Tuesday, April 17, 2001

Our last morning in Roma, and we bring our myriad fighting styles up against the shower. (It's a big, open tub with a hand sprayer and no curtain.) Mark masterfully utilizes "Squat Like A Monkey!", a technique designed to minimize drippage and sprayage onto the bathroom floor. (It is also maximally modest.) I favor "Stand Tall—Like David!", in which I let the water cascade over my fully upright form (and much of it, obliviously, onto the floor). With this style, I can also check myself out in the mirror, and revel in egregious nakedness in a large room. (The bathroom's cavernous.) Matt goes with a David variant, in which he stands facing away from the mirror, minimizing visual exposure to himself in the buff. Erin takes baths.

We're all booked on overnight trains tonight—Erin back to Wien, the M's south to Brindisi (and the ferry to Greece). So, we're forced to check out of our lovely four-bed suite, and stow our luggage with the hotel. We also have no plans yet for filling up the day; but I convince the others to slog back to the Vatican again, in the hopes that St. Peter's Basilica will be open.

Sadly, it isn't—instead, some guy in a tall hat is conducting Easter Mass, or something. The nerve. We stand respectfully for much of the mass, and get a glimpse of His Holiness (in PopeVision^TM!). [The day before, we took note of merchandise for sale in the area (including St. Peters shot glasses!). Sadly, despite the rain, our imagined "Ponchos Pilate" were not for sale anywhere; much less "Pope on a Rope."] Also, it doesn't appear that the reopening of the Basilica is imminent; we depart, thwarted. Still, we can hardly complain about having seen Easter Mass at the Vatican.

We head north along the Tevere, to the Villa Borghese, a sprawling complex of foliage, stone, and stuff. We argue politics for awhile, with me self-righteously inveighing against Clinton, as always. Otherwise, we pass the hours pleasantly in the park. Amazingly, I convince Team Italia to have a third go at St. Peter's. ("What else are we doing?") On the way, in front of an unnamed structure that is either a castle or (more likely) an aqueduct, Mark buys a donut the size of Erin's head (as easily discerned from the photo). From there, we angle back into V.C. again, and find ourselves talking theology—specifically, transubstantiation.

M: It was that issue, and indulgences, which pretty much caused the split of the Church.
M: [gesturing at St. Peter's] Hey, don't knock indulgences; they paid for all this.
E: Also, remember—the people who paid are in Heaven now.
M: And Martin Luther's in his own level of Hell—where somebody comes by and nails a sign to him every day!

And, sure enough, the third time's the charm—the Basilica's open for business! (Erin and I agree Mom will like this story . . .) And, well, St.   Peter's   basically   knocks   the   wind   out   of   you.

Walking back to retrieve our cached luggage, I start to worry about the coming transportation challenges. (Also, being homeless is wearing on me, I find.) Gloria Steinem once noted, "I don't like writing; I like having written." I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps I don't like travelling so much as having travelled . . .

On a cheerier note, I hand off my Rome guidebook to the hotel deskman, for the use of future guests. Normally, I'm quite acquisitive about such things; but on this trip, to save weight, I've been leaving guidebooks and maps in my path, all across the Continent. (In Siena, there was a Rough Guide Tuscany on the shelf; but the Siena section had been ripped out. Pleasingly, I was able to replace the missing pages with my ripped out Siena section from Fodor's Italy. 8^) Anyway, in a word, I'm finding the shedding process quite liberating. I mean, who did I think was going to come by my apartment and be impressed to see a Rome guidebook on my shelf?

We say an affectionate farewell as I put Erin on her train for Wien. Then, Mark & Matt & I have almost 5 hours to kill before our train. We find a lovely bar, then a restaurant. Finally, our heads hit the couchette pillow hard.

We awake in the far south of Italy, and get coffee in an overcast Brindisi—which is actually pretty cute. Unfortunately, we don't find it cute that nobody is sailing a ferry for Greece today. DAMMIT! Oh, well, what the hell are we doing, anyway? After securing our tickets for a 7pm passage tomorrow, we find we're able to check in early to a cheap, nearby hotel, and settle ourselves down to relaxing and doing laundry. And making use of the cybercafe. 8^)

Walking by the harbor, Mark notes that he enjoyed the challenge of getting into Rome, finding his way to the hotel alone, etc. I reply that every game played by humans basically has one core function: to make things hard on purpose. Still—while I have gotten some satisfaction (and confidence) in overcoming the difficulties of this trip—I think the bloom is a bit off the travel rose for me.

On my 27th birthday, in October of 97, I had never set foot outside the continental U.S.; since then, I've been trying to make up for lost time. But I've seen a few places now, and dabbled in a few tongues, and bested a few trials in foreign lands. The sense of urgency is gone. There are a few trips I still want to do, but probably not right away. On my first big trip, in Guatemala, I considered that maybe I didn't need that trip of itself so much, as the rest of my life needed to have the experience, the perspective, the adventure of it. Considering it thusly, I realize I'm already looking forward to being back in Palo Alto, in many ways.

Ali once noted, "That's what money is for, is for travelling." And I thought she might be right. More recently, she said, "Travel's shit, really." What she meant was the transporation glitches, the delays, the expense, the lost/stolen luggage—and, mainly, that travel is still so worth doing in spite of all of that. I suppose that travel, like most everything, is a mixed bag. I'll just try to remember to count my blessings . . .

Good cheer on dinner! After a fruitless walk to the cybercafe and arcade (both still closed, Easter Monday), Mark and I stumble on a highly copacetic bar. They've got 5 brews on tap (5 styles under one label), good bar snacks, intensely friendly staff. (And an arcade next door!) We start in on a couple, then I run out to raise Matt from his siesta to join us. Conversation ranges over high school chicks we should have but didn't, or did but shouldn't have, dated; our greatest historical paintball moments; famous, mad philosophers Matt has met (Steven Pinker, Daniell Dennett); and the unlikelihood of our presence in the universe. To set the scene, I review:

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. For the first billion and a half of that, pretty much all you had was roiling, cooling magma, and a lot of deadly solar radiation. Then, you suddenly got single-celled life—blue-green algae, other forms of "goop." And that was all you had for two billion years. At that point, you got multi-cellular organisms, and eukaryotes, and thinks got a lot more interesting. To skip a couple of steps . . . about 100,000 years ago, you got homo sapiens sapiens, which were enough like us that you could, you know, hold a conversation with them.

Anyway, lately, at night, I look over at some nearby tulips or something, then I stare up at the starry dome—and spontaneously and uncontrollably begin laughing my ass off. Here's what the universe is, in a nutshell: unfathomably large, burning, fusioning, balls of hydrogen; and unconceivably long stretches of empty, freezing vacuum. And somehow we got tulips out of the deal. TULIPS! How the hell did this happen?

Further, mixed in with the tulips, we've got these mobile hominids, six billion of them—with protein-based, neural networks in their craniums that are so complex and subtle that they can contain a symbolic representation of the emptiness of the universe, and the unlikelihood of the tulips inside of them. Finally, if you're still not floored, three of these hominids sit in a bar in Brindisi, and squeeze air out of their lungs, channelling it with their lips, tongues, and teeth, and convey to each other a very detailed account of the notion of the vacuum, and the tulips, and the neural networks. They pass it around.

The more I learn about evolutionary science, cognitive science, and cosmology (which, admittedly, isn't much yet), the more utterly stunned I am by things—and the less I can even imagine that religious folks could be more awed by all of this (considered as God's creation). God, frankly, is a lot more likely; in some ways more plausible. Blessings, indeed.

[Note: Mark has objections to the above, on statistical grounds; but it's my damned dispatch, and I'll hang on to my sense of wonder if I want to.]

Tonight: Greece. Cheers.

Michael