2011 has been the most memorable year of my life. Over the last few years, an increasing sense of stagnation had been setting in. Moving to a new country has sorted that out. I’ve got a fresh perspective on life, met and worked with people from diverse backgrounds and traveled to more countries than I did in the last 10 years. I am ending the year a tad happier, a little wiser, a bit calmer and a lot more content. In short, 2011 restored that childlike sense of wonderment that is perhaps the first casualty of the daily grind of life.
May 2012 bring knowledge, wisdom and beautiful music to everyone’s life.
PS I picked up a new camera shortly after Christmas. It’s a Sony NEX 5N.
We were in the Ikea store just a few days before Christmas and were quite amazed at the number of things available for decorating Christmas trees. All mass-produced and all very pretty. I saw boxes of snowflake-shaped, string lights lying in the bins they keep near billing aisles to nudge you into making those last-moment, things-I-never-needed-but-will-now-buy impulse purchases. There was a suction cup attached to each light in the string to allow you stick it to a glass window and that had enough of a novelty value for me to buy one box.
[The suction cups have proven to be dodgy and have had to be supplemented with some Sellotape]
The wife was in London to enjoy the build-up to Christmas. She brought a collection of colourful postcards from Tate Modern to put up on the living room wall. The white walls were in desperate need of holiday cheer and I was more than happy to play along. Here is what the collage of postcards on our wall finally looks like:
The problem with visiting countries that have a currency different from your home country is that you’ll always have some change left over at the end of your trip. This pocket diary was procured from a shop at the Prague Airport with spare change from the trip1 (scans of the front and back cover):
I tend to doodle a lot – especially when I am told to sit down and listen to someone make a presentation. The “information density” in such a setting is too low for my mind to be fully occupied. It tends to wander off into distant lands of its own invention and has to be shanghaied into paying attention to the matters on hand by doodling. Here are some pages from the diary:
My trusted Pilot V5 ran out of ink during one of these sketches. I had to modify the lyrics of Emilíana Torrini’s Fireheads to suit the situation:
It’s not fair to say I wasted ink
in my view I used it all up
Invigorated by our coffee and a generous dose of sunshine, we spent a few more minutes walking around Piazza Navona soaking in the streets, the façades, the street musicians and other little surprises.
Vatican City features prominently in every school quiz book as the smallest country in the world. The word ‘country’ conjures up all kinds of imagery in your head – borders, security guards and checkposts. In reality, it’s hard to tell where Italy ends and Vatican City begins.
The Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome is just a kilometer or so away from the Vatican (so much for the separation of Church and State).
When you are approaching the Vatican from the Castle of St. Angelo, you run into a small flea market selling souvenirs, old books, LPs and B&W stills featuring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck from Roman Holiday. ‘Paradise’ from Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto blared from a shopkeeper’s stereo as I browsed through LPs of Mozart’s symphonies, operas, and piano concertos. I wonder how many people these days get to experience the paradise that springs into existence each time the gramophone needle touches one of those LPs.
When we entered the Vatican City precincts, a large crowd of immacualately dressed people was leaving the Vatican. As we reached St. Peter’s Square, the reason for the mass exodus dawned upon us on seeing the rows of empty chairs – the Pope’s Sunday mass had just finished.
Still, there were plenty of people queuing up to enter St. Peter’s Basilica. The queue was long enough to make us postpone our visit and go looking for lunch instead. We found a pizza shop in a small street doing brisk business – a sure sign that hot, delicious pizzas awaited us. Pizzas in street shops in Rome are sold in rectangular slices by weight (pizza al taglio). There were lots of vegetarian toppings to choose from – some a little unusual. What the wife took for pineapple turned out to be potato.
We spent some more time walking around the Vatican. It’s a funny sensation to be walking in a country that was just an answer to a trivia question for you until a few hours ago. It’s also easy to forget that people live here with the same mundane problems as ours – the Sunday load of laundry for instance:
Having bookmarked the pizza place for another visit, we left for the Spanish Steps. I kept seeing something interesting even in the commonplace buildings:
The Spanish Steps were overrun with tourists, so we walked to the obelisk in the square at the base of the steps and sat there for a few minutes.
There were a plenty of interesting buildings around.
Many luxury brands have showrooms in the streets around the Spanish Steps. We were visiting a country deep in the financial crisis. Their prime minister, Silivio Berlusconi, had resigned the day before and the government had just passed austerity measures to save hundreds of billions of Euros. But it looked like business as usual here. I guess history isn’t as dramatic when you are living it.
The old, ‘grungy’ façades of the showrooms are a perfect foil to the glittering, expensive products selling inside. The Diors, the Pradas, the Cartiers, the Louis Vittons were all here. Our relationship with luxury products is limited to parodying the brand names. For example, Bulgari becomes Burglary. It’s not a case of grapes being sour, it’s just that we prefer mangoes. Have spare money, will travel.
It was finally time to tackle the Spanish Steps and enjoy the view of the world along the way (and from the top).
By some quirk of fortune, we found ourselves at the Colosseum on every single day of our stay in Rome. Entry to the Colosseum closes at 3:30 PM and so we never got to go in till the very last day.
The Colosseo Metro station was undergoing repairs. Had it been any other Metro station, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed. But this station being next to a thousands of year old monument, the rubble seemed full of poignant irony.
The wife had singled out a nice dinner place while browsing a tourist guide at a bookstore at the Termini Station. We spent the evening looking for it. At one spot, as the wife raced ahead looking for street names to orient us on the map, I found myself standing across the road from the Ferrari store. A man stood at the stores’ door while his partner stood in the middle of the road to take his picture:
The food at the restaurant justified the effort it took us to find it. There was something special about the vegetables in Italy – especially the tomatoes. They seemed so full of flavour that for the first time in Europe, we found vegetarianism worth the trouble.
Our second day in Rome began with a visit to Trevi Fountain. The walk from the Barberini metro station to Trevi Fountain is a short one but I found plenty along the way to click. This was the first time I was seeing Rome in proper daylight and I was as fascinated by the colours of the buildings as their textures. Parts of Rome felt as if an artist had taken Paris and had applied a grunge filter to it in Photoshop.
I heard Trevi Fountain before I saw it. It wasn’t the trickle of a fountain that I heard, it was the roar of a waterfall. That should’ve prepared me for the scale of what I was about to see but it didn’t. My jaw dropped at the sight of the 4-storey building they call a mere fountain.
Hundreds of coins were lying on the fountain’s floor. According to local legend, throwing a coin into the Trevi fountain is supposed to bring you back to Rome. We didn’t throw any, but we’ll probably return to throw one in.
Our next stop was the Pantheon. On the way we came across a structure that looked suspiciously like it, but it wasn’t the real thing.
We also came across a closed shop that specialised in pendulum clocks. Christiaan Huygens would have been delighted. If you stare at the picture for a minute, you can actually hear the clocks tick in your head.
From the outside, the Pantheon looks simple and very time-worn. We never got to go inside as it was closed that morning to the general public for a private ceremony. A choir was singing inside and strains of beautiful music drifted out. And so we got to see Pantheon aurally.
It was a sunny but cold morning and by now we were craving a cappuccino. We decided to walk to Piazza Navona and sit for some time in one of the many street cafes there. Rome is the sort of city that makes you feel that you could spend a lifetime there and you still wouldn’t have seen anything. There was something interesting waiting to be discovered at every turn.
After walking around Piazza Navona admiring the various fountains there, we finally sat down for a cappuccino.
My mind had obviously been picking up a lot of religious iconography consciously and subconsciously. That’s the only way I can explain why I saw cassocks, chausubles and priests in the folded umbrellas of the café.
