Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Backyard blessing



Here it is
a gorgeous day
on a long holiday weekend
and here I am, still recovering
slowly
way too slowly
from a nasty cold
wondering
am I blessed or cursed?

I sat outside on an old chair
in the sun-dappled shade
next to my house
overlooking the golf course and Pearl Harbor
soaking up the warmth
of some afternoon rays
a box of Kleenex, glass of water
and assorted reading material
close at hand. 

I seldom just sit
and watch a day unfold around me
as it did today

Under a serene baby blue sky
white clouds promenade by
A chaotic overgrown pink and orange bougainvillea hedge
grows diagonally downhill
keeping watch over golfers on the green
like some giant comic caterpillar
or perhaps an enormous caterpillar sushi roll
covered with orange tobiko fish eggs

First a small white butterfly
then a large elegant yellow and black one
visit the bougainvillea hedge
and flutter away  
A fat black bee buzzes reconnaissance
flower to flower
A lime-green lizard scurries along the metal fence towards the hedge
dodging a big brown one twice his size
who is left inflating the bright red air sac
in his throat, triumphantly

As usual, the many tiny dark green leaves
in the monkey pod canopy
sparkle and dance in the breeze
like a chorus of small shimmering stories
sung over and over and all at once

I try in vain
to capture the bougainvillea caterpillar critter
on my smart phone
but it is way too dumb
to see inside my imagination’s eye

And then
suddenly
it began to rain
A blessing
in my own backyard.

 

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Cinque (#5) True confessions: We took a Rick Steves Tour


Tourguide Nina in animated conversation
with ristorante owner Angelo - Florence, Italy  
I'm slightly embarrassed to tell people we took an organized tour in Italy. Until this trip I considered traveling with a tour group to be something for old people …or those who fear the unpredictable nature of travel…or clannish types who wish to avoid exposure to local riff-raff.  Growing up in Washington DC, with its throngs of summer visitors, we natives of our nation’s capital were distantly disdainful of the monument and museum-going crowds. And as a near 40-year resident of “paradise”, busloads of impervious and insensitive tourists are the ever present annoying-to-offensive norm.  So perhaps this explains my prejudice against the idea of joining a group of strangers to trek through a foreign land.  The best option, of course, is a local acquaintance or family member who offers to show you around and takes you off the beaten track to their favorite spaces and places, as we enjoyed when we visited Joel in Hungary in 2008; and when Kelly, Mom and I accompanied Uncle George to my grandfather’s native Ireland in 2004. This Italy trip was our first foreign travel occasioned not by work or a personal connection in country, and to a destination where we did not speak the language.

In my experience, while planning for trips can be fun, the extensive research and planning often becomes time consuming and stressful, and with all the other demands of life, to make this a real vacation, I wanted to skip some of that stress. As occasional vicarious viewers of Rick Steves’ (RS) travel show, we have always enjoyed his low key, “normal guy”, respectful approach to European travel.  Visiting his tour site, Peter and I liked that his tours are very active with lots of walking; small groups (24 to 28 people), focused on history, culture, art, people and food (vs. shopping). You have time on your own in each destination, you stay in small family owned hotels, and Rick Steves has a personal relationship with some of the towns and their residents. In fact, one of our tour destinations was Cinque Terra, five small cliff side towns that suffered major flood damage 8 months before our visit there. Rick Steves heavily promoted and contributed to the relief efforts in those towns and lowered the cost for our tour to encourage visitors to return and contribute to the fragile local - and national- economy


Post-tour, we give the RS “Heart of Italy” tour an enthusiastic thumbs up.  Our tour guide, Nina, was a well-informed, insightful, entertaining, hard-working woman in her late thirties, born in the US of Italian-American parents, now an expat living in Rome for the past 15 years and fluent in Italian.  Along the way, at the major museums and sites and in each town, we had extraordinary knowledgeable guides and storytellers – such that I was constantly scribbling notes and quotes in a series of small notebooks and returned to the US feeling as though I took a walking mini-course on Italian history, art and culture. I was extremely grateful to have the tour handle tickets, reservations and the inevitable bureaucratic headaches, so we skipped the long queues for major sites and spent precious time seeing and being there. 

Gabriel, guide in town of Lucca
"Ask me about history and I become serious.
Ask me about food and I become very, very serious" 
I was apprehensive about 2 things: (a) the tour group: would they be snobby, weird, politically reprehensible, overly intrusive and talkative, or simply be people we would wish to avoid and (b) the bus: the tour’s mode of transport from one city and town to another was via bus.  With a history of motion sickness, and a great fondness for trains, I was less than enthusiastic about this feature.  

Neither of these proved to be an issue. While we made no lifelong friends and the group was not diverse in age and ethnicity (most were well-educated white professionals or tradesmen our age or older; with the exception of one Japanese couple from California in their 30’s, a late 20-something daughter of another couple…and Peter), we found all to be pleasant and companionable, none to be offensive, and some to be, in fact, quite interesting.  And the bus was a large, comfortable, half-empty vehicle with big windows where folks could spread out and sleep, write, watch the scenery, socialize or not. At some point during each bus ride, Nina provided a short period of rolling commentary and background about the places we were passing and the town to which we were headed.  En route to our final stop in Rome, in addition to an enticing preview of Roman roots, Nina gave a talk on current events, politics and culture in Italy – with plenty of time for us to ask questions.  As you can imagine, I loved this part, and filled up many tiny pages. The bus was driven by Dino, a sweet young father of 2 children who spoke very little English, but when I told him “Siamo da Hawaii” (we are from …) he exclaimed “Hawaii is like a dream to us!” – and indeed, visiting our exotic shores must seem an impossibility to someone of his income and time in life.  I responded that “Italy is like a dream to us … and (with Nina interpreting) when my kids were little, I never thought we could come to Italy….but here we are…so perhaps one day your dream will also come true”  

The extensive walking and toting of one’s own luggage was as advertised. In fact each of us was only permitted to bring one suitcase of modest size, because one needs to be prepared to cart one’s bags from bus or train stations along narrow bumpy lanes to hotels, and sometimes to carry them upstairs in hotels with no elevators. Hotels were simple, some were charming, all were comfortable and in excellent central locations.  

Overall the tour,  which began in Florence, moved on to coastal Cinque Terra, traveled inland to historic towns of Lucca and Volterra, and ended in Rome, offered a good balance of city and small towns, scenic and historic, major sites and off the beaten path (or “Europe through the back door” as RS likes to say). 

Tour Improvements? Fewer multi-course dinners, more music and dance, and more trains!

This will sound strange, I’m sure, but we were provided with a few too many delicious multi-course meals; The traditional Italian meal is one of many courses (see blog entry Tre (#3), eaten late at night over many hours. I don’t know for sure, but doubt that average Italians eat like this every night, any more than most Chinese eat a 10-course dinner every night.  While some meals were on our own (mostly lunches), most dinners were organized, and by the end of the tour, Peter and I (and some others in our cardiovascular demographic) … could not quite stomach the volume of rich food and wine at dinner. It felt bad to waste good food, and we worried it might be an affront to the staff of the ristorante - who often included the owners, and, like American pollsters, seemed to be carefully monitoring our reactions. We always exclaimed it was delicioso, but (with a hand on the belly) e tutto (that’s enough).  Plus, one must always save room for the dolce (desert) J  

On this tour, there was no music or dance, either formal or impromptu (unless one counts singing Tanti Auguri (Happy Birthday) to fellow tour members, which I do not).  I would have liked to see some music or dance gathering, folk or formal, perhaps in lieu of a group dinner.  Peter and I even practiced a couple Hawaiian songs and baby hula just in case there was occasion for cultural exchange, which there was not--not too disappointed here!
If one was determined, of course, one could certainly get tickets to an opera, one of the nights in Florence or Rome – and one could always decline the dinners, but they were, after all, already paid for.  

It was a slight disappointment that this tour did not include Venice, however, I would not have cut anything else out – and staying 2 nights in each destination was a good feature.  

Hotel Pasquale owner
Felecita Pasini
in Monterosso al Mare
Surely, a big difference between traveling in a tour and on one's own can be the opportunities to meet local people and hear their views of their home and the world. It is hard to say if we would have had more genuine communication in a country where we knew only a few words of language and little of the customs. We had time before and after the tour and at least a half day off in each location to explore on our own, and during that time we made our share of errors in cultural etiquette (it took me almost till the end of the trip just to order caffe correctly) and enjoyed a few satisfying local encounters. But these “learning experiences” shall be the topic for a future blog post.  

While the tour included brief train rides into and between the lovely Cinque Terra towns, a longstanding yearning to travel by train caused me to engineer a 2-day post-Italy train journey for Peter and I from Rome over the Alps into Switzerland, flying out of Zurich.  So, for this leg, I happily took on the pre-planning fun and stress. It turned out to be an incomparably gorgeous whirlwind ride through extremes of climate and culture… and is the promised topic of yet another blog post somewhere down the line.