June 27, 2010 Culture, Travel
Still astonishing for the engineering fete of persistence that keeps a city built on mud flats standing after 1500 years. Piazza San Marco floods with a rising tide every twelve hours but what’s a little water in the foyer? A true Venetian would never abandon his city to a fickle tide.
If anything the ground is giving way to the centuries of history that saturate the buildings and streets above it. Yet it’s sad to see such a marvel, once ‘the liquid frontier between the east and the west’ transformed into a tourist attraction. Although it’s probably been that way since long before my time, each year more citizens are forced to relocate to affordable suburbs away from their beloved canals and bridges. Tourists we come and spend and drive up prices, we leave trash and take away photographs and silly souvenirs, but we don’t keep the city standing; the citizens do and they’re the ones tourism forces out. After a while we’re bored and we leave and the citizens that are left go about their business. They work on renovations funded in part by our lavish pleasure-spending and do their best to keep their city standing, flooded or dry, infested by tourists or not. A simple task to master the fickle tides! The true engineering fete of persistence for Venice would be not to abandon the city to the flood of tourists, either.
April 23, 2010 Travel
… at least for the day. Consistency over time has never been my strong point. I do things better in bursts. I’m back now, but not even I can say how long this round will last. It wouldn’t be magic if I told you when and to where I was going to disappear, now would it?
Besides, I’ve been working hard at the restaurant and I saw traveling in my future. Work brought me money and being homebound gave me itchy feet. Abra cadabra, I made the magic happen. I haunted Paris for a weekend. I flew to Barcelona and spent four debaucherous days on the beach. If that’s not life I’ve never seen it. And now you can see it, too. I’m sorry this photo is small. I’ve got a lot more. Maybe I’ll dust off the flickr account to share the rest with you.
There were complications, of course. Aren’t there always? A volcano erupted in Iceland and belched an ash cloud south to dissipate across Europe and my sister and I were damn near stranded in Barcelona. Thousands of flights were canceled and billions of dollars lost before the smog wandered across the Atlantic to plague more travelers in America.
Not only was our first flight canceled, but the rescheduled flight was, too. Determining the direction and dissipation of ash clouds must not be an exact science. We ended up driving back to Germany, but no matter how odious the drive was (I assure you, it was. I hate long drives), it was still better than getting stuck. I know, boo-hoo, stranded in Barcelona. But know this: it doesn’t matter how good the food, how cheap the wine, or how sunny the beaches (all true), getting stranded anywhere is a disastrous prospect, to both bank accounts and blood pressure.
December 9, 2009 Travel
With four days until departure, and a week of traveling ahead, the most German I can manage before my arrival in Frankfurt is to memorize a few basic phrases. Ja, Nein, and Wo ist die nächste Kneipe? (Where is the next pub?) ranked high on the list, so I’ve got the important things down. Between now and then I’ll be so busy packing, driving, flying, visiting family, and slogging through security checkpoints that learning more German seems a distant concern.
All the same, I figured I could read on the plane, so I scoured a half dozen bookstores for a pocket reference guide for German phrases. They typically had several sizes of dictionary and nothing else. I was hoping for a handy and amusing book, something like Common German Insults and Pickup Lines, with which I can anger the men and woo the women. My antics with such a guide would all be forgiven, of course, because I’ll massacre the delivery, but there are no limits for good entertainment. Publishers take note. Need I point out the vast untapped profits (and laughs) ripe for the picking in such a market?
When I finally found a common phrase book, it was priced at twenty dollars, so I figured I’d save cash and not make a fool of myself, at least not at first. I’ll just pretend I’m mute instead. Nod and smile, or hope to god they speak English. If things gets out of hand, and my safety depends on recalling on cue that thirty letter safe word, and the metal chair they handcuffed me to is bolted to the floor, I’ll have to rely on my survival skills and the panic-induced strength that surges through my limbs when confronted by whip- and chain-weilding leather-clad vixens.
Once I got home from the bookstore, however, that thought began to worry me, so I dug around for a while and found a few websites to help me out. I bookmarked a basic German course on Wikibooks, the Google translator, and the jackpot of all reference pages for German (discovered after wading extensively through ads and other Internet muck). If you prefer video lessons YouTube has some decent ones, too, and it helps just to familiarize yourself with the sounds.
These resources will be more useful as a reference guide once I’ve been exposed to the language than they are right now, but anyone with considerable motivation and persistence could conceivably learn German without spending a cent beyond access to the Internet.
When I get to Frankfurt, I’ll do my best not to agree with anything I don’t fully understand, especially when it’s offered by a woman in tight leather. And if I don’t heed my own advice, at least it’ll be a good story. Otherwise I’m just going to jump right in. Klingt Spaß, ja?