Information overload
Oct. 1st, 2007 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanticoI. I have been *Doing Things*. Many of them, actually. Where on earth do I start?
First, I should say OMHIGOD CONGRATS to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
swantower and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kniedzw for their wedding. I saw the pictures, or at least some pictures, and they all look exceptionally lovely and romantic and wonderful. It sounds like you all had a marvelous time; I'm very very sad I couldn't be there. I'm not going to write to much more on the subject, because I already walked into Italian class all teary after lookign at the pictures and if I start wibbling now I will never get my errands done.
Classes are not intense, but there are a lot of them. Most unpleasantly, they are on an American schedule, which flabbergasts me and makes it very difficult to get used to an Italian schedule (i.e. everything being closed whenever we have a break for food/errands or all fun stuff that goes late happening the day before we have early classes). I love all of my teachers, however. The art teacher, Raffaela, is AMAZING. Mostly because she's *harsh*. Not mean, just very, very unforgiving. If you're doing it wrong, she'll lay it on you like a cat macro, and if you're doing it right she'll be pleased and point out everything that's still wrong about it. And we are not, NOT allowed to call ourselves artists. Sellable, maybe. Not artists.
Whether I agree or not, I have improved leaps and bounds under her tutelage, happy to let someone else criticize my work instead of constantly obsessing about it on my own. It makes me yearn for some kind of artists circle in Bloomington who can look at what I do and tell me. "This is fucked up. Here's how you fix it." And likewise I can do the same.
My italian is also improving, though usually only in specific phrases, like "Where is ____?" "What is this bizarre thing on the menu?" and "No, I do not want to 'make friendly' with you!" Also, my bargaining skills are rapidly becoming leet. I bought my first big present to myself (a sparkly of great magnitude) and I brought it down from 100 euro to 50.
In life, I have been CLEANING UP after myself, doing the dishes, making my bed and doing my laundry. This I take more than anything as successfully upkeeping The Ritual of self-evaluation/change that I began in coming over here. I am most pleased.
Also, I have been travelling. Descriptions under the cuts, as they are long. Since I am very lazy and very busy, they are cut and pasted from e-mails I have sent out earlier.
Friday night of the second weekend we ran to the train station and began our long, long day of traveling to get to the hostel we'd booked in Neptuno, a small town just south of Sorrento/Capri island. I discovered that train tickets are not as cheap as I'd been led to believe, alas. We took one of the super fast trains to Rome. I got a window seat; the view was *amazing*. Northern Italy is beautiful, but it's southern Italy that just captures what you think of when you imagine Italy. It's all earth and flame, brown and gold hills studded with green, blue and purple mountains in the background, deep red earth, vinyards and small houses and villages on top of plateaus.
From Rome we immediately jumped to Napoli (Naples), which we discovered to be a HORRID city. The place feels oppressive and fearful, and is quite literally one huge, sprawling ghetto with a cold steel and glass heart. The only good thing about it is that it runs from Mt. Vesuvius to the sea, caught between the two; honestly, I believe this is part of the reason for it's degredation. Can you imagine what living on and in the shadow of something that can, is expected to and in fact is overdue to KILL YOU DEAD will do to the soul of a city?
Vesuvius! It's actually both more and less impressive than I thought it would be. The
mountain is lovely, but there's something sad about it, like it feels crushed under the
weight of the buildings crawling up it's side, people crawling over it like ants. I hate to think what will happen when it decides to shrug them off. The mountain is actually shaped kind of like a horseshoe, in that it has a small peak to one side and the cone to the other. that smaller peak is apparently the edge of where the mountain USED to be before it erupted and buried Pompeii--if you draw a line from the old cone and the new one, it marks where the missing
chunk of the mountain should be . . . and good christ, it's like dropping one of the Alps unto the countryside. The *sea* was moved when it erupted-- the land gained something like 30-50 feet in height once the ash had settled.
Anyway, we took something more like a grubby little subway around the mountain and on to Sorrento, which is a little tourist town set on the beaches and cliffs of the Amalfi coast-- which are STUNNING. I had my first religious experience in the country . . . driving along the one lane wide roads with 180 degree turns and drops straight down into the rocky shores of the Mediterranean, from about, oh, 500-800 feet, IN A TOUR BUS. Front row seats. Nothing between me and the very large windshield but open air. It was . . . thrilling is a very good word for it, but beautiful, too. Oh my god, beautiful. Tropical colored flowers exploding everywhere, bungalow style homes stacked on the 45-75 degree hillsides, great old churches and terracotta villages, stairs and passageways into god knows where, and olive trees EVERYWHERE. the sky is a tone of blue that I thought I'd never see. And all of it overlooks the Mediterranean,. Out hostel was a group of rentable bungalows/small general store/ice cream shop/travel agency/campground/discotheque, with a path down to the sea. My god, the sea . . . never in my life did I imagine water could *actually* be the color I saw. I now understand why I have the paint pigment called ultramarine blue. It was like looking into a jewel, like some living thing made of Lapis Lazuli, or a million Hope diamonds.
Saturday we decided to take a ferry to Capri, where I decided that I am meant, in fact, to
be ferried around the sea on a small boat with the wind in my hair, wearing sunglasses
and sun dress (and as Jason pointed at and I was imagining, a giant white sun hat). That's my natural state. The cliffs! 1000 foot high, towers cathedrals of rock! I tried to do a watercolor that day and just failed miserably . . . I was too overwhelmed. After that we swam and sunbathed. I am now a strange shade of *tan*. It's weird. That night, when everyone was getting shitfaced, Corri (a cool girl I'm making friends with) and I decided to go skinny dipping. The sea under the moon is surreal, like a dreamscape-- rocks like lost hopes and water like tears, and the moon the shape of a hawk's eye. I lasted about five minutes in the water and then panic took me back to the rocks. Too many places for sharks to hide.
Sunday was Pompeii, which was amazing, and which we walked around for FIVE HOURS. My feet
hurt so, so, SO bad by the end of the day. I never really took it in that Pompeii was actually, you know, A CITY. It is so strange to wander around on ancient stones and through crumbled houses, seeing things that just jar you with how familiar they are-- an alabaster countertop in what used to be a cafe, graffiti of two gladiators fighting, and the story of Troy; and the bodies of course, which are not just plaster casts but plaster cast placed around the surviving skeletons. In many places you can see the bones sticking out. Over all of this, Vesuvius looms. Ill put up pictures later, and you can see just how much of that volcano was dropped on the city.
Then a long train ride home, and classes.
I traveled to San Gimignano and Siena on Friday with my class and both cities were beautiful. San Gimignano is a small medieval city atop a mountain with surreally beautiful tuscany hills unfolding from it's base. It was raining all day, which was ok, because when you looked out over that view you could see places where the earth and the sky blended together and other parts where sunlight was trickling over vinyards and farms in miniature. The town is old, and full of tourists, but there were enough hidden gardens and streets to keep me occupied and away from crowds. I also visited the Torture Museum. It was pleasantly educational.
Siena is the city I imagined Florence would be, all winding roads that make no sense,
tunnels and staircases and alleys and hills. Hidden places and sudden, unexpected turns.
I had fun wandering it. More than anything though Siena is worth visiting for their
church. It is probably the most beautiful artistic creation I have ever seen, and I mean
that absolutely. The architecture is no Duomo, but similar in that the Sienesse architects copied a lot of what Brunilleschi did-- and the inside is far superior. The entirety to the floor is done in superb murals made of red, white and black marble. In main hall of the church is ringed with the sculpted heads of every pope up to the 12th century, and eerie effect.
The ceiling is dark blue set with golden stars, and the dome has a golden sun at the top ringed by stunning gilded paintings of the apostles. There are frescoes over all of the walls,
sculptures adorning everything, and a room that was the library for the church that houses
the greatest treasure of all.
Hundreds of years ago, right after it was decorated with stunning frescoes, that room was sealed up and only recently opened-- which means the frescoes look like new. The GLOW. I've never seen anything like it. The room is dedicated to the Madonna (the floor is made of cerulean blue tiles set with golden crescent moons), and I had fun pointing out all of the symbolic correlations between her, the Universe and High Priestess cards of the tarot and Moon Goddesses to my bewildered but fascinated and highly christian traveling companions (I also had to explain what the inquisition was to them in the Torture Museum. They remarked "I never knew the church *hurt people*!" I died a little inside.) Actually, I saw several two other representations that are almost exactly the images in the tarot for the Hierophant (of course) and the Wheel of Fortune, both of which were part of the murals on the floor. Oh, and there was no plain white wall in the whole of the place-- it was constructed out of striped black and white marble.
So that's what I've done. How I've been is a little different. Amalfi was great;
it felt very much like what I expected Italy to feel like: magical, foreign, surprising,
beautiful, warm. Coming back to Florence was kind of a shock, and then it was a little compounded by traveling to Siena, which was the other half of my expectations-- elegant, a little lonely, mysterious, possibly dangerous and delightfully labyrinthian. I like it here, but . . . I really hate living in a city, and Florence is a City. It's brown and gray and smells like sewage (or, when it rains, boiled spinach). Even a city like Florence makes me itch to get out to the hills. It feels too much like home; cars honking, overpriced everything, ads and TV and everything else. It just feels so normal, not like I'm in a foreign country at all. It's been getting a little better, but I truly don't like the urban part. I'm not really sure how to proceed in my relationship with it; it's nothing I was expecting, quite a bit that's an unpleasant surprise, and far more drab than anywhere else I've been.
And oh, I'm lonely. Not just for conversation, but for two things I never realized I'd miss: geekery, and human touch. No one here is a nerd, no one plays games, or reads comics, or watches the same TV shows (I can only hear so much about Laguna Beach and the Hills before I want to die), no one writes fanfic or draws fantasy or reads similar books . . . you get the idea.
Touch is harder, because I can always find something to make conversation about, even if I have to turn off geek-brain and talk about shoes. I miss hugging people and being pet and scratched and snuggled or even touching someone's arm. That's something bizarre I so took for granted that I didn't realize I wouldn't have.
As if this wasn't long enough, I have finished my first piece of painting in months: a piece that's actually very important for my spiritually, as it's the first one done out of a series of Oracle cards I am making just for me, and represents the stage I was in when I first traveled here. I am very, very proud of it.
She is Murron, the fifth sign of water, and she is Incubation.
First, I should say OMHIGOD CONGRATS to
swantower and kniedzw for their wedding. I saw the pictures, or at least some pictures, and they all look exceptionally lovely and romantic and wonderful. It sounds like you all had a marvelous time; I'm very very sad I couldn't be there. I'm not going to write to much more on the subject, because I already walked into Italian class all teary after lookign at the pictures and if I start wibbling now I will never get my errands done.Classes are not intense, but there are a lot of them. Most unpleasantly, they are on an American schedule, which flabbergasts me and makes it very difficult to get used to an Italian schedule (i.e. everything being closed whenever we have a break for food/errands or all fun stuff that goes late happening the day before we have early classes). I love all of my teachers, however. The art teacher, Raffaela, is AMAZING. Mostly because she's *harsh*. Not mean, just very, very unforgiving. If you're doing it wrong, she'll lay it on you like a cat macro, and if you're doing it right she'll be pleased and point out everything that's still wrong about it. And we are not, NOT allowed to call ourselves artists. Sellable, maybe. Not artists.
Whether I agree or not, I have improved leaps and bounds under her tutelage, happy to let someone else criticize my work instead of constantly obsessing about it on my own. It makes me yearn for some kind of artists circle in Bloomington who can look at what I do and tell me. "This is fucked up. Here's how you fix it." And likewise I can do the same.
My italian is also improving, though usually only in specific phrases, like "Where is ____?" "What is this bizarre thing on the menu?" and "No, I do not want to 'make friendly' with you!" Also, my bargaining skills are rapidly becoming leet. I bought my first big present to myself (a sparkly of great magnitude) and I brought it down from 100 euro to 50.
In life, I have been CLEANING UP after myself, doing the dishes, making my bed and doing my laundry. This I take more than anything as successfully upkeeping The Ritual of self-evaluation/change that I began in coming over here. I am most pleased.
Also, I have been travelling. Descriptions under the cuts, as they are long. Since I am very lazy and very busy, they are cut and pasted from e-mails I have sent out earlier.
Friday night of the second weekend we ran to the train station and began our long, long day of traveling to get to the hostel we'd booked in Neptuno, a small town just south of Sorrento/Capri island. I discovered that train tickets are not as cheap as I'd been led to believe, alas. We took one of the super fast trains to Rome. I got a window seat; the view was *amazing*. Northern Italy is beautiful, but it's southern Italy that just captures what you think of when you imagine Italy. It's all earth and flame, brown and gold hills studded with green, blue and purple mountains in the background, deep red earth, vinyards and small houses and villages on top of plateaus.
From Rome we immediately jumped to Napoli (Naples), which we discovered to be a HORRID city. The place feels oppressive and fearful, and is quite literally one huge, sprawling ghetto with a cold steel and glass heart. The only good thing about it is that it runs from Mt. Vesuvius to the sea, caught between the two; honestly, I believe this is part of the reason for it's degredation. Can you imagine what living on and in the shadow of something that can, is expected to and in fact is overdue to KILL YOU DEAD will do to the soul of a city?
Vesuvius! It's actually both more and less impressive than I thought it would be. The
mountain is lovely, but there's something sad about it, like it feels crushed under the
weight of the buildings crawling up it's side, people crawling over it like ants. I hate to think what will happen when it decides to shrug them off. The mountain is actually shaped kind of like a horseshoe, in that it has a small peak to one side and the cone to the other. that smaller peak is apparently the edge of where the mountain USED to be before it erupted and buried Pompeii--if you draw a line from the old cone and the new one, it marks where the missing
chunk of the mountain should be . . . and good christ, it's like dropping one of the Alps unto the countryside. The *sea* was moved when it erupted-- the land gained something like 30-50 feet in height once the ash had settled.
Anyway, we took something more like a grubby little subway around the mountain and on to Sorrento, which is a little tourist town set on the beaches and cliffs of the Amalfi coast-- which are STUNNING. I had my first religious experience in the country . . . driving along the one lane wide roads with 180 degree turns and drops straight down into the rocky shores of the Mediterranean, from about, oh, 500-800 feet, IN A TOUR BUS. Front row seats. Nothing between me and the very large windshield but open air. It was . . . thrilling is a very good word for it, but beautiful, too. Oh my god, beautiful. Tropical colored flowers exploding everywhere, bungalow style homes stacked on the 45-75 degree hillsides, great old churches and terracotta villages, stairs and passageways into god knows where, and olive trees EVERYWHERE. the sky is a tone of blue that I thought I'd never see. And all of it overlooks the Mediterranean,. Out hostel was a group of rentable bungalows/small general store/ice cream shop/travel agency/campground/discotheque, with a path down to the sea. My god, the sea . . . never in my life did I imagine water could *actually* be the color I saw. I now understand why I have the paint pigment called ultramarine blue. It was like looking into a jewel, like some living thing made of Lapis Lazuli, or a million Hope diamonds.
Saturday we decided to take a ferry to Capri, where I decided that I am meant, in fact, to
be ferried around the sea on a small boat with the wind in my hair, wearing sunglasses
and sun dress (and as Jason pointed at and I was imagining, a giant white sun hat). That's my natural state. The cliffs! 1000 foot high, towers cathedrals of rock! I tried to do a watercolor that day and just failed miserably . . . I was too overwhelmed. After that we swam and sunbathed. I am now a strange shade of *tan*. It's weird. That night, when everyone was getting shitfaced, Corri (a cool girl I'm making friends with) and I decided to go skinny dipping. The sea under the moon is surreal, like a dreamscape-- rocks like lost hopes and water like tears, and the moon the shape of a hawk's eye. I lasted about five minutes in the water and then panic took me back to the rocks. Too many places for sharks to hide.
Sunday was Pompeii, which was amazing, and which we walked around for FIVE HOURS. My feet
hurt so, so, SO bad by the end of the day. I never really took it in that Pompeii was actually, you know, A CITY. It is so strange to wander around on ancient stones and through crumbled houses, seeing things that just jar you with how familiar they are-- an alabaster countertop in what used to be a cafe, graffiti of two gladiators fighting, and the story of Troy; and the bodies of course, which are not just plaster casts but plaster cast placed around the surviving skeletons. In many places you can see the bones sticking out. Over all of this, Vesuvius looms. Ill put up pictures later, and you can see just how much of that volcano was dropped on the city.
Then a long train ride home, and classes.
I traveled to San Gimignano and Siena on Friday with my class and both cities were beautiful. San Gimignano is a small medieval city atop a mountain with surreally beautiful tuscany hills unfolding from it's base. It was raining all day, which was ok, because when you looked out over that view you could see places where the earth and the sky blended together and other parts where sunlight was trickling over vinyards and farms in miniature. The town is old, and full of tourists, but there were enough hidden gardens and streets to keep me occupied and away from crowds. I also visited the Torture Museum. It was pleasantly educational.
Siena is the city I imagined Florence would be, all winding roads that make no sense,
tunnels and staircases and alleys and hills. Hidden places and sudden, unexpected turns.
I had fun wandering it. More than anything though Siena is worth visiting for their
church. It is probably the most beautiful artistic creation I have ever seen, and I mean
that absolutely. The architecture is no Duomo, but similar in that the Sienesse architects copied a lot of what Brunilleschi did-- and the inside is far superior. The entirety to the floor is done in superb murals made of red, white and black marble. In main hall of the church is ringed with the sculpted heads of every pope up to the 12th century, and eerie effect.
The ceiling is dark blue set with golden stars, and the dome has a golden sun at the top ringed by stunning gilded paintings of the apostles. There are frescoes over all of the walls,
sculptures adorning everything, and a room that was the library for the church that houses
the greatest treasure of all.
Hundreds of years ago, right after it was decorated with stunning frescoes, that room was sealed up and only recently opened-- which means the frescoes look like new. The GLOW. I've never seen anything like it. The room is dedicated to the Madonna (the floor is made of cerulean blue tiles set with golden crescent moons), and I had fun pointing out all of the symbolic correlations between her, the Universe and High Priestess cards of the tarot and Moon Goddesses to my bewildered but fascinated and highly christian traveling companions (I also had to explain what the inquisition was to them in the Torture Museum. They remarked "I never knew the church *hurt people*!" I died a little inside.) Actually, I saw several two other representations that are almost exactly the images in the tarot for the Hierophant (of course) and the Wheel of Fortune, both of which were part of the murals on the floor. Oh, and there was no plain white wall in the whole of the place-- it was constructed out of striped black and white marble.
So that's what I've done. How I've been is a little different. Amalfi was great;
it felt very much like what I expected Italy to feel like: magical, foreign, surprising,
beautiful, warm. Coming back to Florence was kind of a shock, and then it was a little compounded by traveling to Siena, which was the other half of my expectations-- elegant, a little lonely, mysterious, possibly dangerous and delightfully labyrinthian. I like it here, but . . . I really hate living in a city, and Florence is a City. It's brown and gray and smells like sewage (or, when it rains, boiled spinach). Even a city like Florence makes me itch to get out to the hills. It feels too much like home; cars honking, overpriced everything, ads and TV and everything else. It just feels so normal, not like I'm in a foreign country at all. It's been getting a little better, but I truly don't like the urban part. I'm not really sure how to proceed in my relationship with it; it's nothing I was expecting, quite a bit that's an unpleasant surprise, and far more drab than anywhere else I've been.
And oh, I'm lonely. Not just for conversation, but for two things I never realized I'd miss: geekery, and human touch. No one here is a nerd, no one plays games, or reads comics, or watches the same TV shows (I can only hear so much about Laguna Beach and the Hills before I want to die), no one writes fanfic or draws fantasy or reads similar books . . . you get the idea.
Touch is harder, because I can always find something to make conversation about, even if I have to turn off geek-brain and talk about shoes. I miss hugging people and being pet and scratched and snuggled or even touching someone's arm. That's something bizarre I so took for granted that I didn't realize I wouldn't have.
As if this wasn't long enough, I have finished my first piece of painting in months: a piece that's actually very important for my spiritually, as it's the first one done out of a series of Oracle cards I am making just for me, and represents the stage I was in when I first traveled here. I am very, very proud of it.
She is Murron, the fifth sign of water, and she is Incubation.
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Date: 2007-10-01 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-10-25 12:05 am (UTC)