A day in Mantova

The first time I went to Mantova I was the guest of an Italian family, their six year old twins were students at the summer English school where I was tutoring. We went together to Mantova with the other tutors and their host families, to see the sights and have lunch. I tried the ‘typical’ pumpkin pasta dish, which could have been nice if it hadn’t been flavoured with that marzipany almond flavour that I hate.

I had this idea that Mantova was a massive/normally sized city – a consequence of being shown around by other people is that it is easier to ignore some of your surroundings and just blindly follow the group leader. And so when I returned to Mantova on Friday with a friend, I was surprised to see just how small the city appeared on the map. It’s also surrounded by artificial lakes on three sides, meaning you quickly come to the end of the city by walking too far in any direction. So it was perfect for some late-summer touristing and wandering.

One of those many lakes ^^

We spent a lazy, languid day, checking out cake shops, the cute rococo theatre and lunching on pasta at a restaurant that used fake sunflowers (!) as table ornamentation. It was also one of those places that refuses to serve tap water, but at least the food was good.

A sleepy afternoon in Prague

Groggy notes written after waking from a nap, and a couple of photos of Prague, too..

I woke from my nap two hours ago and I’m still in that groggy stupefied state – so sleepy and so tired. My afternoon of last minutes Prague sight-seeing was interrupted by a text from Matt; he had headed home earlier and we forgot to do the key exchange. So back up the hill I went. For a burrito, a sweet Jaritos soda and a nap. You can tell I was in Prague, right? It wasn’t a bad end to the afternoon, but it involved a little less Prague than I would have liked.

And so I spent the rest of the afternoon lounging around our apartment (a comfortable little number in Praha 3, if anyone is looking for a recommendation I can send you the airbnb listing) – reading, snacking, internet browsing, future wondering. So achieving little, really.

The first time I really heard of Prague was when my cousin visited there, gifting a pair of earrings to me in the process. It sounded so exotic to me, so European. And we finally went. And there were so many people! There’s that travelling in August thing again. Never a good idea. And that wave of heat has still been sticking around.

So the old city was so hot and so crowded. And yet we still went out in the heat of Thursday to do one of those Sandemans three hour walking tours. And all those tour groups (ours included) kept having to squeeze past each other to reach such and such monument or sight, or such and such piece of shade. It’s around this point that a city starts to stop looking like a city and more like something of an amusement park. And the buildings are so beautiful and so ornate that they only add to this illusion, they could almost be unreal.

Often, halfway through these longer trips that we sometimes take, I start to wonder why I am so keen to travel, on the idea of travel. That conversation in my head starts to revolve around the same points, of whether this is all just one long holiday – nothing more enlightening or worldview expanding about it. Just another form of mass consumption, of pleasure seeking and leisure.

And, actually, on this trip we have both been working, so these thoughts are a little more unnecessary than usual. Even my holiday reading is an Italian book, so I’m still studying alongside. I would likely write more here, but we’re travelling with only Matt’s computer and he needs that for real work. So.

On the walking tour, our guide was discussing different perceptions of history around the world – what 1000 years looks like to someone from New Zealand, compared to someone from Europe, compared to someone from Egypt. This haphazard European history lesson we have been putting ourselves through the past two years has been one of the many valuable things i have got our of our regular travel. (That, and the food.) I know far more about empires, kingdoms and wars than I ever used to. It could have been learned through books, but, if anything, any desire to read those history books comes from visiting certain places. And of course, all this can only help next time I play Trivial Pursuit against my dad. So it’s good for something!

How to communicate (a long form wondering)

Stories in the sand, in Nice, France

Developments in communication technology over the past 15 years used to feel as if they were aligned with my own growth. The internet arrived at my house just as I became a teenager, and I bought my first mobile phone when I was 16. Both came in time to be used to email, text and instant message those same people I saw all day at school. In my first office job out of school, our antiquated computer system printed on that old-fashioned computer paper with the holes down the sides, and an email server that looked nothing like the Microsoft outlook I encountered when I started at my first full-time job three years later.

And now that I am nearing 30, life developments no longer happen so fast for me. With this comes the feeling that I have enough tech and communication tools in my life. I skype, email, instant message, I send photos, videos, texts, documents, and I blog, Instagram and tweet (I also sometimes learn things) – all, often, from an iphone that seems every smaller compared to the newer models. I can also while away hours not doing anything in particular, wondering about the lives of some Pinterest pinners, boring myself with Buzzfeed and attempting to read all of the internet. The balance between internet and private and virtual and real still exists, even if not always maintained.

But just because the rate of my own change and growth has slowed doesn’t mean that anything else has, or will. And just because I don’t feel like I need new methods of communication doesn’t mean that they won’t keep coming. Or just because I think they’re a bit ridiculous doesn’t mean they will go away. And so I have to ask myself questions like, is there a place for snapchat in my life? (The answer to that one is yes, but barely.)

Notes on post its and chewing gum, Verona, Italy

With all these shiny happy things, I sometimes just really miss receiving personal post in the my real-world letterbox. A Facebook message or an email from a friend is awesome, but it’s not quite the same as a short scribbled message on the back of a postcard. I still have, among the many things in my parent’s attic, a shoe-box with the letters, cards and postcards received over my child- and young adulthood. I was a terrible letter writer, lacking the imagination to start my letters with anything other than ‘how are you? I’m fine’, but writing letters was what we did. I wrote to my grandmothers, family friends who lived in different cities, school friends who moved away. I wrote to my cousin at her first year hall of residence at university, her value as a person clearly illustrated by the responses she sent me (first year of college, likely still opening letters with ‘how are you? I’m fine’.

Five years after that letter from my cousin, my sister went to America and Europe for a multi-month tour. As well as post, we did get telephone calls from her (this was pre-skype) and emails sent from the shared-computers, ones that she had to line up to use. The letters that she sent me are stored in that shoe-box. But the emails..? Mum used to file them into an email folder, but I doubt that still exists. Does the digitisation of communication mean you no longer have to store as a keepsake everything ever received? For an email, what would that look like, anyway? A print out identical to an office email? A pile of computer paper neatly stacked in the same box it came in? Or as an electronic folder on the computer desktop, never again opened and hogging space on a hard drive?

It is easier to pretend that old emails don’t exist. A couple of years ago I threw out some letters that brought back feelings of embarrassment and memories of awkward teenage moments I didn’t want to remember. I briefly had an old teacher as a pen-pal (who was legitimately awesome) who counselled me on a mean girl in my glass. I recycled those letters, because I care about nature, but how much easier is it to select all and trash little bits of internet fluff? Or, even better, to simply abandon old email accounts and wait for the hosting site to shut them down.

When my age group started to travel, friends would send bulk email updates with what they had done and where they had seen. The emails have now been replaced with a single photo on Facebook, which is somehow expected to convey in an instant what an email achieved in a half hour. I still send the occasional postcard and birthday card, even if Italy likes to make trips to the post office an expensive privilege. I know they are never received on time, and they are still accompanied by the Facebook post, because things are no longer official unless they’re virtual and visible, but I prefer it just the same.

Notes on Morocco

I showed a friend the camera phone photos I took during our week in Morocco (he actually asked to see them, I was a little surprised, it seems that everyone does so much travel of their own now they aren’t ever interested in anyone else’s) and a very narrow theme was immediately evident: doors, men in pointy hoods and the occasional medina/souq appearance. How formulaic. While a small sprinkling of the evidence is here, those doors may well get their own post (5 of 7 postcards bought home were also of doors ahahhaa).

We had almost, up until the day of our departure, decided not to get a hotel our first night, as our flight arrived after 1am and the first trains started from 4. Common sense (and our advancing age) prevailed, and the airport hotel was duly booked. Best decision ever.

We loved our Moroccan breakfasts, especially the daily pancakes served up in Marrakech. One oily and flat, like a Malaysian roti, the other puffy and light, like an English crumpet. With a bread basket, fresh orange juice and mint tea on the side. All eaten with piles of butter and super sweet honey. The Italians who we always seemed to share hotels with didn’t appreciate the pancakes so much. At least one pancake style would be left on the table while they would, however, have finished all the bread. There is a stereotype that Italians only like Italian food, and some stereotypes are mostly true.

I love mint tea: mint tea for breakfast, mint tea for an afternoon break, mint tea post dinner. Mint tea all the time! We had one glass of wine each the whole week we were there, and subbed it out the rest of the time with this super sweet replacement. New Years eve was even celebrated with a glass of mint tea (and then an early bed time, advancing age and all that). I aaaalmost considered buying a silver teapot and tray set, but then didn’t. Next time, perhaps.

Meat, and food generally, is much more immediate at the butchers stands in the souqs. The chicken butchers would have fresh chicken meat in front and shelves of live chickens behind, ready to be taken home (alive). We passed one vendor struggling to keep two live chickens on the scales with one hand, while adjusting the weighted scales with the other. Another day we walked past a butchers with four fresh goats heads lined up in a row, little tongues protruding ever so slightly. I appreciate that this meat is likely fresher, and the animals likely treated better, than any of the factory over-farmed animals that end up in our supermarkets, but it turned my stomach a little all the same. I’ve had vegetarian thoughts ever since I was 20 so maybe this will be the year I finally succeed.

There were donuts in Fez, though annoyingly I never got a second chance at the stall who sold the best and cheapest. Knowing that scarcity breeds demand, that donut seller was only at his spot for short and varied times each day.

But, it doesn’t always feel so easy to find food. Our first morning was spent in Casablanca, where a combined total of 5 pan au chocolats were the only food we had from breakfast until lunch. One internet resource or guide book had said that Moroccans generally eat at home, so most restaurants generally cater only to tourists, while the cafes are more of a male tea drinking establishment.

It also wasn’t so easy to get lost in the medina, especially once you got north of the souq in Marrakech. There was always a man or a group of children ready to tell you that there was nothing further this way, though whether it was because they were genuinely helpful or because they just really didn’t want you invading their part of town I’m not really sure. It does feel that a way of life is being experienced as a theme park by all the tourists rolling through, so if it was the latter I really don’t blame them. More amusing was the group of kids who tried telling us in French that we were heading down a no-exit street, who then laughed at us on our way out again. Our favourite thing to do here (and generally everywhere) was just to wander and get lost and the constant hustlers offering to take you to the tannery, or to the square, or to the museum got a little boring.

We were lulled into a false expectation of how warm it was going to be by misunderstanding people’s comments of ‘oh how warm it will be’. They of course required the follow up of ‘compared to here’. In Fez our concrete-room-on-the roof with a centimetre gap under the door didn’t provide much warmth, nor was the breakfast on the exposed sunless terrace so comfortable. But it was much warmer compared to Trentino, and wearing close to every item of clothing in our bags wasn’t enough to stop either of us catching colds when we arrived back in Bologna at close to midnight.

I had a revelation on this trip, though it is rather startlingly obvious, that if I had stayed in Wellington post graduation and worked in steady jobs between then and now, that I would have earned enough money to have both paid off my student loan and saved a fair deposit for a house. The choices we make, huh. I still choose this option, but interesting to think that those other things could have been nice. I know some people manage to do all the things all at once, but I’m not so smart.

Other things about Morocco:
There is a cheap (maybe 45 dirham, or €4.5) and easy train from Casablanca airport to the main train station. We stayed at the Relax airport hotel near the airport, which has terrible reviews on Booking.com but is actually really fine. They also have a free airport shuttle, bonus! That both picked us up after our late flight and returned us to the airport the next morning, where we caught the train.

There seem to be Ibis hotels next to all the main train stations (at least in Casablanca, Fez and Marrakech).

Trains are a super easy and comfortable way to get around. They are slightly pricier than the buses, but only by a little bit. We travelled second class where you do not get a reserved seat but never had a problem with space (we were travelling in late December) except for the time we shared spots with an annoying English family and their annoying teenage sons, who would have preferred to have their feet up on a chair, rather than us sitting in it.

We were told things about dodgy stomachs so only used bottled water and sanitised our hands before eating anything. Matt started out a little freaked out by the street food, but relaxed a little when I pointed out that our breakfast pancakes and orange juice likely came from those same street stalls. Most of our meals were eaten in restaurants.

Roaming in Rome, part 1

One of the problems with having a degree in Media Studies is that people expect you to be good at creating all kinds of media. Not so, my degree was completely focused on the theory side and I came out with no practical skills whatsoever. That hasn’t stopped me (well actually it did but five years post graduating I’m getting around to it) from attempting to make a video anyway. I put together bits of stuff I filmed while we were in Rome, with a less than steady hand and a camera that liked to refocus itself. Music is Apple Pie Bed, by Lawrence Arabia.