New Blog

I obviously haven't posted on this blog in a long time, but I am currently getting back into blogging. So if you stumble upon this and you are at all interested, check out my other blog here.

Thanks for reading!

Firenze, Italia

The Birthplace of the Renaissance
I went to Florence for the 4th time on Sunday. This was, however, the first time I really invested any time in the museums. Of course I'd been to see the David, but during my previous visits, I wasn't as interested in paying a lot of money to go look at Renaissance art. Now, however, not only do I have the time and money, but I've also managed to cultivate an interest in the city and it's art. It is part of my job, in some ways.





Now here on the left is a picture taken from the Uffizi Gallery. I was expecting to be bored at the Uffizi, since the only paintings I knew of that were there were the Birth of Venus and... well that was all. Botticelli is an early Renaissance painter, and until recently I'd never had any interest in that. Anyways, the bridge on the bottom left is the Ponte Vecchio. I went to Florence with two girls that I know, Federica and Claudia. They are the female balances in our house, since they come over pretty regularly. Neither of them speak English, however, and so for the entire day I was forced to speak Italian and listen to them in Italian. I can speak Italian ok by now, but it is difficult for me in English to talk about art. I think, considering the circumstances, I performed admirably. But now Claudia is a really quiet girl. Most of the time I'm speaking with Federica, but at one point, while Federica waited in line, Claudia and I left to take a walk. Not knowing what to say as we walked across the Ponte Vecchio, I said in Italian, "This bridge is really old." It wasn't until I finished the sentence that I realized how stupid a statement it was, "Ponte Vecchio" means "Old Bridge."

The girl on the left is Federica. The reason for the trip was that it was her birthday. The one on the right is Claudia. The other reason for this trip was that she'd never been to Florence (and it's only an hour and a half away!). Jim's uncle was in town and together they went to a town in the south of Italy called "Santa Croce", where an ancestor of theirs has a villa named after him. So Jim couldn't come. Yashar... well Yashar just sucks and bailed out, so it was just the three of us. I had a good time though.









I will probably at some point go on a lengthy analysis on here about the Renaissance, but right now I'm a bit brain dead. Hope you enjoyed my few pictures (I stole them all from Claudia).

Feel Good Lost

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper, who did his job well."

Though it may sound corny, this is the philosophy I’ve been applying lately to tour guiding, because I’m endanger of losing my job.

Being a tour guide in Italy is actually a fairly respected profession, and being one in Rome is really good. I spend 90% of my free time studying for work, partly because I’m interested, but also because it is a lot of information and a lot of different topics I have to handle (over 3000 years of it; sometimes I have dreams about Pope Julius II or Gianlorenzo Bernini). This has always made it hard for me when speaking to Americans. Most tend to think that I ride on top of a bus or something. So when I tell people what I do, I try to not use that term for it’s kitschy connotations. Instead I say I am a "private guide" or something. I know it is a really pretentious way of saying "tour guide," but I say it because I’m embarrassed. So many people in America don’t think of it as a real profession. But calling myself a "private guide" is pretty much true. Sometimes I will have a group of about 10 people whom I guide through Rome, but mostly I pick people up from their hotels, take them where they want to go, tell them about the sites, take them out to a nice restaurant, etc. Some of these people pay me a rather grotesque sum of money, and for the first time in my life I’ve had a job that I really enjoy. I get to meet people from all over the world and get paid to do what I’d do for free anyways if I had the means, which is talk about art, philosophy, history, culture, etc. I have a nice apartment, I’m learning a new language and meeting a lot of people, I’m planning on traveling to Africa sometime in the future, and I have been able to save a little bit. And I don’t have to worry about money. Or haven’t had to worry about money. Now, as the dollar drops, my company is getting less and less tours, and since I am the last person they hired, I am at the bottom of the chain. They are giving all of the tours to the people who have been with them for several years. My two bosses called me over one day and sat me down and told me that it might be a good idea for me to start looking for another job. Though he told me to wait three weeks to see if the season picks up. And so now they are paying me the equivalent of 500 dollars a week just to go in the mornings to the Vatican and pick up headsets and give them to groups. This takes about a half hour. But they also want me on call for any last minute bookings, so I can’t go and get another job. This week so far I had one tour, which I mentioned in my last blog. I am surviving, but I don’t know if after another week they are going to tell me that they can’t keep me on this stipend anymore. I have enough now for rent for next month, and that’s it.

So yet again, I’m worried about money. A part of me feels like this is why I’m always so happy in Italy, as strange as that sounds. But it really boils down to the acquisition of necessities. In the States, I could always rely on someone’s help for just about anything. Friends, family, maybe even the government (harhar). But here I have only a limited grasp of the language, am working here *ahem* illegally, have no insurance, no parents’ or grandparents’ houses to go to to do my laundry or move into if I don’t have the money to pay rent. Etc. Here, if I make rent and have enough left over to go out on the weekends, I’m pretty damn happy. I eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow I will die (First Corinthians, I believe; or that Dave Matthews song, if you’re more for the pop-cultural references).

And so back to touring my heart out. I am basically a pop-historian/performer sometimes. I am here to educate people and be thorough about it, but also keep them entertained. This means I am trying to become extremely friendly with everyone I meet, and get to know their interests as quickly as possible, and be as pliable as possible. I have to be 200 times more charismatic than I really am. And the performance element of it, well I have to tell stories that can last 15 minutes sometimes, and most of them involve a lot of people that no one has ever heard of. Telling the history of 1st century B.C. Rome can get pretty confusing for the average layman, since there are at least 5 civil wars that I reference in a matter of minutes, each one of these wars one could devote days to discussing. Or telling people about the different popes who commissioned what in the city of Rome. Most people don’t know the difference between a Borgia pope and a Della Rovere pope. So I have to sum it all up pretty succinctly, and I have to never let my enthusiasm wain. As soon as someone starts to get confused about which person fought who in which war, as soon as someone loses interest, I’m pretty much screwed (did I mention a lot of what I’m working for is tips?). I don’t even like people, and I hate public speaking, but I have become pretty damn good at it, and more often than not I have people who aren’t even taking my tour listening in on me and coming over afterwards with legitimate enthusiasm about what I’m talking about, asking me all types of questions.

Basically I’m trying to be as impressive as humanly possible, because then they will leave comments about me on the travel websites, or they will write a good review of me to my bosses, and then maybe I can keep my job. My job is simply a means of surviving here, I know, but it is also the only job I can do really well here, since I was a pretty crappy English teacher, and there aren’t a whole lot more options.

My one main other option is to start my own company, and more and more lately I’m thinking that that might be a good idea. My only problem is starting a website. I know absolutely nothing about web design, and that is the most important part. I can make business cards or fliers to put at hostels (I’m thinking of doing a 15 Euro evening tour of Rome for college students, for one. Each booking gets a free bottle of wine, minimum 2 people per booking; this is a good idea because college students are really the least concerned about money, since they're generally here to have a good time and live off of student loans or some other income), but I need a place where people can come and make their bookings. Anybody know anything about web design?

Other than that, my life is pretty awesome right now. I’m going to Florence this weekend for a friend’s birthday. I think they want to take a train there, but I’m going to persuade them to drive. Cheaper.

Ok, well I’ll see ya later.

Pictures

Some pictures of where I've been staying:


























Some old pictures of me and Jim atop the Aventine hill.



















The courtyard.


I still can't get this damn thing to work. This site is confusing. Anyways, hope you enjoyed.

Ok, pictures!

Here are some pictures of my new place. It is an old 16th century stable house. It has wireless internet. Yay! The door on the left of this picture is my apartment. Up the stairs is where my friend Jordan and his girlfriend live. Elena, Jordan's girlfriend, owns the house, and is my landlady. Currently Jim and I split a studio. This whole place is an artists' colony. There are many fascinating people living here. My neighborhood, Tor Pignattara, has the ancient aqueducts running through it.

I hope these post in the format I'm trying to get them to post in.








Yours truly,




















There is a little bit of color.



















Our bathroom. I know how interested all of you are in our bathroom.

New Post... With Pictures!

Not a lot, granted, but a few. These are from the Wine Festival here in Marino. La Sagra dell'uvo. I'm in an internet cafe, so again I'm paying good money to smuggle this information back to the United States, so I won't really caption any of them other than to say that most of these pictures were taken by my friend Jordan's girlfriend Elena, and the people in them are friends of mine. Jim is sitting to the left of me in the picture of me (which I appear to be in some sort of prolonged ecstatic state or something) and the rest of the people are the only other English speakers in town (as far as I know). The pictures of the people dancing were taken from the balcony in the Cantina where we were sitting. A cantina is a place where they make wine. This one is 400 years old. An old man sitting at our table brought his accordian and started wailing on it at one point, and the entire place went nuts. Everyone was singing and getting up to dance. It was fun.

Here, let's see if this works...

OK, well nevermind. Coming soon, to a computer screen near you... pictures!

La Casa Nuova

Ladies and Gentlemen, my phone and internet have finally passed away. I should be moving soon, but cercando per un appartamento è piu difficile quando si non ha il internet o un telefono. Si dice, "Merda!"

Communications from here on out will become increasingly sporadic as I plunge into Rome's heart of darkness surrounding Termini-- tis a land of anonymous foreigners, kebab shops, internet points, hostels, and travelling college students. In other words, No Man's Land. Wish me luck. I have ample supplies.

As long as I'm forking out this exorbitant amount to use the internet for a half an hour, I might as well take the opportunity to fill you all in on my life: it is exactly the same as the last time I posted. I have a good job that I enjoy (but which unfortunately ends after next week), I spend all my free time exploring the insides of church, or finding new areas of town to venture into. The other night I wandered into the Jewish Ghetto; I've been there before but never spent much time. The Jewish population in Rome is the oldest in the world outside of Israel. I could tell many stories about their historical persecution in Rome, but I won't go further than to say that in 66 AD, there was a revolt in Jerusalem which ended in the destruction of the entire city, except for the West Wall, or Wailing Wall. Thousands of slaves were brought back to Rome. This is around the same time that Vespasian starts building the Colosseum. Hmm... why don't we use these Jewish slaves to build it?

I think it is now one of my favorite places in town. It's in the center, but buried in a tangled mess of vicoli (alleyways) so that the general tourist would never find his or her way into it. Or out if that be the case. This means it is quite and relaxing, but still maintains the same charm as the neighborhoods surrounding it. There's even an ancient pagan temple there, dedicated to Octavia, the sister of Augustus.

I wandered through there for a little while, waiting for some friends to show up. Eventually I stumbled into a piazza with the infamous "Turtle Fountain" in it. I'd read about the fountain: it was made by Carlo Maderno, one of the few friends of Michelangelo. It's small and very Rennaisance, and therefore not nearly as famous as Nicolo Salvi's offensively Baroque Trevi Fountain (not saying it's ugly, I know that would be a sacrilege, just that there are too many people around and it is so imposing that, with these large crowds, one has a tendency to get claustrophobic) or Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, but I liked it more. It was well lit and in a nice, small piazza. The basin was shallow and set into the ground so that the actual fountain was mostly eye level. It was interesting to stumble onto unexpectedly, especially since I had read about it before and knew it at once.

I decided to buy a beer there. A small one, while I waited for Jim and Yashar. The girl at the small bar in the piazza, the small EMPTY bar, said, "Sei". Sei can mean several things. It can mean, "You are," or "Are you", or "if", or, and this is the last thing I thought she said, "Six." I thought I didn't hear the first part and that she said "Di dove sei?" which means, "Where are you from?" Common enough question. So I replied, "Alabama." "No," she said, "Sei EURO." You never, ever, ever, pay that much for a small peroni. The ones twice their size would run, at an establishment like that, about 3-4 euros.

I forked it out and drank in bitterness while I waited for Jim and Yashar. Eventually they called me and I met up with them on the main thouroughfare in the Ghetto (did I mention this is where we get the word ghetto?). They led me to an old middle school buried in the ghetto; this old school had been converted into a multi-purpose club. I'm not much into clubs, but this place was undeniably one of the coolest places I've seen in Rome. In Philly it would be famous. It's in the heart of the Jewish Ghetto, every room had some different feel or type of music playing, it was four stories high, in the center of the whole thing was a giant courtyard where the children presumably used to play games. The lunch room was the bar. The place was also inhumanly packed. I saw a friend of mine there and talked to him for a bit-- he was en route to Tuscany for a meeting with the director Spike Lee. He was going to be a translator for Spike Lee's next movie-- a World War II film set in Italy and centered around a squadron of black soldiers. I was impressed, a little.

I talked to several other people there, but didn't dance or anything. Not my style. But maybe I'll go back one day.

This is a pretty typical day here.

Well, I'm going to catch a train back to Marino now. Hope everyone is good.