Grab Bag

Pals! I write this on a sleepy and mandatory-no-running-off-into-the-world-or-doing-schoolwork morning, as I near the end of a few weeks moving faster than I'd like. I'm writing the last of a few scheduled updates to keep the posts coming in their lackadaisical pace while I - and I hope this is Actually True - unplug and abandon my laptop until I arrive in Bologna for my month of remote-work semester prep. It felt like a good time to drop a post with a lot of fragments that didn't feel substantial enough to merit their own post and may not in fact merit this one but guess what, idiots, it's my blog and I will tank my own traffic if I want to! OK! To the jump! To the things!

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It is objectively the case that it is Good to be in a part of the world - of which there are many - in which most of the trucks you encounter are shorter than me. Death to trucks!

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Relatedly: there is nothing like exploring a wide variety of cities (from different cultures, ages, etc.) to make you realize how many unspoken values manifest themselves in the way we assemble our cities. You realize that some places are better at asking, for example, "what's pleasant to look at" when designing and constructing buildings; or that some have bothered to ask "how might humans pleasantly navigate from one point of the city to another." I've been a pretty radicalized anti-car maniac for years (even more so now that I have to own one for my job) but America's car supremacy becomes more apparent, and violently stupid, the more you explore places that have rejected it.

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Another objectively Good part of the world is: anywhere that ordering a drink inherently means they're going to bring you a snack of some sort, because it would be uncivilized to get drunk.

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On the night train from Palermo to Naples, my conductor knocks at my door. When I open it, he announces "Scuse me!" [holds forth a small, apparently battery-operated square with a glowing light on it] "This is button. Of emergency!" I nod, sort of understanding, as he slides it into a notch on my cabin wall, tips his cap, and leaves

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I've met up with some folk over here and it's nice sharing a table, but have been pleasantly surprised at how happy most places are to throw me a table for one, even as I land in a busy spot like Naples in its high season. Solo dining can be tricky in, say, Greece, where the expectation is usually that a group of people will be ordering moderately-sized plates of simple dishes to share, but nobody's weird about it - the most pushback I've gotten was a lovely group on Lesvos inviting me to join their table because they "wanted [me] to feel the warmth of the island." GOSH.

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The first time in Italy I was delighted to realize that Italians mostly chase the shade when walking, and this time learned how many cities in Sicily were designed with their tangle of streets providing frequent shade almost no matter where the sun is, with seaside towns often oriented to route the breeze through strategically angled alleyways. Still, one of my most delightful "heat: let's all run away from it!" realizations came in Palermo, where I realized that every piazza I stepped into had a cluster of people in the shadiest cafe terrace, with every sun-drenched terrace empty... for now. I like this image of a clock of humanity, rotating around the piazza as the shadows move, desperately working to stay cool.

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Relatedly, I cannot overemphasize the sheer goodness of finding a garden anywhere you can as you explore a city. (You may want to turn on satellite view if you're using google maps for this, as you'll find a lot of two-tree squares in Naples that Google thinks are Real Parks Gee Whiz!) The temperature falls, the greenery calms you, and if you're lucky enough to find a substantial one, you can find the sounds of the city fading a bit as you settle in. Any time I've started to burn out on travel on this trip, I have been able to  find a green escape that almost always recharges me.

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I'm struck again on this trip on the unexpected echoes of Japan in Italy and vice versa. Both cultures with a heavy emphasis on locality and seasonality, observing microseasons and traveling domestically because why would you drink Sicilian wine and snack on arancini in Turin when you know it's all going to be better in Catania? Both with a long-established ethos of draining every inch of possibility out of an ingredient, plant, fish, etc. Both with a heavy focus on the exact right way a thing should be done in the land of food and drink, and both full of places - artisanal workshops, restaurants, even pastry shops - that limit themselves to one thing and then work on perfecting that thing. (And both with a lot of utterly tacky, disposable, plastic-junk culture that defiantly opposes this older tradition.) In a lot of ways they're utterly opposite to each other, Italy's chaos and casual elegance obviously not on speaking terms with Japan's systems and formal codes, but I keep being reminded of each place when I'm visiting the other.

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I know I've got some diary-heads out there, who have various levels of the experience I routinely return to, in which you start journaling or gratitude-journaling, and then life does its thing and GOOD BYE JOURNALS. This year I've been keeping a book of days, and I've found it transformative. Literally just a daily-planner-looking notebook to jot down the minimal details of a day ("100 degrees. Early walk, bus ticket, wrote season pitches. Sandwich dinner with Mario (Cuzzante). Candle heat. Red ale.") and no room for anything else. Every week or two I may pull out my journal-journal for longer thoughts (less frequent now that the blog is taking up some of that slack) but mostly this is helping me capture the shape of days before they leave my head. Pre-trip it helped me identify some patterns that were good to identify, mid-trip it's helping me make sure I don't lose everything in the blur of moving a bit quicker than I'd like in these just-a-few-days stops. So yeah: I'll never be a daily-planner-as-daily-planner guy, but this book-of-days thing? I am obligated to recommend!

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Okay goodnight forever! Keep an eye out for an Athens update coming later this week, with Sicily tales arriving shortly thereafter as I settle into Bologna! Be kind to yourself and (if available) others!