On the docket

Today's focus will be packing bags for my Tuesday departure to the US (since we'll be at the beach for the weekend, returning Monday). I should say "bag" because I'm aiming to cram a month's worth of stuff into one carry-on suitcase. And since our activities range from camping and hiking to city dining and wine tasting, in temperatures ranging from Death Valley Pickle to San Francisco Fickle, I imagine the task will be a bit tricky. I will count on layers, and on laundromats, to make it work. I'll choose the most lightweight things I own. The clunkiest things (tennis shoes, for camping/hiking, and jeans and a sweatshirt) I plan to wear on the plane. So here's hoping for the best!

Almost a year ago was the disastrous pre-trip where I discovered that our paid-for tickets did not exist. So another task today will be thorough confirmations of all plane tickets.

There are still a million details to figure out for the Las Vegas/Grand Canyon/California driving tour, but I figure I can do a little bit of that while I'm in Boston, and that we can also just go with the flow and find places to sleep on the fly. Is that a bad idea? It being high season and all?

Last but not least, tonight we're going to see a Madeleine Peyroux concert at the beautiful Palau de la Música Catalana. Yippee! M's birthday gift from his parents were concert tickets, and we got to choose which concert (limited by the fact that it had to be, um, today, the only day M. is in town before our trip and without prior commitments). Lucky for us, this concert is happening today, and lucky for me, the birthday boy is sharing his present with yours truly.

Reader

Last night a friend came over, a friend we haven't seen in months, and part of his news concerned a business venture/harebrained scheme that involves selling ebook readers to the European market. He wanted our two cents as to whether this is a good idea. In the US, the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle have made some waves, but here there are few to zero places to buy such devices, and publishers are correspondingly slow to format new books in European languages. Anyway, whatever he decides to do, the best part is that he had a Reader with him. And he left it with us for a couple of days to try out!

I will defend and champion the old fashioned, ink-and-paper book as long as I have breath, but I have to admit I jumped up and down like the geek that I am when the Reader come out of its box. I've been loosely following the news on these things but hadn't yet held one in my hands, much less used one to read a book.

So last night before falling asleep I curled up in bed with a Ken Follett e-ink novel (pre-loaded, it was pretty much my only option longer than a twenty-page excerpt) instead of my ink-ink James Baldwin novel. I am rather surprised about this, but I loved it (not the novel--blech, the experience)! "Turning" pages didn't involve anything more challenging than a slight pressure of my thumb, which in bed with a husband who is bound to bolt upright and look about him as if an intruder had just catapulted through the window when I make too much noise, is an advantage.

I'm enthusiastic about the e-ink, which really is easy to read and easy on the eyes, in bright light or in low light (although there is no internal light source, so in the dark, I still needed a lamp). The device is a pleasure to hold, weighty without being heavy, and is a perfect compact size; I could slip it in my purse and easily bring it on the metro or on the plane.

And for sure, what made me interested in the thing in the first place are the implications for travel. I routinely lug around piles of novels to read while I'm in the air and wherever I'm going. Imagine no more heavy knapsacks! Imagine being able to refer to books that I needed for research without bringing the book along! Hundreds of books in one!

Which brings me to the drawbacks. As a literary scholar, I see great potential for this thing but have a feeling the realization is going to be long in coming. The titles available are bound to be best-sellers and standard classics, with not much in between. Poetry? Literary theory? History? Literature in other languages? (Which is the challenge our friend is facing.) Plus, it would be absolutely essential to be able to mark and annotate pages for future reference. The Reader has a "bookmark" feature, but it only enables you to "dogear" a particular page, with no way to distinguish why you did so. If you want to refer to your bookmarks, you get a random (the top?) line of text for the page, which doesn't help if you were interested in something further along. And your only option for deleting bookmarks is all or nothing. Plus, unless they come up with some very good interactive indexes and tables of contents, reference books will be as good as useless.

The menu interface leaves a lot to be desired, and can sometimes be slow. Even turning pages is annoyingly slow; there's a sort of black and white "flash" each time you do it. You can look at pictures and book covers but they're very slow in loading and only in black and white. It plays music, and you can stick headphones into it to listen while you read (not a feature I'd use, I don't think, since I don't like music piped directly into my head while my head is immersed in the world of a book).

I understand the Kindle does have internet connectivity, and does include newspaper and magazine reading capability. For me that would be useful, since a reader like this is the perfect distance between a laptop (on which I normally read the paper, but only at home or somewhere with internet) and a fancy phone (which I imagine is too small to really read a mag or paper), and would be perfect for commutes and travel--while saving oodles of one-use paper trash. The Reader, without these features, probably can't compete with the Kindle.

There are also looming questions about copyright, the price of books, digital vs. analog. Would I want both versions of the same book, if it's one I want to own and keep?

And the big question, the question our friend is asking us: Is it worth it? Would I buy it? For 300 bucks, I'd wait until they come out with better and cheaper versions before I'd buy. I'm thinking it's still not the moment to jump on this particular bandwagon. Hopefully someday the clever and cool folks at Apple will come up with a design that puts all the others to shame.

Resume

How has it happened that several whole weeks have gone by since last I wrote anything here? It was kind of not my fault, because of the lack of internet in Barcelona, although it is kind of my fault because I can usually get a neighbor's signal if I sit on or near one of the balconies. Plus, we were in Brussels this past weekend for a wedding, and there was internet. But again! Not so much my fault! Because we had guests staying with us and you know how it is with having guests: you end up running around doing stuff and not so much bloggity blogging.

So, enough excuses. Since I've dropped off the face of the earth (no skype either, not since the Great Computer Failure of June 08), I should just briefly--but chronologically, as I am unfortunately linear in my thinking--summarize what we've been up to since I came to Barcelona with intent to live. (You see, strangely enough, after all of this time visiting Barcelona on summers and vacations and weekends, and even after we bought an apartment here, I've never truly thought of us "living" here. And now I do, because we are. It feels good.)

Hold on, first another (non-linear, parenthetical) note: I just typed the word "resume" instead of "summarize." Even as I pressed the delete button I was dumbly trying to process: why isn't resume right? why on earth did I think it was resume? what's the right word anyway? My fingers, typing faster than my brain, typed resume because in Catalan, you say "resumir" to mean "sum up," "go over," "summarize." Can it be that Catalan has so infiltrated my thinking that I am using reverse false cognates?

Anyhoo. The first week here was a madness of getting the apartment in shape for the Mister's birthday party and for guests who were to spend the following weekend with us. It was grimy from disuse and lack of time, on prior whirlwind weekends, to clean. I finally was able to convince the electrician to come and install all of our lights, which was a relief because it meant that our restored original lighting is now in place, instead of naked lightbulbs. The weather was sultry hot, humid, sunny. I didn't sleep properly for days, because of the heat, and the noise from the street through the open windows. But it was better than Brussels, where jackets are still necessary.

We had a fun family-and-friends birthday party; everybody had just left the house around midnight when our weekend guests arrived--the same Italian friends whose wedding we attended in Sardinia. We went to the beach for the first time this year, we ate lots of good food, we trudged around the city in the heat, we watched Spain win the European football championship. Our Italian friend (a big football fan himself) was a little puzzled, I think, as to why the Catalans were rather lackluster on the cheering front, until we pointed out the Franco-era flags waving in the stands and listened to frenzied radio commentary about the "raza superior": it's amazing how football in Europe can be so...political, so closely tied to ultra-nationalism.

Our friends left last Monday, and I finally had a rather calm few days to myself here. I got some work done, explored the neighborhood, did a little sales shopping. (In Europe--well, at least in Spain and Belgium--the sales are restricted to post-Christmas and late summer. Other times of the year, it's rare to find anything on sale, and so during these sale months everyone goes crazy, and it makes the news, sort of like Black Friday. I myself rather prefer NOT to shop during these times, as formerly orderly shops become bargain-basement jumbles of clothes, and formerly solicitous salespeople become surly and snappy. But I went to buy some items I had my eyes on earlier, and snagged them on sale on July 1.) I also finalized our rather complex set of plane tickets from Barcelona to Boston (me) and Brussels to Sioux Falls (him), then Sioux Falls (me) and Omaha (him; yeah, don't ask) to Las Vegas, then Las Vegas to Barcelona. It'll be his first trip to my midwestern birthplace, and I haven't been in years. We'll be in Iowa/South Dakota for a family reunion, and then we're taking two weeks to drive around California. I have never been (less surprisingly, he hasn't either) to Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. So those are all on the list, and I have a feeling two weeks is going to start seeming awfully short.

I also got a haircut! I got a very short cut--a pageboy?--with long straight-across bangs. I've never had bangs like this and I'm still adjusting to them, but I think I like it. It looks kind of retro, kind of flapper-ish, and it went well with the beaded dress I wore to the wedding this weekend.

I had a bit of a misadventure when I flew to Brussels last Thursday. Somehow in setting the alarm I changed the time as well, so that when I thought I was waking up at 5:30 in the morning it was really 3:30 in the morning, and I had in reality only slept for two hours. Not until I was wheeling my little suitcase down the dark, deserted street did it occur to me to wonder why there were so few people and why it was so dark at 6 am. I showed up at the train station at 4:15 in the morning, and had to wait for it to open at 4:30. The first train to the airport was at 5:30, so I kind-of-slept for an hour, dragged myself to the airport and through check-in and security, and then kind-of-slept for another two and half hours because--Murphy's law!--the plane was delayed for two hours.

Upon arrival in Brussels, I had to rush home--shivering, because the skirt and tank top that had seemed so smart in boiling Barcelona did not quite cut it in chilly, rainy Brussels--change, and meet my Mister at a super swanky delicious restaurant called BonBon to celebrate our two years of weddedness. It was worth it though, because the meal was a memorable one and the travel stress melted away under the influence of a nice wine recommended by the sommelier and the handsome face across the table.

Unfortunately the glamor could last only for so long, because we had to clean the house in preparation for the guests who would be with us for the wedding, arriving later that night. The weekend was full of wedding flurry, inevitably. The bride and groom and many of the guests were a group of friends who had studied with the Mister at the Johns Hopkins International School in Bologna, a fun mix of Americans and Europeans of all stripes, and I got to meet some of them for the first time. The wedding itself was a civil ceremony that took place at the very grand town hall in the very grand Grand Place, and drinks afterwards were Belgian brews at a nearby brasserie. We danced and mingled until four o'clock in the morning, and the next day we were plied with the famous fries at Chez Antoine in Place Jourdain. I flew back to Barcelona late last night (the Mister had flown to Madrid for a conference) and well, here I am.

Here I am, that is, until a week from tomorrow, which is when the whole American adventure starts. I'm super excited to see family and celebrate and lolligag in cabins by the lake, but I'm really quite beside myself that we're finally going to take a driving trip around the west coast. Even if I end up feeling like foreigner in my own country.

Homebody

Somehow I managed to wake up an hour early, without realizing it. So at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, I am already dressed, my suitcase is packed, and I'm ready to leave for Barcelona. It's like someone just handed me an hourglass and all of those grains of sand are available for me to do with as I will.

I'm glad I have the chance to do a quick update here, because once I'm in Barcelona I won't have internet. We will alert Telefonica that we would like their services as soon as humanly possible, but we are resigned to the fact that Telefonica will not in turn provide us with their services as soon as humanly possible. In fact, they will probably wait as long as humanly possible to give our home an on-ramp to the information highway.

It has been quite stressful to contemplate leaving Brussels. Even though I know I'll be back here often, and I can use my husband to ferry any object I wish from one city to the other, I feel like I'm abandoning this little home I have created here, and all of my favorite things that make it feel like home. It's not so much a question of the stuff as it is a way to ground myself. I worry that I'll feel divided; I'm such a homebody that I need that extra reassurance of place, like a dog circling round and round before being able to settle down with a snuffly sigh.

Oh, one detail that I should not forget to mention is that the princess of Belgium came to our concert at the Cathedral on Friday! Even if I do say so myself, the concert was quite beautiful, fit for a princess, though during the event itself I hadn't figured out who in the crowd was Her (maybe my angle wasn't good). But we happened to be standing by the front entrance when she was escorted out, and the funny thing about the princess is that she totally looked like a princess. She wore a bright yellow dress of some stiff, tapestry-like material with a matching coat that flared at the knees. Her hair, in a shoulder-length bob, flipped out on the bottom. She carried a little matching bouquet of yellow flowers. As we stood there gaping, she was walked to the car, someone holding a huge umbrella over her head. Then, as her car pulled away from the curb, our friend decided to wave to her, and she waved back! We decided that's what she does for a living, so she should wave, shouldn't she?

A few more grains of sand...

Too sweet times two

It occurred to me after this weekend that I made the same mistake twice, once in Paris and once in Florence: I wasn't choosy enough about my street food.

The day we arrived in Paris, I was jonesing for a good crêpe. Dinner had been eaten, and I still hadn't had one; the situation was getting desperate. We were strolling the Champs-Elysées in the evening, and I decided to go for one of the little stands to the side of the avenue, even though I had my doubts when I saw that the crêpes were pre-made. Overcoming my doubts, I thought: it's Paris--all the crêpes are good, right? But sure enough, my lemon-sugar version was so terrible that I had to throw it away without finishing (which, if you know me, means that it had to have been really really bad): gummy re-heated pancake, too much sugar, not enough lemon to cut the sweetness. It was like eating pure, chewy, sugar.

By the time we had to leave, the next evening, I realized I still hadn't had a good crêpe. So as we headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage and get a taxi to the airport, I stopped at a place near Saint-Michel, dangerously at the heart of the touristy area near Notre-Dame. But there was a line (not always a good indicator, especially if they're tourists, but still a positive sign) and the guy was making crêpes to order. Plus, the chocolate was pure dark chocolate, a bar broken up and melted onto the pancake, so I knew my favorite, the banana-chocolate version, would likely be good. It was better than good, it was delicious, a perfect harmony of fruit, bitter dark chocolate, and warm crêpe.

But I did not learn from my mistake. In Florence, after having dropped my luggage at the hotel, I was supposed to go find the Mister, mid-presentation, at the Palazzio Vecchio. But first I had to eat lunch. I ordered a slice of pizza just so I wouldn't feel guilty about eating only ice cream for my meal, because what I really wanted was a good gelato. I again made the mistake of choosing the first place that I saw, on the corner of the piazza in front of the palace, despite my misgivings about the gelato's rather insipid look. It's Italy, right? All the gelato should be good.

The coconut and melon flavors that I chose weren't horrible enough to throw away, but they weren't that great either. My idea of a good gelato is pure, intense, condensed flavor. It should bowl you over. But these were just overly sweet ice creams with a hint of coconut, a hint of melon. The coconut too pillowy, the melon too grainy, neither the texture nor the flavor made it special.

Fast-forward a day and a half. I still hadn't eaten a good gelato (although, thanks to the generosity of the conference organizers, I had eaten a delectable meal at Rossini). We were heading home from dinner, and in the morning we would be catching the bus to the airport, and I didn't think 8 o'clock in the morning would be a socially acceptable time to eat ice cream. So it was then or never, but my hopes were dim, since it was nearly midnight. Yet, we saw a glimmer in the dark, the warm colors of an ice cream parlour across the street from the Ponte Santa Trinita, and a line of Italians waiting to order their cones. A good sign indeed.

I ordered a small dish of the pear gelato, and it was heaven. Like eating a perfectly ripe pear, an explosion of fruit in the mouth, the cool, dense texture of ice cream. I could leave the city a satisfied gelato-eater.

So I hope my lesson is learned, next time I want to eat a city's signature sweet without trusting my better judgment. Go where there's a line of locals, where it's made to order, where the flavors are home-made.

Your brain to bubble cool

For my birthday last month my parents sent me a lovely package, including a book of Emily Dickinson's poems and letters written to her friend, sister-in-law and next-door neighbor, Susan Huntington Dickinson. I've loved reading through it, not only because it offers a perspective of Dickinson that quite shatters the fragile, secluded spinster myth, but also because of the tenderness and spontaneity of their correspondence.

Here's a poem I especially enjoyed, one that expands on the idea, contained in a (later I think?) Dickinson line, "slipping is crash's law."

80

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full
Music on --
He stuns you by degrees --
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Etherial Blow
By fainter Hammers --
further heard --
Then nearer -- Then so slow
Your Breath has time to
straighten --
Your Brain -- to bubble Cool --
Deals -- One -- imperial --
Thunder bolt --
That scalps your
naked Soul --

When Winds take Forests
in their Paws --
The Universe -- is still --

Interlinking links

It turns out that the internet was neither invented by Al Gore, nor first developed in the 90s by a crack international team of programmers, but was dreamed up in 1934, right here in Belgium.

Today's New York Times contains a fascinating account of Paul Otlet, a Belgian librarian who conceived of a vast interlinked network of information, which one could access through a screen. From one's desk, one would summon text, images, audio, and film, and the screen could be divided into multiple "pages" to view documents simultaneously. This "bibliothèque irradiée" (radiated library) would serve to make humanity's thoughts available to all. He called his central storehouse of knowledge the Mundaneum, and today one can visit the Mundaneum in its incarnation as a museum in Mons, Belgium. Which I will have to do one of these days.

As I read the article, from my screen with its multiple pages, which came from a link in my electronic mailbox, and watched video within the newspaper article, and then googled a snippet of French from a visual of one of Otlet's manuscripts that I had glimpsed at the end of the video, and then read more articles about the same subject, I was floored all over again by the mere existence of the web, and its vast complexity. (And was all the more impressed by Otlet's prescience.) Even in the misery of an information crisis, the breakdown of my hard drive, the interconnectedness of digital knowledge is pretty mind-blowing.

Then again, there's of course something to be said for the tactile, the hands-on, the ink-and-paper world of knowledge. As a book lover, both of the world of language they contain and of the bound pages that form a beautiful object, I can't forget the generous sense of discovery afforded by the physical archive. There's a lot out there that's not online. In that spirit, a short editorial laments the disappearance of the copy editor's position in journalism.

Also, speaking of text and tactile, here's a charming story about an architect who designed an apartment as a chamber of secrets. The owners, after a year of living in the house, were sent a clue that sent them on a treasure hunt in their own home, in part directed by a book of stories that they soon found behind a false wall. Hidden panels, complex word games, cranks, keys, puzzles...I love how the physical space and the materials of the home's construction were fitted together in new ways to send them on a journey. Even better: the final "reveal" of the whole elaborate game is a poem written by the father and hidden in the walls of the family room, right under their noses the whole time.

And speaking of homes: this weekend we're making the "move" to Barcelona. As of Friday, I'll be done with French (oral exam was today), and will have sung in my final choir concert (we're premiering a new work, at the Cathedral). So off to Barcelona we go, in a summer experiment to transition our lives from based-in-Brussels to based-in-Barcelona. The Mister will still be in Brussels Monday pm-Thursday am, and I might come along from time to time. Hard to tell how it will all pan out. Of course I have not done any "packing" whatsoever, and have barely had time to contemplate what I should do to prepare for such a (semi-)move. I have no doubt that the transition will be slow and that bits and pieces of my life will remain in between the two places for quite a long time. I know it's the right decision, though, because the thought of leaving Belgium isn't at all making me mournful (yet?). I will miss choir, and the few good friends we've made here, and the swimming pool across the street. And I'll definitely miss my spacious kitchen and the living room that we've only just managed to furnish how we wanted it.

But in Barcelona there's an empty bookshelf, waiting for us to fill it with our beloved books. I know that then we'll feel like we're really settling in, building our own secrets into the walls.

Broken

I return to my little home on the internet after what seems to me like aeons, but what in reality was only a few days.

My computer (the professor) died, you see. The hard drive just gave up and petered out. According to Philippe, the dude at the place where I brought it for a second opinion, it was broken in several places. I now have a new hard drive, but it is of course entirely devoid of everything that makes my computer my computer.

And of course, I hadn't backed up in a looong time. I lost all of my pictures, all of my music (although I'm going to try to reinstate what was on my ipod), archived emails, translation work, poetry, and my thesis. Yes, my thesis. I have some piecemeal versions of things stored on a little flash drive, and everything dating before last summer is on the external hard drive. But, but, but... I'm mourning even the loss of my web browser bookmarks, because I had a lot of research discoveries stored in that list.

Last Wednesday and Thursday were spent in horror and denial. I felt very very alone, not only because I was without my computer (my source of pretty much all connection with the outside world, plus all entertainment--movies and music), but also because in this country of PC's, I didn't know where to turn, and my husband was out of town. I called my brother, international cell charges notwithstanding, ostensibly to get his advice on some attempts at resuscitation (I initially thought it was just a question of a too-full hard drive) but really just to hear his voice.

Friday I flew to Italy to meet up with the Mister for a quick visit to Florence, where he had presented at a conference. It was my only chance to see him during a long stretch of his travels, so at the last minute I had purchased tickets. Although when Friday rolled around I wasn't very much in the mood to leave town, it was a good thing I did because I could somewhat escape my computer woes (and, not incidentally, escape the frigid air and incessant rain that this country seems to think is acceptable weather for June).

Philippe called when we were standing in front of the beautiful Santa Maria Novella, only to inform me that it was impossible to rescue the hard drive. If sackcloth and ashes had been available, I would have been wearing them, accompanied by garment-rending and gnashing of teeth.

Dragging my feet, because I knew it would be depressing, I went to pick up the computer today. And indeed, it is depressing. I don't know where to start to make the machine feel like mine again.

More Sardinia

It's been a rainy, cold, rainy, gray, rainy week in Brussels. The kind of week that makes me want to hibernate. My mind protests--it's June!--but my body shrinks in on itself, my eyelids droop, and I am uncapable of tackling that sinkful of dirty dishes.

As an avoidance measure and a dose of escapism, I'll allow myself to revisit Sardinia for a while, to travel back to its stark landscape and think of the sun... (For part I, go here. For musical accompaniment, go here.)

***

The morning after the wedding we managed to tag along with our friends from Naples for a bit of sightseeing in Alghero. She: a petite but formidable Italian political science professor. He: a French professor originally from the Congo, who always wears fabulous powder-blue suits. They've been married for thirty-eight years--yet another example of the many multicultural couples we meet in Europe. For me, the best part was that we could speak in French; thus, at least while we were with them, I didn't have the frustration of understanding much of what was going on while not being able to muster complete sentences in response (as with Italian).

En route, we found out that it was his birthday that day, and that the main goal would be to find a great place to eat seafood for lunch. Besides a momentary pang of worry that we were intruding on their celebration, I was delighted with the plan. And the pang quickly disappeared as they insisted that the celebration would be even better with us along.

Alghero is a beautiful seaside fortress town (most of the fortresses having been built by the Catalans) and that day it its sandy stone walls were sun-drenched, the water glittering. After a brief stroll at the port, our friend spotted a restaurant terrace with perfect balcony views of the sea. We were shown to a table perched on a little bridge crowning an arch of the city wall, and thus we had views in two directions: the boats and water portside, and the stone alleyways leading into the town. We committed ourselves into the restaurant's care, telling them to bring an assortment of antipasti and the freshest fish of the day. What issued forth: a huge array of delectable plates of seafood. I especially remember a fish that was paired with fresh peaches, and another version of the octopus and potato salad we had eaten the day before. And the main dish, a magnificent spigola (sea bass) was just what we had been looking for: delicious, fresh, simply prepared.

We asked our waitress about Catalan speakers in Alghero, curious to see if we would find any. She herself didn't speak Catalan, and told us we would have a hard time finding someone. Nevertheless, as we strolled the city after our long lunch (a stroll that was enhanced by refreshing homemade gelato), we saw signs everywhere that Catalan was actively spoken and promoted: all street names and tourist information signs were in both Catalan and Italian, and many shops sported stickers indicating that "Aqui es parla Català" (Catalan spoken here).

Soon it was time to re-traverse the island to somewhere in the vicinity of Tula, a tiny town smack in the middle of Sardinia, for a party at the bride's sister's farmhouse. Earlier that morning, I had mused aloud as to whether we would see any of the nuraghi, prehistoric conical towers whose ruins dot the landscape. These towers are over three milennia old, and still are among the most prominent man-made constructions to be seen outside of Sardinia's cities. Despite a lot of driving, we hadn't glimpsed any, but as we followed the ribbons tied on the corner of country roads leading us to the party, suddenly looming up out of the hill was an impressive nuraghe, which the bride's nephew later told us was one of the most well-preserved examples.

Thus cheered and awed by the sight of such a formidable piece of history (mysterious, too; they don't know for sure what they were for), we drove into the farmyard. Inside a walled courtyard the family was busy setting up snacks, including homemade wine (in big soda bottles, labeled either AM--which somehow meant fruity/sweet--or secco), cheese made from the family's goats, and fresh olives, plus leftovers from the reception the day before. We admired the sweeping views, watched as the sheep were herded out to a far pasture, the shepherd accompanied by four dogs of amusingly different shapes. One of the little nephews found a scorpion somewhere, put it in a jam jar, and delighted in waving it under the nose of all the women. We went to see the goats and pigs, and visited the milking room and watched the sister (they couldn't stop work even when the party was at their house!) and brother-in-law wrangle 150 goats into the milking machines.

Sometime before the steaming plates of pasta were brought out of the cavernous barn of a kitchen, Stefano the guitarist showed up and someone got out an accordion, a harmonica, and a tambourine. As dusk fell, they traded Sardinian songs and Neopolitan songs, and little kids danced around them. At about this time, I found myself sitting next to the bride's mother, and even though my Italian was rather more like pidgin Spanish with an Italian accent, we had a long conversation about the house that she and her husband had built, what it was like to have six children, to give birth in a house with no running water...

Here are a couple of videos of the music, including glimpses of the matriarchs of the clan:


Sardinia accordion from Robin from Cant d'ocell on Vimeo.


Sardinia harmonica from Robin from Cant d'ocell on Vimeo.

When finally it was time to drive to Olbia, where we were staying before flying out the next morning, we made the rounds to say goodbye and give our thanks to our hosts. That's the thing about Italians: by then we were sent on our way as warmly as family, even though we had known most of them just for a short weekend. When I told the bride how beautiful her family was (that was a sentence I could muster in Italian), she impulsively squeezed me tight in her joy that I had seen it too.

Whirling

Where to start? My head is whirling a bit. Maybe the varnish has gone to my head. I just spent the last two days staining and varnishing our wall-to-wall bookshelves in Barcelona (we wanted a grayish color and I think it came out sort of blue and I'm not super happy with it, but since I was never really happy with most of the colors in the house [we chose them over the internet {in case it's not obvious, choosing paint colors over the internet is not a good idea}] the bookshelves can just be part and parcel of the strange pastel palette we had already established).

And that was after a quick overnight stay in Paris that felt so much more than quick. It felt ample and romantic, as trips to Paris should.

I was sad to miss the funeral of our friend in Vermont over the weekend, but I am even more grateful than ever for the contact afforded by modern communication: this blog, photos, e-mails, cell phones. Though it can't be denied that a wired world has sometimes changed our lives for the worse, in this respect it is reassuringly good. Living so far away from family and friends in the states would be so so much harder if letters or even just phone calls were all I had.

Also I want to write more about Sardinia, as promised, and that already seems like so long ago. I will need to write about it soon lest it all dissolve into hazy memory. Soon!

The sting

It's a strange, sad day. After French class, I went to the train station to buy my ticket to Paris for tomorrow. As I walked into the station, I remembered that the Mister's train to Paris was leaving just about at that very moment (he has a conference there today and tomorrow and so we're meeting up in the morning), and I ran up to the Thalys platform and walked down the wagons until I found his familiar profile.

There we were, saying a surprise good-bye while the train steamed and beeped. But he broke some news that left me sobbing on the platform as the train pulled away, time only for a brief hug.

A close family friend of ours in Vermont, a young guy only 24 years old, died suddenly last night. He had battled leukemia for seven years, had gotten better, and then now, within days of discovering that the cancer had returned, passed away.

It's an incomprehensible loss; he was an only child and my heart mourns deeply for his parents, dear friends who have been fixtures of my life since before I can remember. My dad wrote, "[our friend] understood that his life was in God's hands. But it's so terribly hard to understand why he was taken from us." It is terribly hard to grasp such a thing, where human understanding and comprehension in the face of death fail us.

So no poem today, rather a passage from the Bible that is a lifeline for the shipwrecked, a promise in the face of human despair of death. In one of its beautiful metaphors, death is simply a change of clothes, something as quotidian and comforting as a new garment.

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed--in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"

Sardinian wedding

I want to write about last weekend's wedding, but it seems so unreal to me already, like I lived for a short time inside a novel--one that takes place seventy years ago, peopled with archetypal characters and elemental landscapes--but then I woke up, or the story ended. In the novel, I was a character myself; I spoke halting but lilted Italian with a tiny wizened woman who wore all black and a silver bun (the bride's mother), and I listened to the goats bleating and ate cheese made from their milk, and watched the moon rise heavy and orange over the fields while a bright-eyed boy in a black cap crooned Neapolitan songs on his guitar. But I was also reading the novel at the same time, I was the outsider who awkwardly observed, the foreigner drinking it all in, in order to remember as much as she could.

And because I want to remember it all, and since my memory is unpleasantly spotty, I need to at least get some of the key things down on paper (as it were).

One of those key things was the serenata. At nearly ten pm on Friday night, we arrived in little Alghero airport without a clue as to who was picking us up, what this person looked like, or how to contact him or her. To our utter surprise, the groom himself pulls up (on the eve of his wedding!!) in a tiny car and hurredly introduces us to the other passengers, and we zoom off into the Sardinian night. It transpires that we are smooshed in the car with the Neapolitan musician who will be helping the groom to serenade the bride and thus woo her to the altar (the wooing had I assume already taken place, but not the serenading). We drive over an hour, picking up other carloads of friends at several strategic points, until we are a caravan of some twenty five people, and after pulling onto roads that are increasingly narrow and tiny, we end up on a dirt road in the middle of the island, stumbling up the bride's driveway in the pitch dark, everyone laughing and shushing each other and hoping that no one heard the cars or seen the headlights. I am stumbling more than I might have because the stars are an inverted bowl of brilliance and all I want to do is look skyward.

There is a balcony, and when the singing starts, everything is just as you might imagine it would be. Lights go on one by one, the dog starts barking, heads poke out of windows and doors. Eventually the bride, laughing and surprised, appears, and descends to embrace her groom. With liberal kisses for everyone else as well. We all sing along with the last song, and I do too, though I don't know the words.

Everyone is invited inside and even though it is midnight, and no one has prepared for our arrival (the groom assured me it was all a surprise, a tradition from his part of Italy imported to her part of Italy), out of nowhere appear piles of paper-thin crispy bread (pane carasau), homemade salumi, cheese made from the bride's sister's goats, and bottles of wine. And huge heaping platters of tender almond cookies. Everyone lingers by the door, and back in the yard in the dark, the guitarist starts playing again. My husband sings along, and we watch the moonrise. I have never seen a moonrise. For the first few minutes as it quickly moved up over the horizon, it seemed as bright as the sun, but without the sun's brightening effects on the sky. He and I fall asleep on the drive to the hotel, forty minutes back over country roads.

***

The next morning, again to our surprise, the groom appeared at the hotel at the appointed departure hour, this time wearing a blue suit and a shirt with brass bells at the collar. Someone handed him a bouquet of red roses. A long line of cars gathered, and bedecked with ribbons, honking all the way, we drove to the bride's village. This time we rode with professors from Naples, and all of us were puzzled when we passed the town hall, where the wedding was to take place, and continued to the same house we had visited the night before.

It turns out that the groom has to show up to collect the bride Sardinia-style, and receive a blessing from the family--the equivalent, I suppose, of a girl's parents/father walking her down the aisle. The roses were to convince her to be whisked off by the bell-rung boy. While we waited for her to appear, the guests mingled about and enjoyed a lavish spread of more of those delicious cookies and a tableful of others, including cloudy almond meringues, and coffee and moscatel and fizzy Italian aperatifs. When I walked into the house I was surprised to see a row of five elderly figures seated on a couch, every one of them in head-to-toe black clothes: four women with severe buns in their silver hair, and a gentleman with a cane and cap. They reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of the Mister's great-grandmothers (black clothes and black kerchiefs on their heads, every day) or of Italian women in the 1930s. It took me some time to realize that one of these ladies, whom I assumed were grandmothers and great aunts, was in fact the mother of the bride.

When the bride descended the stairs, to thunderous cheering and camera flashes, and accepted the bouquet from her intended, he brought her outside, where her mother waited with a plate of rose petals and rice. As we all watched, she recited a blessing, flinging rice and roses over their heads, and smashed the plate at their feet. (More plate smashing was to occur throughout the day: at the town hall after the wedding, and at the hotel before the reception.)

The wedding itself took place in the town hall, a square unlit box with humidity-warped, faded 1970s travel posters on the walls. But the warmth and joy of all the participants filled the room, and the judge (who wore a red sash) made it clear that this bride was a well-loved daughter of the entire village. She is, in fact, the youngest and prettiest of six children, including five other beautiful sisters and one brother, who has severe mental retardation, but who raced around all weekend embracing everyone and hooting out his excitement. He was a part of the merry hubbub, gently watched over by all.

The main focus of the reception, back at the hotel, was the food: no less than fourteen (fourteen!!) courses, and when we studied the menu on our table, we knew we had to take it easy so that we wouldn't miss out on tasting any one of the regional foods. We ate an abundance of seafood, fried antipasti, two kinds of pasta specialties (one of them was gnocchetti, which despite the name are not like potato gnocchi but are smaller curled shells that look like gnocchi), delectable clams, big plates of raw carrot, celery, and fennel (I was skeptical, but these were surprisingly refreshing in the middle of a long meal)... Now I can barely remember it all (I meant to bring home one of the menus but failed to grab one when we left) but I vividly recall the first of three desserts (not including the piles of cookies everywhere): seadas. These are pastry pockets stuffed with pecorino cheese, fried, and smothered with the local honey. Absolutely amazing.

We ate, and ate, and ate. For over five hours, just eating. And talking, of course. Across the table from us, a woman who works at a national archive seemed nice enough at first, but as the evening wore on, got increasingly too-friendly, woozily telling M. how beautiful I was and liberally dispensing cheek-smoosh kisses to everyone who got near her. While we all crowded around to watched the bride and groom cut the cake, I felt someone grab my tush and thought it was the mister because he was behind me when I turned around. But HE had seen, as he walked towards me, that it was Mrs. Too Friendly. Eeek!

Despite this unfortunate incident, I was charmed to pieces by the other company, especially Stefano the singer who had led the serenata the previous night. He was upset that the DJ wasn't letting him play often enough (although he had already regaled the bride and groom several times), and with his injured air, his guitar and smile, he was the classic picture of the underappreciated artist. He and the Mister got to talking about politics, and it turns out that his views are somewhere in the idealist-Marxist-anarchist range, anti-institutional and pro-equality. Somehow this was entirely of a piece with the music and the self-absorption, and I felt that I had just gotten to know one of the people I read about for my thesis on 1930s Spain: the tragic artist, the anarcho-idealist. Lofty pride and political conviction, softened by the romantic strumming and the twinkle of humor in his eyes.

Hours of eating, one spectacular espresso, and a bit of dancing later, the Mister and I decided to retire to our room, thinking that the party was winding down. After a good two and a half hours, we came down to take a stroll, and the party was still going on, our friend Stefano slumped on a bench and strumming melancholy melodies on his guitar into the night air.

***

I'm going to stop here, but in the next installment, I describe the events of the day after, which in some ways were even more fable-like than the wedding itself. Oh, and I should mention that the pink dress was perfect! I was perhaps even a bit more gussied up than some guests, but as I said last week, overdressed is better than underdressed.

I should be packing

In a last-minute attempt to learn something about the Italian island of Sardinia before landing there without a clue about local culture, I did some surfing. A few helpful New York Times articles and a badly translated poem or two later, I discovered this BBC broadcast about the music of Corsica and Sardinia. The music is haunting and the interviews are fascinating. Both halves are worth a listen, but the second half focuses on Sardinia.

I also discovered that D.H. Lawrence wrote several long essays about the island, collected as Sea and Sardinia, which I would love to bring along (one of the best joys of travel is reading literature about/set in a place while you are there), but I have a slim-to-none chance of finding a copy before my flight tomorrow morning.

I'm especially curious about the town of Alghero, which is still Catalan-speaking, even though the Catalans haven't been in charge around there for centuries. I'd love to hear what it sounds like, if the Italian has influenced it enough to make it odd or even unintelligible to my ears. From what I can tell, the ceremony will take place either in Alghero or not far from there, so hopefully we'll have a chance to find some local Catalan speakers.

And I hope to increase my small Italian vocabulary--it's all about gleaning, picking up what I can, at this point, since I've still not properly studied the language. It's high on the list, though.

Thanks to those who responded about the dress: two out of two votes are for the pink one, which is what I also decided yesterday after trying them all on and confirming my suspicions about what doesn't fit and what's too casual. Pink is cheerful and just right for a May wedding, and it looks great with a vintage beaded necklace I bought at a flea market here in Belgium.

So until next week: ciao, arrivederci, ciao ciao!

Italian wedding

Five days of visitors (who managed to come on the sunniest possible days of the year in Brussels) followed by three days in Barcelona has not done wonders for my productivity. Neither will leaving again on Friday for a wedding in Sardinia.

I am stressing quite a bit about the question of what to wear to said wedding. The last time I went to a wedding in Italy (a very similar circumstance, where I barely know anyone except my date, except that wedding took place in a terrassed villa overlooking the stunning Lago Maggiore) I was distinctly and embarrassingly underdressed.

I had hastily purchased a flowered cotton sundress in Salzburg, where I was living at the time, and stuffed it in my backpack. After an overnight train ride in a hot and crowded cabin, I arrived in Milan on the morning of the wedding and changed into my dress in a filthy restroom at the train station. Upon finding M, who had come by train from Barcelona, we were picked up by some relative of the groom and squeezed in the back of a tiny (also hot) car with several other wedding guests, and driven to the wedding, at least an hour away. I stressed much of the way because we were late (the finding and and squeezing in and leaving had taken some time) and because I hadn't seen M. in ages and he had to make polite conversation with the other folks in the car.

I needn't have worried; evidently weddings, like everything else in Italy, start rather late. When we arrived, almost an hour behind the appointed time, the bride and groom hadn't even shown up yet. However, I was immediately self-conscious because every other guest there was impeccably fabulous in that Italian way of theirs. Not that everyone was dressed formally; I remember seeing women in pants and men without ties. But there was a lot of silk and satin, a host of perfectly draped scarves, exquisite hairdos, fancy heels: everything breathed elegance, expense, and fashion. My cotton sundress suddenly made me feel like I was twelve years old. And it didn't help that I still felt the grime of a long trip and a train station restroom clinging to my skin.

Hence my Italian wedding anxiety syndrome. This time around, I want to feel good about the way I look, even though I really have no idea about fashion and don't own a pair of heels. Just as before, I am completely unsure what the wedding will be like, but I'd rather be overdressed than underdressed. Just as before, we will be picked up by some unknown entity from the Alghero airport, but at least we'll have a night at a hotel before the wedding.

So I need help. What to wear? On Sunday in Barcelona night I was frantically trying to dig out a pair of sandals that would be appropriate for a wedding, quite fruitlessly. (Where, oh where did we put our summer shoes?) I will have to make do with ballet flats, I think.

My options are:
1. A muted hot-pink strapless dress. Simple but fancy because of shape/draping. I could wear with roped pearl necklace and a light blue scarf.
2. A black dress with a white swirly/chain pattern. T-back, fitted waist, draped skirt. Don't know how to accessorize it.
3. Black pants and a pleated green silk top. Shimmery and thin straps. Maybe the most flattering option. Could wear with earrings and necklace given to me by the Mister for my birthday. Too informal?
4. A red matching pants and top outfit with spaghetti straps. Dressier than option 3, but I've worn it to about five weddings already. May not fit me any more.

It's possible that, once again, I will arrive in Italy feeling rather grimy, because our shower has been cold-water only for a week now. Before, at least the bath spigot had hot water, and I could take baths. Yet upon arriving here yesterday, and despite the fact that workmen have been here twice already and have supposedly fixed the problem, things are worse: there is no hot water anywhere in the house. I have to shower at the swimming pool across the street. I'm clinging to the upside though: this weekend, there will be a hotel, where presumably I will be able to shower and dress. An improvement over the train station.

Chocolate and sun (have become ongoing themes, notably because this country has a lot of one and not a lot of the other)

So I'm sure the world is hanging on a thread to find out whether I found cocoa powder and whether the party was a success. Because, of course, the whole world reads this blog and this is all immensely interesting to everybody. (Dripping. With irony. But seriously: to the people who DO read this blog, especially if you're not related to me? I'm actually very surprised and honored.)

Thus you will be immensely gratified to know that--a million and one thanks to Anne--I was able to find the cocoa powder (with the coffee and tea! on the bottom shelf!) and make two ooey gooey chocolate cakes. Everybody loved them. Who wouldn't?

The party turnout was somewhat mediocre, because Friday and Monday are holidays in many European countries, and so people left for the long weekend. But the crowd was a good one, notably because it was a fun mixture of my friends and my co-birthday-girl's friends and very international.

And we have a ton of leftover chips and pizza and cake, and I always appreciate leftovers.

We have friends coming from Barcelona today to visit us for the long weekend--they and the mister took the same flight this morning and they should be here momentarily. Perhaps even walking up the stairs right now. Because they chose the best possible weekend to visit Brussels, weather wise, I'm sure we will be doing lots of traipsing around town in the sun, interspersed with lots of beer drinking in the sun.

Have a great weekend!

All this juice and all this joy

It's time for a spring poem. My favorite is Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet "Spring and All." Quite a number of his poems are on the springtime theme, which fits with the fecundity of his language, all of the assonance and alliteration and swinging (he called it "sprung") rhythm.

The line, "When weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush" is one that I whisper to myself when everything is green and bursting around me. I'm not a big memorizer, but somehow Hopkins' poems are ones whose words stick with me, and chime out when I least expect them to.

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. --Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Frisky

Click on this link. Go ahead, it's OK! I'll wait.

Now, what did you see? FIVE suns? Five suns without any clouds or raindrops on top of them? That's what I see! Oh yes I do.

For the first time in my (admittedly porous) memory, the Brussels forecast is a sunshine FLUSH. (Forgive me if my poker metaphor is off, because I don't play poker.) A week of suns. A week of warm.

Earlier this evening, I said to the mister, musingly, "Can you believe we've had four straight days of perfect sunny weather?" And then I clicked over to the forecast, and I saw what you just saw, and rejoiced.

(There's a good reason to have a birthday in May, and this is it. Everyone gets frisky.)

Help! Send cocoa powder!

My plan is to make two decadent chocolate cakes for the joint birthday party on Thursday (one of my good friends here was also born on May 8 so we've joined forces). My mom sent me her famous chocolate cake recipe, and that's what I really want to make; I can already almost taste it and my mouth is watering. Besides, it serves like a million people because it's towering and huge.

BUT, that recipe, as well as all of the chocolate cake recipes in my Gourmet cookbook, as well as most from my go-to food websites, call for cocoa powder.

Which is apparently not to be had, in this, the COUNTRY of CHOCOLATE.

Am I missing something? Is there a secret baker's supply store that I am unaware of that would supply all of my missing ingredients? This is not the first time I've run into difficulty over seemingly normal baking needs.

Alas, I shall just have to find a powder-less recipe. Maybe this one?

A room for living

The sofa and coffee table came almost a week early, last Thursday. It was perfect timing, too, because the Mister showed up from his long travels just a few hours later, and it was nice to have both of them get here on the same morning. We are tickled pink just to have an actual sofa to sit on; we keep patting its back it like it's a new, albeit unwieldy, household pet, and marveling to one another, "It's so big! We can both sit on it! And it doesn't sag in the middle!"

I'm thrilled to have it in time for the party (over 50 people on the guest list...it's going to be a humdinger!) and for the friends who are coming to stay next weekend.

So, without further ado, here she is, the lovely Chesterfield:


I did a pretty good job of the advance mockup, right? For comparison:


We decided against the bamboo rug--I kind of like the clean look of the wood floors--but everything else is pretty much how I envisioned it. It's much more welcoming to walk into the room and see the sofa in front of you--arms out, like an embrace--than when it was up against the wall. I guess I've learned something, after all, from those interior design magazines!

Here are a couple of closer views:



I'm already loving my little window workspace, especially today with this incredible weather and the windows flung open to the warm breezes. Of course, that clean desk surface has an evil twin; the other desk, which you can't see in the pictures, is covered in a swamp of papers and doodads. That's my next job.

But for now I think I'm going to pack a little picnic and go to the park for lunch. It's too gorgeous to stay inside.

Spring in a bottle

A surprise came in the mail a few minutes ago: a bottle of the perfume that I've been wanting for ages!

I won it in a contest, believe it or not, and I hadn't even known I'd won, but the mailman rang the bell, and there it was, the perfect surprise for a sunny spring day. Especially because the perfume itself is a green, fresh scent, with lily of the valley (for May day!), jasmine, freesia, citrus, and hyacinth.

Although I almost never enter contests, this one caught my eye because of the prize. Also, since it was from a new expat magazine, I figured probably not a ton of people would enter. I had to take a picture of myself reading the magazine in my favorite spot, and send it in with a short explanation. That's it! I had the Mister take a picture of me reading it at the airport, because most of my magazine reading these days takes place at the airport or on the plane.

I've never won a contest like this before; I can't stop grinning. And since it arrived just a couple of days before my birthday, it's like an early present. How lovely!

(Later: pictures of the new couch!)