Travelogue 289 – August 8
The Medieval Modernist Romantics

Apropos to my trip to the Thames – I mean the proper Thames, in New London, Connecticut – I must make mention of the arts. We have visited the menacing submarines of Groton. Now make a visit to the mellower, artsy precincts of New London, across the estuary. In a town of 20,000 we have dozens of art studios, but the kingpen is the Hygienic Arts Coop and Gallery. Inside this hallowed complex is where I have the honor to lay my head for four nights, my friend Troy being one of the resident artists.

A block from the river on lively Bank Street, this building stands like a spot of good cheer and genius, a building that dates to the mid-nineteenth century. The Hygienic spent most of the twentieth century as a 24-hour eatery. The gallery inhabits an old restaurant space. In darker times of urban blight, during those dastardly 60s in particular, the building became a center if unwholesome and illicit activities – which history is really a feather in any arts community's cap. In 1979, local artists made the Hygienic Restaurant the locale for its first community show. By the 90s, the artists were organized and ready to take over the failed restaurant and renovate the building. The resident artists are a diverse group. Troy paints and designs beautiful block prints. Kevin is a glass-blower. Downstairs is a busty blonde metal-worker who calls herself the Madagascar.

Rosanne (a pseudonym: she prohibits the use of her real name, which is very, very different than Rosanne) has bought me a ticket for the featured exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 'Sin and Salvation: William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision'. William Holman Hunt is one of the founders of this quirky and influential movement. Three young men meet in the house of one of their moms. Three young men with grudges meet at mom's house. They mock the establishment. No, this is not Edina, circa 2008. It's Gower Street, London in 1848. The enemy is the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom they call 'Sir Sloshua'. Boys, boys...

Seduced by the Romantic movement in literature, these boys have a vision. In the same way that the Romantics challenged the excessive rationalism, formality, and elegance of the eighteenth century, these boys would challenge the prevailing conventions in painting. Raphael, wunderkind of the Renaissance, introduced corruption into the visual arts, they say: his elegant classicism inspired centuries of fuzzy, formulaic composition. So, back to the days … PRE-Raphael. They revive, each in his own way, the vivid colors, detail, and complex composition of the Quattrocento.

The three boys are Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, (who should win awards just for his name). They're debut as a movement would be the exhibition of Millais's painting, 'Christ in the House of His Parents' in 1850, a work raked over the coals by none other than Charles Dickens. 'Blasphemous,' he cries. Why? Because Mary is ugly. Come to the rescue, young John Ruskin.

What emerges over the next few decades is a body of work, vivid and quickly recognized, romantic in subject and tone. The mood is perhaps best captured in Hunt's 'The Lady of Shalott', a web of myth and symbol, a swirl of glowing color, a central figure captured in awkward motion.

And emerges a mythology of the movement, a collection of eccentric characters: the morbid poet-painter Rossetti and his prolific siblings; the hyper-creative William Morris; the adventurous Hunt, who makes four trips to the Levant and eventually builds a house in Jerusalem. Biography was their art as much as poetry or painting. But such is the tradition, Mannerist or Pre-Raphaelite.

From Tems to Thames, the torch is borne. Artists, unite, throw off your chains! See you at Mom's!

Travelogue 288 – August 4
New London

I take a lunch break in Boston. I've arrived by train. I will depart by plane. I have a mid-afternoon spell for relaxing in the city center. It's been years since I've walked around this old town. After four days in New London, Connecticut, downtown Boston seems ostentatiously modern and glossy, populated uniformly by the ambitious. At least, I can say that their pace along the immaculate streets is ambitious.

New London is a small spot on the map in eastern Connecticut, but its hilly little byways and choppy river waters hold lots of crazy, concentrated history. The river is the Thames, and please pronounce that exactly how it's spelled, resisting the snobby impulse to say, 'Tems'. They say that's how the name was properly pronounced when the town was settled by John Winthrop and his merry band of pilgrims in 1646.

The settlement was located on ground called called Nameaug by the Pequot Indians. Nameaug comes from an ancient inscription on the site that says, 'My Name is Augustus Caesar,' which supports a theory I'm marketing that New England was first settled by the Romans in the third century AD. (See photo for historical re-enactment.) Archaeology is a hobby of mine, though of course I prefer to pursue it without getting dirty. I'm pretty sure I'll find that inscription one day. I begin the search for it in the bars on Bank Street in New London.

Troy and I set out on the Thames one day – after some lovely chowder at Captain Scott's on the wharf – in order to investigate further the history of this place. Or perhaps it was to enjoy the sunshine on a rare clear day. We board the tour boat, the only guests for the 4:30 tour, and take our seats as the captain and tour guide climb into the high cabin that makes the vessel seem as tall as it is long. Though there are only the two of us, the tour guide insists on delivering his comments through the loudspeaker. Put-put we go out into the river/estuary. Yes, the wide-mouthed old Thames is tidal, and it is half seawater: the bottom half, according to our guide. We choose the 'sub' tour, meaning we're going to head upriver toward the Navy base, rather than downriver and into the Long Island Sound.

Here are some history teasers about New London and Groton, which is the city opposite to New London. Did you know that it was right here in this happy port that radar and sonar were developed, in the naval labs? Or that penicillin was developed here in the Pfizer labs? I can't find much 'expert' corroboration on these points. In fact, I keep running into those pesky Brits (and their dirty 'Tems') when I research OUR accomplishments. But our tour guides were quite clear on these points.

One item even the most annoying Brits won't contest is that the first nuclear sub, the USS Nautilus, set sail from this very port in 1954. Our little tour boat chugs by the sub base upriver, and we spot a few black beauties at port there, fueling up for their next pass at St. Petersburg.

Another thing the Brits won't deny is that they just about destroyed New London in 1781. Apparently, General Benedict Arnold, a native of the area (from Norwich), having already switched sides, finding himself woefully idle and undervalued by his new masters, decided that a raid against the privateers of New London might be a good career move. He chased our good soldiers from Fort Trumbull on the New London side and besieged the fort on the Groton side, Fort Griswold. It was a massacre. There's an obelisk on the sight now. Troy and I visit the remains of the fort, wishing a Brit or two would dare to show up now and mispronounce our river's name.

A plaque in the ground commemorates the spot where Colonel William Ledyard was mercillesly cut down by a British officer. According to legend, the redcoat demanded to know who commanded the fort. Ledyard replied "I did, sir, but you do now," and offered his sword. The British officer took the sword and then murdered Ledyard. That's not chivalry.

Just downriver from the sub base, you pass the Coast Guard Academy, looking trim and cheerful. In my high school days, I flirted with the notion of applying there. These days, by some quirk of brain chemistry, that memory is intimately connected to another: a miserable hour of vomiting on the ferry to Cyprus in the mid-90s. Funny how the mind works.

In the evening, Troy and I meet his mother in Ocean Beach, just south of New London, on the Long Island Sound. We sit on a concrete balcony, sipping Long Island iced teas (what else?) and contemplate the fuss over antique cars in the parking lot. We also contemplate the sunset and the rise of the near-full moon. From our privileged spot, it seems as though we can see the fabled lands of Fisher's Island and Orient Point, Long Island. We search the horizon for the famous haunted lighthouse, but can't find it. Alas. Maybe the Brits have stolen that, as well.

Travelogue 287 – July 31
Connections-icut

It's 5am; sunlight is tinting the sky over the highway, over the wooded hills. When is the last time I've seen so many sunrises? 2009 is my Year of Eastern Skies. (A better title than Year of Sleepless Nights.)

We're on the move. We're on obscure, twisting roads among minute-man hamlets and Dunkin-Donut townlets. The ways may be obscure to me, but these are the days of Troy's life. We've taken in three of his childhood homes, nestled in woods that haunt with Sleepy-Hollow shadow and European-import little people, among trees pointing with irrepressible life toward the hope of new light. This is the East, land of the sun, land of beginnings. It's where America, land of liberty, took its first steps. It's also a place of memories. Connecticut is where Troy grew up, but it's also where I spent a few years after college. It's dark with night; it's new and it's old in the dawn – just as I'm innocent and decrepit in the state of sleeplessness.

In the middle of the road of our life, I find myself in an obscure forest. I've was writing about Dante recently – part of the futile project to document my life during the last five years. (Yes, even Dante makes an appearance!) Suddenly echoes of Dante are all too apropos. I've just emerged from a midnight expedition through several circles of hell. I now feel comfortable that I'll be ready for eternal torment when my time comes. I've been there, and it looks a lot like Atlanta.

Specifically, it looks like the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Terminal C. Terminal C, my assigned circle, is actually straight as an airliner's aisle, but much less roomy. My circle of hell is very long and very crowded. The ugly tiles of the corridor gleam with artificial lighting, enhanced to glare even more unnaturally than earthly fluorescents. Lost souls from delayed and canceled flights wander up and down the hall without rest because there is nowhere to sit. You pass restaurants and bars that are rammed to capacity with the unhappy dead. There is no rest. There is no exit – except for the connecting flight that seems to suffer delays at a faster rate than the normal progression of time. I spend four and a half hours in Atlanta.

In case you think your circle of hell might be better, I'm here to report that they are identical. I manage the Dantean feat of escape into an adjoining circle. I ride the infernal escalator down into the subterranean tunnel that connects the four terminals, T,A,B, C, and D. I shuffle like a zombie along the bleak wormhole, eschewing the moving walkway, thinking that haste is meaningless in hell. I catch the escalator up to Terminal D. It's as though I had never moved. Rod Serling is the poet of modern hells, not Dante. I stumble back in horror, running back down the wormhole.

With a weary eagle eye, I notice on one of my passes that there's a seat in Popeye's. I order a three-piece Greasy-Meal from minimum wage minions of Beelzebub. They are not like earthly fast food employees because in hell they enjoy their boredom, staring off into the lack of distance and reciting menu options with weird relish. I eat slowly, drawing out my sit-down time and watching with horror the skits of the damned. There's a toothless man in his fifties with a remnant of blonde good lucks. He's chatting up a teenage girl at the table next to him, saying she looks like Julia Roberts. She says she knows she does. She has square-tip manicured nails, painted in an elaborate design. She wears a cardinal red hoodie and very thin, flat flip-flops. He points out that though he wears his wedding ring, he and his wife are separated. At several adjoining tables, massive mamas with arena-sized brassy voices conduct swarms of children like electron clouds. Only Julia and I out of all the guests at Popeye's are eating. I escape, choosing the tortures of aimless fatigue to the terrors of the fried-chicken funhouse.

Somehow it happens that an angel of mercy sponsors me, plucking me from early damnation and depositing me in Boston, in the quiet halls of Logan International. Troy is waiting for me outside Terminal C. I breathe in the fresh, outdoor fumes of Boston with new gratitude and love for life. I will reform, Domine; I will be a better man.

Over hill and dale, we speed through the forests of old Massachusetts, racing toward Connecticut down trails blazed by Puritans. I contemplate our pilgrim's progress in the rays of a new dawn. Lids fall heavily over my eyes, and the sun leaves a scarlet mark. Never forget, my son: Terminal C!

Travelogue 286 – July 18
The Cone of Noise

My neighbor across the hall listens to public radio 24 hours a day. It's not a disturbance particularly, though it is disturbing. Heavy metal would be a disturbance; MPR around the clock is just creepy.

When I pass her door, I picture the ceaseless sentences like the bars of a cage. Each story is time spent, and she scratches the count of her days into the plaster of her wall. The curtains are shut tight against the light of trivial weekdays. What are the bare sidewalks and traffic, the peregrinations of fellow citizens, measured against the titanic struggles of Ms. Sotomayor or the exteeeeeensive debate about healthcare in America? This is Reality.

Is it?Is it information or is it living? I should knock on my neighbor's door. Maybe there's been a half-hour segment on the subtle border between the two. Maybe Ira Glass has a show on file: 'Where Reality Falls Short'.

Myself, I could use a break from reality. The emails and phone calls keep coming in. Please, people, work it up into a pithy interview piece or a droll presentation with sound effects. Even better if I can download and pause when I like. And please tag it with a thinking-person's rhetorical question at the end, so I can feel engaged – in that gosh-times-are-tough, glass-of-milk-and-off-to-bed kind of way.

No, Reality is at my door, relentless and messy. The assault has been merciless since I first went to Ethiopia. Now, Saba is feeling short-changed by the role of Leeza's sister. When the bank balance is low, accountability rising, staff needs and children's problems spiking, she thinks there should be more rewards. 'Give me more' is her slogan. What annoys her is that it seems to be everyone else's slogan, too. Families at the school are unbearably insistent on this point. Funders are all about the children and families. They are not concerned about her. When her work is unsatisfactory, the funding is threatened. Her response is to threaten the funders. She invents crimes and lawsuits. She sends the lizard men after my staff, has them dragged to the lizard station in the middle of the night.

Too much Reality, Ira. I want to cocoon with a discussion panel. I want to drink cocoa and participate in American democracy remotely, absorbing issues of moment between cups of coffee.

It's 4am. I can't sleep for worrying. I pause at my neighbor's door. The debate goes on, wonderfully responsible, wonderfully lulling. I'm thinking my neighbor is peacefully slumbering, Bless her, and bless Ms. Sotomayor. Me, I'm kept up by the faces of children who might not have a school to attend this fall. I'm going to see what this day looks like as it comes up over the Mississippi. They keep coming, the days, sunrise after sunrise.

Travelogue 285 – July 11
That Heaveny ittle L-word

Today it's six years since we lost Leeza. I've seen the whole day, from its first dark blue glimmerings outside my apartment window. I haven't been sleeping.

The dawn brightens and the sun appears unimpeded. It's a perfectly cloudless sky that greets me. Before the sun sends first fire over the horizon, I'm out for a jog. It's a dream-like run on no sleep; the world meets my fragmented thoughts in a shimmering no-man's land.

Yesterday I'm on my bike charting some long miles on a muggier day of pachydermic clouds. I'm just topping the crest of the new pedestrian bridge over Hiawatha and reviewing a dream while I'm scanning the horizon.

The dream is the briefest of narratives, profound only in the feeling and recollection, rather than in stories: languidly, I reach the top of a staircase, or I come to the end of the riverside promenade. Sadly, but with a smile, I say, ‘That’s it?’ The stroll ends suddenly. But sometimes, I think dreams are encoded software updates. You wake up, and the silly dream seems significant. The world looks different.

The pedestrian bridge commands a wide prospect, encompassing the downtown skyline, the Seward and West Bank neighborhoods, and the old silos along the river and along Hiawatha. I happen to catch sight of Leeza’s apartment building on Franklin, and it comes home to me again that the next day is the anniversary of her passing. I’m sad.

This world looks different today because the after-world looks different. I’ve never lacked occasion in this life for contemplating the next. Death began stalking me and my family and loved ones early. And even when our grim friend has taken breaks, I’ve dabbled in religious meditations and childish speculation about things occult and divine, and never – surprise! – come up with anything very original or plausible.

The central issue raised by death and dying is loss. Today’s update, still booting up, informs me that somehow we don’t lose. Even with sad eyes on the old landmark, my dream sings a soothing song. I don’t ask where she is anymore; she doesn’t ask where I am. I’m insomnia on a bike; I’m coasting through sunlight.

The 11th has dawned, and the sun has risen quickly. By the time I jog across the Stone Arch Bridge on my way home, the sun’s gotten a good inch or two free from the eastern fringe of trees. It’s bright in my bloodshot eye. There’s a man slumped against the railing of the bridge, muttering to himself. He seems to have no shape among his tattered clothes. I’m sure the only difference between us is that I’m moving. What keeps me from sliding down to the ground and indulging in dreams?

The funny thing about yesterday’s cycle ride is the mission. A few keys have popped off my laptop’s keyboard, among them the L. I’m on my way to Todd’s to borrow a keyboard. Can I recover my L? The answer for now: just keep moving.

Travelogue 284 – July 10
13 Points

Was that poetry, Tom? If so, it was the type that almost slips by you, especially after a few margaritas. He’s leaning in the doorway of the Terminal Bar with a drink in his hand. I’m walking my bike beside Roxana. Tom says, ‘Oh no, Dana’s bike is drunk again.’ He's smiling like peace's eternal reign, and his voice is like a wall of granite in the forest.

Tom is a neighborhood guy. You can see him just about any day of the week, wandering up East Hennepin. He might be coasting on his bike, or measuring melancholy steps. Many mornings you can see him at Taraccino Coffee Shop. Many nights you’ll find him at the Terminal Bar. He’s the guy who looks like a graying and haggard (and yet still better-preserved than the original) Nick Nolte with a beard.

The Terminal Bar is where I met him first. It was during that summer after my first trip to Ethiopia. A friend’s band was playing at the bar. We struck up a conversation at the bar. He had hit on hard times … about forty years ago. He still worries over it. You see the anxiety on his face during the day. But at night, with a beer in hand, he is easy-going and kind. I tell him about Leeza and Ethiopia. He rumbles with a lot of sympathy. He tells me he has been meaning to turn his life around. He has his mind on going south, Arizona or Florida – I can’t remember where. I tell him I’ll buy his bus ticket.

Roxana and I have been just down the street at the noisy Bulldog, playing hearts with Todd and Snookie B. That's the card game in which hearts are meant to be discarded. They're worth one point each, and the low score wins. Even worse is the loathsome queen of spades, worth thirteen points. I saw more of this damsel of distress than I would have wished, and ended up losing, but not before one superlative act of cruelty, dumping the queen on Todd when he was saving the rest of us from a desperate moon gambit on Snookie's part. Oh well, just a card game; but if only you could have seen the shock on Todd's face.

Todd had his revenge; he won the game. But he suffered a minor defeat as weatherman. When we arrived at the Bulldog, clouds were gathering, dark and threatening. Todd poo-pooed our fears of rain, and we sat alone at an outside table. He pulled up the radar and showed us. Yep, the skies looked fairly harmless on the computer screen. Sitting outside at the boisterous Bulldog has definite advantages. Sure enough, the clouds proved impotent for a few hours. We started our game. Several parties followed our lead and chose outdoor tables. But halfway through the game, a determined drizzle discovered us, leaving a film of card-deterrent over the tabletop. We had no choice but to move indoors, sitting at a high four-top in that corner between the shuffle board and the bar, and underneath three TV screens.

Tom never took me up on my deal. He stayed in Minnesota. He's still in Minnesota, wrinkling his brow in the morning over life's cruelties. I don't know if he has a home, if he ever had a home. But he has the permanently rumpled look of itinerancy. Sometimes he looks at me with a low fire of pain in his eyes, and I know Florida has occurred to him. He's still in Minnesota, though, smiling like a lord at his hearth in the evenings and uttering crypticisms.

Come to think of it, I believe my bike is drunk again.

Travelogue 283 – July 5
Complex

Yes, back in the States I’m immediately partaking in two of my stateside indulgences with great relish: books and movies. I won’t say ‘film’, like my European mates might, because I acknowledge my addiction to blockbusters.

The latest is Johnny Depp’s Dillinger, a portrayal ‘shot through with wit and intelligence’, according to the local paper. Aesthetically, the movie is graceful and interesting to watch, thanks to Michael Mann’s direction and his little video cameras: sharp pictures, dizzying motion, and the latter mercifully controlled so that one might think there’s conscious choreography behind the jerking and swirling lenses, not a ten year-old’s impulse to make the audience puke.

And, to employ a tired standard to Hollywood, the characters are not one-dimensional. Dillinger makes some bad choices, and the cop in close pursuit, Batman in disguise, makes some ugly compromises. There’s moral tension to match the simpler variety of tension.

It’s odd that we feel comforted by such a bland formula: ‘It isn’t simplistic. It’s complex. There are no easy answers. The characters are multi-dimensional. Etc.’ But isn’t Dillinger most endearing when he says, ‘I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars and you. What else do you need to know?’ But: if we secretly root for simplicity, does it mean that we believe it exists? Isn’t it patronizing to make a moral position out of praising complexity in characters? Don’t we all live in the same tough world?

Maybe my taste in books is a little more sophisticated. Maybe. I cruise around Amazon, looking for titles I’ve picked up here and there in magazines, mostly while in Ethiopia. I have an interest in history lately. I order two recent biographies, one of King Alfred and one of Caesar.

I haven’t started reading the book on Alfred yet, but apparently the author, David Horspool, applies himself like a scientist to the mythology wrapped around the famous king, like cloth around a mummy, untangling each length of it in light of various myth-making agendas, and sets out to discover what one reviewer describes as ‘an altogether more ambiguous and interesting character.’ (Hmm. Again the nod to the dubious god of complexity.)

The Caesar bio, on the other hand, reads to me like Seutonius made mellow, and outfitted with casual paragraphs of historical context, in the lecture voice of an amiable old Classics professor, which is just what the author is. The blurb inside the book jacket says, ‘JC was a complex man (!) … and this author presents Caesar in all his dimensions and contradictions’.

I hear a soft and smug voice behind all this, telling us that only the sophisticated men and women of our era, schooled in Freud and Oprah, can understand and value complexity. And I wonder, did Seutonius think Caesar was a simple man, one-dimensional, unambiguous, lacking in contradictions?
Caesar, of infamous diversity in sexual tastes but so devoted to his first wife that he refused the order of an earlier dictator to divorce her? Caesar, of ancient aristocratic lineage, who championed the plebs? Caesar, who worked his way up the traditional ladder to power and then did more than any man to destroy the same tradition? The politician who out-soldiered the soldiers, and then became scholar? Because Seutonius didn’t state the obvious, ‘Here is an interesting man; he was complex in character,’ does that mean it escaped his notice?

Or have we agreed for the purpose of simplicity on complexity? A character can’t be taken seriously unless there is ambiguity and contradiction. Until he or she has become complex, we are allowed to scoff. I wonder if this is a strategy in Sarah Palin’s mind as she strengthens her bid for the presidency by walking out on the responsibility of governing Alaska, mid-term? Does any contradiction add up the right way: complexity = personality heaven?

Here’s some complexity for you: why did Michael Mann change the famous ‘lady in red’ to the lady in a white blouse and orange skirt? Does that make sense? He must be complex.

Here’s some more. The real Dillinger allowed his dad to talk him into doing the right thing and going to prison for eight years for robbing a local grocery store. Eight years during which he stewed and raged, and plotted doing some real damage. His bank-robbing spree lasted only one year before he was killed. So there is a little more going on than fast cars. Hmm.

Travelogue 282 – June 5
The Dao De Minn

Okay, I’m experiencing a little culture shock this time around. I’m back in Minnesota. It’s the silence of this place. It’s unnerving. It’s like the sky is too big. There’s plenty of activity – cars still buzzing, business still bubbling, (in its subdued post-prime way) – but the sky just swallows it, as if the vast blue were a wool blanket left over from winter.

One is forced to surrender to it, and move like one is in a medieval Chinese poem, pantomiming the ancient art of the shout in a snowstorm.

The street that can be talked aloud on is not the true street;
The voice that can be heard is not the true voice.
It was from the Noiseless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
Noise is but the mother that rears the ten thousand annoyances.

So one retires with a sigh of relief to the normal quiet of an afternoon bar and watches the quiet sport, baseball.

We swing thirty times and call it an inning;
But it is inside the spaces between swings that the game exists.
We spend millions on fifty thousand seats;
But it is on the green space in the middle, where there is nothing, that the usefulness of this vessel depends.
We mold plastic into stacks of cups;
And it is on the empty space inside the beer cup that usefulness of the cup depends.
Therefore just as we cheer the home run, we should cheer for the empty times, during which we visit the bathrooms.

I make it to see Star Trek, one of my primary goals since I have made it back in the country. We watch the aged Spock as he is forced to watch his planet implode in the silence of space. Quietly it obeys its fate, according to the designs of the evil Romulan, collapsing inside the aural pillow of deep vacuum.

Key to the plot is a show of rage by the young Spock. And it can’t take more than a minute from the rest of the script. So the resulting scene pulls the specter of the loss of his mother from a well of convenient imagery, like the tears of the Madonna as shorthand for everything sacred to medieval man, and Spock obliges with pantomimes of rage.

The names that can be named are not true names.

This resonates with what I see among my compatriots, through the goggles of culture shock, a kind of staged, silent opera. In this show, emotions are substituted by a variety of film and TV shorthand for emotion, according to the script. We’re busy; we have a lot on our minds. An inconvenient ‘issue’ arises, and we have a hunch that a reaction is called for. We know the scripts.

The sky re-asserts its pre-eminence, pushing down. Our thoughts jump like water bugs beneath its vastnesses. When the day is done, we’ll hide.

Travelogue 281 – May 27
Leaning

I’m back in medieval Italia – and more convinced than ever that it’s the Middle Ages that remain triumphant in Italia, the birthplace of that era’s antithesis, the Rinascimento, renunciation of everything Gothic and ‘dark’.

I’m led away from the Italian capital, from my tender-hearted city of condottieri, new classicism, corruption, and the Counter Reformation, my humble town of baroque and rococo, Rafaello, Bernini, and Michelangelo, by a quirk of modern, internet travel.The cheapest route between two points in summer is a small line: a light thread held tight by a small airline traveling between two small cities. Rather than join the cattle drive between capitals, I’ve booked a cosy hop from Pisa to Bristol that costs only a few dollars more than the mandatory fees and taxes. (Though, with trains and hotels, I’m probably breaking even.) I’m happily counting my pennies saved on the train ride to Pisa, humming along to the Tuscan landscape, when the conductor informs me that I forgot to stamp my ticket at the station. Forty euro penalta! I’m no longer humming. I’m brooding along with the rain clouds gathering over the Tuscan hills.


I’ve been to Pisa once before, about five years ago. It was another pass-through. I wasn’t drawn by the Leaning Tower. I was drawn by geography: the coast, and the necessity of connecting two trains. I did walk around the Campo dei Miracoli, where the duomo and the famous tower are located, and I was impressed. I was impressed again this time, though the flavor of the place struck me differently, leaving an aftertaste of spice from the Orient. It is beautiful architecture, but kind of bizarre in its prolific detail of design. There is a strong element of Muslim decoration here. In any case, it’s a wonderful park, with lots of space for lots of tourists, and wide, tempting lawns that give employment to guards.

This time, I have a long day in Pisa, and I’m well rested. I decide to tour the sights. Preliminary report: it’s one of my favorite little towns in Italia. Smaller than you would think, comfortable, and scenic. And medieval: seems like the Rinascimento sailed overhead. And what’s more: lots of people on bikes. It’s a university town.

Once you’ve marveled at the Muslim-Gothic architecture of the duomo, and you’ve posed with your hands out, holding up the leaning tower, here are the must-sees of Pisa. Head back to the Arno. It’s a cute little riverfront, and you’re forgiven for taking joy from nothing else but the promenade. But you might as well mix in a little history. If you walk left along the far shore, having come from the duomo, you will have an opportunity to add another jewel to your Knights Templar tour, the church of San Sepolcro. Besides having a cool name, it has a lengthy history, being built some time in the 12th century. It’s an octagonal structure, following the usual Templar plan, simple in design, and inside it consists of little more than an ambulatory around a central apse and altar. My sentimentality for these Templar churches is just these symmetrical blueprints, roughly circular, which echo Middle Eastern and, indeed, Ethiopian, church designs. But, dating back to the earliest days of Templar history as the church does, I’d bet my collection of Atlantean crystals that there’s some mystery in there for Tom Hanks to decipher.

Backtrack along the river the way you came, passing the bridge you crossed and continue. You will come to the marvelous church of Santa Maria della Spina, built in 1323, right on the banks of the Arno – though it’s been moved across the river to its current site. You can’t miss it because it rests right in the middle of the sidewalk. And yes, it’s that small. It’s a sweet little church, built like a tiny showcase of every high Gothic trick. Very lovely and worth a visit.

Back at the Ponte di Mezzo, you’ll head back into the old town. You’ll want to stroll up and down the Borgo Stretto, a narrow, old street with plenty of outdoor cafes, shops, and covered walkways that might remind you of towns on the Adriatic, like Padova or Ravenna. Close to the river, you’ll discover San Michele in Borgo, a beautiful small church dating back to the 900s.

Have a seat in one of the cafes and partake of the modern town of Pisa. Watch the locals bike by, or eavesdrop on the chatter of the teens at the next table. It doesn’t sound so inane in Italian. Look over the wares of one of the dozens of African street vendors who will approach you. He will be grateful you spoke to him. He’ll proudly tell you about Senegal. He’ll proudly tell you about his lighters and fanny packs until you buy something.

But save yourself for dinner. After 7:30pm, you will want to cut through the alleys branching off from the Borgo Stretto and find the nearby Piazza delle Vettovaglie, a kind of scaled down and mellow version of the Campo dei Fiori in Rome. Visit this square in the morning for its market, in the afternoon for coffee and people-watching, but definitely visit in the evening for food at the wonderful Vineria di Piazza.

Don’t be fooled by its stripped down presentation, broad wooden tables and benches, inside and out, very informal. The food is incredible. At one meal, I have fat pasta with boar meat. At another, pasta and vongole, or clams. I was content as I could be, sitting at a small table behind a group of doctors of philosophy, speaking in English about extensionality and substance, sipping my wine and watching the square outside come to life again.

We were all taken by surprise by a sudden, heavy rain shower. It was cause of much merriment as people dashed under cover on all four sides of the piazza. Within minutes, all that was left in the open square was someone’s forlorn Harley Davidson, popped alone on the cobblestones. Twenty minutes later, the rain had passed and sunset colors were creeping into the piazza. There is something about Italian towns that seems to enhance the beauty of sunsets, as though traditional architecture were designed for nothing else. The brick, the plaster, the tiles all seem to pick up and glory in the hues of day’s end, the time when everyone takes to the streets for their passegiata. There’s nothing like it.

Travelogue 280 – May 26
Spring Therapy

It’s Roma the next day, and my squeezed itinerary only allows half a day and an overnight. I hustle from airport to train to Metro, so that I can catch the day’s landlord, Sr Tallarico, at the apartment that has become my new stopover pad. It’s down the Via Appia Nuova in the area called Colli Albani, as I’ve previously described it: mile upon mile of bland residential high-rises, that still manages a sunny, Italian charm.

Sr Tallarico is sparing with his Italian charm. If anything, he is rather Teutonic in the administration of his bed-and-breakfast. Sr Tallarico is an older gentleman, whose retirement is devoted to the serious business of hospitality. He is a small man with an unyielding scowl on his face, and today the scowl is sterner than usual because I’m late by one day – travel problems: see the previous blog. I did manage to email ahead to assure him that I would still pay for my reservation, but it is all unsettling for him. The whole notion of Addis Ababa is unsettling for him.

Once Sr Tallarico has grumbled off, I am free to engage with my beloved and eternal city … for a few sleep-deprived hours. By the time I’m back down the four flights of stairs to street level, there can be no doubt: this tour will be an abbreviated one, a kind of collection of distilled essences. In fact, I realize, I will be staying right here in Colli Albani. Once the scope of the tour has been settled, the choices are easy.

First come tastes. I have a cornetto and caffe at the Small Cafe across the street. That’s the name of the place, in Italian, the Small Cafe. The baristas recognize me, sort of: in their comfortably disdainful way. I glance through the local paper for the latest shenanigans of the Pope and soccer stars.

Next comes fast internet. I check in at the Bangladeshi phone and internet place around the corner. Checking in is no easy task. The Italian government requires ID on every user, and the Bangladeshis require a user card and passwords that somehow must incorporate every bit of biographical data available. But once in, it’s heaven: responsive internet. I can go wherever I like! I book my hotel for the next night, in Pisa, and it takes five minutes!

Next comes therapy. This will be color and aromatherapy. I take a walk to the Caffarella Park, that expanse of green hills between the old and new Appian Ways. It’s gorgeous out. I catch my first spring scent of lilac. I’m overcome by the scent of grass and wild blossoms in the hills. It’s dizzying. And the spring colors fairly vibrate with life. In fifteen minutes, I’m quite restored: all is right with the world. I hike to the top of my favorite hill, from which you can see the dome of St. Peter’s in the distance, and in the other direction, several high monuments along the old Appian Way.

Back in town, I indulge in pizza and gelato. The day is complete. I’m ready for a long rest, and I’m in bed while the sun is still high in the early evening sky. Tomorrow I have to catch an early train. I’m so successful at resting and at rising early that I’ve showered, mastered the Metro, and boarded my train by 6:30am. Off to Pisa!

Travelogue 279 – May 25
Sun Smiles

It may happen one day that you arrive in Cairo unannounced, on an unplanned stopover. You might, for example, have been forced to extend your business in Addis Ababa. It might be that the combination of making last-minute changes to your travel plans on a weekend, inept customer service, and internet problems have overwhelmed any hope of comfortable travel, and you arrive at Cairo airport at 3am for an eight-hour layover. Don’t fret, because Sameh will be there for you.

You’ll recognize Sameh as the composed and awake, well-dressed and well-groomed (in hirsute and fat tie Arab style) young man waiting for you as you emerge from customs and passport control. Actually, he is the one who will recognize you: as a discerning Dutch businessman on the go. Yes, I’ve had the odd good fortune to arrive from Addis at the same time as a KLM flight from Amsterdam. In a surreal twist, during these days of swine flu, the men with white masks over their mouths and noses who meet us directly as we enter the terminal building, are stopping travelers from Europe and letting those from sub-Saharan Africa go. So I emerge ahead of the brisk Dutch businessman, looking just Dutch enough for Sameh to rush to my service.

Sameh escorts me up the long escalator to the mezzanine level of the terminal, into his little office with comfortable armchairs and brochures. Hotel and taxi? Why, of course. He glances through a notebook full of hotel brochures, and he selects the perfect glossy trifold for me. I’ll be spending the night in the Sun Smiles Hotel in Heliopolis, a short ride from the airport. It’s new; it’s quiet. It has a cool name.

The taxi driver doesn’t find it amusing. This round, grey-faced man engages in long guttural exchanges with the even smoother young travel agent assigned to walking me down to the parking lot. He needs to process the name of the hotel, the directions to the hotel, the voucher for the hotel, his compensation, and the current state of NASA, as far as I make out. While they negotiate in ever higher volume, I watch a grumpy Dutchman grouse and quibble with his handlers beside the next car; he’s obviously irritated at being frisked for farmyard viruses. His taxi takes off well before my driver has exhausted his line of inquiry; the Dutchman stares grievously out the back window as if in one last indictment of all customs people and chiseling travel agents. I don’t know what indignities he may have suffered from the men in the masks, but I find no fault in Sameh’s service. He was there when I needed him, and within the hour I’m snug at Sun Smiles Hotel.

I might have been snug in 30 minutes, but predictably my taxi driver gets hopelessly lost, flying down the wee-hours highway, only to creep in confusion among the side streets of the hotel’s neighborhood. I get a comprehensive 3am tour of some two dozen affluent blocks in Heliopolis. He pulls over to ask at a 24-hour newspaper stand. He engages in more discourses with my smooth handlers on his cell. And eventually, on a block virtually indistinguishable from any other, housed in a building indistinguishable from its neighbors, we discover the Sun Smiles Hotel, resplendent inside if not out, in the splashy (faux) marble and gold style of the Arab world. My bed is sprinkled with ficus leaves, and at its foot is my towel, twisted into the shape of a heart. I am delighted by these touches, as any sensitive traveler would be, but have to confess that sleep came as something even more deliciously luxurious. Four hours later, I have to submit to being rudely awakened for the next leg of travel.

Travelogue 278 – May 9
Good Vibrations

Here’s what I’ve learned about life in Addis Ababa in the merry month of May: First of all, as I’ve mentioned before, we’ve arrived at the end of the dry season, so hydro-electric Addis Ababa is perhaps the quietest capital city on Earth. It’s a great month to pick up a meditative spiritual practice. There will be plenty of time for enlightenment while you wait for the power to come back. And during those brief and unpredictable spells when the lights come on, you will need Buddha by your side while you try to catch up on weeks’ worth of work. You will see the neon lights of Nirvana well before you finish any of your projects.

While Minnesotans revel in the glories of springtime, Addis citizens are sweltering under the sharp sun of the final month of dry season. If you have asthma, don’t step away from your inhaler: nine months of particulate matter has lodged itself firmly in the atmosphere of the city. Native citizens labor under the burden of pollution-fueled colds and flus, while faranjis wheeze and limp along the roads of Piassa, looking for internet cafes with generators and available computer stations.

But today, there is one happy place in the nation that is a showcase of ruddy good health and good cheer. That is the Tserah Tsion School in Mojo. About a dozen members of Team Tesfa, men and women, teens and adults, have volunteered to hop on an early bus to Mojo in order to spend the day cleaning, maintaining, repairing, and painting the kindergarten out there. It’s part of my effort to set a tone to this team project, one of generosity, community service and moral leadership. If any one of these athletes resents giving to others, they should be in Hollywood, because at 7am they are all smiles. We take over one of the minibuses heading east, occupying every last seat. The hour and a half trip is all bubbly conversation and laughter. And once there, not a moment is wasted. They mob the astonished school staff, and immediately start piling tables and chairs and mixing paints. The only delay is waiting for a local boy to fetch us jerrycans of water.

Soon the school is a hive of activity. The athletes have swarmed into every room and have started sweeping dust and cobwebs off the walls. The water arrives and swaths of primer and paint are unfurling on all sides. Everyone is splattered from head to toe. In the playground, Lewis – a volunteer from London – is busy kicking around a couple soccer balls donated by Mark, another Londoner, with some of our kindergarten kids. The school has a vast, dusty space for play – the spaciousness was one reason we liked this facility. And there is no fence beyond a much-abused hedge, so the road beyond is like a spectators’ gallery. The team invasion is provoking a great buzz in the neighborhood. Kids are especially intrigued by the wild soccer matches. A few slip through the ‘fence’ and join the galloping play. The reckless cavorting is no less a temptation for me, and I’m drawn to dash into the games, thinking nothing of trying to keep up with professional long-distance runners. The mill of karma grinds quickly, and the dues are paid that evening: sunburn and lactic acid burn, as I watch Liverpool play the game the way it’s supposed to be played on the TV in the hotel restaurant.

By mid-afternoon, the team is wrapping up. We’ve painted inside and out, and we’ve patched up some cracks in the concrete floor. Asnakech, official barometer of mood, strikes up a whine for food. But Addisu won’t have it. He is surveying the walls earnestly, and he attempts to explain what is thinking. I sigh when he says ‘pictures’, and pull out the camera again. Photography has been my primary duty today. But, no, he protests, it’s si’il that’s missing: art on the walls. The athletes are immediately on it, sketching out houses and animals and flowers in primary colors. A few of the drawings show promise, only marred by the English spellings the runners add underneath.

It’s time to eat. Malaku, our local school director, takes us to a place that looks like an old and neglected VFW hall, with an empty stage and an empty dance floor. The staff, with stunned faces, round up a chain of tables that they set up beneath the stage. Malaku is maitre d’ and conductor, taking orders from among the day’s three dishes – kikil, tebs, and shiro – lamb, injera, and chickpea sauce – and orchestrating the convoy of food and beverage from the distant kitchen. The team is in good spirits, and they plow through plates and bowls of food with gusto, while Malaku keeps it coming. Yes, good deeds do have their rewards.

Travelogue 277 – April 28
Surprising

It must be close to a year since I first wrote about Abiyu, the high school boy from the village of Debre Tabol who spends his school breaks in Bahir Dar playing tourist guide and hotel broker. We took him on as a temporary employee back then, taking him out to the Gobame school with us. After we returned to Addis, he carried on with a few tasks for us in Bahir Dar.

We met up with him again on our latest trip to Bahir Dar. He’s getting ready for his final exam, which will qualify him for university study. He says he wants to be a doctor. For the moment he joins us again in our endeavors. Further, we convince him to follow us down to Addis since he has a break before his exams.

It’s a fun trip for him, if a little distracted and hectic. It’s his first time in the capital city, and some things come as a shock. At first, we have him staying in a room that Selam has rented for him. But he calls us in great distress because his landlord is an ageing lady who is fond of chewing ch’at. As if that isn’t already too much to contend with, he has decided that she is a witch. He’s afraid to sleep there.

So we set Abiyu up with a little bed at the Tsegereda School, and he eats with Yigramachew’s family. He and Yig have become close in Bahir Dar; Abiyu is great with kids. He works for us, getting a taste of what business in the big city is like. He handles himself well.

We are so confident in him, in fact, that we send him to do some of the research in a town where we would like to set up the next school. He returns with five pages of hand-written notes in both Amharic and English. I’m ready to weep at the sight this document, as much professionalism as I’ve seen in years! I accept neat pages of information with great ceremony.

A more typical work session occurs a few nights ago. We have sent Addisu and Ijigu out with Menna’s camera to document another potential school site in the city. (Yes, another school project: things are popping here, folks!) The two guys do a great job, and they return with about twenty photos. The trouble is, clear as some of the photos are, the boys cannot agree on what they depict. It’s a big house: so big that the pictures could originate in completely different sites.

I stop the debate about which room is which, and ask the boys to draw me a map of the house. Simple enough, I’m thinking: a big square for the compound and then rows of smaller squares for rooms, and so on. But what I get are intersecting blobs, and each room a heavy, drifting, single line. The boys start arguing again. My head is in my hands and Menna is laughing. Meanwhile our bill is mounting at the cafe as the boys eagerly fuel their dispute with tea.

We often meet in cafes because, to date, there is no office. The HQ cafe on this trip has become the ‘La Coquette’, one of a new generation of high-end cafes: clean and well-lit, with nicer cakes and higher prices. There seem to be quite a few of these suddenly. I’m not sure where the boutique crowd came from, but every cafe in Addis still manages to be crowded in the evenings. The advantage to the higher prices is a chance at a table. We hold on to this table at prime time in the evening; the bill climbs in tandem with the frustration. We leave with little less knowledge about the house in question, but easy consensus among the boys that it’s perfect.

As a reward for Abiyu’s efficient service, we take him out to dinner and to the new mall in Bole, where there is an American-style movie theater. I’ve mentioned this place before with much enthusiasm. For dinner we take him to one of the best pizza places in town. It’s the first time he’s tried pizza, and he wrestles with it mightily, holding it upside down in both hands, curling it, rolling it, and letting the cheese hang over his mouth. It’s also the first time he’s seen cheese. Abiyu professes to have enjoyed it, though it seems to me that he might have thought that pizza was a lot of work for food.

He is wide-eyed as we enter the multi-storied mall. We do the movie right, with popcorn and soda, and sitting up front to catch every bit of lurid action in this classic American guns-and-car-chase story. Afterward, in the lobby, he sums up his assessment of the place with a big smile and his beginner’s English, ‘This place,’ he says, ‘it’s surprising!’

Travelogue 276 – April 24
And the Ugly

One eye is almost swollen shut when I awake today. I think some little bug took advantage of me last night, biting me near the inside corner of my eyelid, and now I’m a monster. I splash cold water on it, and work the distressed flesh in the mirror. It’s funny how one clings to the accustomed contours of his face, and the slightest distortion completely throws him. A day’s bug-bite swelling makes me ugly. I don’t want to go out.

I’m in a foul mood. Breakfast is late. There is a renewed canopy of clouds overhead. I’ve dreamt about hopping onto the metro of some European city, heading toward some stimulating stop, a luxurious cafe, a downtown riverside, a bustling modern avenue. But worst of all, I’m ugly.

I stand in the concrete courtyard and I stretch. The morning is fresh and cool enough to be pleasant. The clouds are the type that are likely to burn off and scatter across a blue sky. I can veritably feel the sun on my shoulders in anticipation of a beautiful day.

From outside the gate come sounds of the day’s start. They are happy sounds, children running by and shouting, neighbors hailing one another. Who can listen to the bustle of a fresh morning without hearing the echoes of others, thousands or millions of others, depending on the power of his or her imagination? Who doesn’t wonder at the resilience of mornings and the life that awakens in them every day?

I confess that the noise from beyond that gate, and a dozen others in Ethiopia, has oppressed me in the past. Beyond is the Other, difficult homo sapiens, difficult town. Out there are kids who push each other into me for giggles, the duryes who call me names, the glaring old men, and the rag-tag, insistent beggars. The noise beyond contains every conflict and insult, every birr I’ve been cheated out of, and every embarrassing encounter.

But today I stand in the courtyard, brooding, and the sound of life creeps into my awareness, and I listen to it. The noise has been transubstantiated from everyday clamor into hope. It complements the hint of sun among the clouds, suggesting that even those disfigured as me have a place in the pageant of the a.m.

I’ve been watching moods lately, fascinated by the whimsy of them and trying to find a logical correspondence between triggers and the emotions they fire off. By trigger, I don’t mean the speeding car that splashes you with mud as it passes. I mean the unpredictable impressions. Why does the combination of a song and the color scheme of a cafe’s decor, tossed in with the timbre of a man’s voice as he answers his mobile, transport you to one morning in a hotel lobby in Monfalcone and perhaps excite a longing that is as absurd as it is intense, considering how remote and unlikely the recovery of that memory was in the first place? Are moods a lottery? Is there really a mathematics to chaos? Either way, we don’t turn away the jackpots. My mood is three bars of gold when I open the gate.

Travelogue 275 – April 23
Buna and the Philosopher

The visitors are gone. I’m sitting at the table in the modest salon of my home – white walls, linoleum tiles, boxes of Stuff lined against one wall, the small white fridge tucked in among them. I have the laptop open, the ancient Mac PowerBook donated by Pey and Giles. The screen radiates a bright and artificial shade of blue, almost matching the cushions on the backs and seats of the wooden chairs that Saba bought for me a few years ago.

Right next to the table, next to the door to the kitchen, in the sunlight admitted by the front door, sits Tsegenet. She is roasting coffee beans, and she is doing it the traditional way, sitting on a low stool in front of the small stove, the pot of beans, the jebena (the traditional coffee pot), and the tiny coffee cups, like Japanese tea cups, which are placed on a wooden tray equipped neatly with a small drawer. On the ground is a scattering of grass.

All I see is the part in her thick, black hair as she bends over the miniature gas stove. It’s a comfort to me, I find: Tsegenet’s competency and the smell of roasting coffee. I return to my glowing, blue work station with renewed confidence.

When the beans are roasted, she holds the pot high and swings it slowly in the air about the room to spread the aroma. Then she passes it to Gete, who will take the beans outside to grind them. This is done with a heavy rod of metal in a chunk of wood that has been hollowed out at the top. The compound resounds with the thump, thump of her labors. The vibrations of it travel through the concrete of the courtyard and through the hollow cinder blocks of the walls.

Gete is a regular part of the household now. She has settled into her routine here, showing up late, hanging around listlessly until someone reminds her of her duties, her youthful face slack with mysterious thoughts. She has a lot to think about for someone of her age. She’s already been married for some four years before she came to Addis. She’s sixteen, though she appears to be fourteen.

We make sure she keeps her studies up. Some evenings, once all work is done and we’ve had dinner, we sit her down in front of her notebook, which she bends over as though she has sight problems while she sounds out the letters of English words or Amharic characters. ‘P-A-T,’ she whispers. She stares for a minute, and then she pats herself on the head with a smile, remembering my demonstration.

Sometimes, we’ll pull out the old Connect Four game, which she became familiar with in Bahir Dar. She’s quite adept at it. She’s earned the nickname ‘the Philosopher’ at this game, she pursues her victory with such single-minded and inscrutable concentration. Sometimes the Philosopher will lean over until her nose nearly touches the middle of the vertical board, and she’ll chew on her game piece. She reaches up and drops the piece in with considerable deliberation.

Travelogue 274 – April 11
The Golden Mask

Early one morning, we go for a lake cruise to the headwaters of the Blue Nile. We walk up Lake T’ana’s shore to a small set of docks for tourist boats, far away from the convenient and high-priced docks by the Ghion Hotel. We rent a boat for 150 birr, and head out, the boat and the pilot-guide to ourselves. No one’s in a hurry – the morning is calm and sweet – so it takes us about a half-hour to get to the headwaters. We’re lucky to come upon a group of about five hippos, lounging in the water near the islands at the headwaters. They wiggle their ears and glance at us sleepily. We enter the mouth of the Nile. You can see right where the waters divide between lake and river; there’s the steady ripple of a current, looking like a watery zipper joining seams.

It’s hard for me to be in Bahir Dar without thinking about Egypt. I wonder if others are similarly reminded. Now I think of Cairo, and the glinting, sea-like blue of the Nile winding its wide way through downtown. They are good complements for each other, Bahir Dar and Cairo. Most travelers go to Cairo to connect with the ancient roots of our civilization, but they might find it hard to tap into the feeling of millennia lapsed and set aside like rolls of papyrus as they negotiate the sprawling metropolis of Cairo, let alone any feeling for the lives of the ancients. Drifting on Lake T’ana, particularly in a papyrus boat, as the orange mask of Helios rises in the east, one feels time.

Okay, one does glimpse fleeting time among the sands of Giza. To my credit, I’m wearing my cheesy tourist cap from Rome – upstart little town across the Mediterranean – as I ride the camel across the sand dunes. I was offered a cheap version of Arab headdress by one of the camel guys, and I proudly refused. I will enter the realm of history as Western, compromised and corrupted as the Caesars ... though perhaps with less panache. Little does all that matter, though, once one is out on the sands, under the oppressive gaze of Amen Ra. Even now, in the age of highways and encroaching suburbs, one approaches the Great Pyramids ant-sized among the blank dunes at the edges of the Sahara. There are other ants leaving their ephemeral trails, but the blaze of the sun and the sands’ radiation blot everything out but the enormity of the pyramids. One doesn’t know the pyramids from photos. One must approach them, like subjects toward their kings.

I’m riding with Said today, a former air force helicopter pilot, now retired and driving vans for a tourist company. He’s from Port Said. He has a friend, Said, who rents camels. We meet him in an indifferent neighborhood of Giza, where camels and boys mill around restlessly. It’s strange to travel by camel through suburban streets, rolling along with the animal’s distinctive gait. But it’s only a few blocks to the gate in the wall that separates suburb from unbound desert. I ask Said the camel driver how far it is to Libya. The answer is in weeks, but I am instantly sold on the idea. ‘Let’s go.’ He says no one does it anymore. In his dad’s time, they would set up camel caravans. Now it’s SUVs, and a matter of days.

Said the van driver has several obsessions. First is the new Ring Road, which has shortened the drive to Giza considerably. I can appreciate that after the ride from the airport, which is an hour of traffic any time of day. ‘See, see!’ he points out a narrow road that passes underneath the new road, clogged with cars. It’s a hazy day; we should be able to see the pyramids already. ‘Al Humdillah,’ I say. Thank God for ring roads. It’s a strange echo from Ethiopia, this obsession with roads.

Second on Said’s list is an admiration for the houses of the rich. After Giza, we cruise south along the western edge of the metropolitan area. We’re headed toward Saqqara, where I will stand in the hot sun before the oldest standing pyramid, erected nearly six thousand years ago. Stand on a height and you can see the Giza set to the north. Look south and see a few more in the distance. There are over a hundred that have been discovered. We drive by fields, and by dusty enclaves of suburbia. You really see how the Nile makes Egypt. Signs of life in this city strictly follow the map of canals that fan out from the river. To Said’s delight, there are mansions galore on this road, many not finished yet. He slows every few hundred yards to point out another. Many have a view of the Great Pyramids.

His last obsession is one that I can share: good food. He shares with me an Egyptian fast food delight called koshary. It’s a mixture of rice, pasta, chickpeas, and various etceteras that together make something delicious and filling. He warns that you can’t find good koshary just anywhere. He has a friend who owns a fast food shop in Giza, and he sells the best koshary. He’s so proud of the dish, he pays for mine. We sit in the car after my visit to History, and we greedily eat koshary.

Back downtown, I make the pilgrimage to the famous museum of Egyptian antiquities. It’s a short walk from the Sadat metro station. I mingle among the bus-tour crowds, and file in. The place is like a grand warehouse, organized very loosely according to period, featuring amazing antiquities standing in confusing jumbles. My eyes glaze over fairly quickly, I’m afraid. I’m very well behaved in an art museum, but not at my best among bits of stone.

But there are some wonders that penetrate even my bland crust. There’s the heavy lid to a stone sarcophagus carved with a beautiful woman made of stars, reaching out to the deceased. I’m not sure how comforting that would be after a few hundred years: I might have wished for consummation before then. But there are worse sights for the stiffly departed, I suppose.

There are rows of crazy wooden armies and wooden fishermen who accompanied the deceased into the lands beyond, carrying on with their bucolic, river-bound lifestyles for eternity. And upstairs there are the heavenly furnishings of our friend, young King Tut, including the famous mask of gold, its glassy eyes staring forever upon ... paunchy American tourists? Or upon the bliss of the Western Lands?

Personally, I have to prefer the statues of Tutankhamen’s predecessor, the famously perverse Akhenaton, whose mysterious wife Nefertiti became something of an archetype of regal beauty. The pharoah himself preferred to see himself in bizarrely androgynous terms. He has been called the world’s first individualist, and he survived the disgust of his successors to purse his ample lips at us all. Was he the inspiration for Moses’s monotheistic revolution, as Freud suggested? That would be fun.

Travelogue 273 – April 9
Barack and the Pelicans

A street boy walks alongside me, with nothing better to do than chat. It has just rained, though the sun is breaking through in the east. He points out a rainbow. In Amharic, it’s called Mary’s Belt. When I tell him I’m from America, he wants to lead me to the new hot spot in Bahir Dar, the Obama Restaurant. People in Ethiopia are very enthusiastic about Obama. He’s tiru sew, a good man, in everyone’s estimation. Finally, America has another president who stands tall, says one taxi driver. ‘Bush’, scowls another, ‘only he want, war, war.’

I’m up early for a walk, something I particularly enjoy when I’m in Bahir Dar. The breezes are gentle, and the lake is peaceful. The sun’s first reflections on the water are subdued and lead one toward meditation. Reflection and the gentler activities of the mind have been hard to come by during this trip to Ethiopia. The agenda has been action only and stark decisions.

We’ve come to Bahir Dar as a full team this time. Mark’s in-country from London, only for two weeks. We had a narrow window for this trip, and the airline wasn’t cooperating, so we arranged for a van. With seats to spare, we expanded the expedition, inviting Mark’s sponsored child and his uncle, and inviting Gete. The van is deluxe: spacious, clean, and powerful. But it doesn’t save us from the ravages of the long and spotty road. It’s still too many hours of bumps and swerves. You might say our drivers are ‘deluxe’, as well, steaming ahead, leaden-footed and minds afire with ch’at. And somehow they proliferate. We leave Addis with two drivers and return with four. Over the course of the journey, they exile us to the back seats with their feverish discussions and feverish accelerations.

There are some highlights to the long, long drive, despite the damage to our nerves and rear ends. There’s a nostalgic stopover in Sticktown, scene of much merriment on New Year’s Eve of the Ethiopian Millennium in 2007, when the whole UK contingent was in Ethiopia. It had the feeling of a homecoming, teens with sticks chasing us up the steep road out of the Blue Nile Gorge as we approached that sweet old Dodge City of the African highlands.

This time we crossed over the new bridge at the bottom of the gorge. Last time it was only under construction. Though the bluffs are all brown with the season, the Nile is still wide and glinting in the hot sun. The federal guards allow us to stop and take pictures, though they, sitting on folding chairs in the shade of a few dusty trees, guns across their laps, yell every so often to caution us against arbitrary pathways, as though either baiting us or proving they’re on the job.

Once in Bahir Dar, as though the bone-jarring odyssey weren’t enough, we’re straightaway in vans for a few more trips. The first is to Gobame, site of one of our schools. The dust is overwhelming, and we stagger into the village on half a lung each. The children run from the school in their heavy green dresses and cloaks, but they don’t mob us the way Addis children do. They hesitate a few yards away, and they duck their heads and stare, walking beside us. Some of the children are frightened of Mark and I, and I can’t help exploiting that to the hilarity of the others, reaching out a quick hand toward them. Their eyes widen and they stumble and flee. Once we’re all gathered at the schoolhouse, I find these timid ones and take their hands. They can only stare back.

The second trip is to T’is Abay, the waterfall some half an hour from the Nile’s Lake T’ana origins. It’s along another teeth-chattering dirt road. Once you’ve reached the village, you have to walk to a river crossing, where you negotiate with a grouchy latter-day Charon to ride five minutes in an old metal skiff with benches along both sides. It’s a beautiful little passage, among reeds and papyrus, with sunny hills in the background. There’s another, longer walk on the other side among farmer’s small fields, under the gaze of shepherd children. Some of the fields are devoted to ch’at, a burgeoning crop here of late. Once you’re near the falls, you are assaulted by a variety of enterprising young sales-people, offering you soft drinks and pseudo-traditional knick-knacks. One lad wants to provide the soundtrack for your entire experience with his bamboo shepherd’s flute. He would follow you into the rocks underneath the falls if he thought you had a birr or two for him.

Even with all this drama, or perhaps in consequence of it, I find the mellow evenings by the lake most pleasant. We gather every evening, the whole team from Addis, in the lakeside ‘Mango Park’, just as the sun is getting ready to set, when the sunlight on the lake is most golden and there’s a strong breeze coming in off the water. This park is little more than stepped concrete leading to the lakeside, each step furnished with lines of rusty chairs facing the water. We always meet at the farthest end of the park, right by the water. Mark and I have Meta beers and the rest have Mirinda or Coca. Mark has brought along a little plastic game of ‘Connect 4’, so we play game after game, collecting numbers of wins and losses and declaring champions. Pelicans gather on the water, just beyond the papyrus. In the late afternoon, a cafe employee will go out in a papyrus boat filled with fish to try to entice the big birds closer to the park. Sometimes he is successful, sometimes not. On several afternoons, we catch sight of a hippo that has strayed from the Nile’s headwaters and pops his ears up close to the cafe. This goes on until it’s dark and we pack up to seek out one of Bahir Dar’s small and dimly lit restaurants. Strangely enough, now that I look back, I realize we never did try the Obama Restaurant.

Travelogue 272 – April 3
The Body Electric

Among the adventures of life in Ethiopia, few are as misadventurous as those concerning electricity.

Internet will be the first complaint you’ll hear from tourists. If you’re a local, or have achieved the patience of the saints, it must be comic to sit in an internet cafe that’s popular among faranjis and listen to the concert of huff and fluster and forlorn sighs that rise from every other station. The connections are slow and unreliable. Alas, my patience falls a good deal short of the saints’ – it hovers somewhere around the level of a taxi driver’s – so it’s rare that I’ll enjoy the spectacle. I’m usually contributing.

In my case, the predominant challenge has been getting any current at all in my new house. A little known secret about Ethiopia’s electrical sockets: it seems there are two sizes for the two-pronged attachments that give life. The outlets in my house admit the smaller size, and everything I own seems to be fitted with the larger size. There are only three outlets in my house. One outlet is dedicated to the refrigerator. Menna works a sleight of hand in which the fridge’s plug hangs from the outlet, the tips of the plug just making contact with the juice. We went shopping for extension cords and those little multiplier plugs. The cord we found didn’t work, and the first multiple-outlet was molded for the small size. When finally we found an attachment with small-size prongs for the wall and accommodation for large-size plugs, -- this begins to sound obscene – it was time for celebration. But the neighborhood was blacked out.

It is late in the dry season now. The rainy season ends in September. For a city that derives a significant percentage of its electrical power from hydroelectric sources, this creates a situation near crisis. So at this time of the year, the city starts rationing. One or two days a week, neighborhoods experience day-long blackouts. The hydro-hieratic planners alternate the neighborhoods so that coffee and internet service (in the abstract sense) can be found on any day. That’s the theory, but of course there are the random and unexplained blackouts to contend with.

There are also the mysterious ‘dry-outs’ in water service, as well. As I’ve observed before, these often follow strange daily cycles – water from the faucets in the morning, dry in the evenings, etc., -- but it happens that two or three whole, mournful days go by without water. I bring water up in connection with electricity because these are the two essential ingredients in the life-sustaining elixir we call hot showers. The powers behind the powers seem to have decided that one flowing service to any given house is boon enough, so the hot shower is something to be cherished. Ethiopian quandary: if you discover on a 3am toilet run that there is light and the water is running, what do you do? Can you sleep knowing that this could be your only chance for a hot shower?

Travelogue 271 – April 1
Oikos, Dolce Bet

This year, home is in the hills of Shiro Meda. I’m back on the north side of Addis Ababa, among the meandering lanes of uneven stones, among the humble and the poor, among old ladies in traditional white, and among loitering teenage boys trapped uncertainly between awkward poses – sardonic or friendly or menacing – particularly conflicted when a white guy appears. Menna and Ijigu have outdone themselves on this house. It’s quiet and relatively well-appointed. We share the compound with the landlord’s family and servants, a small and respectful household. The compound is laid with concrete. It’s furnished with the usual vicious dogs who live their lives inside barred iron boxes barely wide enough to hold them. My little house is closest to the compound gate.

Gete is of indeterminate age, in her teens. She wears her rural upbringing in her humble clothes, thick skirts and kerchief over her hair; she wears it in her gait, ungoverned by the clock and stooped in docility; and she wears it in her face, slack in deference and innocence and a kind of wonder at the crowd and flash of the city. She is sister to one of the teen athletes of Team Tesfa. She has been tentatively invited to join the staff of Casa di Jarvis, working as house cleaner – though much of the time I make her and her sad face sit and eat or copy out alphabets and numerals.

Conforming to the theme of the year, I’ve had all possessions and all my thoughts (conveniently suspended in notebooks) gathered at the new house, and whenever possible, while directing staff from the dining room table command center, I sort through the Stuff, breaking open boxes like tombs at Saqqara, boxes with no corners or seams left, held together by stubborn packing tape, holding my breath through clouds of dust, sweeping away dead spiders, rat turds and cockroaches to access treasures from the past. Five years I’ve been here! I marvel; the household carries on its work.

I think, at times like these – the cook is in the kitchen, the courtyard is being swept by someone from the landlord’s retinue, the bathroom is being mopped by Gete, bedsheets hang from the clotheslines, Menna is calculating budgets at the table – I think of the household in its traditional role in history, the oikos, the fundamental unit within the organization of civilization, the microcosm of society, the central root in the Greek word that becomes ‘economy’.

‘We’re just about out of soft, Gete.’ Soft is the word for tissue or toilet paper, an essential item in the oikos, forced to serve a variety of sanitary purposes in Ethiopia. When she returns, she leaves tracks of mud, so she wants to mop again. It seems I’ve arrived in Addis at the leading edge of a storm front that brings the spring’s ‘little rains’. All the locals rejoice, enjoying the respite from months of harsh sunshine, while I curse my ever-cloudy fate.

Travelogue 270 – March 27
Twenty Million

Taxi drivers will tell you with a sigh of exasperation that Cairo is home to 20 million souls. That’s a big number and probably exaggerated. More conventional sources assign 16 million to the metropolitan area. But what are numbers anyway? To the man in the street, a number like that is an expression of a feeling before it’s a statement of science.

If you would like that ’20 million’ sensation, here’s what I recommend: take a stroll in the late afternoon from Opera Square in Cairo to the historic Al Azhar mosque, through the market district. This is not an exercise for the faint of heart ... nor for the claustrophobic, nor for those sensitive to noise, for those subject to panic attacks, nor those with strong ideas of personal space. Take a deep breath before you take this plunge.

This walk is as near perfect human chaos as I’ve been. But if you’re like me, once you pass a certain degree of chaos, when the street is filled to bursting with humanity and cacophonous sound is rising to fill all of space, you finally have to laugh. An order inside chaos emerges, and you give in to it or you become paralyzed or bruised. You surrender to something like continuous, improvised motion: turning, accelerating, wedging between people and objects, facing down a wall of traffic for just the right moment. Give up on straight lines and don’t look ahead. It’s a dance.

At last you reach history. You will pass a few lovely old mosques from Cairo’s youth, and you will enter the old Muslim quarter. Follow along the murderous multi-lane thoroughfare that has roared at your side for a mile. You will come to the venerable Al Azhar mosque, granddaddy of Cairo mosques and founder of the world’s second oldest university, bestowing degrees by the end of the tenth century. The mosque is open to visitors.

Walk back down Xaos Avenue to the Egyptian fast food outlet, Gad, for a chicken shwarma. Don’t let them lead you upstairs, where you will pay double price. Take your meal out. There’s nowhere to sit and eat, so order a taxi and ride back to Opera Square for a couple dollars. You will have plenty of time to eat, as the driver has to drive out to Heliopolis in order to turn around and rejoin the tooting traffic going your way. Meanwhile learn your Arabic numbers as you sort out the fare.

Don’t worry: Cairo has more peaceful entertainments. The first one is at home, if you’re staying at the Windsor Hotel. The Windsor is a vestige of British colonial presence. It stands tall and narrow above alleyways and noisy cafes (ah, the smell of shisha!), its spacious rooms set round a tiny cage of an antique elevator and its accompanying spiral staircase. On the second floor is a pleasant bar, famously furnished with chairs made of barrel halves and friendly society. Notice in the dining room a painting partially burned during anti-British riots at the time of rebellion against the Empire during the 50s.

Take the subway down to Sabat station. The trains are easy. Tickets are one Egyptian pound and conveniently bought at the station. Just beware entering the women-only car if you’re male, watch your toes, and be ready to push your way off the train at your stop. From the station, find your way to the Nile. Let the god Aman Ra guide you west. You’ll find the southernmost bridge to the neighborhood of Gezira on the river island of Zamalek. Don’t mind the occasional amiable man who sidles up to you and wants to practice English. Eventually the educational dialogue will come round to money, and you’re best to say no early. Don’t mind the cop stationed mid-bridge who smilingly asks where you’re from and shakes your hand and then demands fifty dollars. Smile back and carry on. Enjoy the walk. The Nile downtown is broad and beautiful, and surrounded by glassy cityscape. One afternoon, take an alternate route, strolling down the eastern side of the river from the same bridge. Stop in a few of the high-rent hotels and pay the price for a coffee, soaking up Middle Eastern luxury.

The neighborhoods west and south of the Windsor are fun, especially in the evening. There’s lots of shopping, and it doesn’t stop until near midnight. The buildings are Old World European. The stores alternate between Old World and modern style. Stop for ice cream. Peak in the McDonald’s to see the young Bohemians bitterly swallowing their pride for the free wireless.

Cairo highlight and lowlight: Be sure to stop by the Khalily Musuem on western side of the Nile, just south of the Sheraton, for quiet time with Rodin, Gaugin, Van Gogh, and friends, along with lots of Japanese and Chinese porcelain. Be sure to miss the old Coptic neighborhood, which has been reduced to incomprehensible alleyways like chutes in a stockyard, channeling mobs of tourists among confused and underwhelming sights.

Travelogue 269 – March 23
One Ship’s Cargo

Poppies are blooming red among the ruins. There are oranges on trees along the street. An African immigrant has me by the throat in the Metro because I tripped him. I’m in Rome!

It so happens I’ve arrived on the day of the Rome Marathon, which was the occasion for my first visit to Rome, seven years ago. I catch a bit of the end of the race, cheering on the stragglers, at the Fontana di Trevi. The city is extraordinarily crowded.

The crowds don’t deter me because my objectives on this stopover in Rome are modest. I want to rest up for Ethiopia; I want to take walks in the sun. I want to see what sights I see. Most of historical Rome, I’ve visited at one time or another.

Sun and walks. I’m an effective traveler; I meet my objectives almost immediately. On my first day, I make my way to the banks of the Tiber in the oldest part of Rome, where the old green river curves toward the south, just below the Capitoline and Palatine Hills. This is, roughly speaking, where it all began. It’s also where the oldest standing Roman bridge, the Ponte Fabricio, spans the short distance from the Capitoline side to the Isola Tiberina, Rome’s only river island. The bridge was built in 62 BC, while Julius Caesar was just a young, rebellious praetor and notorious reprobate.

The Romans believed this island in the Tiber grew around a seed of grain tossed into the river after the deposition of the Tarquins (a nasty Etruscan dynasty in the 7th and 6th centuries BC). If it wasn’t a kernel of grain, it was the body of Tarquinius Superbus himself. Silt gathered for a few short centuries until it became this solid, boat-shaped isle. Scientists have something to say about that theory, but don’t they always, those pesky devils?

For quite a while, the island was ignored or even avoided as a disreputable acre, the dark street corner where Albanians and skinheads smoked and plotted. But then destiny spoke out. Battling a plague, the Roman Senate consulted the Sibyl. This oracle recommended a temple to Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing. This entailed sending a delegation to Epidauros. The delegates returned with the gift of a snake, meant to be the centerpiece for a new temple to Asclepius, the god of healing. As the delegates arrived home, rowing up the Tiber, this serpent slithered overboard and swam straight for the isle. This is where the temple is meant to be built, decided the Romans.

Built it was, a temple that stood for five hundred years or so. So enamored were the Romans by the temple and its story that the island accrued a magic and a legend all its own. It was clearly shaped like a boat, this bit of land. The Romans enhanced the resemblance, erecting an obelisk like a mast and buttressing the sides of the isle with a marble keel, a piece of which can still be seen, embellished with a caduceus in relief, the symbol of Asclepius and of all healers. And an aura of healing attached itself to the location, an aura that has never diminished, even with the destruction of the temple by the zealous new state religion imported from far Palestine. The temple was built over by a church for the disciple Bartholomew, whose severely compromised remains are said to lie here, but the other half of the island is given over to a hospital that has been run by healing friars since the sixteenth century.

In any case, the island is a pleasant place to hang out on a sunny afternoon. Below the church, temple, and hospital, as though the boat has run aground, a broad space roundabout the island has been paved. You can walk around the isle or sun yourself leaning against the slope underneath the hospital, along with a host of descendants of the old priests and soldiers.

Thank you, Carolyn, for posting entries while I’m in blog-unfriendly Ethiopia!

Travelogue 268 – March 20
Altered States

I’ve been graced by two unlikely boons in Perugia this week, religion and the blues.

Antonio is a book binder. He comes by it honestly, having grown up with the craft in his family in Puglia. He is a handsome man, with curly black locks to his shoulder, a strong, goateed chin, and piercing eyes. As a boy, he wanted to be a priest but he became a bass player instead. He has lived in London so he speaks English very well, though thankfully not well enough to have lost that melodic Italian accent. His Japanese girlfriend is back home, waiting for a new visa. He has settled in Perugia, and works out of a studio on the Via Sant’Agata, an arched, ground-level space that used to be a stable. You can find him on occasion behind a table in front of the cathedral, selling blank, Renaissance-style, leather-bound books that he has crafted himself. But don’t look for him this weekend because he’ll be in Frankfort for an AC/DC concert.

Antonio has a friend from Sparta, a gentle and serious and saintly man, whom I will call Biff in order to protect his identity. Biff has lived in Italia for a dozen years now but he’s about to return to Greece. He is a graphic artist and piano player. He has studied botany and biology. He’s an extreme ascetic, and he observes a very rigid and healthy diet. He is a loner and a very quiet man. He passes days on end in silence.

Antonio tells me that Biff is a devotee of meditation. What type, I ask. Ah, what type indeed! Biff comes up with something I had never heard of. The answer is Hesychasm. It seems that as a young man, Biff spent some years among the monks of Athos, and not just any Orthodox monks, but ecstatic who can fairly be called the Sufis of Orthodoxy, who seclude themselves from civilization in the mountains. Hesychasm, Esicasmo in Italian, is a meditative practice that Biff compares to certain yogic disciplines. It includes breath control and a kind of mantric use of the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

I flap my gums about a past and passing interest in Sufism, and a visit I made to a Sufi ashram in Turkish Cyprus once upon a time. My ten words to his one put the lie to any spirituality I might have made pretense to, but I still do harbor a genuine, if dilletantish, appreciation for devotions and discipline like his. Within minutes, I’m Biff’s biggest fan, and I try to keep the conversation going, but Biff has exceeded his word quota for the week: discourse complete.

Genius of another ilk awaits us at night. Antonio invites me to the Thursday open mic might at Busker’s Irish Pub, which is just a block down the ol’ cobblestones from my hotel. Whatever one may think of the tired Irish theme, the space is very comfortable, two floors in an old building, with lots of rooms and a stage at the back of the lower floor. The open mic night is popular. All the Italians there seem to know each other. A lot of them are musicians, entering with instruments on their shoulders and ordering nothing.

We meet Matteo, a passionate young man who sold his ’58 Stratocaster to pay for flying lessons. Now he is a pilot for a small carrier, and he has another guitar. He is an accomplished player, as he proves later in the night. But first, the three of us must have long and impassioned discussions about politics. Their explanations of current politics in Italia seem impossibly bleak. Matteo draws a comparison between Roma 2009 and Orwell 1984, and it’s completely plausible if everything he and Antonio say is true.

Finally, by 11:30, as my red eyes sink low in the night sky, the music starts. I’ve begged the cute MC, Sara, to allow Matteo and friend to go first. In my honor, they perform American blues, including 'Hoochie Coochie Man'. They turn it a laudable performance, and I enjoy the cultural dissonance as much as the show (medieval town, Italian language, Hoochie Coochie Man). Bravissimo!

Tonight, a heavy snow is falling on the streets of the old town. I’m nearly alone as I stroll the Corso. ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ is being broadcast from some bar’s outdoor speakers.