I am Karan from Olympia, WA.
Almost every other name used here is a pseodonym pseudonim pseudonymn alias.
The rest of it is true - mostly - and all of it is my own.
Don't even think about taking any of it, unless of course, you want to pay me.
Random Wisdom: Freedom of Press is limited to those who own one - H.L. Mencken
The counter says that 2846370 have been flummelized, but I personally think it's all a big lie.
Campanile di San Marco
(The Bell Tower at Saint Mark’s Plaza)
I know it’s an odd shot, but I kind of like it.
I took this photo in October 2005 as my friend Nancy and I awaited dawn over Basilica di San Marco.
Our problem was that we arose at something like 4am to see it and the sun slept in for another 2 hours.
It seems that we were given a summer sunrise time - so we stood shivering in the dark accompanied
only by two men who swept the old bricks with ancient brooms. I was quite content to be there and
see a part of Venice rarely seen by other tourists.
When the sun did emerge, the pigeons awoke and flew their welcome dance. I snapped this picture
of the Campanile di San Marco and if you look closely not one single pigeon made it into my photo.
Buying heavily into Lehman Brothers ($.13 a share!) and WAMU (pricey at $2.01 a share) has kept me oh so busy lately. Did you know it’s dirt cheap? When I’m not papering my walls with it, I’ve been way too absorbed in actually doing my job...which like always, leads me to distractions galore. Today I spent much time looking for a nice Venizia web cam to help me escape all the crap that is floating down upon us in America.
The winning web cam: http://turismo.regione.veneto.it/webcam/. If you don’t speak Italian, “Vista sul Canal Grande da Palazzo Balbi verso Rialto” means, the view of the Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto (Bridge).
I really loved Venice....didn’t expect to, but it’s the place in Italy I most want to return to. Sigh. I really really want to go back so when I cash in on my Lehman/WAMU windfall I’m so going to buy my own Appartamento di Venezia, with a boat of course.
Now I’ll get back to work. You guys are such slave drivers.
Fernet Branca, August 8, 2008
When my friends and I returned from Italy in 2005,
Nancy entered an extended period of reading
books about Italy or Italians. She shared these
stories with Carol and I and some we shared a
mutual admiration, some not so much. One of
these books was an odd one called
Cooking with Fernet Branca.
This odd little cookbook of sorts showcases the
extreme animosity between an English writer named
Gerald and Marta, his Italian neighbor lady. Original
recipes are shared such as “Mussels in Chocolate”,
“Garlic Ice Cream” and “Baked Pears in Cheese
Sauce”. There’s even a tasty sounding recipe for
Marta’s dachshund. Fernet Branca is a major
ingredient throughout the book. Now just what is
Fernet Branca?… Did you notice there—it was
like I was reading your mind?
Fernet Branca is a bitter concoction made up of over
40 herbs and spices. It was designed as a medicinal
cure that apparently treats everything from
constipation to menstrual cramps and for the last 163
years has been an Italian favorite. Those who love
the stuff often talk about how it’s an “acquired” taste
which is code for yuck. Did I mention that it’s 40 proof?
Anyway, after we read this book, we decided that we
simply must try it out and after a lengthy hunt for a
single bottle, found in the Bay Area (California), we
finally scheduled last night as our Fernet Branca night.
To make it a full evening, we also opened the last
bottle of Italian wine, one from Montefalco, Italy,
a bottle of limoncello from Cinque Terre and a cordial
called Vin Santo imported by V. Sattui winery.
Our intent was not to get all blotto’d...but instead to
conduct a serious scientific taste test. As it turned out,
the tasting yielded happy side effect....a nice Italian
buzz. We started with the Montefalco vino, moved on
to the limoncello then the Fernet Branca, and finished
with Vin Santo.
The Vin Santo and the Montefalco red were very nice.
The limoncello was, well lemony and the Fernet Branca
was, as described, obviously an acquired taste. It had a
multi-layered taste sensation that yielded the same
sort of effect as chewing vitamins or nails or vapo rub.
Even chasing it with ginger ale, as recommended
by many San Franciscans, didn’t kill the flavor. It
stays with you. Seriously stays with you. In fact,
the unconstipatingness of the stuff is legendary, not
that we drank enough to test that.
Despite all that, Carol liked it just fine and in fact
is the happy owner of a nearly full bottle of Fernet
Branca.
Today is Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. It is a fine Mexican holiday that seems so much more appealing that then hyper-commercialized Halloween most of Madison Avenue now embraces as theirs.
Usually we spend the day not celebrating, but now and then we get invited to a spectabulous party that features the very best of this tradition. This year, you can celebrate too by learning about a long dead Italian.
One thing that many Italy touring Americans bring back to the US, particularly the protestant flavored Americans, is a memory of all the dead bits that seem to be enshrined every where. It’s true, the Italians like their human relics. They like them plastered, they like them dried, they like them skeletal, they like them in tiny bits....sans bones, sans skin, sans substance of any sort - just ashes or dust. Most are revered in places holy but a few are on museum display like my favorite bit, Galileo’s finger.
A regretted aside...I never did get to see St. Anthony’s tongue.
The plastered dead look a lot like porcelain dolls complete with painted-on facial features. Believe me when I say that it’s not a good look for anybody.
The qualifications for relic-hood seem to be somewhat ambiguous with the only commonality being that the dead person has a fan in the shape of a Roman Catholic cleric. Some are relics by virtue of qualifying for sainthood, some get the nod if they can be held responsible for some sort of after death surprise. Galileo had supporters who liked that he stood up to the Pope and snapped off that finger when he was moved from what was supposed to be his final resting place.
Unfortunately, tourists aren’t supposed to photograph the dead or the works of art. The explanation for the need to buy a postcard is that the flash from a camera degrades the object. I don’t understand how that is so, but mostly I complied. It made hauling my big old camera a pain in the butt most days.
One night, I had an invigorating, wine-fueled conversation with a fellow American traveler named Bruce, conversation filled with admiration for all these relics and he and I promised to swap pictures of the dead when we returned to America. The very next day, with my promise to Bruce in mind, Nancy, Carol and I traveled to some hilltown in Umbria. There, in the local church was this man, known by the locals as the Pilgrim:
This is an illegal image, the only illegal photo I took yet one of many criminal acts I committed while visiting the lovely country of Italy, including taking a knife to the Vatican and numerous traffic offenses that killed no one and went unheeded by the Carabinieri.
This guy looks like he’s propped up in an old glass fronted upright piano…if he had been wearing a Stetson, I could have been visiting Tombstone, Arizona. No gunslinger, this guy was on a holy mission. He is called “The Pilgrim” and sometime in the 15 century he was doing that old St. Francis thing and making his pilgrimage in his brown robes. When he got to this particular hilltown, he was tired and fell asleep on a bench using his arms to cradle his sleeping head. That was the good news. The bad news is that he was found dead and stiff just like that in the morning and because he was unknown and on his pilgrimage, the locals called him the Pilgrim and buried him right away. The next night he was out and found propped next to the church. The locals buried him again and then the next morning he was back. Apparently this continued on a fairly regular basis for about a year and then every once in a while for a few more years. Finally they decided to just keep him in the church and gave him his own little niche in his glass box.
He doesn’t look too bad for someone who’s been dead for 500+ years….actually a little bit better then some of those plaster dipped stiffs I spied. Really.
Finally, a first installment of pictures. This is in Trastevere, an area near the Tiber River in Rome that is quite charming and becoming the “in” place to live. We are all three responsible for this group of photographs.
Trastevere di Roma
Click Old DOM above or Here to view it.
This is an on-going saga of my trip to Italy. I traveled with two friends, Carol and Nancy, while we toured the countryside for almost a month. Read the whole thing in one place here.
I have so much work to do it’s not funny....of course all of my life is colliding at once....making me face impending doom. So, of course, instead of doing any of it, I’ll sit down here and write about Italy instead.
In early October we hopped aboard Trenitalia, departed Rome and headed north to La Spezia where we needed to catch the train to Cinque Terre. It was about three hours to La Spezia and then about 15 minutes more to Riomaggiore where we had to catch the last green bus of the day at 1900. No sweat. We left Rome at about 1100 so that gave us a good seven hours to cover the distance.
We almost missed that green bus.
The trip to La Spezia went fine...we had that journal adventure and we met a young solider headed for assignment in Torino and we met a very nice French woman who resides six months every year in Italy and the rest in France. Overall a fine train trip.
We arrived in La Spezia and immediately bought our Cinque Terre passes*. We asked the station master where to catch the train to Riomaggiore and he told us to go to binario tre. In La Spezia there are several platforms or binario (aka bin). They are all on ground level and if you are courageous (read fool hardy) you can cross the tracks to reach each platform. There are even little paved pathways to each bin, complete with clearly stenciled signs that warn against such a venture.
The other way to move from one bin to another was to go down a flight of stairs, cross under the bin and climb back up. It was the long way and our luggage was very heavy....my suitcase was very heavy. V.E.R.Y - V.E.R.Y - H.E.A.V.Y. I know this because we had to move from the bin where we disembarked to the station house and with instructions that our next ride was from the very platform from which we had just arrived...we had to go back.
I didn’t want any more of that down the stairs / up the stairs business. I eyed those little paved pathways and weighed my options. I looked up the tracks and I looked down the tracks. I looked at Nancy and she looked at me and we scooted right across two of those handy little pathways so clearly marked with bright yellow warnings. Carol followed us but she was not happy with such risk taking.
We sat on binario tre and waited for our train. While we sat there, a brightly painted train rolled up to binario uno and then departed. We looked at the arrival and departure monitors and saw that we had just missed our train. No problem. There were lots of trains to Cinque Terre. Carol left her luggage with us and hot-footed it to the station to ask which bin we needed for the next train to Cinque Terre. Bin sette.
This meant that we had to haul our stuff there and even though Nancy and I were up for the little paved pathway, Carol was not and I think was close to crying in fear for us. We could see that she meant business in this not wanting us to do it ever again so in deference to her deep fear that we would end our trip to Italy in a most tragic fashion, Nancy and I stopped with such silliness and opted to go follow Carol’s sensible lead. We went down the stairs and then we went up the stairs. As we sat on binario sette, we watched across the tracks to bin cinque as our train rolled up and then out.
We did know how to read the monitor just fine, but it was wrong...really, we were right, it was wrong.
We went down the stairs again and then up the stairs...back to binario uno. We missed the next train too.
It was about this time that I began to think that we were doomed to spend the rest of our vacation in the La Spezia train station hauling our too heavy suitcases back and forth to await the our train at the wrong bin. It lost it’s magic. Then I noticed something interesting. Each binario had two wee booths on it.....they sort of looked like phone booths and as I watched across the expanse of the binarios, I saw a man enter one, press a button and descend. Hallelujah and thank God for elevators!!!!
I walked to the wee booth at our end of the bin, fumbled about and figured out how to open it and this time, Nancy and I took ourselves right down to the lower level and then over and up in another elevator right up to the next bin. Just in time because I was close to telling Carol that I was going back to face the danger crossing the paved pathways.
Binario tre and by the way, we missed the next train...again.
This time we had all assurances from the station master and eventually the monitor agreed with him and we confidently sat in abject patience for the next train. While waiting, a young woman from Philadelphia, Nicole, walked up and asked about the train to Riomaggiore. It seems that she had missed the last two because the monitors were wrong. We told her to wait with us. A couple from Colorado joined us too and soon we were the American contingency hoping to get to Riomaggiore. And Carol, Nancy and I were the ring leaders...the other three trusted us to get them there. *snort*
While we were waiting at binario quattro, the train arrived....again at binario uno....but because we knew how to move quickly using the wee elevators, we descended and ascended in quick time and finally, took our seats and enjoyed the short ride to our next stop. We jumped off the train and we had to hurry, but we did catch the last green bus of the day and our hosts at Cinqueterre Residence happily checked us in.
The very next day, we shipped a bunch of our gear back to Olympia, opting to lighten our load over hauling it up and down any other stairs.
* Trave hint: buy a Cinque Terre Pass before you buy your train ticket to any of the five destinations in CT. It is prepayment for all transportation within Parco Nazionale Delle Cinque Terre (the Cinque Terre National Park). By all transportation I mean all transportation, including the train, the green buses, the green carts, the green taxis and even the elevators which weren’t green but could have been.
This is an on-going saga of my recent trip to Italy. I traveled with two friends, Carol and Nancy, while we toured the countryside for almost a month. Read the whole thing in one place here.
