Çok fazla!

Korean edition in the middle! 

On the road to Ephesus I let Amanda play photographer and focused on chatting with our cab driver using my ten new Turkish vocabulary words along with his five English ones. The first words in a new language are so delicious, like popping one tasty truffle into my mouth after another, unsure of what’s inside but delighted all the same.

I was a bit bummed about the futility of recording everything. Sometimes a photo or a note jotted down in my notebook is enough, but “enough” for what? To remember? To capture? To share?

Maybe it’s just to entertain myself, to become more amusing as an old lady, with a slideshow to accompany my stories.

Sometimes it feels aggressive or possessive, like theft. Like conquest.


I write everything down because I want my ideas and thoughts to be more explicit, to thicken in layers of meaning and metaphor. I love and enjoy visual art of all stripes, but my mind tends to move best in language.

Language is insufficient, too, though. At least my skill with it is: I try and try to get at the lushness of the vegetation in Laos, or the light that moves across the rooftops in Barcelona, but my pictures have me beat before I even open my notebook. These images are mute. They evoke whatever they do without words, without need of words. Images are so elegant and efficient in that sense.

When I feel like I’m overdoing it on the recording and analysis, I make deliberate efforts to put my pen and camera away and just look, just smile and talk and try to let go into observation and experience alone. But I hate for things to end, I hate to ever forget anything, lose anything, throw anything away -- in part because it feels like that’s all I do sometimes. Lose things. Break, stain, ruin things. Leave them behind, have them stolen, mail them somewhere to where I’m not.

Its tremendously comforting to get ideas out on paper or in pixels, to know that they’re in my pocket or humming in the internet, and I don’t have to trust this silly brain to keep from forgetting it all.

Anyway, Ephesus.

We first visited some ruins believed to be the last place where the Virgin Mary lived before her death. It was bizarre to think of her as a real person, someone living in a house as an old woman with caretakers and apostles by her side. I felt nothing but a bit of awe at the age of the building; a man next to me from the Philippines wept as he prayed.

There were prayers written on scraps of fabric tied to this wall outside, a huge knotted mass of them. I wrote similar prayers on wooden plaques at shrines in Kyoto and left paper flakes of gold on Buddha’s knees in Bangkok, but this time I took a pass.

It was partially to keep from holding our little group back, but it was also because Christianity has no novelty. I never believed that my plaques or gold flakes would get me anywhere but it was fun to bow and circle, to join with people of unfamiliar practices and try it, try everything.

I half wish I had tied a prayer to the wall now, too. Occasionally I treat Christianity like an ex, or like a friend who wronged me somehow whom I no longer speak to. That simply isn’t the case; Christianity didn’t wrong me, it just wasn’t right. It’s better when I treat it as neutral, as one amongst many religions I don’t believe in, though I happen to know a bit more about it than the others. The art is better when I think this way, the ruins are more awe-inspiring. Just another current in the stream of history: as an observer and contemplator of life, I can get close to it without expectation or intimacy.

The library of Celsus was awesome. Once it had space for 12,000 scrolls! Celsus was buried inside! I want to be entombed in a library! Wickedness all around.

I was also thrilled by the last standing column of the temple of Artemis... and by my camera’s incredible lens and its ability to capture the nest on top.

The Vatican

We got to the Vatican and back by an easy train ride from the port of Civitavecchia. It was good to trust each other and our instincts, the inherent logic of a system meant to move people around. Every time we saved ourselves a few hundred euro by not booking cruise-organized excursions I felt smug and snobby, too proud of our willingness to do things the quote-unquote real way.

hell yes I took that in manual! I am totally getting the hang of my camera!

In the Vatican itself, gilt glitter like religious shock and awe. How much wealth could one group of families possibly acquire? Enough to fund all this, at least. Apparently the Vatican is still one of the richest countries in the world. I don’t know if that’s per capita or what, but I believe it on sight alone.

In the Sistine Chapel I put one hand on my mother’s shoulder and one on my sister’s back and shuffled through like that, saying nothing, looking only up. On a gentle current of human bodies I was carried past a legend I had studied but never quite connected to; it’s hard to feel anything personal about a work so heavily reproduced and pop-ified. (Who could imagine they have a personal relationship with the Mona Lisa?)

I wanted to linger, but our excellent tour guide prodded us out after what only felt like a minute or two. When there are so many masterpieces about, there are compromises that have to be made.

On the street were several Roma beggars. For many Roma this is a lifestyle, not a temporary state of hardship. Amanda and I sort of pat each other on the back and shook our heads in fine Puritan fashion, emphatically claiming, “No! Neither of us would ever live this way! Whatever it takes, you’d never find us on the street like this!”

Is there a natural conscience that supersedes cultural and traditional strictures? Education is one way to develop a mind beyond culturally imposed boundaries, but only if society lets you and culture teaches you that education can be used to create such a personal perspective and set of values.

Or is there something innate in us that tells us how to live, and culture simply lets us make excuses? Lets us form habits that become exceptions to the unyielding internal compass indicating true north no matter what language spoken or religion practiced?

We ate pasta to the tune of a violinist ambling slowly up the alley. “Oh, how very Italian!” we thought, eagerly taking out our video cameras to capture the magical Mediterranean moment.

Our waitress warned us the violinist was a pickpocket, known for lifting tips off patio tables before the waitresses returned, and we should watch our bags when he waltzed by again.

put it in your pocket and take it with you

FLORENCE

Overwhelming beauty in Florence. Every facet, every gilded rafter and crumbling cobblestone speaks. All they say, though, is, “eat something. Drink something. Look at this, look at that. Life goes on, and in what fine style.”

Richness and movement in stone. Intensity and passion held static but forcing the eye to movement. Emotional investment in the content is palpable. The Duomo! How much detail in color, in texture, in composition can you pack into and onto the exterior of one structure? Every other square made me reevaluate my answer.

Man do I love me some pointy pines. (I now can identify these as cypresses. They are THE tree of the Mediterranean countryside.)

How can people live in such a beautiful place?! How does anything ever get done? I would just walk and stare and eat and stare and smile, never writing, never asking for anything more than what I had.

We had. The most. Incredible. Gelato. Ever. Rich, light, smooth, with one delightfully crunchy bite of coffee bean.

I was bored of shopping until I touched the buttery leather we had talked so much about. My mother wanted a jacket, a jacket, a jacket from Florence, so we were on a mission.

Apparently there’s a 10,000 euro fine for buying fake designer purses off the street. It sounds crazy to fine the customers rather than just the sellers but after spending a little time in this leather market I’m pretty in favor of the fine.

The Italian government is serious about protecting their artisans and their manufacturers. They know they have a treasure, and they’re not down to let Chinese bootleggers destroy that market. Even though the fine is mostly about protecting the big brands like Prada and Gucci, small manufacturers benefit too because if you can’t get a fake Gucci you’re totally happy with a real leather no-name bag or wallet or coat from one of them.

My bag just broke and I started using the one I bought in Florence yesterday. Wow. It’s awesome and so beautiful. Thank you, Italian government, for protecting the leather industry!

There wasn’t much time, but there was no way I was going to miss Santa Croce. I stood before the tombs of Galileo and Leonardo DaVinci and Dante. I wish there had been more time. Contemplation of greatness can’t be done in a 20 minute dash.

There are many holes in the wall serving decadent-looking sandwiches and little glasses of wine. Two patrons can stand at the counter at once; we breezed pass many pairs like this, always in the shade.

We had no time to eat ourselves, or even to pause for a picture. How opposite we were than the diners, deciding spontaneously to feast on the street because there was nothing else they needed to do. Their only aim was enjoy each other and some food and wine for a moment before ambling on in their beautiful, beautiful city.

PISA

The leaning tower is a fabulous stage prop.

We had pizza in Pisa and life was absolutely grand. It was good to relax, to sit back after a full day of running around to enjoy some deliciousness that could really make us feel like we had arrived.

on Barcelona, the first time

first meal was paella! nom nom nom

A little twist in biases of Spanish as a blue collar language. To hear white people speaking snobby Spanish made Amanda and I raise our eyebrows at each other and say, “Ahhh, but of course.” And they were speaking it right to us, without fail, because we could easily be one of them.

The crowded bus was full of smiling, quiet people. They were mostly beautiful, even those with paunchy faces sloping to pop in exaggerated chins and noses. 

A pale, skinny girl in a dirty white dress was hanging off her father like swinging from a lamppost in the rain. Her dark and taciturn companion didn’t touch her own father at all.

The old women don’t look innocent here. They look like repositories of wisdom and scandal, beyond the possibility of shock or surprise. 

The “x” in Catalan is a lock to which I desperately want to key. 

Everything is lovely, lovely lovely lovely in every direction. Thrillingly gorgeous buildings with old plaster facades and curling wrought-iron balconies, the fantastic architectural genius of Gaudi, the way light moves across the rooftops.

I want to do more than take a picture, I want more than beauty. How can I crawl inside of this, this feeling of peace and chill and joy and vibrating excitement at once, to be alive? To see these things? To be with my beloved family at the same time?

Why are there no scrambled eggs here? All we wanted were egg sandwiches!

Why does it take a half hour of charades and pictionary to STILL only end up with four well-done sunnyside up eggs and some bread soaked in vinegar and salad dressing? 

first two video attempts