcuterie, made me tea and various English breakfasts every morning, and served as the most eager, informative tour guide you could ever ask for. Kate and I shared hours of conversation about our lives, explored Bristol when Stuart was away (and when she and I weren't working on our day jobbery), and all three of us got into London for a day. I met some of their friends, I had a full and rewarding week, it was all extremely neat is the point. Photos, video, and more past the jump as usuallllll.
First the video... and guys, Secret Time: it's sort of a Bristol video (and a bit of London) but it's also sort of about Kate and Stuart and how much I love 'em and admire their relationship. It was a real joy to get to spend almost a week with them, and I hope some of that comes through in this thing:
Most of our time was spent in Bristol, but we did get into London, which was wonderful. I hadn't been in years - the last time I went it was with family, though I had a few days to explore on my own a bit. But it felt different this time - I suppose being with friends and just having a greater familiarity with a number of city's designs made it feel a bit more normal, which was surprising to me.
Kate's one request for the day had been that we go to an exhibit of Yayoi Kusama's work at the Victoria Miro; "She works in dots," Kate said, and Stuart and I immediately became extremely annoying about the whole thing. "She does a lot with pumpkins in this one," Kate clarified, and we gave her reason to wish we had not come along to begin with. But here's the thing, is that Kate's basically always right when you get around to it, and jeez she sure was here. Snippets in the video above, but this was well worth the queuing, and a nice reminder to keep checking out things like this In The World even as a non-art-world person.
Pump-a-kins! Only two people were allowed in this mirrored cube at a time, for twenty seconds. IT WAS COOL, DID I MENTION THE COOLNESS OF IT
The rest of the day was Exploring Mode, with Stuart taking us on a walk through Islington, down to the Barbican (the whole complex of which is fascinating and cool) and swinging by the Guildhall, Bank of England, and a few markets before making our way up to a reading that I skipped out on to catch up with my dear friend Katie Swimm, just arrived that day for her own London-based research. It was a swell, all-too-brief day in the city to which I hope Stuart and Kate move so I can continue to bother them as an obnoxious houseguest.
Leadenhall Market! Sadly, we were by this point running a bit late to meet Katie for a drink, so had to rush through a few cool spots. It seems that I am compelled to return?
FRIENDS AT DRINKS! Kate J apparently refused to be in this picture, and also seems to be shockingly tall, or else that table is shockingly tiny, anyways photos are fun good job everybody.
The rest of the time was in Bristol, which is quite a lovely city. Banksy's home town, it's got a robust counterculture, and is the kind of place where every weekend there's something afoot - a festival, a show, or several of each. Kate and I did a good deal of work during the days, but fit in a few exploring wanders (including a duck into one of my favorite animation studios!) and had some delightful evenings out with friends, at speakeasy bars and cider boats. It was FUN and we were PARTY PEOPLE and now we are all taking a weeklong NAP, good work everybody.
CIDERBOAT! Out for some ciders (PRO TIP: I am terrible at picking ciders, there are so many good ones and I only picked terrible ones!) with Gillian and her friend Richard, both of whom were lovely and delightful, and with whom I was and always shall be proud to share a drinking-boat.
Bartender coven scheming our next round of drinks. This was the FIRST speakeasy of the night!
Stuart holds court as Alex and I pay attention. This was the SECOND speakeasy of the night, and it is here that I achieved my greatest accomplishment of the week: saying something about economics that was not grotesquely incorrect and terrible! It was something to do with bananas or cans of coke I believe.
I know what you're thinking, this must be from a THIRD speakeasy but guess what idiot, it's the first one again, because linearity is a phantasm and life moves to its own rhythms and I wanted ONE photo of me and Kate on this lousy post since she kept successfully avoiding it (except for this entire series of selfies that she took on my phone). Anyway this is me and Kate, we're pals, she's nice if sometimes scowly.
Now I'm up in York, at the start of about a week in Yorkshire, and I am loving it. More to come soon - afternoon tea, city walls, a staggeringly gorgeous cathedral, and a couple of superb museums! Stick around for THAT, or whatever!
Wow, guess what gang, it turns out when you see friends who've been close to you for over fifteen years and they introduce you to their friends and their city and you're back in the Anglophone world you get real bad at blogging. (At least it's partially because you were working on your dissertation, good for you for doing that, nice job gang.)
Anyhow, day late/dollar short but here's a thing about Berlin theatre! After the jump, general thoughts and a few show-specific notes.
Pre-show at the standing room area for Berliner Ensemble and Robert Wilson's Threepenny Opera. It is hilarious that Brecht's ensemble ended up in such a classically designed theatre space, but kind of fits him in just about every way as well.
A quick video sample of the first show I saw in Berlin (slightly different than its current staging). Gives you a good sense of some of the work on offer; a few selections from the show are on Youtube and worth seeking out ...
General thoughts: Holy moly German actors are fearless. Pretty much across the board there was a level of bravery, commitment, and training that outstrip most of what you see in the States (and at least what I've seen in the UK). I have cockamamie theories about East Cost v. Chicago Style acting, but Berlin actors really take the best of all worlds, and even when the productions aren't what you want 'em to be, it isn't really because the actors fall short.
The theatergoing culture is rabid in all the best possible ways. The audiences are more wide-ranging in age and (at least apparent) economic strata than I've seen elsewhere, and from a chat with a friend-of-a-friend, it seems that this holds up in general. Not only do, say, administrative assistants with no theatre background go to the Schaubühne, they all have opinions about specific directors and performers at the Schaubühne! Part of this magic is that the theatres are generally quite good at fostering the Space For Conversation we're always nattering on about in the States. (This is true in London at the Barbican and National Theatres, too! Probably other places too, and I have extremely high hopes for the newly redesigned Steppenwolf in this regard.) Full-service cafes and multiple common spaces for slightly-elongated intermisisons where patrons may nosh on bretzels and beer while debating what they're seeing. But of course subsidy matters too - when you regularly have tickets available to any comers at 6 euro, and discounts for the unemployed, students, disabled, elderly, for free or nearly-free tickets... you're going to get more people in the room.
I also love the repertory system. It means it's easy to catch 3-4 different shows by the same company in a given week (handy for tourists!) and that shows continue to live and breathe as they come in and out of rep. It seems an incredibly rich challenge as an actor, and as an audience member it means even if you live in Berlin you can always just check out what's on this week at, say, the Volksbühne and drop by if it's new to you.
The pre-show for Shakespeares Sonnette, another Wilson/Berliner Ensemble collaboration. Stunning.
Show specific thoughts Shakespeare's Sonnets, Berliner Ensemble; Threepenny Opera, Berliner Ensemble
So Robert Wilson has been collaborating with the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht's old theatre company, and the results are fascinating and weird. Wilson brings a lot of his usual tools to the table: ultra-slow motion, a precisely spartan use of lighting and design, and broad clowning. Ha ha ha JUST KIDDING broad clowning is (at least to my knowledge) a pretty new tool in the Wilson toolkit, and gang, it is a weird fit. Extremely broad gestural and vocal goofing presented with the same kind of methodical presentational style that has been at the core of Wilson's stuff going back to Einstein on the Beach (probably earlier, but that's my personal first frame of reference) is... strange. I think not entirely successful?
What's fascinating is watching his performers still find sharpness and audience-engaging quickness in the margins of the piece; and when either of these pieces turned away from slow-motion mugging to more serious work, it was transporting. Much more successfully, I think, in the Sonnets than Threepenny, if only because the material was more pliable and Threepenny needs, I think, a bit more lean comedy than broad sound-effects-laced buffoonery.
But oh man those actors. The woman playing Macheath was stupendous, the ensemble in the Sonnets was full-hearted and athletic, and I'll say that I walked away with at least three or four indelible theatrical images and moments that I'll carry with me for a few years yet. When this stuff works, it really works. And with regards to Shakespeare's Sonnets - it actually made me realize what dozens of ill-fated "what if it's in a white or gray box?" designers are trying to achieve. Very cool stuff.
Mother Courage and Her Children, Berliner Ensemble My one intermission walkout of the week, though generally a pretty respectable production. To my thinking, the main thing was - this was neither a reconstruction-productions from Brecht's modelbucher, nor was it a substantial re-imagining. Instead, it sort of split the difference - same circular playing space, but not a revolve. Other design concepts led to blackout, no-action scene changes of upwards of twenty seconds. There was actual rain on stage for the first twenty seconds of a scene before it phased out. All of it felt very half-thought-through, and while the actors were adroit, it had all the trappings of a museum piece, an old reliable for the tourist crowd. And truth be told, at least half of why I left at intermission was that crowd - neighbors talking through the show combined with my knowledge that I'd be seeing a three-hour, no-intermission show the next night, and I thought it best to be gentle on myself.
Wallenstein, Schaubühne A three-part Schiller play! I was apprehensive about this one, though I have to say the production didn't disappoint in any of the ways I feared. But it still was a bit rough, a bit one note - literally, in this case, as a deep bass synth note sat underneath the entire show without pause. I suppose that was to underscore the central idea of the piece - war is bad and it's gonna keep being bad - but really, do we not get that? In some ways it was a bit of an experiment - seeing how sustaining a seething semi-shouted performance in murky lighting for two hours and forty-five minutes makes the closing violence feel - in brighter lighting, a stage full of gentle rain, and blood blood blood. (A horse carcass hung center stage for the entire show, if you're looking for another Potent Metaphor.) Again, some superb performances within the confines of direction that pushed them all to eleven in unhelpful ways.
Apokalypse, Volksbühne This was kind of stellar. A (virtually) one-man show whose text consisted of the entire Book of Revelation, with brilliantly simple design. Wolfram Koch played John (so to speak), committing to the fervent, lit-with-fire intensity of a prophet (or a madman, depending on your perspective), with one actor/musician working a synth pad/metronome and another holding a prompt book, reading the text to Koch as he performed it (again, depending on your perspective there's lots to read into that). This was the performance where the craft of the actors really shone - not just Koch but Elizabeth Zumpe, playing the prompter (and this was a performance, simple and clean and intense in its own way). In some ways, it was all the ingredients you'd look for in creating a sketch of German Theatre - a bright yellow (latex?) business suit (later stripped down into a kaleidescopic body stocking), a few simple design elements deployed with precision, and full-on commitment to a conceptual premise. It's not the only time I thought of Darren Nichols from Slings and Arrows (though Wallenstein was much more a Darren production) but it had that aura around it in a good way. A great deal of why it worked - comedy, or perhaps more precisely humor. Not laughing at the text per se, but laughing at Koch's human, frail delivery of it. There was a lot to unpack for such a simple piece, and that may be why it, along with Shakespeare's Sonnets, might be my favorite of the theatre pieces I saw in Berlin. (Is it possible that having more familiarity with the text for both shows in English helped? WHO CAN SAY.)
Anyways, that's a way-longer-than-you-wanted report, but the long and short of it is: even if Berlin didn't already strike me as a city in which I'd love to live someday if I had free reign, its theatre scene would make that a tempting prospect. If you're ever passing through, it is very worth exploring.
Berlin was one of those cities that immediately, instinctively, gave me the sense that yes: I could live here. I would love to live here. An electrifying theatre and arts scene (as much for the diversity of the audience and the avid theatergoing culture as for the work itself), a stellar international (largely street food driven) food culture, and relative affordability across the board. More than anything, Berlin is a city that is living and making, rebuilding itself and full of people that have come there to create things. You feel that energy just walking around. IT'S NEAT. A few photos and a video after the jump, with more thoughts/images/video to come over the next few posts...
Oddly digitally jagged photo, but it fits the heavily-under-construction scene! This building is craziness. They're basically reconstructing a 19th century palace that was turned into a hulking Soviet monstrosity in the postwar period. The amount of re-defining, re-building that this city has been doing for years is quite stunning.
Self-portrait (one of a couple of attempts) at the Reichstag, which is pretty cool to start with but exceptionally stunning at sunset. That's how I spent my last evening in Berlin, and gang: EXTREMELY ENDORSED.
This isn't even really street art (which I'm sure will make its appearance in future posts on the city) but man, the street art scene in this town was ON POINT. Mostly I just liked that there blue poster there. It was KEEN!
Brecht! This photo is basically foreshadowing for a future post on theatre in Berlin. But also: how cool is it that tram stops have quotes by artists and intellectuals engraved into the wall (with a huge etching/drawing above 'em)? Answer: medium cool, B+
As I write this, I am on a Norwegian air flight from Berlin to London, nicely emblematic of the open-borders (possibly vanishing, who knows!) European Union. It seems like a good time to wrassle out some thoughts and encounters I’ve had in the past weeks related to language, fitting in, cultural fluency and exploration. All this, and nothing more, after the jump!
Chandelier at Brauerie Spezial, my B&B/Biergarten home in Bamberg and the site of my lengthiest, most in-depth conversation entirely in German! Which was not the best conversation I had in Germany! I guess this is FORESHADOWING for the post below? Is that a thing? I'm not sure how captions work.
Swinging from Italy into Munich was something of a relief. Not only does Munich feel, oddly, intuitively familiar and coherent in a way that much of Italy did not, but I was back in a country where I had reasonable fluency in the local language. This hadn’t really been an issue early on in the trip – I spoke German in Austria and either German or English in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
English was particularly common outside of Austria – as the manager of an excellent wine bar in Budapest put it, “We all have to speak something other than Hungarian, because who’s going to learn Hungarian?” I had a tour guide who told a similar story – he actually remembered the year that, following the fall of the iron curtain, all of his Russian teachers were suddenly English teachers.
In Italy, the language barrier was higher – fewer locals were conversant in English, and my Italian was pretty well limited. The compensating factor was physical animation. Generalizations, again, but Italians bring a robust physicality to conversation, so even when reaching a linguistic impasse, it was usually an easy hop over to miming our way through a conversation.
So, being in Germany was a bit of a relief, though also a bit stressful – because my dissertation is on a German-language topic, there was always a meter pinging in the back of my head, a flashing light next to a panel reading “If you don’t get through these conversations entirely in German you will never successfully acquire a PhD.” It was imposter syndrome, but for chatting with neighbors at a restaurant. SUPER FUN!
What it ultimately fed into, though, was this odd tic I have found that I have, which is the desire to completely blend. It’s the same instinct that, back home, sees me immediately scope out ordering systems at restaurants, traffic flow in train stations, etc. In these travels, it’s manifested itself in an attempt to “stick the landing,” to run encounters start-to-finish in the local language, almost to go unnoticed as a non-native speaker.
Which is hilariously stupid, turns out, because of coursethe best and most interesting conversations I’ve had here have been the ones where I admit to some blend of ignorance and curiosity, where my linguistic skill level (however rudimentary) is more about respecting the culture and gesturing an investment in it, and less about some weird act of touristic espionage.
So, when I’m at a bar in Berlin and I tell the bartender that it never occurred to me that Austrian rum would be a thing (and of course, why wouldn’t it?) it ends up unlocking a conversation with him as well as the four other patrons at the bar, two of whom go on to spend most of the night chatting with me about their own travels, what they like about the cities they like, swapping advice for my Scandinavian travels coming up, and their take on Brexit and the future of the EU.
Or a night earlier, at a burger joint, when it became apparent that my German was a little too limited for the awkwardly polite chit-chat I was sharing with the two guys at my table (both working in Berlin at a pharma company), the switch to English opened up a conversation about the relative levels of bureaucratic red tape in Germany as opposed to France as opposed to the States, more travel story-swapping, and conversations about the depressingly-universal topic of gentrification (increasingly aided and abetted by AirBnB, against whom there is an incisively vulgar PR campaign afoot in Berlin).
Or a conversation with my roommate Laelia in Munich, who literally started the conversation by saying “English or German?” and leapt immediately to a fantastic and lengthy set of conversations. We bonded over a shared love of cities that incorporate green space well; chatted about her travels in the States and mine abroad. This was one of the most political conversations I’ve had over here, though not in the immediate “you’re not electing Trump, are you?” sense that you’d expect. Rather, her bewilderment at the States’s two-party system led to us mulling over the cultural differences between Germany and the US – that the US is a rooting country (with politics as sport) where, soccer excepted, Germany is not. (“The fact that you guys are devoted to a college sports team because you were born somewhere is crazy to me!”) More specific to our current degraded politics, she noted that at least for her it seems that Germans are very pointedly averse to charismatic politicians, and the kind of media-saturated celebrity-worship that has elevated Trump is anathema for obvious reasons “because of our history.”
I guess the linking thread in all these conversations has been the moment of one of us (often me, and I hope to get better at doing this!) saying “I don’t know!” And as much as my instinct is to Do Well and Just Seem Like A Local, the obvious-in-hindsight reality is that so many doors open when you reveal yourself to be a well-intentioned explorer, happy to admit your limited knowledge and eager to learn more. This, I hope, is something I’ll carry back with me into my life back home when I return, hopefully by thoroughly integrating the phrase “I don’t know, I guess I must be too stupid, forgive me ughhhh” into my daily lexicon?
OKAY! A National Express coach calls my name, and I’m off to Bristol! Berlin posts a-comin’ in the day or two to come. SPOILER ALERT: Good gravy I loved that city.
SO. Bavaria was a wonderfully calm bounce-back from Venice in just about every way. Cooler temperatures, a little less hectic in terms of the tourist trade, and a lot of greenery helped; it was also something of a relief to land in a country where I speak the language at least relatively fluently again. Video, photos, and very brief useless thoughts after the jump!
Heyyyy it's King Ludwig! Wacky King Ludwig, as they called him. Not to be confused with Mad King Ludwig (that'd be II). That came later. Anyway HORSE STATUE
While Italy was a frenzy of exploration and activity, Bavaria and Thuringa were much more about slowing down and recovering, even as the city-to-city pace continued to be a bit quicker than it had been in Italy. A little light sightseeing, but for the most part this week and change was about catching up on sleep, getting back on track with the dissertation, and conversation. (More on that in a coming post.)
Also, while not as evident in some of these photos, it was shocking how much a difference getting north of the Alps made in terms of cloud cover. It's honestly taken me a week or two to adjust to the regularly-cloudy skies after almost a month of entirely-sunny Italy. This makes it all the more ironic that I brutally sunburnt myself on my third day in Munich.
Munich! The collision of new and old, of reconstruction and existing monuments, is actually pretty mild here compared to other parts of Germany (and oh man Berlin...) but it's kind of the most immediate thing that struck me about Germany as compared to Italy.
It was also about beer. Good lord, people aren’t kidding about German beer. Specifically Bavarian lager, and specifically fresh Bavarian lager straight from the keg or the cask. Refreshing, light, delicately flavored, and cheap.My stop in Bamberg also included some rauchbier (smoked beer, a local specialty), which was odd but also delicious, and much milder than the rauchbier I’ve had back in the States.
Bamberg, as viewed from an amazing beer garden on the outskirts of the city. These were places of community, all-ages and convivial and charming beyond belief. It was at this beer garden that I first noticed what's become a pattern: namely, that I'm somehow a magnet for small German kids who are fascinated with me, and of whom I'm instantly petrified that they're gonna figure out that my German fluency is limited and make fun of me. Pat King: EXTREMELY ADEPT at finding reasons to fear five year olds!
I wish I’d spent more time in Munich, since I needed a lot of my time there to recuperate, spending much of it reading in the Englischer Garten rather than exploring (and certainly rather than taking the you-would-think requisite day trips to Dachau and Neuschwanstein). But I’m glad I got a dose of smaller-town Germany – Bamberg is a real treat of a town, especially at dusk and after dark – and taking it a little easier in these weeks left me ready to dive headfirst into Berlin.
DID I MENTION THAT BAMBERG IS PRETTY? IT IS NOT AN UN-BEAUTIFUL PLACE. Let's all go there for a reading vacation someday.
Speaking of, one last stray thought: Rick Steves has a theory that Americans' vision of Germany (the lederhosen, the beer halls, all that pastoral stuff) is really about Bavaria because that's the area that American G.I.s largely controlled after the war, so that's the imagined nation we brought back. It's an interesting thought, but what I'm finding in my early Berlin days is that it seems to work in reverse. At least in the parts of Bavaria that I visited, there was a lot of American inflection - a prolific (and quite excellent!) burger scene, and the sense that the region was oriented in our general direction. It's not that that's not true in Berlin - it's rare here that you'll go long without hearing English on the street - but Berlin is much more of a global city in its tastes, its culture, its general attitudes, in comparison to Munich. This might be a completely invented reality, but this is my blog so you're all living inside my madness now ok byeeeeee
The Dom in Bamberg. Regensberg's Dom was if anything more stunning, but heavily under construction; Erfurt's was grand but it was hot and glarey, and so NO PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF REMAINS. Have we mentioned that there's a sort of lazy undercurrent to the weeks under discussion here? What's that all about.
Full Bavaria/Thuringa post coming (I think) tomorrow, but here's a quick video I grabbed in Leipzig, which had superb street musicians playing around with Bach. (As, for that matter, did Erfurt!) Even within the generally-more-ambitious, we're-real-musicians scene I've encountered in Europe, these cats had CHOPS, man.
Another piece written on the bus from Regensberg to Bamberg, arriving to the blog later than expected.
I’m bouncing around Munich (loved it, for very different reasons than I’d assumed I would), Regensburg and Bamberg, and it’s seeming likely that I won’t have a video/photo update slated until I get to Berlin, so in the meantime, here are some incoherent ramblings less about me than about the trip! (OK some of them are about me it’s my blog nobody’s paying me to be fun to read so deal with it.)
Regensburg is very pretty, fairly quaint, and under construction!
Uneducated generalizations after the jump!
Italy is spectacular at public water. It flows freely. Like, to a degree that’s actually sort of wasteful? Most of their public fountains just run constantly, and unless they’ve really perfected recycling the water that spills into the gutter… Well, in any case, particularly when you pair it with Rome’s legislation requiring that cafes permit non-customers to use their restrooms, it’s the best country in the world in which to remain hydrated. WOOT!
I realized my third night in Germany that it was the first time in a month that I’d heard somebody watching movies or TV while wandering the streets of my small town (Regensburg). Obviously that’s not to say Italians don’t watch TV or movies… but whereas a stroll down my street in Boston or Chicago would typically lead past numerous flickering screens/audio spilling out the windows, that was not the case in Italy. Not sure why.
I had a full conversation in a foreign language! A 30-minute lunch chat with an older German man and his wife… well, mostly the man, as she seemed a little nonplussed by his decision to chat up the clumsy, half-stupid foreigner. But it was great! My half consisted mostly of smiling and nodding and desperately trying to decode on the fly as he told me about (I think) his career as a test driver for Mercedes busses, his work taking him to Scandinavia, where he found Finland verypeaceful even if others found it boring, about his son who works (worked?) in America, about his wife teaching German in New York for a brief period of time, and… probably many other things that I tried to keep up with but didn’t quite piece together. These chats are always kind of delightful and kind of stressful – you can feel, in the moment that you fail to understand what somebody’s saying, their anxiety over being clear even when it’s clearly your fault for not understanding. But this chap was a delight, always bounced back when I got confused, and was clearly pleased to give me a chance to stammer clumsily about my summer and where I’m from and what I do. (OH! He also talked about how, being from Stuttgart, he and the people in Bamberg basically don’t speak the same language. Regional variances are tricky, man.)
The trip, I’m realizing, is turning into a great control-grouped case study on national diets. I can feel my body responding very differently to German food (well, and American food in Munich – following the locals, I indulged in some burgers and burritos) than it did to Italian. This is kind of cool; here’s hoping I can take lessons back home with me and construct… THE PERFECT DIET???
It is also turning into a great sampler of amazing local drinks. I have been head over heels for the unbelievably fresh, clean, refreshing lagers (and complex rauchbiers) in Bavaria. My favorite wines in Italy were in the € 1-2 range. It’s been pretty cool, and I’m also getting a sense of how I respond differently to different drinks - what seems to hit me harder, what bums me out, what makes me silly… whether that’s psychological or physiological who knows, but there you have it.
OK. Come Berlin, hopefully some Bavarian (and Thuringen!) photos and a video of some sort. That video thing has been interesting and fun... it's mostly become a sort of moving journal of my travels to revisit down the road, because something about seeing a place in motion really brings things back to me? AND the music is almost always something that's rattling around my head in the various places I've been. So in theory I'm creating little nostalgia machines for myself, plus they have the benefit of being (hopefully) slightly less boring than Obligatory Vacation Slideshows, giving me an easier way to catch friends up on stuff without making them hate a death march of Photos Of Churches! Yayyyyy videos ok goodnight.
This was written on the train from Venice to Munich; I put off posting it for a while, but am catching up now.
Hey gang! (We're all in a gang now don't worry about it, mostly it's just bake sales and coming up with themed brunches.)
Thought it might be worth dropping off some odds-and-ends thoughts here before plodding on to the next array of things! This trip from Venice to Munich isn’t quite the halfway mark – I arrived in Vienna on May 9 and will return home on August 23 – but it’s close enough, and it feels a bit of it, given the structure of the trip. So then: time to take stock and mull things over!
Navel gazing, feelingsy drib-drabs after the jump…
Venetian dead-ends are the best kind of dead ends! This one is also a METAPHOR for that old saying, "There's water at the end of the tunnel."
Where are we at now
After about a month of Italy, which was almost purely about relaxation, exploration, and thinking/feeling, I’m on a Deutsches Bahn train from Venice to Munich! We’re winding through the Brenner Pass, which is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. It’s a long trip, but well worth the time to see the landscape slip past. No photos or video, as my reserved seat had me in a seat with a decal on the window, but as a Human Being I was Deeply Moved!
From here, it’s a few weeks of Germany, a few weeks with old, close friends in the UK, and a few weeks of Scandinavia and then back to the adventure of trying to write a dissertation hooray for life!
Yr humble narrator, in Emilia Romagna, in one of the many shirts that are increasingly too baggy for Fashionable Company
Where we are at now, but like, in here (vaguely gestures towards heart)
Better places. Good days and bad, steps forward and back, but the slow movement seems to be forward-ish. Early on in this trip I was moving through a pretty self-critical place; friends were great about reminding me not to be overly hard on myself, but I’m glad I spent the time there that I did, because I definitely had a lot to learn as a person and a partner. Coinciding with this, as something of a transition, came a wave of – no better word for it – resentment, occasionally shading into anger. Again – not my favorite, but I do know that the mind and body have to rewire themselves pretty significantly, and this was A Necessary Step.
Lately, I’ve felt much more… balanced, I guess. I’m reminded of something that I was told months ago: that healthy processing after emotional traumas involves a balance between past and present. There’s often a tendency to either ruminate in the past, dwelling and replaying and grinding one’s teeth forever; or to completelyignore it, try to hit “delete, ignore” and race into the future. But productive processing involves a balance – looking to the past for lessons, for perspective, for growth, and looking to the future with a sense of purpose, plan, openness, receptivity. That’s where my head’s been at. It’s not that I’ve shaken off my circumstances – I think about the divorce pretty much daily – but the direction of those thoughts is shifting, gradual though it may be, towards something more useful, more productive, more hopeful. And that feels real good.
FRIENDS ARE HELPFUL! (OK this statue might not be about Pals Being Great, nobody really knows and it might actually be about how Romans Are Scared Dummies, but I'm choosing to interpret it as a time-traveling tribute to how great my pals have been this summer. Pals!!! You've been SO GREAT!)
Where are we at in terms of whether our brain is functional
Ha ha WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE are doing fine mostly.
Trip fatigue is a real thing, and I’m incredibly ready to land somewhere for a week or so – the quick stops in Padua and Venice have left me a little off-kilter, and taking a few days in a few towns in Bavaria and Thuringa look likely to be much the same. BUT, when I’ve been able to plant somewhere for a week, get a routine quickly established, be fully unpacked, and let my brain be in the present rather than looking to the next stop… those have remained good weeks. I’ll have that again in Berlin, after which I think every stage of the trip is close enough to a week that it’ll treat me well.
As to the dissertation: Italy was, for the most part, a total break. Usefully so, given how much material I’d been tearing through at the end of Vienna. And letting the ideas and fragments marinate has been good. But it’s time to pivot back into gear, to get this stuff in shape for a productive year of work ahead. The hope is to spend my time in Germany/UK/Scandinavia mostly doing translation work and some analysis of the plays and production texts that will form the core of my work so that when I return to the States I have a good body of work to play off of as I head into the writing phase. One very positive step: I got into a working group at ASTR, one of the two major national theatre conferences! This gives me an impetus to write a chunk of the dissertation early for the November conference, and will hopefully give me an early temperature check on the work I’ve done, to make sure I’m not totally off balance.
Anyhow. That’s about me: brain, heart, and body all doing mostly okay and hoping to keep making gains as I head into the back half of the summer. The fall is a big unknown and I get nervous thinking about it, but this year has taught me, if nothing else, life goes on after some of the worst things you can think of, so that is what I hope to do as well! Hooray for adventures!
I've written a couple of posts that I meant to put up this week. Then Baton Rouge happened, Falcon Heights happened, and Dallas happened, and frankly nothing I have to say or share seems of any significance, nor feels appropriate given the nightmare unfolding back in my home country.
I hope you are following the news not to gawk at personal tragedies, but to learn more about the world we have built, and to learn how we might be able to change it.
Campaign Zero has been targeting these issues for some time, though I only learned about them in the wake of this week; consider using their site as a resource, a tool, a challenge.
I'm sure at some point I'll get back to posting and catch up on this trip. It continues to be worthwhile - and certainly my conversations about the politics of the USA have become more significant, if much harder - but not today, not this week.
Venice (after a brief stop in Padua). Video, photos, thoughts after the jump.
A not-un-pretty place, this "Venice"
I planned my Italian month very deliberately moving from south to north, knowing my aversion to heat meant that I had to try to plan accordingly lest I spend the entire month sweating and crying. The one major downside: this would put me in Venice at the start of July.
My favorite trips are almost always in shoulder season or the off season. Seeing cities when they’re not crushed with tourists, when the weather is a little milder, and when everybody’s a bit more relaxed is what it’s all about for me. I loved visiting Paris in November (even if Paris is one of those cities that doesn’t really have an off season). Portland Maine is gorgeous and idyllic when the cruise ships ease up in late fall and winter. And Venice in July seemed likely to be something of a disaster.
Well, idiot, think again. It was stunning, more than living up to its reputation as a magical place.
The thing that struck me was how easy it was to slip off the tourist conveyor belt from the Rialto to St. Mark’s Square. It’s a small island – you can walk between most any two points on it in about 30 minutes, even with all the necessary zig-zagging over canals and rios. But as soon as you duck off into a tiny side street that looks like it might not go anywhere, 90% of the crowds fade and it’s just you and a handful of others exploring the much-more atmospheric city that lies in wait.
Not to mention: much cooler. Narrow winding streets provide ample shade, and often a breeze cutting through the alleyways to further cool you down while the major thoroughfare bakes in the heat.
In short, if you want to survive Venice and you’re going during the summer months: get off the main passageways, start your day at dawn, and nap from about lunch to 5 pm.
The view from my AirBnB window. Holy moly this was a gorgeous spot. Everybody! Stay in Dorsoduro!
There are sights – St. Mark’s is impressive, particularly if you go at 11:30 when they illuminate themosaics - and a number of Important Museums. But for a two-night visit, I was mostly content to just wander the streets and climb the bridges and soak it all in. It was a stunning place and I cannot wait to go back, with a little more time to get out into the lagoon to visit the smaller islands surrounding the main one.
It was a great end to my time in Italy – overwhelming and peaceful all at once, full of long quiet stretches for contemplation and just enough of a jostling crowd to make me glad to arrive in Munich to a more-orderly, cooler, and more work-a-day environment.
Ciao for now, Venice: see you some November in the years to come
Let us now sing the praise of Italian regional culinary traditions and rivalries! If you ride the train between points in Italy, you can begin to predict what dishes you're going to find in your next town. Passing field after field of corn in the Veneto, it makes perfect sense that on arrival in Padua and Venice you find polenta all over the menus. Almost every region has wines and dishes associated with it: the chianti, beans and beef of Tuscany, the pesto and seafood of Liguria, the offal cookery of Lazio... and in Emilia Romagna, Italy's heartland, you have prosciutto, balsamic vinegar and Parmigiano-Reggiano. That's what we're after in this post.
Food nerd geek-out follows after the jump...
My major splurge of Italy (and indeed of the trip as a whole, barring any last-minute wait-list miracles at Noma) was a full-day food tour of Emilia-Romagna led by Alessandro, a madman from Tuscany who carries the flame for Emilia Romagna now that he lives in the hills outside of Bologna. The tour started early (departing Bologna around 7 AM) and ended in the early evening, taking in a Parmigiano factory, a balsamic vinegar producing estate, and a prosciuto factory before a ludicrously lengthy, delicious lunch on an organic farm and vineyard.
It was pretty neat.
Cheeeeeese, in the first 24 hours of its life
All these products are DOP – protected by a certification process insisting that their principal ingredients be local to the sub-region of Emilia Romagna in which they are made, that their processing and manufacture be local, and that their quality be attested to by local consortia inspecting the foods produced. Much like champagne from Champagne, only balsamic vinegar made according to exacting standards in this one corner of the world can be sold as Aceto Balsamico Traditionale di Modena DOP.
Prosciutto in its late curing stage
The tour was unreal, largely thanks to Alessandro’s outsized personality. A total showman whose banter and routines worked almost entirely due to his deeply-rooted genuine passion for the products he showed us, he was a born performer, entertaining the little kids in our group as well as the adults, condescending to nobody and wildly encouraging of everybody. His exuberance was inspirational.
This photo op was mandatory according to Alessandro. There is a photo of me inspecting cheese as well. YOU WILL NEVER SEE IT, SOME THINGS WERE MEANT TO STAY HIDDEN.
(As a side note: it was also fantastic to take a tour like this and feel no pressure whatsoever to buy anything. If anything, Alessandro erred on the side of making it clear that nobody was expected to buy anything from any of our stops. Most people did – this is where having another month and a half on the road really came in handy in resisting temptation – but “it’s not necessary,” as he reminded us.)
Gettin' them curds outta that whey.
And the food was incredible. An excessive breakfast (following a visit to the cheese factory) of young table cheese, three-year Parmigiano, salami, pizzettes, mortadella sandwiches, lambrusco wine, cappuccino, cornetti… after three weeks of getting used to light Italian breakfasts, this was absurd. We had tastings at all three locations, followed by a lunch at which Alessandro insisted on seconds on every course for every person. It was wild and wonderful in equal measure.
Breakfast! Phase one of... many.
Anyhow. Food tours: they have the potential to be terrible, pretentious, consumeristic, awful things run by and for awful people! But this one was amazing and incredible and I loved it WHO KNEW!
A row of barrels for DOP balsamic! Every year, one of these rows produces one liter of vinegar, or ten bottles that can be sold. The stuff is a labor of love; as Alessandro said, many families produce the stuff not for commercial sale but for their family and closest friends. It takes twelve years to begin to be able to sell the stuff; you start a row expecting you'll hand it off to your children, and there are some that he knows of that go back at least 130 years. Food cultures are neat sometimes.
I learned this not here but in Tuscany: roses grow at the end of rows of grapes because, it turns out, they suffer the same diseases/blight that grapes do, but show the symptoms sooner! Basically roses are nature's canary in the coal mine of winemaking. Well, that's a terrible metaphor, goodnight forever!
Well, that took a minute. Turns out, Venice is astonishing and I basically could not do anything except explore that city the entire time I was there. I'm up in Munich now, which is lovely in its own right, and catching up on my dissertation and this here bag of words. So, backtracking a bit to catch up on things.
Side note: the train ride from Venice to Munich is stunning. About six hours long, winding through the mountains, small Alpine villages, mist and forests, it's just jawdropping and glorious and if I wasn't heatstricken and exhausted from my Venetian exploring, I would have tried to capture it somehow, but as it is I just gaped out the window and occasionally drifted in and out of sleep.
Jumping back a week... Reggio Emilia and its neighbors, after the jump.
Reggio Emilia on market day.
The thing is: when temperatures get to be upwards of 90° F, I fall apart completely. Mentally, physically, emotionally. I get irritable, unfocused... the whole nine yards. And it was solidly in the 90s pretty much my entire week in Emilia Romagna. So that colored my experience a little bit. I spent a good deal of time getting my dissertation research organized and mapping out my next steps as I start sorting through everything I grabbed in Vienna. (I should have been able to predict this, but obviously Italy was not conducive to getting a lot of reading and writing done.)
That said, I got some good exploring in. A day shared between Modena and Bologna - the former a fairly upmarket town, the homeplace of balsamic vinegar, and perhaps my favorite town in the region in balancing small-town scale and pace of life with just enough energy and activity to feel lively; the latter a college town that brought back a little of the business and human tumble of Florence and Rome. I spent a half day in Parma, which... I liked? To be honest, my least favorite of the three - it felt the least alive to me, although surely the blazing heat had something to do with that. But I'm glad to have seen it!
The food market in Modena! This place was awesome on many, many levels, and if I were to do the trip again, would probably be my home base in Emilia Romagna.
Modena also had (hands down) the best street art of the three major cities of the region. This little nook was typical - colorful, varying styles, pleasant and bright. SIDE NOTE: Have I mentioned that Italy is THE BEST COUNTRY EVER for public water availability? This is true.
An arcade in Bologna. Arcades are the best and most magical things ever and the only reason we do not have them in America is that our urban developers have always hated the American public and want us all to get sunburned and heatstricken and die on the sidewalks with parched lips and dried-out pores.
But my home base was Reggio Emilia, a great little town that's not especially on the tourist trail (with the caveat that just about every place in Italy is on the tourist trail to some degree). While its neighbors are mostly significant for food-related reasons (Parma ham, Parmigiano Reggiano, balsamic vinegar, and Bologna as the Fat One with all the Amazing Traditional Restaurants), Reggio Emilia is mostly known as the birthplace of the Italian flag. There's a museum for that.
But really, it's the place I visited in Italy that felt most like it operated on its own rhythms and to its own purposes. There was a strong sense of community - most people seemed to know each other, and (at least non-Italian) tourists were very much the exception rather than the rule. This was both charming and a little challenging - unlike my Parisian trip some five years ago, I hadn't had the time to devote a few months to language skills for this trip, and so while I had the basic pleasantries and tourist-interaction phrases down, it was hard to open doors without a real ability to banter or chit-chat.
Which is not to say the people were unfriendly. In fact, the city seemed to have festivals of some variety every other night, and the passagiatta - the evening stroll after dinner - was as lively and expansive as any I'd seen in Italy. There was a large student population, most evident at night in the piazzas, which gave the place a real thrumming energy.
And yet - I often felt a little isolated, a little unable to bridge that gap. Now that I'm back in a German-speaking country, it's much improved - but it's certainly whetted my appetite for more language acquisition. Almost the entire reason I travel is because I want to get behind the scenes in any given culture, and one thing that my week in Emilia Romagna demonstrated was how useful language skills are in slipping around those corners.
The prettiest of the several festivals in town was the all-in-white dinner party in the city centre, where families and groups of friends set up picnics in the street in an all-white setting, many employing Alice in Wonderland themes to their decorations or dish names. I was able to wander through on my way to a performance of True West - particularly fascinating in Italian! - and it was just the loveliest thing.
