Denmark

The story begins the same to each new Dane we meet.

"Yeah, my parents were born here Well, near here, in Bjedstrup, near Skanderborg. My dad came over in '27, and my mother left Denmark in '39, just a few months before the Germans invaded."

The Americans in front of us on the plane overhear, and nod. It's a very American tale.

"My mother and father actually met on the boat coming back to Denmark. She was coming home from a visit to her mother, and he was going back to find himself a wife."

The hotel receptionist in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, looks up and smiles. She knows that Danish girls are the best for marrying.

"Well my father had sort of settled in a place that actually looks very similar to Denmark--namely, Racine, Wisconsin." He chuckles, "the fields, the farmland, even the trees look so much like Wisconsin. It looks just like Wisconsin!"

"Around the corner is the entrance to your room," the receptionist says. "This key gets you in the door, this one for your room."

Both the hotel receptionist and the waiter at the cafe (clearly a local college hangout) seem confused that a man named Eric Pedersen, who looks 100% Danish, doesn't speak the language.

"My dad would've been happy to teach my sister and I to speak it," Eric explains, "But my mother wouldn't let him. 'You're in America,' she'd say, 'speak English!'"

I have the most European driving experience, but taking the wheel of our rental in Denmark, where rules are followed (even, it seems, not so much out of fear but out of some, rather foreign, sense of communal goodwill, completely absent in Italy), I am nervous I'll break six inviolable laws before breakfast. We're meeting Lennart Frederiksen, a curator at a local museum and researcher of local Danish genealogies (check his website at http://www.fredenslyst.dk). Lennart lives in Skanderborg, where Eric's mother was born, and we meet at the local McDonald's to follow him the last few miles in our pilgrimage to the home of Eric's ancestors.

"This place DOES look a lot like Wisconsin," we say as we follow Lennart and Eric, who has chosen to ride with the one so connected to his past.

First stop is Dover Kirke, the church where Eric's father was baptized. It sits in the middle of three fields, its cemetery full of gravestones with "Pedersen" on them. "I don't know if any of these are my relatives," Eric says with some sadness. "It's such a common name, and I've lost contact with any living relatives."

He perks up in the inside of the church. "A spitting image of the one I went to as a kid," he smiles, walking up the pews to the altar. We pretend to baptize Aryn and take some pictures. Aryn picks up a Danish hymnal and proceeds to belt out two full verses of Amazing Grace. This small church, somewhat unremarkable in appearance (much like the Old North church in Boston, really), feels like it's built on sacred ground. Two if by sea, without whom Eric, Julie, and now Aryn would not exist.

The house where Eric's father was born is about fifty meters inside the town limits of Bjedstrup. No one in Aarhus had heard of this town, and that may be because on the map there aren't even any intersections to speak of, let alone a posted population.

"The house used to have an attached barn," Eric explains to Lennart, pointing to where now an in-ground pool sits, covered. "Those trees weren't there when my grandfather lived here, either.
He made a path up to the top of that hill, where he had a table and chairs." The owner isn't at home, but we gather from the signs outside and the laborer's truck that pulls up as we're leaving that she owns a pool installation company.

The school is about 200 meters away, but has expanded quite a bit in the past 100 years. Lennart points out the building that would have been the one-room schoolhouse a century ago, then invites us to his house for Aebelskiver (a kind of Danish pancake about the size and shape of a golf ball).

"Normally we only have these at Christmas," he explains, "but we'll have some today."

"Sue makes those," brags Eric. "Of course, we have them all the time, for any big family
gathering. She also makes frickadilla, kleiner…" he goes on, listing the Danish culinary delights of Racine. Lennart seems to recognize few of the foods, but we do find many later in the supermarket. "By the way," Eric asks, "do you have kringle here?"

Lennart looks confused.

"It's a pastry we have in Racine," Eric explains, "thin, with a filling, shaped like a racetrack."
Lennart thinks for a moment and shakes his head. He's never heard of it. Many of the Danes we encounter seem slightly bewildered at, if not to say uninterested in, those portions of century-old Danish culture their far-flung forefathers decided to preserve in the New World.

We take one turn after the school, leave the town a moment later, and at no time does it look like we are anywhere but a tiny cluster of houses amid farmland.

"Wow, look at that horse farm," we exclaim, coming over a hill. It's so pastoral, such a postcard Danish farm. Lennart turns in the driveway, and Aryn waves to the horses as we follow. His wife and daughter greet us at the door, exclaim over Aryn's appearance (for once, not for its uniqueness but for its similarity to their own families). They show us the pictures of children who could all be related to Julie's family.

"For this whole time I've felt almost like I was among family," Eric tells them, which certainly explains his abnormally loquacious mood these past 24 hours. "It's like Racine used to be, with such a concentrated Danish population."

Two enormous but shy dogs eye us suspiciously as we sit down to coffee, cinnamon roles, aebelskiver, and long talk.

"There are so many Danes in Racine that the queen herself came once," Eric says. "Marguerite came to Racine!"

I'm privately reminded of the comical Lake Wobegon anecdote about the King and Queen of Norway, who do a whirlwind tour of the Norwegian enclaves of Minnesota and Wisconsin singing songs their parents had never even heard of, eating terrible food in VFW after VFW and looking at endless black and white photographs of dead ancestors from the Old Country, and when they return from this grueling trip they look at each other and say, "now who were those people?" I smile from the humor, not the condescension.

The Frederiksens are impressed by Eric is saying, but, like everyone else, confused that with such a strong heritage he doesn't speak the language.

"I studied some of the Rosetta Stone," Eric admits, "but what understanding I do have comes from when I was young. My aunt [he says a word that sounds like festerolavia, which doesn't jive with my translator] came to visit when I was young, and she didn't speak any English and expected us all to understand her. If I didn't understand what she asked, she just said it again, louder! She wanted her sugar cubed and her tea leaves loose. She stayed for a year and a half."

The story continues on the train to Copenhagen, through that great city (if you want to see Amsterdam but are indifferent to pot, go to Copenhagen instead), and in the airport. Every Dane is family, though we met none related by blood.

"All the family I knew in Denmark has died," Eric tells the souvenir shop lady, who is actually from Australia but moved to Denmark for her husband. "My father was 48 when I was born, and he was about the youngest in the family so all my aunts and uncles had grandkids my age. I've lost contact with all of them." Sue buys souvenirs for everyone at home, many of whom may never come over here.

Will we return together, a new contact with a living relative made and strengthened? Will we walk the streets of Copenhagen in the balmy summer, not the wintry November winds? Will the Little Mermaid be there when we come back, instead of on loan in the Far East?

Garrison Keillor would be proud of this visit, but so would T.S. Eliot. Old men ought to be explorers, the poet said. And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time. Eric, an indifferent traveler at best, may not agree with the former sentiment, but we have now lived the latter.

As the plane first touches down in Copenhagen, I see Eric's face as he peers out the window and murmurs "Never thought I'd make it here. I never thought I'd make it to Denmark."
"And here you are," say the Americans in front of us on the plane with a smile.

Passionsspiele 2010

"I think I only have two things on my bucket list," says my mom as we drive north. "Other people may have more, but for me, I just have two. And we're going to do one of them right now!"

My mom isn't the kind of person who disguises her enthusiasm for something, and there's an atmosphere of excitement in the car as we cross the Po and start to spy the foothills of the Alps. Since I was a child I'd heard about a village in Bavaria that put on a play only every ten years, and while these ever-growing mountains may have posed quite a challenge to the likes of Hannibal, we'll cross them in just a few short hours.

The town of Oberammergau, population 5,204, is home to some fantastic artisanal wood carvings, a NATO school, breathtaking flower gardens that hang from typical dark wood Bavarian facades and, every decade, swarms of ancient tourists creaking off tour buses, finally checking the Passionsspiele off their bucket list.

In 1634 the town of Oberammergau was plagued with, well, the plague. The townspeople came together and put on a play about Jesus' death and resurrection, in a desperate attempt to show their devotion to a God who, they thought, had forsaken them. It must have worked, because from the time of that play, no one in Oberammergau has died of plague. They now put the play on every ten years to keep the memory alive and, perhaps, to keep the protection from the plague alive too.

We worry about how they'll change the story, or what they'll do to Christ's divinity. Germany (and indeed, most of Western Europe) is famously skeptical, with abysmal church attendance and a strong influence not only of modern progressive humanism but westernized incarnations of Buddhism or spirituality in the most nebulous, uninvasive forms. It's really only the Catholic PIIGS countries that have any measurable church attendance or active religiosity anymore (ideas, after all, have consequences). Can an ancient story of an outdated religion survive in such a climate?

We sip our radlers--a mix of Sprite and beer that, we hope, will allow us to savor the tastes of Oktoberfest while not knocking us catatonic during the first three hours of the six-hour play--and discuss our concerns. We hope these people can get it at least mostly Right. Sip.

We are about to find out just how preposterously small our minds really are.

"Jesus, the Jew, sought to renew the religion of the fathers, a religion built on the foundation of the law and the prophets, by showing that the personal relationship to the Eternal Father-God represents the core of all religious activity," my Passionsspiele 2010 textbook reads. "Religion is meant not only to give order to human life but a lasting inner connection with the realm of the divine."

They've given us textbooks in English to follow along, because the play is, naturally, in German. Julie and I share a booklet, even though they gave us two, because while it may be a bit inconvenient to have to accommodate another person's reading speed or desires, sharing a booklet allows us to share the experience, to read along together.

But how can I tear my eyes away from the stage? A crowd, all in blue, more people than I've seen attending most other plays, swarms the stage. Sheep, donkey, goats, horses, camels, all leaving their mark behind to be cleaned up during intermission, are led or ridden by actors from age one to ninety. When the crowd roars, my heart stops with the sound. I've seen fewer people on the field for a Super Bowl halftime show than the multitude to whom Jesus preaches. He turns over their money changing tables, their oil jars. He smashes a cage with doves, and they fly out into the open sky to make a home in the Bavarian Alps.

Recent iterations of the play have incorporated more and more of the Jewish traditions from the period, and the fabulous costumes worn by the priests and teachers of the law, the Last Supper based more on an actual Passover meal and less on Da Vinci's fresco, and the constant acknowledgement of a simmering tension between a people both socially and politically oppressed and their Roman occupiers shows the depth of thought the committee put into the show. The miracle unfolds itself on stage as additions to the sparse gospels play out flawlessly and seamlessly. Jesus' words repeated by Nicodemus as he quarrels with his colleagues in the synagogue. The pomposity of those Jesus called "whitewashed tombs," and their elevated intellectual dialogue. Third-Reich Pilate, a no-nonsense military man in complete command of his post, but who also asks, jarringly, "What is truth?"

My favorite is the living images, the live stills of Old Testament episodes that introduce each scene and ground the story in its ancient past. And how apt (and sometimes obscure) the references: the anguish of Cain before the anguish of Judas, the mocking of Job before Jesus' trial in front of the high priest, Joab's betrayal at the rock of Gibeon before Judas' kiss in Gethsemane. The sacrifice of Isaac and the raising of the bronze serpent before the way of the cross and crucifixion.


(from the trial of Jesus before the high priest):

3rd witness: He said: I am going to tear down the temple built by humans and replace it in three days with another that was not built by human hands.
Ezechial: What an impudent boast! It took 46 years to build this temple, and he wants to rebuild it in three days?
Nathaniel: What do you have to say to object to this testimony? Can't you think of a response? Contradict, if you can!
Annas: He neither speaks nor gestures. The defiance he has shown against me has not yet left him.
Nathaniel: I see: you think you can save yourself if you keep silent. He doesn't dare confess in front of the fathers of the people, in front of the judges, what he has boasted before the common people.
Caiaphas: Jesus of Nazareth! Impatiently I have waited for this moment. Whence do you assert this claim? Who has appointed you leader of Israel and judge over us? Speak!
Jesus: (is silent).
Annas: Should reverence not protect us foam being made an object of his derision?
Nicodemus [to Annas, Nathaniel, Caiaphas]: He is a living reproach to your basic convictions.


The scene continues and Jesus does claim to be the Son of God. He does physically rise from the dead. He does preach the Beatitudes (though he might have said "Blessed are the poor" vs. the “poor in spirit”), He is wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The feared theological "flaws," such as they are, mostly aren't. Jesus has blonde hair, and Judas looks much more Jewish than any of the other disciples. For all the strides forward in German-Jew relations these past six decades, you'd think someone might have noticed. The former charge, about poor vs. poor in spirit, may be the insidious influx of progressive socialist theory into the text, or just a translation slip-up, or whatever. Certainly heaven and the Christian life are dependent on subjecting one's individual will to the Divine Will ("In his will is our peace," as Piccarda Donati says), whereas one's relative economic class may have far less influence on actual salvation, but as the choir sings Hallelujah and the crowd envelops the risen Christ and we weep in the cold night air, not much matters but Christ and Him crucified.

Haarlem

It costs about half as much to stay in Haarlem as to stay in Amsterdam, which is why we spend our two nights in Holland there. That, and the great sage Rick Steves says that if you have two days to spend in Amsterdam, spend one in the city and one in Haarlem. I know, enough with the Rick Steves already, but I wish I paid even more attention, because he gives the hotel we booked indifferent reviews. There isn’t much wrong with it, except that it’s a bit remote from the train station and breakfast isn’t included, so our 20 minute train ride to Amsterdam Centraal takes longer and cost twice as much because of cab fare and our stay costs more than advertised because of the costly—albeit delicious—morning buffet. That 20 minute commute from Haarlem to Amsterdam would make an excellent bike ride, though, through the beautiful Dutch countryside.

The town of Haarlem, home of Corrie Ten Boom, is like a Dutch Bruges with fewer tourists. After getting past the obvious comparisons with the Harlem of New (Amsterdam) York, the town offers serene walks along the canals, winsome shopkeepers and museum guides, plenty of pedestrian-only areas, and (sniff sniff) a few of the other delights this country is famous for.

The Corrie Ten Boom house, we find by accident, is just off the Grote Market square. A pilgrimage for many, including the Van Dykes, of Boston, who make up the other half of our tour group, the house is restored to look like it may have in those horrible days when she had to hide Jews in a false wall (aka “the hiding place”). Pictures of family and friends line the walls and the piano is in good repair (the Ten Boom family and guests kept busy by singing and staging plays during blackout hours). The refugees in her house certainly led a better life than Anne Frank’s family, 20 minutes away by train. Fun at night and sun during the day (an enclosed area on the roof allowed them to sit outside unobserved from the street below—or the Gestapo headquarters 200 meters down the road), they were the ones taking heroin from clean needles. Corrie Ten Boom’s story during the war is compelling, and her thirty years of charity work and evangelism after speak to the passion alive inside her. She died on her birthday, as did so many other saints.

Also highly recommended is the Adriaan Molle (or, you know, the big windmill). It’s reconstructed in the old style, with wooden pegs keeping the all-wood gears, pulleys, shafts, and brakes together. We learn how the position of the sails sent messages across the town and how they can turn the turret to face directly into the wind, and enjoy the warmth of all-wood construction after spending so many months living in marble. We also have a wonderful view of the town and the yachts sailing up and down the main canal.

Within sight of the windmill is a playground on the banks of the canal. For a sitting fee of fifty cents, we eat our packed picnic of cheese and fresh bread, tomatoes and olives and an inexpensive merlot. Aryn plays and plays as the sun trickles through the boughs of a great willow tree.

As the sun sets, Aryn settles into bed and Julie rests her legs in the bath with her book. Jake and I have a drink and discuss the incredibly long twilight this far north. The conversation turns, as it does when someone like me talks with someone like Jake, to politics, poverty, development, literature, economics, God, and Garrison Keillor. Someone once told me that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. I took issue with it then, and I still do. Not because ideas aren’t discussed by great minds, but because it implies that an amiable and edifying conversation among friends about this person’s pregnancy or that person’s recent trip to Barcelona is somehow inferior to an angry and divisive dispute about integrating Muslim immigrants into European society or whether six-day Creationism is the only possible interpretation of Genesis. Here’s an idea: edifying conversation among lifelong friends strengthens the most important thing in heaven or on earth—our relationships. Discuss.

So thanks, @Jacob Steele, for the conversation and the memories. May we meet again soon in another corner of this wide world.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam has an interesting personality. The pot and sex tourism color the whole of the city center.

“Why do they have to play it up so much?” asks Jake, my friend from school who is interning with an NGO in Brussels and also the impetus for our trip to Benelux. “Why can’t it just be like, ‘pot and prostitution are legal here,’ and that’s it?”

Money, I imagine, if the swarms of hairy hippies humping their backpacks off the train with a wild excitement in their soon-to-be-glazed eyes are any indication of the scale of its share of this city’s tourism.

“I just think they’re selling themselves short,” Jake concludes.

“Not entirely my favorite city,” Julie agrees, as we dodge every conceivable form of transportation: bus, tram, taxi, construction truck, bike, bike with huge box on the front like a wheelbarrow with pedals, and bike rickshaw.

Our concierge in the hotel in Haarlem agrees. “You were in Amsterdam?” he asks us as we check out. When we nod, he snorts, “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

We visit the NEMO science museum (which looks like the prow of a huge ship sunk in the canal), hoping for an awesome toddler-geared exhibit. We are disappointed—first by the amount of kids there, then by the target age of about 8+. Aryn lacks the patience required by the exhibits, and we don’t linger. The VOC Amsterdam, an old Dutch East India ship collocated with the NEMO, is more exciting. Aryn, aka “captain Jessie,” a riff on her current adopted character from Toy Story, learns to fire a cannon, steer the ship, and cook and eat the hardtack and gruel enjoyed by the ship’s crew. The captain’s mess has roasted chickens and wine in bottles shaped to be very bottom-heavy. She loves it and doesn’t want to leave.

We walk. She falls asleep.

It turns out to take less time to walk back to the Centraal station from the NEMO than it did to ride the bus. Most of the city center is like that. Better, even, to take a bike, which we do later.

But Julie yet again proves her skill at locating the best café. Note: in Amsterdam, “Coffee shops” sell pot, and cafes are cafes. We sit amidst a record market and watch old metalheads browse the vinyl discs for buried treasure. The sun, surprisingly blazing, kisses their grateful northern European skin. We came north to flee you, sun, but the breeze is cool and the Amstel cold and much is right in the world.

Our walk, unexpectedly, takes us through that staple Amsterdam walking experience: the Red Light District. Shine on, sun.

Julie gasps, “There’s a naked woman in that window!”

I smile. I’m happy she gets to see this, and I say “I’m happy.”

“You’re happy about this?” she asks, with her uncanny ability to cut through equivocation. “You think these girls are willing?”

Well some are, of course, but I remember that it was on a previous trip to Amsterdam that I was first awakened to the world of human trafficking.

“It’s got to be better here,” Jake offers, “with regulation, enforced condom use, access to healthcare…”

“Like using heroin from a clean needle, you mean?”

“No, I mean the regulation should keep the trafficking and exploitation side down.”

But when I stayed with the YWAM guys in the “Jesus loves you” building overlooking Centraal station and we discussed their ministry, they told me, “If a prostitute ever accepts Jesus, we have to get her out of town immediately, or she’ll be killed.”

And, in fact, Amsterdam is one of the top destination cities in the world for human trafficking. While it is difficult to know which women initially chose to work in the sex industry, seventy-five percent of the prostitutes are foreign (most from countries identified as “source countries” in Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia). Routine medical checkups are not required. The U.S. Department of State confirms 909 trafficking victims in 2009 (that’s one for every 18,091 people in the country, as compared to 1 per 182,343 in the U.S. and 1 per 118,221 in Thailand), and in 2007 and 2008 the government prosecuted and convicted 152 traffickers with an average sentence of 15 years.

When a Christian organization called Scharlaken Koord (in English, the Scarlet Cord) surveyed 439 prostitutes they had contact with, 380 had been introduced into the business by a supposed “lover” or boyfriend. That sounds a great deal like the classic tale of a trafficking victim: an offer to a desperate citizen in a poor land that sounds too good to be true, and it is. Upon arrival in their promised land, they are informed of the massive debt they now owe (transportation and visa costs, etc.), and they must work off their debt however their captor demands. Usually this debt comes with crushing interest, making it impossible for the victim to ever pay down the debt at all, and they die in captivity. The two competing gangs of pimps in Amsterdam are known for seducing new talent into the profession, so one can conclude that the majority of the prostitutes here are, in fact, slaves. Roxanne, you DO have to sell your body to the night.

We walk.

The mood passes. We ride our bikes out of the Amsterdam of snickering pothead fantasies. We cross canal after canal, the houseboats quietly moored to city streets. Every street has a red bike lane, and we stay safely in our lane and accelerate. I hear Aryn over the wind and the traffic, “Be careful daddy! Mas dispacio.” We discover the magic of the Museumplein, a giant square surrounded by the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum with huge “I amsterdam” letters we could climb on and a playground—plenty of people but plenty of space. We ride from there to the Vondelpark. A park within a great city is one of life’s finest things. The feeling not quite of herbs and stewed rabbit, but rather of calm amidst a lively chaos, of plunging beneath the surface in a waterpark, refreshes like an acre in the country never does (or, one wonders, never has to??).

Dinner under the NYSE and other financial buildings a few blocks from Centraal station is an urban dream. Initially unsure about the food, thinking a place with such incredible outdoor ambiance couldn’t excel also in the kitchen, we are surprised by an outstanding dinner of couscous salad, tomato and red pepper soup and a cheese plate with that rich, northern European bread. Also beer, and another order or two of fries (how many is that today?). Aryn chases the pigeons as we pass the plates around, savoring a fine meal in the mild evening air. Big banks, drugs, human trafficking, heaps of dreadlocked Rastas on the Haj, and I’m still in love with edgy Amsterdam.

Brugge

We had to buy our tickets last minute, but thankfully flying to Brussels from Rome was the cheapest flight I could buy for those dates. So we land in Brussels after an easy drive up to Rome Ciampino, where the parking lot is closer to the gate than the check-in counter is at FCO. Also the airport code is CIA, and the first syllable sounds like “champ,” and I think that’s awesome.

Sitting on the train from Brussels to Bruges, we both comment how similar the countryside is to Wisconsin. The buildings, of course, retain that European flavor—that distinct foreignness to remind us again that (pinch) we’re in Europe, in Belgium. Deciduous trees growing in thick, rich soil brings a feeling of home while the thin, watery sunlight is a welcome relief from a Mediterranean August.

The Flanders hotel, in Brugge, is the best hotel we’ve stayed in yet. The beds are soft, the breakfast enormous, the pool sufficient for a windmill-weary three-year-old who left her house at 8 and took a series of cars, airplanes, buses, trains and taxis before sitting in a stroller for a while.

Our sunset windmill walk calms Julie’s and my frenetic pulse. Julie falls in love immediately. Old historic Bruges has a trail along the surrounding canal, and on the north eastern path you find four giant windmills all in a row. A lawn stretches between them, inviting picnics, Frisbee or, today, a group of dog lovers exercising their pets.

How much is our impression of a place colored by the weather? London, in the sunlight, like when we visited, is unspeakably amazing. Pisa, in the rain, was worth a few pictures and a swift exeunt stage left. Brugge, with her cool summer showers, horse-drawn carriage rides past “God haus”-es where medieval nobility provided free lodging to peasants willing to pray them into heaven, sunny boat rides beneath the bridge leading to the swan-filled convent Julie will join if I break our agreement and die first, and her winding streets filled to overflowing with chocolate, waffles, beer, French fries, and chocolate, ranks easily among our new favorite places on earth. We are definitely in the right place at the right time.

Rick Steves told me that Bruges is a touristy place where you don’t mind rubbing elbows with a bunch of other tourists. If I do nothing more with this blog than to validate the recommendations of this incomparable traveler, from where I sit that would be okay. For you, dear reader, if that happens, just go watch his PBS shows.

About half the streets are bumpy stroller rides. The convent I mentioned earlier is open to visitors, but Aryn is sleeping and the cobblestones are too uneven to stroll through. So if I die and Aryn is grown, you can go visit Julie there and see for yourself. You may not recognize her, because she’ll have gained about 200 lbs by the time you catch up with her, and she’ll probably have finished the whole chocolate statue of Barack Obama.

Our dinner, at an Irish pub staffed by real Irishmen, is fantastic. They serve us delicious food with salad such as we haven’t had in quite some time. My Leffe beer has a pleasant aftertaste, the fries (a food invented in Belguim, which is why we call them French fries) are divine, and the whole culinary experience is totally lost on Aryn. But she manages to eat enough to “earn” dessert (parents, don’t judge me), and wouldn’t you believe it, the chocolate mousse steals the whole show. We have to physically restrain our child so she doesn’t inhale it so fast she chokes, and I have to strain myself to remember much else about that dinner, so consumed is my mind with swimming in that heavenly confection.

Dependapotamus--part 1

Everyone claims to have met one. Everyone says they know about someone who has never left the base, or never gone anywhere their whole tour here. We all talk about that pitied and piteous creature who cannot acknowledge that they live in Europe, and cares nothing for the lifetime and more of joy and wonder at their fingertips. A mythical beast stalks the faketown of Gricignano, and its name is dependapotamus.

I first heard the term probably on my first night here. It’s cropped up here and there ever since, and every time it makes me smile and cringe together. Dependapotamus. Oh, it’s hilarious. The image of a military spouse, swollen to hippo proportions, waddling about a house she’s terrified to leave, makes me laugh every time. But that poor girl, that poor husband.

I’ll carry the stereotype further, and get almost inexcusably, irrevocably mean, but [spoiler alert] all shall be redeemed. The term bears lingering over, like refried beans or sausages. Disgusting as you see it constructed, but quite palatable afterward. She doesn’t have to be fat (yes, it’s always a she. The male equivalent is usually a servicemember himself and we just ridicule him to his face). She doesn’t have to be mean, or overbearing, or lazy, or any of the above, but the term in the Naples context (that is, talking about Naples-area military spouses) always implies a terror of leaving the house. That terror keeps her from leaving the base, and it clouds and colors her impressions of Italy unfairly. She hates Italians because they’re unhelpful at the Commissary on base. She hates Italians because they’re loud in the pool on base. She hates Italian drivers, and is terrified to drive off base. How could anyone like it here, she asks. Italy is home to 70% of the world’s art, but for vacations, she wants to go to America (that is, “‘merica”). Or just stay at home.

Dependapotamus describes someone who didn’t want to come here, and doesn’t want to try to like it here, is too afraid to take a chance and explore, and therefore hates it here.

Now, clearly there is no one who ever fits this description completely, or at least not for a very long period of time. If someone spent their whole three years here like that, that is a person above all to be pitied. Because no human being is static, and no one’s attitude toward one of the great destination countries on earth can remain 100% negative forever.

In reality, among real people, I wonder if the term simply describes someone in the throes of culture shock. I know these people who are terrified to drive in town. I know these homesick full-time moms who were wrenched from a comfortable life and support network and thrown into one of the hardest overseas assignments in the U.S. military (don’t ask me, ask the guy who’s lived overseas with the military 27 of the last 35 years, in all of the locations available. He’s the one who said if you can live in Naples, you can live anywhere). If you’re grieving for the life you had, and you encounter minor hardship after minor hardship, and your patience wanes and wanes until it snaps completely, you will begin to behave like a dependapotamus.

But how precedented is the feeling of distaste for a foreign land, especially from the spouse of the principle traveler? Abigail Adams, that paragon of servant wives, the one any military wife during times of long absence aspires to emulate, writes the following of Paris (Paris!), to which her husband had dragged her for his diplomatic service: “You inquire of me how I like Paris. Why, they tell me I am no judge, for that [living outside the city] I have not seen it yet. One thing, I know, and that is I have smelt it… It is one the very dirtiest place I ever saw. There are some buildings and some squares, which are tolerable; but in general the streets are narrow, the shops, the houses, inelegant and dirty.” She goes on to talk about how hard it is to meet, let alone converse, with French women, and then when you do meet them (in this instance one of Ben Franklin’s “most intimate friends”): “I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.”

The wife of a senior diplomat said these things. The wife of a future president, who raised children, one of whom became another president, without much help from dad, gushed about the DISpleasure of living abroad in a palace outside one of the greatest cities in the world (though, to be fair, in this historical context, “the worst of times,” maybe Paris then had more austere and hostile qualities than we modern travelers see).

This too shall pass, as they say. Abigail did eventually look back at her time in Paris with fondness. But the shock in the moment is undeniable.

“To have had Paris tolerable to me,” said Abigail Adams, “I should not have gone to London.” Now there’s a sentiment I can commiserate with.

Living in Naples

I’ve decided that everything I hear about Naples is true. I love it here. I also hate it here. Both equally true. But mostly I love it here. A small town crowning a tiny Italian mountain is infinitely more fascinating than a small town back home. The evening, Italy at twilight, when the Mediterranean sun has set but hasn’t finished shining, holds a magic no swarm of mosquitoes or pack of stray dogs feeding on roadside trash can truly quench. Hiking up the rim of an extinct volcano and looking over the bay of Pozzuoli, the islands of Procida and Ischia, the hydrofoils leaving for the Amalfi coast across the Bay of Naples—this is the sublime in the supreme.

But the robberies, the horror stories told and retold within the American faketown in Gricignano, are also true. A girl I work with has gotten robbed more times than I can count, likely because she is loud and has probably made enemies, so now her enemies know every time she goes out of town. I hesitate to say the gassing stories are true (allegedly thieves will gas people in their sleep so they sleep through the entire nighttime robbery), but I’m willing to believe.

And the pizza, the caffe, the sfogliatella, the seafood are to die for. And I can park at work for free and walk to the international airport. And I get gas coupons that make the astronomical European gas prices obsolete and I can drive around Italy paying what an American pays for his or her gas back home. And within eight hours of driving, I have access to 70% of the world’s art.

Ah, Naples. It’s no vacation, but it’s a chance of a lifetime. The mafia terrifies me. The gypsies terrify and fascinate me, and bother me when I park at Ikea. They stole my friend’s car when she was in it.

Napoli is a condensed Italy, an Italy without hospitality, or at least a pre-tourist Italy. Neapolitans are an intense variety of Italian, or perhaps an unconquered breed. Individuals have been extremely hospitable and friendly, but as a group they repel the casual tourist. There are very few “touristy” places in Naples. It’s for the varsity team—all others need not bother. There is treasure here for a seasoned explorer to find. It requires more than mere receptivity. You’d hope the next sentence would read “…and rewards more than the more immediately pleasing tourist destinations.” But it’s never that simple. Maybe I’ll be able to say that, eventually. Maybe not. That’s probably the wrong way to frame it, but I’ll have to let you know.

Driving part 2

The last time I mentioned driving I was somewhat shellshocked at the way the Neapolitans have taken to cars. Italian driving in general is pretty wild, but Napoli is a distilled essence of Italy, an Italy without laws.

“Romans drive crazy,” says Maurizio, a Roman, “but we don’t like to drive in Naples.”

There’s rarely been a better example of a pot and kettle, but it speaks to not only the disdain anyone north of Naples feels toward this city, but also to the reputation of the Neapolitan man in a Fiat.

First, the disdain. Northern Italians say that Africa starts south of Rome. Indeed, Rome is as far south as most of the tourists come, except destination travelers looking for a day in Pompeii, Amalfi or the Royal Palace in Caserta (and then only to film something they couldn’t get permission to film in Rome). If you’ve been to northern Italy, from Tuscany and Florence to Venice and the Dolomites, from Milan to Torino to the Cinqueterra, there’s enough to explore for a lifetime. Why bother striking south, into the harsher land with sharper wine and fewer road signs? Why spend valuable vacation time wandering lost through the rough city, risking pick pockets in a region with 30% unemployment? There are answers, and there are reasons, but most don’t stop to hear them.

Second, the reputation. I call all drivers here men. It’s a very male world. Even in Bahrain, I saw more women out in public (one exception: malls). Walking through our little town’s piazza, Julie wonders if women are even allowed outside here. The only ones we see are behind registers, in courtyards gossiping around plastic glasses of wine, or naked on billboards. Oh, I forgot the prostitutes. One hazard of driving is the old man who stops to pick up a prostitute (all of them African, most of them carrying their kids around, most, one assumes, slaves). If I want to smash into any Italian drivers, those are the ones.

But I categorize the drivers as young rich men, young fashionable men, old rich men, and old men. These drivers can be either male or female, but female drivers here usually fall into the young fashionable men or the old men categories.

Young rich men drive very expensive cars, impeccably shined, and yield to no one. Their car could be an enormous BMW SUV* or a tiny BMW sports car, and we have no idea what they do to earn this kind of money (though at least out where I live, one assumes, unfairly, it’s either the Comorrah or Casalesi clan). They are extremely special, and therefore extremely impatient and will cut you off at any opportunity. In fact, how dare you even presume to “share” the road with them? They will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever stop or yield the right of way. If they are within 100 meters of your intersection, either stop or consider an alternate route.

*(no SUV here comes close to the size of the average American SUV. A VW Taureg looms larger on the road here than a stretch Tahoe does in the U.S.)

Young fashionable men may be extremely poor and barely able to afford their Fiat 500, but that thing is spit-shined and they are prouder of it than of their new sleek purple popped collar. They yield to no one. Because Italian youth live with their parents well into their 30s, this car is also the proverbial basement couch for the amorous young couple. The fashionable young men are extremely special, and therefore extremely impatient and will cut you off at any opportunity. Being the most creative category, they may even create opportunities to cut you off, for example by passing you on the right and cutting you off, then zipping to the left lane and answering their cell (which, on Italian freeways, requires a 70% reduction in speed) and then coming up from behind you and cutting you off again. How dare you even presume to “share” the road with them? If you can beat them into the intersection, you may continue on your way in relative safety, until you meet another one.

The old men drive extremely slow. Not slow like an old person on a U.S. highway, trailing the speed limit by five or ten in the right lane. No, old Italian men drive 20 in any lane. 20 kilometers per hour, or maybe per day. They are the greatest hazard on the road, all the more so because they’re probably 50% of the johns stopping to rape the slaves on the narrow street corner, too. They are terrified of driving, but what the heck, all the kids are doing it nowadays, and they’re at least as special as any of these young ruffians. Probably more so, because he remembers when this whole town was nothing but a couple of fields and a café/bar. At an intersection, assume this old guy doesn’t know he’s on the road, let alone where he’s going, and just go around him.

Old rich men are like the young rich men, but their range of cars will include a Mercedes with blacked-out windows or a Mazerati. One assumes they own this particular strip of road, to include all the businesses on either side, the slaves working every corner, and the utility companies employed to repair the road and pick up the trash. They’ve grown patient in their old age, but are probably more special than any other Italian, who is more special than anyone else. They may grant you the right of way as an act of munificence, but pretty much most of the time they are impatient and will cut you off at any opportunity. In fact, how dare you even presume to “share” the road with them? If you don’t yield them right of way, tomorrow that intersection will be gone.

I’m not sure what the protocol is for passing a horse. I guess just wait for an opening. The same goes for a scooter, the driver of which is holding the reigns of a white pony. I let that guy go.

I’ve concluded that driving here is about asserting your manliness, or your specialness, or somehow convincing the entire world to bow down to you. Honor is supreme. Yielding is dishonorable. “I am special,” everyone insists. “It shouldn’t have to be ME that backs up.”

In the States, the most impatient and self-absorbed drivers are the rich suburbanites. They are in fair supply, and they drive even bigger SUVs than anything to be found in Europe. A New Yorker profile of one of the super-rich suburbs of New York City said that money, while it may not be able to buy happiness, certainly buys impatience. But there are enough semi-courteous people, or at least community-minded people with the barest hint of suspicion that they may not be the most important person in the universe, to keep the rudest among us in check on the U.S. roads.

The advent of the Euro halved Italy’s wealth and impoverished an entire generation (probably more). Maybe these “new poor” Italians still feel as special as the American rich. There’s a pregnant concept.

Coming home

London wrecked me. Stepping off the plane, I no longer want to live in Italy, least of all Naples. Coming home from England and having to speak Italian for the first time (though we heard plenty of it on the Tube in London), I feel a wave of frustration that wasn’t there before. I don’t want to drive with the crazies. I don’t want the Mediterranean sun. I don’t want the trash or the pastries or the road signs leading to nowhere. I feel myself thinking that it isn’t fair I couldn’t live in England, which has that rich, European history but where we could actually ask someone to explain when we don’t understand something.

Far from being an antidote to culture shock, it heightened it for me. It’s like I’ve been running a race and stopped at a donut shop. When it comes time to start running again, every particle in my body screams against it. No, we’ll stay here, they all say. Let’s run some other time.

But I have to go to work tomorrow. And I have to get someone to fix that awful smell in our bedroom.

Just like I’ve had striking experiences on the road leaving Campania, we seem to always come home to something terrible. From Tuscany, we came home to an alarm we couldn’t shut off. When Julie got home from Rome, I’d left my keys on the inside of the door at 4 a.m. and her key didn’t work from the outside (our friend had to break in). Coming home from London, they were working on the water and we couldn’t get water pressure in any of our faucets. Coming home from Alberobello, we still didn’t have a home yet. The first day back at work from a vacation is always the worst, as well.

Living in Italy, if I haven’t made that clear yet, isn’t remotely like vacationing in Italy.

Napoli is a condensed Italy, an Italy without hospitality, or at least a pre-tourist Italy. Neapolitans are an intense variety of Italian, or perhaps an unconquered breed. Occupied countless times in their 2,700 year history, but never conquered. Individuals have been extremely hospitable and friendly, but as a group they repel the casual tourist. There are very few “touristy” places in Naples. It’s for the varsity team—all others need not bother. There is treasure here, but only a seasoned explorer will find it. It requires more than mere receptivity. You’d hope the next sentence would read “…and rewards more than the more immediately pleasing tourist destinations.” But it’s never that simple. Maybe I’ll be able to say that, eventually. Maybe not. I’m thinking that’s the wrong way to frame it, but I’ll have to let you know. I’ve loved Naples in the past, and there are times I love it still. Will I start the race again? Will I willingly run with the varsity team and dig in to Naples? Yes. Just not for a few more weeks, please.

I apologize for the two-month hiatus. Stick around while I navigate the tricky pathways between wonder and culture shock.

London, part 2

London in the sunshine is my favorite place on earth. It used to be Paris, and they’ve been close competitors in more than this far longer than my lifetime, but when the sun shines in London, I want to be there.

It’s a city that makes sense in the rain, as well. All of Italy is depressed in the rain. When it rained in Pisa, it felt like we shouldn’t even be there.

But it felt perfectly natural to sit on an open-top bus in the drizzle, drying off seats with our cold butts as we changed from one side of the bus to the other for better views. When we rode the boat from Westminster to the Tower, the huge windows let in the view not only of the city but also a lovely dance of water cascading from the North Sea-drenched skies. Londoners are used to the rain, so it’s business as usual in a downpour and a holiday in the sunlight.

The gardens are the best anywhere. We’re staying just north of Hyde Park, so we spend at least a little time every day in the glorious peace that is a great park in the heart of a great city. It’s a peace that resembles the eye of a hurricane, perhaps, or the momentary break from a thunderstorm when you drive under an overpass. It’s the peace of walking or riding public transportation from your urban rooms to sublime nature. The sun on the fields stretching from Kensington Palace to the water, on a tree from the Hundred Acre Wood and a tree from Middle Earth, on the head of a swan in the waters that will host the 2012 Olympic Triathlon, warms me like little else on earth ever has.

We’re fortunate with the weather. It rains only on the second day, and only hard in the evening, after Aryn finally feels better and we meet up together for a boat ride on the river. When we arrive it’s sunny, when we see the Tower and the Eye it’s sunny, and it’s sunny the day we race through the wrong train station for Stansted airport and then finally through the airport itself to just barely make our plane.

The British Pound is less than a dollar fifty, so we’re fortunate with the exchange rate, too. We were expecting the city to be more expensive than it is, and are pleasantly surprised. It’s like any capital city in that it costs twice as much for everything, but you can find fish and chips or a kebab for three pounds anywhere, and the bus is about a pound one-way. Expecting to have to suck it up and just pay what it costs for the experience, the only “splurge” expense is our hotel room, which is huge by London standards to accommodate all four of us.

We spend most of our full, healthy day (no hint of the sickness remains in our child) at the Tower. The Beefeater tour, which starts as soon as you get inside and is essential (and included in the price of admission), lasts about an hour and a half or so. Aryn falls asleep halfway through. We see where Guy Fawkes was tortured, where Sir Walter Raleigh was held with his wife and kids and two servants, where Anne Boleyn was executed and the church where she was buried. The Beefeaters, guards of the Tower and also its tour guides, live on the grounds with their families and attend this very church of a Sunday. Ours is hilarious, and his is the face on the poster in the gift shop. The crown jewels are incredible, the walk along the walls where you can aim a crossbow at the Tower Bridge (the one you recognize in pictures and probably call the London Bridge) enough to rouse literary ambitions in a stone. But then, this is London, so maybe that’s not all that uncommon.

The London Eye, for so much of its life reviled by Londoners as an eye-sore (much like the Louvre pyramid or the Eiffel Tower), is absolutely worth doing once. If I go again, I won’t bother, but flying that high above the city on such a clear day, our shadow falling on a field of sunbathers and picnickers as we drink in mile after mile of this great city is an experience I can take to the grave. This trip has given me a hundred “now I can die” moments. But I’m not dead yet.

My heart goes out to the Chinese businessman in our little pod on the Eye. He’s traveling alone, taking pictures and enjoying himself but, as I know all too well, traveling alone is dreary. Even sunshine in London doesn’t light a lonely heart. I offer to take his picture, and want to invite him along with us. He could be Alyson’s date. She has two brothers in love with Chinese women, so it’s in her blood. But what would her other two boyfriends she found in London say? The Duke, whom she has vowed to marry for his 12.5 billion pounds, or the poor bagpiper on the Westminster bridge whose heart she broke…

So much else to say, too much else to say. It’s still being said from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens to Waugh and Wodehouse to the writers of today. It’s still being said in more than a dozen strong newspapers and in publishing houses not riddled with the despair of their American counterparts. I’m not done with London. I’ll be back a dozen more times before I die. Someday I’ll tire of London, someday I’ll bid this island farewell and set my longing eyes elsewhere. But I think on that day my eyes will look heavenward, and I’ll see this world no more.

London, part 1

I hope, when Aryn grows up, her earliest memory will be of the time she got to see Peter Pan’s statue in Kensington Gardens.

She’s of the age when those earliest memories are formed, when she’ll be able to look back and distinctly remember certain impressions or images and relive that moment forever. Julie’s is of a trip she took to New York City with her parents when she was Aryn’s age. Mine, about the same age, is seeing Disney on Ice at the old North Star’s stadium (where Ikea and the Mall of America now are). I especially remember the bleacher seats—the grimy concrete underfoot, smeared with gum and other garbage. I remember Mickey jumping out of the birthday cake, but I don’t know if that’s a mixed memory, altered by subsequent Disney on Ice performances and hearing my Grandma talking about it.

But Aryn’s face-to-face encounter with Peter Pan, who plays his flute overlooking the water, buoyed up by fairies, contains all the ingredients of memory. It is anticipated (for her, our trip to London was to go see Peter Pan, Wendy and all the others; and every clock tower she saw since our first, aborted attempt to bring her here has been Big Ben); it’s outside the routine (that is, a vacation or special event); and it is individual (Julie remembers the hotel in NYC having beds her size and getting lost, feeling totally alone, in a strange city; I remember the grimy floor not because someone pointed it out to me but because I laid down on the bleachers and looked, observed, all by myself). Aryn stares and stares at the statue and its vision of Peter atop Neverland. She tries to climb it. She reaches up to grab ahold of Peter’s ankle, tickle his toes, anything—much the same way she may someday reach for some boy band obsession if she scores front-row seats.

She won’t leave him. How could she? How could any child, encountering the deity of Youth? I’ve gladly assumed adult responsibilities, but I grin from ear to ear at the bronze likeness of the Boy who Wouldn’t Grow up. We don’t let her climb it at first, but, in the spirit of Pan, she keeps at it and keeps at it. In the end, who am I to desecrate this holy ground with another arbitrary parental edict? She can’t climb very high, anyways.

I hope, at least, that her earliest memory if London is Peter Pan, and not the projectile vomiting that has hamstrung our Sunday plans. She’s thrown up two, maybe three significant times in her life, but today is not her day. First on the elevator, completely out of the blue. We push fluids and rice crispies at breakfast, but they end up on my shirt and all over the bathroom. And the shower.

So Julie takes the first watch and Alyson and I head out for an open-top, hop on/hop off bus tour. We return for lunch, when I relieve Julie and she sets off to drink in one of the greatest cities in the world. (Alyson, my cousin visiting for a few weeks, gets the best part of this deal, since Aryn is starting to feel better even before Julie heads out the door.)

I am, as I listen to a much-revived little girl sing through her “nap,” completely head-over-heels in love with London. The gardens, the black cabs, the busses, the language (and languages), Speakers’ Corner, the Thames, the history, the literature (our hotel is right next to a Dickens Pub), the royalty, the deep, deep complexity, the feeble British sun shining on the burqa of a wealthy immigrant.

I’ve seen the city center, now. I’ve ridden a double-decker and taken a black cab. I’ve walked, wide-eyed, over the Tames at Westminster and through Hyde Park and Kensingon Gardens. I’ve inched through crowds at Harrods and peeked over the crowds to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham. I’ve had fish n’ chips and cider. In the whirlwind, Eurail way I can say I’ve “done” London. But Samuel Johnson once said, “When a man is tired of London, he tires of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” I’ll likely never be done with this city. And it sounds like our little princess is feeling better, so once I stuff her with a few more crackers and another banana, I think we’ll be off to let her gaze at the golden immensity of Big Ben and maybe take a soggy cruise down the magical river Thames.

Aryn loves to open our window and watch the people stroll by five floors below. Wow, I can’t stop thinking. Wow, we’re in London.

Toscana--our trip April 21-24

So the volcano ruined out London trip. Bitterly disappointed, we have to explain to Aryn that because a big cloud is over London, the planes can’t fly there and we’ll have to go see Peter Pan later.

“A big cloud?” she asks, with a three-year-old’s comprehension. “A big Captain Hook cloud is naughty and we can’t go to London and see John and Wendy and Peter Pan and Tinkerbell?”

“Right.” Plus or minus.

So plan B. I have the days off, so… what? Lake Como? Venice? Sicily? I start to make plans.

“I think we should go to Florence,” Julie says when I get home from work. “You’ve been wanting to buy a leather bag, and I want to go see Lucca,” another Tuscan town. And Pisa, and Montepulciano, because that’s where they filmed part of Twilight: New Moon.

Yes. We’ll go see the Twilight town.

Lucca, birthplace of Puccini, is still surrounded by a giant wall. Our B&B, Centro Storico, lends us bikes (“Si, my bike has baby seat”) and we ride atop the wall. Before our first revolution (you can ride around the whole of the old city on the wall), we resolve to buy a bike for Julie and a baby seat for Aryn. After our second revolution, after a few stops for Aryn to play on a few public playgrounds, we’re no longer bitter we can’t be in London. We love this town, and our lovely B&B has conquered Julie’s aversion to cappuccino and converted her to coffee. She now enjoys a cup many mornings.



The train from Lucca to Florence takes about an hour and a half. They say the bus is faster, but we don’t listen. We decide to climb Giotto’s Tower, because it’s Firenze and the view is worth every drop of sweat. Of course, we shrug, we can carry Aryn when she gets tired.

She never does. Climbing past kids twice her age, leaving them in her dust, she hoofs it up the tower like a champ. We barely keep up. Three-fourths of the way up, they display a giant bell. She runs over to it and starts trying to lift it up, though it’s got to outweigh her by an order of 100.

And that’s when the working bells start chiming noon.

I wouldn’t recommend climbing the tower at noon. But, if you find yourself about three meters from the bells when they start to ring the time out across the Tuscan hills, the narrow stairway, encased in stone, offers a tiny bit more protection than the open air.

From the top I can see the city, practically bleeding art. I see the hills Mona Lisa smiles above, I see the river, I see Firenze and the near reaches of Toscana. I see the descendents of the white Guelfs, Dante’s clan, who will later sell me a leather shoulder bag.

Speaking of leather shoulder bags, I’m glad I’m not a Chinese tourist. Even the innocent ones are thrown out of the leather shops as spies. Ah, the world of fashion.


It’s raining when we go to Pisa. It’s raining AND there’s a train strike, which I thought had been cancelled due to the grounding of every flight in Europe. So after taking a cab to the train station, we take one back to the B&B and hop in the car. We fight the crowds, we take a picture, we leave. The cathedral, whose bells the Leaning Tower carries, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.


Montepulciano, which my guidebook mentions as popular with wine lovers, turns out to be the best detour ever. Expecting to simply drive to the centro, take an emo picture holding our copy of New Moon (yes, we packed it for the photo op), and continue home, our mouths drop at the beauty gleaming from this Tuscan hilltop. We stroll through the narrow, pedestrian-only streets. Actually, we climb the streets. All roads lead up in this town centered on the top of a hill. Winding around and around, we can’t keep up with every narrow archway begging us to detour, every little stairway leading somewhere else, somewhere amazing. Every narrow lane we take is a win, every detour a new discovery for us as we hike the steep streets to the piazza from the movie.

But you live in Italy, so you're always on vacation, right?

Sorry it’s been so long. We’ve moved into our house. We’re figuring everything out. Yes, we have to figure EVERYTHING out. We had to learn how to open the front door, plug in 220V plugs that don’t fit in our 220V outlets, reset the water heater after every two minutes of shower. We had to learn how to turn on the gas (or else we’ll freeze to death even when it’s 70 degrees outside), close every shutter before leaving or going to bed (or else they’ll break in and steal everything), open every window at least once a day (or else there’s mold), and buzz in guests with that phone-looking thing.

Living in Italy does NOT equal vacationing in Italy. We are not on vacation. In a few weeks we go to London. That’s vacation. We went to Bari two weekends ago. That’s vacation. It takes a week for a technician to cross the street from his construction site to tell us our water heater isn’t broken. That’s culture shock. Be envious if you like, but great heights are always accompanied by depths. So it may be a little while again…

Bari Safari and Alberobello

I’ve had two almost identical experiences now, both driving out of Campania and into the neighboring region.

Campania, the region with Naples and the Amalfi Coast, Caserta and Benevento, has embarrassed Italy recently with corruption scandals, mafia misdeeds including the illegal dumping of tons of poisonous waste in the countryside where my local produce grows, and a periodic inability to pick up trash.

So Naples and the surrounding area are dirty. It’s something I’ve gotten used to, like the driving, but a few weeks ago when I was driving up to the resort town of Gaeta, in Lazio (Rome’s) region, Campania was in the middle of another trash strike. Garbage lined the streets, piled high in recycling centers and dumpsters, and spilled out into the road of every town I drove through. Then I came over a hill and the mountains rose in front of me, a small town at the apex of a hill in front of them perfectly nestling beneath the grand peaks above, birds flying through the air and a blue, blue sky like a postcard. We passed a sign saying I was leaving Campania and entering Lazio. I laughed aloud.

Driving to the Bari safari for Aryn’s birthday weekend gives me a similar jolt. Actually, leaving Naples and climbing into the mountains leaves the trash behind (the trash strike is over, so just the roadside litter), and we curve around and around on the mountain freeway and enjoy delicious views of Benevento and the surrounding areas. Then a sign announces we’re leaving Campania, which puts us about in the middle of the ankle of the boot, and green opens up before us. Farmland, lush and green, ordered and divided and thick, spreads as far as the eye can see. A shocking transition from mountains to plains at the border.

We’re on our way to the Bari Zoosafari. It’s in the Puglia region, which stretches from the point of the high heel up to about the Achilles tendon. I’m excited to see the Adriatic. Aryn is singing in the backseat, “we’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo. How about you, you, you?” Julie wonders if one package of carrots is going to be enough. We didn’t realize the zoo closes at 4 until about 9 today, so a leisurely morning quickly became rushed as we hurried to get on the road in time to feed the giraffes.

We do. The drive is easy and fast, the tollway smooth. The animals live in their pens with a stunning view of the sea. I imagine I can see Albania. We roll down the windows as a herd of goats trots over to say hello and Aryn climbs into the front seat.

How amazing to feed a giraffe! The animals are certainly not shy about sticking their heads in and rooting around for something to eat. We run out of carrots halfway through and a camel, not realizing we have nothing for him, chases us for what seems like a mile. Aryn can’t decide whether to be terrified or ecstatic. It’s incredible. Go, if you’re ever within a few hundred miles of Bari and have children. Or even if you don’t. I could have reached out and touched a tiger, if I’d been crazy enough to roll down my windows in their pen. Julie snaps a photo of the bear cubs playing in a tree and they all look up at her. We almost catch two lionesses brawling on camera. Aryn turns the wheel and giggles with glee. We ride a train through a shrieking bevy of monkeys who swarm our train car like giant tarantulas. One is able to stick his whole hand in the door, and a thousand horror films flash before my eyes.

Still breathless from being so up close and personal with yaks, dromedaries, elephants, zebras, bison and other creatures from diverse climates and continents, we drive to Alberobello.

Alberobello was built to not exist. The distinctive Trulli huts, architecture unique to the area and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, were fashioned using all dry building materials so they could be disassembled before a tax inspection. Taxes were levied based on the number of dwellings, and therefore the entire town would disappear when the inspectors came around. The Trulli huts have domed roofs and were modular in nature, allowing any arrangement from a single-room dwelling to many connect pods forming an elaborate and spacious mansion. Decorations adorn many of the stone roofs, with various crosses, images of the sun or moon, and symbols designed to ward off the evil eye. The reasons for visiting this charming town are numerous, but it’s hard to think of a reason why anyone today would want to deny it exists.

“We have a church here, a museum here,” the bored hotel clerk tells me. “The Trulli huts are here and here. And that’s it.”

“Is there public transportation?”

“You don’t need it. It’s not a large town.” He seems eager to get out of here. Whether to join his friends outside for a cigarette or to head north for a job and a bright future I can’t tell. “Passport, please.”

I give it to him.

“Can I give it back to you later?”

I shrug. We already have our keys and have moved into the room, and he still hasn’t asked for my credit card. I won’t end up producing it until checkout.

He smiles and hurries outside, leaping back into the conversation mid-laugh.

We’re staying in a hotel arranged by my colleague, Teresa Merola, whose husband knows the owner and who hooked us up with the large room on the top floor. We have a fine view of the town from the balcony, which is actually the roof of the hotel. We are above the main piazza, and I think there’s some kind of political rally going on. We can’t quite tell, because travelling with a toddler means turning in early. Aryn goes to bed angry she doesn’t have enough toys and Julie and I retreat to the bathroom before sneaking into our beds and falling into a sleep we hope won’t disturb our little princess. It does. She sleeps light. We wake up lots. I drink coffee in the morning. Julie drinks tea. Aryn eats yogurt and makes friends with an Italian boy. A father and son speak German. Otherwise the hotel breakfast room is empty.

We love this town. Julie spots a café that I could come to twice a day for the rest of my life. They love Aryn. I try to follow the long article they pasted on the wall—a feature on their café for a German travel magazine. My German is bad, but this hot chocolate is what I want to drink before my execution. I’d drive all the way back here for this café.

It is Aryn’s birthday weekend, and she’s tired of walking through the huts. I think it’s the hedgehog that’s supposed to protect you from the evil eye. Or is it the rooster? Not sure. The evil eye crops up a lot in Mediterranean culture. I’ll keep an eye out for it. Ha ha. We don’t buy a rooster or a hedgehog, but we do let her pick out a doll. She’s pretty much potty trained now, but only just, so every time she announces her need for a potty we still drop everything and race to the nearest one. We do that walking up one street (have to buy an acqua naturale so we’d be paying customers), after which we congratulate ourselves that we’ve effectively potty trained our child. Hurrah. Now, doll in hand, Aryn is stopping at every doorstep because her doll has to go potty. We’d like to move on, but it’s just so cute we can’t rush her. She names the doll Emily.

Driving home (that is, back to the hotel we’ll end up spending 71 days in), the beauty of southern Italy washes over us. Windmills, the giant new ones built to harness sustainable energy and free Italy from energy dependence on France, loom on the horizon. They enhance, not detract from, the vista. I think Italy is second in the EU for solar power, behind only Germany. That’s actually really funny, given their respective climates, but one can’t judge too harshly. I smile, but not as sultans smile, because human progress this time is literally in the form of giant windmills waving their giant arms over a wide plain. Relax, Don Quixote. There are other, better quests.

Patches of red-brown clay dot the sea of green fields. Castles atop the hills, some restored but most in ruins, peer out over the plains. I imagine the centuries of forgotten prince Yurtles, lords over all they could see, survived for centuries by moldering heaps of once-grand rock.

Sorrento

We told everyone we were going to the Amalfi coast this weekend, which turns out to actually be untrue. In the Sorrentine Peninsula, whose mountains jut out to form the southern half of the Bay of Naples, there are two coasts—one faces north towards the city and the volcano, the other south and the sun. The Amalfi coast, that famous playground of European vacationers and the international wealthy, is the southern coast. The towns on that coast include Ravello, Positano (as seen in Under the Tuscan Sun and other movies, like maybe Nine which I haven’t seen as well as the cover of my Naples guide book) and, of course, Amalfi. Sorrento, namesake of the peninsula and the giant lemons that grow there, faces north.

The drive is easy and fairly short from our hotel, though we have a minor wrong turn and the traffic getting into Vico Equense, the first town along the coastal drive, is slow for a while. Apparently the University of Pizza, selling pizza a metro, which had almost as many signs along the way as Wall Drug, is totally awesome. After a traffic circle around a very new-looking fountain in the middle of that town, however, it’s as if everyone vanishes miraculously. We park in a nearly-empty lot in the center of Sorrento and walk out into streets seemingly free of pedestrians and almost free of mopeds.

We debate for a few minutes whether the first town is a local favorite, or if it’s so popular simply because it is the first town. Laziness can play a huge role in leisure, I think. Which is why we stop at the first gelato shop we see. Pictures occupy every available piece of real estate on the walls

This is a very European beach town. We peruse the shops on cobblestone streets open only to pedestrians and the odd moped. Julie buys a sweater for Aryn, because it’s colder in the shade after gelato than we figured.

“I wonder how many Italians dress their kids in a sweatshirt that says ‘Italia,’” Julie says.

I laugh and point at a sign that says, in English, “The best cappuccino in town.”

Everyone speaks English here, which takes some of the challenge out of it for me but certainly adds to the place’s convenience. It’s okay to be a tourist.

Especially because today we are practically the only tourists. We stop at a church with a Presepe, or nativity scene, and Aryn’s voice echoes among the empty pews. We step down a narrow walkway, off the map in search of adventure, and the only sound is a lawnmower and some laundry flapping in the breeze.

Ah, the smell of cut grass and laundry drying in the sun--the perfect way to start any adventure.

There’s a lot at stake when you set off on an adventure with a toddler. With adults only, the worst that can happen from a wrong turn is a little backtracking, maybe some annoyance, maybe ending up in a bad area and encountering some seedy pimp trying to push his wares on you. With a kid, you have to think about her mood—if we wander too far and don’t find something amazing, will she be able to walk back? Will she be so mad she won’t walk back and squirm while you carry her? Can you carry her the whole way? What if she gets hurt? And you have to think long and hard before venturing into any area that looks remotely sketchy. At least the pimp is more likely to leave us alone if she’s with us.

But she is as good as gold and better. The sound of mopeds whizzing by at a hundred miles an hour bother her, and she stops to squeeze her hands over her ears every time. She loves the long stairway down to Marina Grande. Her singing echoes off the walls and through the windows. A grandma looks down and grins from ear to ear.

We peer down the street, nets under the olive trees hanging over the road. A classic low door moment:

“Where is this leading?” Julie asks.

“I think the waterfront,” I answer, remembering the brown sign that usually indicates something worth seeing.

“Well, hopefully we get there soon,” she replies, likely thinking of everything I mentioned above.

I’m thinking of that too when we round a corner, then another corner beneath a shrine to Santa Maria and see a small archway, sunlight from the waves glittering off the walls. We emerge into the light, the Marina Grande gleaming in the full, sun-drenched languor of an ancient morning. Fishermen spool and mend their nets. A man saws boards outside a restaurant as his friend rolls through the narrow cobblestone blaring his car stereo. No tourists but us. Three youths kick a soccer ball in the tiny lot. Aryn wants to join them.

She runs up the steps from where we gaze at the marina, greeting an elderly couple who smile down at her. She turns and grins down at us, the magic and the beauty of the scene reflected in her exuberant smile.

We can see Naples spread like a skirt about the knees of il Vesuvio. I can almost hear the din across the bay—it’s enough to make this sunny silence something more. Not the absence of sound, but removal from it, as if from a great height. I, the hangglider, the soaring eagle, look down on a honking, teeming traffic jam, too high to hear anything but the wind and the small waves breaking on a black sand beach.

Julie and Aryn are here

Travel-wise, my family reunion has been blessedly uneventful. Our worst fears were not realized, of course, and Julie and Aryn’s flight to Rome was on time and delivered all their bags. They would have had a row to themselves except a woman thought Aryn was so cute and sat with them, promising to move when it was time for her to sleep. Well, the woman fell asleep long before Aryn did and stayed in the open seat. Alas for Julie (though Aryn slept more than four hours).

The drive up to Rome and back was easy. It was about eleven Euro in tolls each way, but it was the kind of toll road where you pick up the ticket and pay at the end, so I won’t be buying the little Autopass for the car. There’s a monthly fee, and I’ll probably only be paying tolls a few times a month since I don’t pay one to get to and from work.

But it was amazing, that Sunday morning, to see the bleary-eyed girls emerge from security, Julie holding nine bags on her back and pushing a cart with about a billion more. Aryn ran to me (didn’t trip like last summer on the pier). We loaded up the car and started the torturous ride to our new home.

If you can avoid it, don’t plan a long car ride right after an international flight. Spend a night where you land, or fly directly into your final destination. Also, land in Europe in the evening, so you only have to make it a few hours before crashing and waking up the next morning on a new schedule.

Since their arrival we’ve been getting reacquainted, readjusting to life together. They’ve been licking their wounds and (mostly) beating jetlag. Julie went to see the house I picked out, met the landlord and gave her blessing. Now, once it stops raining long enough for the city electricians to come and hook up the electricity, we should be able to move in. Pray it’s soon.

Tuesday was Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, or, as we say here, Carnevale. Masks, parades, raucous parties, and lasagna. As it turns out, lasagna isn’t a common dish in Italy (it takes about five hours to make), and in Naples you can only find it on Carnevale. I’ve heard other places will serve it year-round, but maybe only the touristy places?

What I do know is that at any restaurant in Italy on Carnevale you can buy lasagna, and ours was amazing. I didn’t expect to like it, actually, because I haven’t liked every other “authentic” Italian lasagna I’ve had before (at nicer Italian restaurants, made by immigrants or the children of immigrants).

But the simplicity of the sauce, the freshness of the cheese, the silky smooth texture… I could’ve eaten ten helpings. Now that’s a Fat Tuesday tradition I can get behind.

When the sun comes out in the afternoons and some of the rain puddles dry up, we are hopeful that nicer weather and a house from which to have adventures are coming soon. Stay tuned as we venture out together into the great city of Naples and the lands beyond…

I walk alone

There’s a certain romance to travelling alone. The nearly absolute freedom of having no schedule, no one depending on you, nowhere to go but where your wandering feet take you—it’s exhilarating. It’s the freedom of the cowboy, the pirate, the high eagle. The hart, he loves the high wood, said Mother Goose, and that lone stag on a mountainside has been envied by domesticated men through the centuries.

But, mostly, being alone sucks.

I view the relentless hours with a dread unknown elsewhere in my life. To have nothing to do terrifies me. So I fill my lonely days with ambitious regimen: two hour workout while listening to Half the Sky, dinner and shower with music playing, Skype, read with music playing, read in bed, keep reading long past a reasonable bedtime until I finally, reluctantly, turn off the lights and face the agonized, empty silence. Wake up, turn music on and go to work where thankfully there are other people. Linger at work. Drive home listening to RAI Radio 3. Will that help me learn Italian? I worry about this.

Sure, lots of people live alone. I just don’t know how they do it.

I eat six or seven of the same foods over and over again. German vanilla yoghurt (or is it Swiss?), PB&J, cheese sandwiches with lettuce from the Veneto, Danish eggs, chips and salsa, Mediterranean oranges. I’ve tried weird experiments with chili and steam-bag broccoli and cheese. Neither broccoli nor black beans belong in chili, I have learned. Boxed Near East couscous is really easy to make and is tasty with chili and broccoli. Oranges, plus orange juice, plus coffee, plus chili and broccoli and black beans equals really bad gas.

I didn’t do dishes again tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Eventually I’ll run out of cups, though I did just buy three more.

I’ve been apart from Julie and Aryn before. My two deployments were much longer than this separation will end up being, but on the ship you can’t wait to get to bed. You’re never, ever alone. The two minutes per day when you can stare at the horizon without someone talking to you or needing you or demanding something from you are some of the few things keeping you going. Bed, on the ship, is the only place you get to be alone, and you hardly ever spend a reasonable (or even healthy) amount of time there. But the growing madness is familiar.

I think I’m sleeping less than normal, now. And my sleep is troubled.

I went into Naples last weekend alone. It takes one hour and twenty minutes to drive to JFC, park and hop on the metro and arrive downtown at the Archeological museum. Most of the excavated relics of Pompeii and Herculaneum are there, and it’s fascinating. Thousands of years of history and art stand silently and stare through me. I do not exist.

I can try harder to be social. I can give the growing list of friends and acquaintances a call and get together. And I will. But as the walls close in and the silence deepens, my spark begins to fade like torchlight in a tomb (whoa, block that metaphor).

It’s been a torturous process getting Julie and Aryn permission to come here. I won’t get into it, but the battle is over and they’re flying in on Sunday.

“It is not good for man to be alone,” God once said.

It’s going to be a great Valentine’s Day!

Rome part tre

The next day the conference ends at lunchtime and my afternoon is my own. It’s time to think big.

Big, in Rome, is easy to find. Piazza Venezia, which vaguely reminds me of our capitol building in D.C. but seems about twice the size. Behind it, the Roman Forum, where I can nearly hear the rumble and bustle of an ancient metropolis teeming with life and power. Above the Forum, the Palatino. Behind the Forum, the Coliseum.

I remember sitting nine years ago on a hill overlooking the Forum, wishing I had someone to tell me about it all, when I noticed the garden on the hill opposite.

“I’d like to go up there,” I said, maybe out loud.

We didn’t.

This time I do. I walk around the South side, near the Circus Maximus (and, as it turns out, the Belgian embassy), which is actually the long, long way around. The entrance is within sight of the Coliseum, and I get the little handheld tour guide so I won’t just be staring at piles of rocks.

The ticket costs 12 euro and is good for the Palatino, Forum and the Coliseum. The machine is 4 euro to rent. The majesty of the palace (as envisioned in my imagination based on the ruins), as well as the absolute power of its inhabitants, quiets me. This was a private room. This was a bath. This was where Nero sequestered his own mother.

My favorite part, as I’d expected before, is the garden. The view alone is worth the entrance fee, and I only have to fight with one Japanese tour group to stare at it. The entirety of ancient Rome is at my feet. And it does not notice me.

Oranges are in season here. I steal one from the trees, but all of them within easy reach are gone so I have to climb a stone wall and jump. It’s sour. Thanks a lot, Nero.

I can’t think of any way to describe the great halls of justice still standing in the Forum, the pillars of the Coliseum, the weight of history through the ages, other than it makes me feel small. I am but one of millions who will set foot here this year, gawking at the grandeur of a cornerstone of Western civilization. My entrance fee goes to help keep this history alive, but otherwise it is unaffected by my presence.

I, on the other hand, cannot remain unchanged when I see the great bronze cross in the Coliseum. It wasn’t until this past century that the Coliseum became a symbol of early Christian persecution and martyrdom. The Pope leads a procession through here every Good Friday.

I find the Barbarini chapel, which is down the street from my hotel. This chapel was the first in Rome to commemorate the Immaculate Conception, but what distinguishes this church is its crypt.

“WHAT YOU ARE NOW, WE USED TO BE. WHAT WE ARE, YOU WILL BE,” the bones of saints scream through the years from the walls, where they are arranged in a grisly replica of the beautiful frescoes and arched ceilings in cathedrals throughout Christendom.

Skeletons in monks’ robes bow as if in prayer, and recline in death. Dust to dust, this discordant display observes like a rat’s claws on broken glass. A child’s skeleton flies above the final graveyard, holding Death’s scythe.

I emerge into the evening breathless. I stumble to a café, haunted by mortality.

“Spirit is born of spirit,” I write, “and Spirit evermore remains.” It may not be a perfect quotation, but the waning light helps, and the Scripture heals.

My Facebook picture is me standing in an old Roman piazza under that even-older Egyptian obelisk under the misty moon. I am smaller than all of this. What they are, I will soon be.

Night falls over the city, and the via Veneto begins to glow in urban anticipation. It’s Friday night in Rome.