An entry about the trip to London is pending and will be for some time.  Sanford and Susanna arrive in Florence soon, and having just picked up fresh fruit and vegetables from the Santo Spirito market, I am leaving to meet them at the train station.  I wanted to note briefly an encounter the other night on the Ponte Vecchio while out on the town with a friend, a former submarine officer.  I overheard them speaking to one another and said, "Ya'll must be from the south, and you sound like you went to Sewanee."  Both reckonings were correct; two were freshly graduated Sewanee alumni (one had made it through only two semesters having never learned where to smoke one's marijuana on campus), and the night's shenanigans intensified.

Excellent Saturday

Wake up late.
Eat a long, leisurely lunch at a surprisingly decent all you can eat Asian fusion restaurant with a friend.
Ride along the Arno River until the back path is lost to grass and stones.
Fix a bike for a cute Venetian girl waiting near a closed bike shop.  Get treated to a coffee and gelato by the same cute girl.  Former flatmate sabotages the situation during the email exchange when she tells the other girl that if she wants to contact her, just contact you:
"Abito sotto lui." ("I live under him," as if I were a sex addict or some form of totalitarian regime)
"No," you retort, "il suo apartamento è sotto il mio voleva dire." ("No, her apartment is under mine she means.")
Cute girl regards you both askance.
Your friend explains, "Ma siamo sempre insieme." ("That is we are always together.")
Another ride, this time through le Cascine, a large, beautiful park full of families, prostitutes, and thieves.
Discover a statue of George Washington.  Yell, "First in war!  First in peace!  First in the hearts of his countrymen!"
Discover a horse racing track and a shooting range with cheap rates.
Flying through the park on your bike, wipe out harder than you have ever wiped out in your life, sliding on your side five yards through the gravel with the bike still under you, dust billowing into the air and a crowd of amazed spectators running to your aide.  Spring up, announce to all that you are okay, get back on your bike, and ride off covered in dust and blood.
Shower, remove sharp gravel from your flayed left arm, and apply bandages to it.
Go out for Notte Blu and listen to a duet of classical pianists playing Mozart and Brahms in la Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza Signoria.
Get to bed early.

Tessera

In Poland, Wenus is the goddess of love.

Typos and the like

Dear readers,

I appreciate you're subscription to this blog.  Plesae excuse the large amounts of typos and grammatical mistakes.  Normally I fire these entries of pretty quickly and often slightly intoxicated.

Much lve,
Townsned

Amsterdam

I returned to Florence Tuesday from Amsterdam, which has become one of my favorite cities.  While Amsterdam is not a economic or industrial powerhouse like London or Berlin or a sheik destination like Pairs or Milan, it contains cultural and historical depths that can rival any European cities.  Over three hundred and fifty years of a strong middle-class and a balanced liberal mentality has made Amsterdam one of the most pleasant and friendly cities on the planet.  When I first arrived there from Florence and found the people to be so nice, I originally thought the Dutch were up to no good -- one never trusts a smiling Florentine.

I went to Amsterdam to visit my friend and distant cousin, Fort, who landed a job there a few years back.  He lives in an apartment, which boasts a rooftop deck that overlooks the Vondelpark, the city's largest park.  We caught up over a couple of real oltramonte beers, admiring the view and shooting at pigeons with an airsoft pistol.  At one point, I noticed a strange, electric green bird flying by; it had an elongated, forked tail and looked like it came from the tropics.  I thought that it must have been someone's pet parrot that had escaped.  When I pointed it out to Fort, he explained to me that the park was full of those birds.  I asked around over the weekend about the parrots, and it seems that Dutch traders brought them to Amsterdam from distant jungles.  The birds adapted, and during the winter they survive by growing heavy plumage.  It is too bad that other such animals didn't adapt.  I would have enjoyed watching monkeys in the park, noodling with the stoners.

The park, like the city, is an excellent human zoo, and I spent many hours walking or riding Fort's bike through the park and the city just observing the people.  I have not seen many places where people generally look so happy, and legalized marijuana cannot be the only reason.  Folks play frisbee and lounge about, young couples walk their strollers and children along the paths, and older couples stroll about holding hands.  The Dutch enjoy going to Vondelpark to relax, and in the late afternoon, many of them lie out on the grassy banks of the park's lakes, taking the sun and napping, while listening to mindnumbing techno, thumping heavily at 120 bps.  Nothing more relaxing.

On Friday afternoon, I ventured out to see some of Amsterdam's museums.  The following day was Queen's Day,  the Mardi Gras of Holland, where everyone dresses in Orange and city becomes one huge, seething party to celebrate the Queen of Holland's birthday.  Over the weekend, the city and the museums were crammed full of people, so I deferred visiting the museums until Monday, opting for the churches instead in the hope that the partiers and tourists had a different agenda.  I was right.  I found the Oude Kerk (Old Church) nearly abandoned and walked around it, surveying its architecture.  The church is located in the heart of the Red Light District, and in Amsterdam, the Red Light District is not a misnomer.  Hookers display themselves in front of glass doors, over which hang long, red fluorescent lights.  The rooms they occupy are minuscule and tacky, decorated with sparse furniture,   leopard print sheets, and colored lights that nightly illuminate the women who slither and sway in front of their doors, waiting for the right man, in a hexing glow.  Since it was the afternoon, the daylight harrowed these rooms of any mystique, leaving them bare and appalling.  Moreover, the B-Team whores were out.  They were mostly swarthy, African types, who knowing that looks alone wouldn't likely bring in the big fish, took to more aggressive measures.  I was staring up at one of the church's corner buttresses, trying to figure out how the church supported its roof since it contained so many large windows, when one of the hookers started wrapping on the glass door of her whore den.  I turned around around, she opened the door and yelled "Baby!  Baby!  Baby!"  I immediately resumed surveying the architecture of the church, but her sisters joined in cracking open their doors, hammering, and hooting at me.  Having never been so popular with women,  I was a bit flattered as I walked slowly and deliberately around the apse back to the entrance, pretending nothing strange was happening.

I enjoyed the inside of the church much more the its exterior.  Besides the lack of prostitutes, they had built the wooden roof of the church much like they would build the hull of a ship, the lightness of which explained the lack of buttressing combined with large windows.  Because the Dutch have been Calvinists for hundreds of years, they reappointed their churches to reflect their beliefs or at the very least their break from Catholicism.  There is not an altar anywhere, and the congregation faces from one side of the nave to a pulpit attached to a central pier.  Some of the windows have full or fragmented scenes in stained glass, but most are empty, allowing cool, white light into the interior versus highlighting any religious message.  This coolness is the mysticism of the Protestants.  It permeates their religious experience and thought, coloring the inexplicable purely with logic or creed rather than mysticism or emotion.  Neither the Catholics or Protestants can offer an equally accurate and consistent explanation of the visible and invisible world -- be wary of anyone who can -- but their approaches somehow makes it palatable.

Also in the Oude Kerk was the World Press Photo 2011, which displayed beautiful and often tough photographs.

That evening Fort and I grilled out with some folks and then went out.  It was Queen's Night, which was the pre-party to Queen's Day.  We wandered around the city, and I met more Italians than I usually meet in one night in Florence.  One trattoria that was selling six packs of Heineken at the door, and I spoke with the waiter and the cook, who was also the owner, in Italian, scoring a handful of free beers and an invitation to join the crew in the back for drinking and shenanigans.  I hung out there for awhile and came back up front for a few more beers.  Fort was talking with the waiter's girlfriend, who was American, asking if they had any Motown -- he was going to teach her how to dance and swing her all over the restaurant, he told her with a glimmer in his eye.  The conversation dropped dead.  The waiter looked at Fort evilly and told him to get out of his restaurant.  Fort was surprised and apologized -- he was just trying to be friendly.  The waiter was having none of it.  He pointed to the door and repeated his command.  The cook came over and asked what happened.  Fort explained, adding that he didn't mean anything by it, and that the waiter needed to loosen up.  The cook lost it.  With both his hands gesticulating wildly centimeters from Fort's chin, he violently demanded why Fort had the audacity to come to his restaurant and hit on the waiter's girlfriend and, even worse, think he could get away with it.  I apologized to the Italians, explaining that no offense was intended, and dragged Fort and our friends outside.  They were flabbergasted.  American and Italian culture differ on some points.  One point is that flirting is rarely casual.

We bar hopped the rest of the night, and oddly enough, we ended up in another trattoria, where speaking Italian earned us more beer.  After staying out much to late, we awoke the next day to Queen's Day.  The air was palpable with the energy of a city in high festival, and the day was the best of spring: clear, cool, and green.  We dawned our orange paraphernalia and walked through Vodelpark, which had been transformed into a massive flea market where Dutch children sell all of their family's unwanted items.  Dutch children look forward to spending their time during their city's biggest party of the year selling junk and haggling with strangers, which may explain why the Dutch have always been great traders and business people.  In fact, the economic crisis has hardly affected Holland.

It took us an hour to walk a kilometer.  We met up with more folks, grilled again, and after a few aspirin, began celebrating Queen's Day.  It was a great party, and the whole weekend reminded me of college on an citywide scale.  Despite a huge party on Saturday, people had been going at it since Thursday as hard as they could.  Our group would grow and shrink as we wandered the city, drinking beer and starting random conversations.  Techno thumped from every angle, the canals were choked with bottles and refuse, and a sea of orange people, drinking and forcing their shoes through the layers of garbage and crushed cans, talked, gestured, yelled, and danced.  If the rapture comes and the Apocalypse goes right, the world will look like Queen's Day.

I spent the rest of my time in Amsterdam's museums, and I found that coming home to Italy was difficult for two reasons.  First, I was leaving a beautiful, clean, well organized city to an old, dirty, city full of grimace and pretension.  Not every country in Europe is first-world.  Second, on the flight back, a beautiful woman sat two seats away from me and removed her scarf.  I immediately detected the perfume she was wearing.  It was Hermes, from a line that I had believed was discontinued nearly five years ago.  It was the same perfume that an ex-girlfriend of mine used to wear, and I was suddenly steeped in memories of her.  A time long since faded once again became vividly clear in a gallop of scenes and sense, the memory of her.  I leaned over and asked the woman if her perfume was Hermes.  She looked surprised and said that it was, but that it was also a new line released this year.  I told her that it reminded me of a girl I knew long ago, positing that Hermes let the line go dormant for a few years before releasing it again in order to drive new revenue off of an old product.  I am still not sure if I am correct, but I believe this is the most valid theory.  I never forget certain scents.

Kebab

It's 23:45, and I have been holding lovely conversations with Best Buy and Apple attempting to discover any possibility of recovering my computer.  The chances look bleak, but I was able to eat a kebab during one call with a nice chap named Austin.  Kebabs fall under the food group of fats, oils, and desperation.  I had quaffed a few rounds with Prof. Ewell after grading exams this afternoon.  Having gleaned a solid daytime buzz, I decided to purchase and consume a kebab on my way home.  This happened before 21:00, a world record, or at least a Western world record as no one west of the Adriatic has ever eaten a kebab sober or as a proper meal. The kebab, however, is a staple many in the Middle East, who bitter about their lot, which forces them to live a world of sand, heat, mountains, and ice and bans pork products, booze, and women, the three things that prevent most suicides in the West, are ready to cry “jihad” and murder us white, slobbering pig-begotten curs. I can’t blame them for being jealously irate, but I hope they take some small comfort from kebabs, which are delicious, as I did while speaking with Apple earlier this evening.

Besides eating a kebab, a few nice things happened today.  I finished grading exams.  Although they were take-home exams and Professor Ingersoll allowed the full use of notes, some students still did poorly.  Amazing!  Some people would fail at paint-by-numbers.  I had beers with Dr. Ewell and the anthropologist who wrote a book examining the anthropological implications of Walt Disney’s rides at the Magical Kingdom. We attempted to divine exactly how the world would implode upon itself, agreeing that Facebook, corporations, China, polarization in the US, fascism, and the automobile would be the leading culprits.  We agreed that baseball offers hope.  A charming Russian couple on their honeymoon joined us, and we all decided that Russia and America should be friends.  Nasdrovyah!  Best of all, I ran into Giulia, my old host-mom, on the street. We had not spoken since last year, when we talked over the telephone about plans that we repeatedly never realized.  We caught up again and are planning to meet soon, although I will not believe it until it happens.

I pack tomorrow to begin the next phase of living like a gypsy, not the whining, unwashed “Dammi una moneta per i bambani, per favore” type but the romantic, Stevie Nicks type.  I will be living in an apartment during high season in order to allow more vacancies, which will in turn lead to more revenue for the church.  Since everything I own fits into two suitcases, moving is only a matter of climbing a few flights of stairs; however, the apartment has no electricity, water, or gas.

Thieves!

Yesterday, someone stole my computer.  The burglary took place in the middle of the Easter service when I was celebrating mass with the congregation of St. Mark's in the basilica.  I believe that no greater offense has been committed in Tuscany since the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, when the Pazzi family in cahoots with Pope Sixtus IV (not Fourthstus VI) attempted to murder Lorenzo il Magnifico and his brother Giuliano during high mass at the Duomo.  They only succeeded in eliminating the later and then being chopped to little pieces, disemboweled and hung from the public buildings, or driven into exile by Medici partisans.  The difference between then and now is that my brother is alive and well, and having never seen the criminal, I do not know who to disembowel and hang from my window, although I would very much like to do it to someone.

Fortunately, I had backed up everything, and nothing else was taken, not even the charger.