Always Trippin’

Where have I been?

I don’t know. There is much I don’t know. 

Visited Mantua, Padua and Venice last weekend. Wandered around churches, saw Giotto’s Arena Chapel, pondered orgiastic frescoes, wondered if I had anything in common with Cupid and Psyche, and looked at silver shoes. 4-Euro bottles of Chianti, a can of Hell Bier, naked skeletal trees by still rivers that waft the scent of sewage to my nose. Bus rides and smiles that convince me of my awkwardness. Dingy carnivals, water-shooting clown contraptions, giants wielding decapitated heads and massive jars of nutella everywhere. Wandering down twisted alleyways, licking my less-massive stash of nutella off my fingers, sand under my shoes and the sunset fading into the sea. Shells crunch under my clumsy shoes. There are sparrows delicately clutching my fingertips in a whir of wings and feathers, eating Pringles out of my palm, and I am murano glass object after murano glass object, bewitched in sparkly delight and girlish fascination. I’ve been in too many other places that claim to be the ‘venice of the east’, but now I’m really here, watching the sleek gondolas slide elegantly across the water, smooth black and gold empty waiting for lovers to giggle their way hand-in-hand over the water.

I’d be pressed up, curled up, warm, breathing and pliant. I’d be here. I am here. Waiting.

All roads lead to Rome, they say, and that’s where the road (or train tracks at least) was leading me at the bright and glorious hour of 6.45 a.m. as I trudged across Florence to hop my Eurostar to Roma Termini. I entered Rome in a sleepy haze to the observation that Roman graffiti was of a higher standard than that in Florence, and we transferred ourselves on to a bus that whisked us over to Vatican City.

The Vatican Museums were simply put, overwhelming. Walking into the School of Athens was overwhelming. Seeing Laocoon and his sons was overwhelming. The Sistine Chapel was more overwhelming than overwhelming. St. Peter’s was massive, and I was happy to see Michelangelo’s Pieta although it was stowed away behind much bulletproof glass after an unhappy incident (what kind of psycho decides to attack a masterpiece anyway?). The food around the basilica/St. Pete’s square, not as impressive. Mildly rancid salami = ew.

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The birds of Rome are crazy! They flock and wheel in insane formations, like a school of fish whirling like black dots in the sky at dusk. We later conclude that we’d probably spent as much time staring at the birds as we had spent staring at Raphael…. Wandering Rome by night is great. We hit up the Trevy Fountain, the Spanish Steps (only to be thwarted by scaffolding) and gaze up at the massive columns of the Pantheon lit by orange lights, and have a lovely dinner in a little restaurant with a very friendly owner who starts babbling in Italian about how we should all vote for Obama.

In the morning, I fuel up on my cappuccino and head out to experience ancient Rome. We mosey over to the Colosseum and imagine ourselves to be gladiators amid the decadence of Rome. Apparently an entire species of elephant was wiped out in the Colosseum for the masses’ entertainment, and they found a mass elephant grave not too long ago (while building the subway?) that still had rotting corpses from thousands of years ago because the sheer number of piled-up bodies created a preservative vacuum.

Wandering through the Forum and Capitoline Hill on a bright sunny day is absolutely gorgeous, and we sit and bask on the rock where Julius Caesar was cremated before we rock on over to the Pantheon, where apparently there are squares cut out of the dome when Brunelleschi came to study how it was built. It was said that the hole in the Pantheon was once plugged by the giant pine cone that now sits in the Vatican, which was popped out by the swirling energies of the ancient gods when Christ was crucified, but the pine cone must have shrunk or the hole enlarged itself massively for that to be anywhere near true.

We visit the Villa Borghese in the afternoon after getting mildly lost in the gardens, and get to see the amazing works by Bernini, and they are amazing indeed. Apollo and Daphne, Pluto and Persephone, and all that good stuff. Our field trip ends at that point, and the four of us who are staying on together take off on an (almost) wild goose chase for the Villa Guilia, the museum of Etruscan art which we do find in the end, thankfully.

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My friends and I hop over to the Yellow Hostel that evening where Joe and I toss back a Chuck Norris Roundhouse Kick to the Head and take it like champs. Absinthe + Jaeger + Vodka? + Tabasco on an empty stomach does make for a pretty strong concoction, and I am happily buzzed for the next while. We bus over to Trastevere and attempt to scrounge up some good pizza.

We make it back and crawl into our bunk beds, and two minutes later a drunken couple stumbles in. They start making kissy make-out noises in the middle of the room, and then the guy pulls off the girl’s shirt. They snog for a little bit more, and then the dude says something like, “give me a minute” - and leaves the room…but he never comes back! Poor lass stands bare-boobed, head buried in arms on her upper bunk and stays like that for ten painful minutes before climbing angrily into bed and seeking refuge under the covers.

Seriously, what kind of guy takes a girl’s shirt off and then peaces out like that? Crazy fella.

On speaking (or not speaking) Italian:

Lucca has a name that’s great for being punny with, a fairly solid city wall that would be fun to ride bikes along in times of no rain, and (here’s a secret) the angel on top of the church in Piazzale Michele has hinged wings so it can flutter in the wind and not get blown off the façade. Wonder who keeps those lubed, but it’s not a job I envy. There’s a full saint’s body in the church of San Frediano, in a lacy dress and glass casket. St Zita’s in pretty good shape for being dead several hundred years, but I was personally horrified at the people who whipped out their cameras in the church and started snapping photos of poor shriveled lady.

There’s a grandeur in the streets that’s still echoed somehow, maybe from stones steeped in two thousand years of history and civilization. I don’t feel quite as able to be a scruffy college student here, although I can’t help being one anyway. But I crave the elegant leather boots that line the streets in window displays, and oh! the brand names of high fashion, they find their home here. It’s strange to call this home now, ten minutes from the Duomo, walking across the Piazza della Signoria by night, looking down the misty Arno and across the city spread out from the Piazzale de Michelangelo where yet another David stands guard. I fill my belly with way too much pasta and gelato, wash it down with wine. Tread soft across marble crypts in the basement of a church, sip a White Russian that costs 7 Euros too much, clutch my purse and hasten home hours past midnight as I briskly step by the gravestones in the Piazza Donatello.

Is it strange that I do not feel that this is my place, among a group of students who should be like me (or perhaps more in truth, I like them) - studying the same things, having lived through the same years? It’s become too commonplace to me, I’ve learned to love the uncertainty and unknown. I can’t relate to homesickness and stress about host families or what classes to take or new roommates. The unfamiliar has become too familiar, perpetual movement has become home. It’s not worth worrying, and it’s not that I don’t care - I’ve just learned to love it all, live it all, the joy of life.

Who doesn’t want to see a massive flower that smells like carrion? Our one day in Kota Kinabalu saw me and Tim from the Netherlands attempting to hustle our way to Tambunan to catch a glimpse of the elusive (although large) Rafflesia. I kicked off the day by making a flurry of what must have been annoying wake-up calls to wrong numbers, tourist information centers, people who were on leave and eventually the Tambunan HQ to see if there were actually any flowers flowering (the blooms only last a few days). Even then, we weren’t entirely sure what they were saying.

“Good morning, are there any flowers flowering?”
(Insert awkward pause) “Yes”.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes”.
“Great! How do we best get there from KK?”
“Yes”.

Anyway, Tim and I eventually found ourselves sitting in the back of a 13-ringgit taxi waiting for it to fill up and whisk us away to these magical flowers. And wait we did. After 45 minutes of bum-numbing motionless sitting squished in the back of the van, we eventually got the required number of passengers to justify beginning the 1.5 hour drive along a narrow, windy mountain road that eventually culminated in the two of us being dumped off in the drizzle at the Rafflesia information center. Apparently, viewing said blossoms involved a RM50 guide cost so we bummed around and looked at the exhibits in hopes that some other random souls would turn up and ease the monetary issues of two broke backpackers. Just as we had given up hope and were about to cave in and embark with just the two of us, three other people showed up and joined our group.

We drove a few minutes further down the road that we had come on, clambered up a muddy hillock, along a river and maneuvered through a barbed wire fence to come face-to-face with the famed flower, although it wasn’t actually the massively massive variety and it didn’t smell, which was disappointing, but did allow me to stick my head next to it without barfing my insubstantial breakfast all over the place. We snapped the obligatory photos and headed back after dropping multiple hints to the other people that we needed a ride back to KK (but it turned out they weren’t heading back anyway).

And so we stood/sat at the bus stop (which was quite clearly marked “bus stop”), where everyone had assured us that buses to KK ran every half hour. Well, the “bus” part was sure right, but the “stop” part, not so much – every vehicle coming from Tambunan was full. Sitting around in the rain inspired us to devise backup plans to get ourselves back to KK, which looked something like this:

Plan A: Catch a bus to KK (Plan A was failing miserably)
Plan B: Hitchhike to KK
Plan C: Catch a bus the other way to Tambunan and then get a non-full bus to KK
Plan D: Hitchhike to Tambunan and get a bus from there to KK

And so on until…
Plan Y: Feign heart attack in the street and get an ambulance to drive us to KK
Plan Z: Pay the equivalent of our first-born child to get a taxi to KK.

Anyway, after thumbing at multiple vehicles for a good half-hour, a red Proton finally flashed its lights at us and pulled over. We ran over (with slight disbelief on my part, and to the cheers of a group of grass-cutters who had been entertained by my attempts at flagging down a vehicle) and got in to embark on a slightly manic ride back to the city as I chatted with the driver about cheery topics such as how 42 people had died at a bend that we’d just traversed. We made it back safe and sound (and for free) and in good time to catch our epic 13-hour bus ride to Semporna that night.