Viva Italia!
Like many people these days I find myself relying on streaming entertainment more heavily than I would like. This has become a winter-time occupation, slowly supplanting my race to watch Oscar-bound films in theaters since so many of them are available online.
As we enter our third year of pandemic-enforced staying-put, I’m gravitating toward films that feature faraway climes. Films like “Under the Tuscan Sun.” I read this book years ago, even own a copy of it. I happened upon the movie a couple days ago, looking for something to watch while exercising in the basement.
What a vision! I don’t mean the sexy Italian guys … I mean the gorgeous Tuscan countryside. There is the walled city of Cortona, the Amalfi Coast marvel of Positano. There are the tall, skinny Italian Cyprus trees, the olive groves, fountains and love of life that flourish in this sunny land.
Oh, I know there are gray days in Italy, too. It’s not the garden of eden. But right now it looks like it to me.
Photos: courtesy Wikipedia, alas I have no recent Italy photos of my own
By Armchair to Benin
Good friends flew out last night for a month in South Africa. It isn’t solely a pleasure trip — though there will be plenty of pleasure associated with it. They’ve gone to meet and hold their twin granddaughters, born late last year.
Thinking of them winging their way to another continent has revved up the armchair traveler in me. Seven years ago, I was in Africa, too, though a completely different part of it, west rather than north, near the equator rather than the Tropic of Capricorn.
I was zipping around on the back of a zemidjan, learning about Voodoo, spotting baboons, hippos and elephants from the top of a minivan, I was touring Benin from south to north, meeting my son-in-law-to-be and so many other good people, all of whom who welcomed me like I was their own.
I was living fully in the way that travel allows, in the way I’ve been privileged to these last many years, in a way I hope to again.
Olmsted in Kentucky
I learned through weekend wanderings that famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted once turned his attention to my hometown.
He and his brother, as the marker explains, had a hand in designing Transylvania Park, where the lovely Lexington Library once reigned; Ashland Park, where I spotted this sign; and Woodland Park, one of my favorite haunts.
It doesn’t surprise me. These places may not be the Chicago World’s Fair or Central Park (two of Olmsted’s more well-known accomplishments), but in them the built and natural environments work together. They have a beauty and a presence — a sense of having always been there.
Dancing in the Streets
I read this morning of the return of 26 pieces of history from France to Benin. The return was celebrated with dancing and singing and general merriment. There were thrones, statues and other artifacts, all taken by France from what was then its colony of Dahomey, all of them finally home after more than a century of exile.
Since some of my family hail from Benin, this is big news. And since I’ve been to that wonderful country, I have a small sense of what it must have been like to see the big truck pull up, the decorated horses and riders escorting it to the presidential palace, the jubilation of the people.
There are plenty more looted treasures to be returned, and it sounds as if Benin is fighting for those, too. But for now, for one small country tucked between the Sahel and the sea, there is dancing in the streets.
(At the Voodoo Festival in Benin, January 2015)
Ewwww!
I took the photo because the light was slanting in from the east and turning all the people into dark forms walking. I took it because of the brick pavement and the lamps that looked like gaslights. I did not take it because the walls were covered with bubblegum. In fact, I didn’t even venture into the alley.
But after I returned, when I was looking through the photos I took on that trip, I realized that this was the famed Gum Wall of Post Alley, a Seattle attraction that I had so far missed but that the governor insists is his “favorite thing about Seattle you can’t find anywhere else.”
I learned that last tidbit from Wikipedia, which also informed me that the Gum Wall became a tourist attraction in 1999, was voted the second most germ-filled tourist attraction in the world a decade later (coming in second to the Blarney Stone) and that more than a ton of gum was removed in 2015 to clean the bricks below.
Experiencing the gum wall only in a photograph is a funny way to “view” this attraction, but given the general ickiness of the place, perhaps the most sanitary one.
En Peu de Francais
With a new French-speaking grandson, I find myself dredging up phrases from ancient history — a high school class in French I. Today’s is “il fait du vent” … it’s windy.
But how much more trippingly does “Il fait du vent” fall off the tongue? Pretty trippingly, I’d say.
Apparently, I could also phrase it as “Il y a du vent,” but I’ll stick with what I learned years ago. Which is way too little to converse with a bright 11-year-old.
Once again, I’m struck by the paucity of foreign language study in the U.S. — or at least my language study!
(I met these children on a trip to Benin in 2015.)
Midway Airport, 10 p.m.
Today’s forecast, in fact the forecast through mid-week, is for “mild and murky” weather. Somehow, that suits. After being caught up in the great Southwest Airlines cancellation weekend and arriving home at almost 2 a.m. as a result, I could use some calm and cloudy days to stay home, do laundry and recuperate.
While I was walking around Chicago’s Midway Airport last evening, I thought about how airplanes and hubs have changed the way we think about travel. It’s a circular experience rather than a linear one — full of hubs and spokes, more tedious than miraculous.
Flying west, I was whisked from coast to coast in less than five hours. Coming home, not so lucky.
First Hill
Seattle is a city of neighborhoods, and I’m getting to know them. Today we toured the Central District (in hard hats, no less!), then lunched in Capitol Hill. Several mornings I’ve hiked along the waterfront. I also visited Green Lake and Woodland Park.
But I’ve spent most of my time in Seattle’s first neighborhood, First Hill, also called Pill Hill because of the hospitals here.
I’ve trudged up steep grades and sidled through shortcuts. I’ve spotted fewer tents under I-5 but heard more sirens heading up to Harborview.
It’s an urban neighborhood with all that implies, but there’s a gentility beneath the grime. Here are leafy lanes and named apartments buildings, an old German deli on Madison and a cathedral garden behind St. James.
I leave today with the smell of the city in my pores and the pitch of the hills in my calves. And I leave … from First Hill.
Marine Layer
Sometimes it seems as if you could will away the marine layer that cloaks this city in the morning, that by walking up and down the hills, through parks and intersections, past coffee shops and markets you could build up enough heat to part the clouds and let the sun shine through.
That’s the way it felt this morning, as I ambled down Pike to Alaskan Way, and headed north … toward Alaska.
I didn’t get that far, of course. Only to Myrtle Edwards Park. But by the time I hiked back up the hill to the hotel, the sun was shining.
