The complex bouquet of an ancient city

When you're traveling, it's easy to believe you become someone else temporarily, and you might make the mistake that I made on our second full day in Rome. At home, I know never to drink coffee after 2 or 3 pm. Repeated experience confirmed that my ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime ceased in my early twenties. Excited to be in what is arguably an espresso lover's paradise, however, and penitent for straying from the righteous path of coffee purity into the low grade inferno of Segafredo Intermezzo, I drank dopio after dopio and Americano after Americano of the good stuff as the day wore on. I think my last double or triple espresso slid into my bloodstream at around 9:30 pm. The next morning, in short, I woke up surprised to find that I had slept. Come 4 am, alert as an owl, I had given up hope, and only then, I guess, did Morpheus deign to grant me the release I longed for.

Needless to say, morning was rough. But as these things tend to go, I was cured by the very poison that needed purging. A dopio from the stovetop coffee maker (moca), an hour of eye-rubbing and foot-dragging, a shower, and it was off to the races. Specifically, the Circus Maximus. Evidently, all that remains of this painfully ancient race track is an oval of dirt and pebbles circling a grassy median, which modern Romans use as, well, a track.

"Wait, this can't be the place. It's just a big dirt track!" Circo Massimo, Rome.

Luckily, Rome has no shortage of awe-inspiring ruins. Just on and over the hill (the Palatine) to my left, lay the Forum and the Colosseum, respectively. Sean and I walked down a small side street that skirts the lower ruins of the Forum and looped around and up a curvy paved road overlooking the old meeting place, a vast grid of lopped columns and chipped pedestals and broken bits of teetering marble and, in the distance, the Colosseum itself. Once we made it to the other side of the Palatine and walked the opposite length of the Forum, now level with us, we became part of a strange exodus, or really, and inodus, carried by the momentum of camera-toting, sunblock-smeared tourists heading inexorably toward the enormous navel of the ancient world.

Il Colosseo, Rome, where cats reign and tourists do their bidding.

I'll spare you the details of the line that snaked among the arches, that held us in its coils for what felt like a suffocating eternity. Suffice it to say, I found myself questioning, as I questioned at St. Peter's Basilica, and as I will likely question again here in Florence at the Uffizi, whether the payoff is worth the ante. This reminds me of the hipster paradox: a hipster is someone who denies being a hipster, reviles hipsters even. By the same token, I am a tourist. Oh how I hate them. Us. Me. The only difference, really, is that I forgot to smear sunscreen on myself for the first two days of sunny tramping.

But I have to be honest, and I am not speaking for Sean here: it is hard for me to see past the photo-snapping, mouth-breathing mob into the utter awesomeness that is this centuries-old gift of man to his posterity. The building is truly magnificent. And I found that if I look very closely at it, into the crannies of the pocky brick walls, full of apertures and variations in texture, or along the veins in the fallen hunks of marble, I can see what I could not see looking out over the landscape of history's bones jutting up from the arena's floor.

Tourist-free zones, Il Colosseo, Rome.

Also, as I learned at the Louvre a few years ago, hamming it with the ancients can be great fun.

My Colosseum glamour shot...

... and Lenny's Italian cousin, Leonardo di Catprio, Il Colosseo, Rome.

Despite all the internal hand-wringing and external crowd-dodging, I was duly impressed and, if not floored, then humbled by the grandeur and deep history of a place as choked with ghosts as the Colosseum must be.

I don't care what anybody says. I am happier in a foreign city's markets, metros, and churches than anywhere else. I love its graffiti, its ambulance music, its un-navigable backstreets, its smells (always the first thing to hit you when you step outside a train station, and always a stench of some unique, signatory blend of rancid waste water and exhaust that makes you want to wretch even as it brings a wide grin to your face, because there can be no surer sign that you are alive and living your life right than a new city's bouquet). I don't care what anybody says. I feel duty-bound to see the Colosseum, or the Uffizi, or the Louvre, even after seeing it and knowing I am better for it. And that's exactly it: such places warrant the pain they put you through, and you win a moral reward for the trouble. But I am drawn to the markets and subways, and I long for the vaulted caccoon of the (Catholic) churches. It's the wandering and the inevitable losing of one's bearings and the heat that only a basilica can cool and the crankiness and bliss that vie for spiritual supremacy from moment to moment that collectively make a trip worth taking. In this spirit, Sean and I crossed the street outside the Colosseum and entered the Colosseo metro station, out first taste of what one friend referred to as a little slice of hell. She couldn't be more wrong. Where she saw tightly-packed cars of groping Italians, I saw a city in the raw, a palate cleansing snap of ginger after the rich, cloying, heavy cream of tourism.

Colosseo metro station, Rome.

Sean and I learned quickly that if you wait at the end of the platform and get in the last car, you are more likely to avoid the crush. We also learned that it is sometimes better to wait for the next car, because it might be roomier, cleaner, and more modern. And you won't get your nads caught in the door.

Some messages suffice without words. Colosseo to Terminale, Metro, Rome.

Two stops down the line, we transferred to Linea A and headed for the Spanish steps and the Trevi fountain. Without going into detail, let me say that the first was a lovely if underwhelming staircase on Rome's answer to Rodeo Dr. The second, however, was a glorious, crowded square dominated by an enormous, god-hewn fountain that, in the heat of the day, served as much to torment us with its glassy blue undulations as to call us to reverence. As instructed by just about everyone, Sean and I each threw a coin over the shoulder into the water to ensure our return to Rome one day. I hate to say that I don't know if my coin, launched from several rows of mostly Asian tourists back, made it into the water. But I believe it did. Sean was more patient and wended his way to the marble edge of the bath and, with a dramatic flare of the fingers, tossed his euro in.

Eh! Neptune! Bafangulo! I got your triton right heah! Trevi fountain, Rome.

Climbing out of the morass of gelato eaters, we ducked quickly into a small medieval church on the piazza, the basilica of Saints Vincent and Anastasio. There, we caught our spiritual breath, dropped a euro in the donation box, and thanked god that people once believed in him sufficiently to build such blessed refuges from the heat and crowds in his name. We thought it appropriate, too, to pay our respects to the reverend genii of the Trevi.

About now, hunger conjoins with heat and exhaustion to bring out the beast within. Another fruitless search for vegan fare ends in our sharing a cliffbar that Sean brilliantly brought along, buying us enough time and sanity to see the astonishing Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which is built into the ruins of Diocletian's baths, down the road from Rome's central train station, Terminale. The organ alone quashes whatever edginess I might have brought in with me from the heat-radiating streets without and the pinch of hunger within. Just unbelievable, this magnificent beast.

Imagine what Brother Jack McDuff could do with that. The mind boggles. Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, Rome.

You're sick of my talk about churches. Tough. There will be more, you can bet on it.

After 30 of my finest minutes in Italy thus far, we made our way back on the metro to Circo Massimo station and walked the 2 miles or so back to Trastevere district, which Sean very rightly refers to as the Silverlake of Rome. It's like an entirely different city, yet it's just across the river. Winding cobblestone streets, shops, attractive people, classic Fiats and Vespas, and, if you can believe it, a vegan restaurant called Ti Diro, where we ate dinner. (We gorged on falafel when we got back to our neighborhood in the late afternoon, but we were ready for more after a quick nap and some down time.) It was nearly midnight by the time we were done, and I had a paper to give this morning, but I said fuck it, let's hit the jazz club. It's probably a good thing that my miserable sense of direction in the Old World prevented us from actually following through on this idea. A bit of wandering up and down Corso Vitorio Emanuele II and we were back in Trastevere, asleep by 2 am.

Of cats, emperors, and ruins

Awoke this morning to a sound that went off in my head, one of those dream noises that startles you to consciousness, at around 6:30 am, or 9:30 pm, however you want to tally it. Aside from the sound of my mental fingers snapping, I slept a deep, dreamless sleep. We were out by 9:30 pm, never having made it to the Tiber for a night stroll. Just too wrecked. First thing this morning, I sat for 15 minutes and let the musty smell of the air shaft outside the living room window waft over me and color the canvas of my mental picture with memories of wet Thai afternoons. This gave way soon to a general sense of peace, good preparation for a day of vagabonding around the Eternal City.

Embracing the Eternal. City. Via della Luce, 16, Rome.

Then, choking down another Segafredo, marginally better than last night's, Sean and I set out for an afternoon of sites, which in Rome is essentially anywhere you happen to find yourself. First, however, we negotiated the complexities of a local cafe, learning that to order an espresso "banco" means to quaff it with a quickness at the counter, and hence pay less than ordering it "tavolo," meaning take your sweet time at a table and pay for the pleasure. We paid for the pleasure, and each enjoyed a corneto (croissant) too, our first of many deviations from vegitalismo (veganism). We were hungry again before reaching the door, so upon crossing the Tevere (Tiber), a muddier, weedier version of the Seine, we posted up at a paninoteca in the Piazza Campo de Fiori, overlooking a farmer's market with some of the most beautiful produce I've ever seen. We sat on the capacious patio, ordered panini e americani e frizzanti (sparkling water) and ate at a Roman pace (slowly) before examining the market fare.

Bridge over ancient muddy waters, Ponte Garibaldi, Rome.

Buying kale, carrots, tomatoes, and parsley for a farro salad, Piazza Campo de Fiori. Very helpful farmers marketeer overseeing my selections.

Very caffeinated, laden with vegetables, we ventured into the circuitous series of allies that expand like tendrils of travertine and cobblestone, winding among crumbling masonry retrofitted with shops and apartments, and punctuated at every turn by muscular gods and bearded men in stone, some sinewier than others.

15th-century fountain by Bernini featuring Bacchic frolickers and turtles, Jewish Ghetto, Rome. According to my main man Rick Steves, "It's said that Bernini cared about the Jews and honored them with the symbol of a turtle — an ancient creature that carries all its belongings on its back." Thanks Bernini!

Swordless (in two senses) man-god, Jewish Ghetto, Rome.

We looked for the famous synagogue of the Jewish ghetto but found the Portico di Ottavia instead, a once-enormous 2000 year old structure that the emperor Augustus built for his sister. Not much remains, but one can lose oneself in imagining what the thing must have looked like in 10 BC.

Portico di Ottavia, Jewish Ghetto, Rome.

Inspired by Rome's first and greatest emperor's benevolence, I gave a crippled gypsy half a Euro for this snapshot:

Little known fact: all gypsies in Rome have humpbacks and severe foot deformities, requiring a penitent comportment and a cane.

If all the gypsies and all the stray cats of Rome united, they could easily defeat the city:

Julius Casear's latest reincarnation, haunting the excavated marble ruins of Pompey's theater, where Rome's almost-first emperor was assassinated by his fair-weathered friend Brutus (below) on the ides of March, 44 BC, Largo di Torre Argentina, corner of Via Florida and Via Arenula, Rome.

Brutus, pictured here, is doomed to share a haunting ground with Caesar, Largo di Torre Argentina, Rome.

Crossing the Ponte Fabricio, we then headed north to Vatican City, hoping to soothe our souls in the cool, catholic silence of the Basilica of St. Peter and the Sistine Chapel. Alas, we only made it to the former, although we did follow the path of the penitent along the cyclopean brick wall encircling Vatican City only to find that the Musei Vaticani, which include the Sistine, admit no visitors after 3:45 (we were an hour late). St. Peter's, however, was breathtaking. As we navigated the babel of tourists and entered the basilica, I kept hearing Mary Garland, a provincial, puritanical American girl visiting Rome for the first time in Henry James's first novel, Roderick Hudson (on which I am presenting at the HJ Conference on Saturday), sighing in sad wonderment that America's "poor past" has died here, below the dome of St. Peter's, "in an instant." Indeed, Ms. Garland, all of America's past can fit in one nook of this vastness:

Words do not suffice. The dome of St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, Rome.

The light itself of the basilica is unlike any other, and draws the chosen into its embrace:

Perhaps I should have worn a holier shirt.

I was complimented after Sean snapped this photo by a heavily bearded man speaking very good English (probably Dutch, who speak better English than Americans), saying I looked very holy. I thanked him, as a good Jewish Catholic should.

The rest of the day is a blur of fruitless walking and dehydration (only on the verge of fainting did I muster the courage to fill my water bottle from one of Rome's many sidewalk spigot's, which look like they draw water from the sewers, but apparently dispense perfectly potable stuff). After a stop at our local biologico (organic grocer) for the final ingredients of our farro salad (about to be eaten), we made it home, exhausted, sticky, happy.

Farro salad with lentils, kale, parsley, tomato, carrot, and pasta, dressed with oil and vinegar, garlic, and Italian spice mixture. Unbelievably good.

Los Angeles to Rome. Departure: 2:55 pm PST. Arrival: 2:05 pm CEST. Approx. 15 hours of travel time. What with travel delirium and all, I'll limit this first post of the Grand Tour (Part Due) to some photos, compliments of Sean's delirium and camera phone, and an occasional gloss.

Still Life, LAX International Terminal #1

Snatching only a tiny taste of sleep from the jostling, cramping, dehydrating netherland of air travel, enduring what in all fairness was about as good a transatlantic and transalpine flight, respectively, as one could expect, Sean and I deplaned at Fiumicino airport about one click below total airburn, waited for our bags, tried to get cash from two bunk ATMs that refused to give up the lucre, and met with our driver--yes, our driver, a very taciturn, fit, cigarette-smoking anachronism with designer clothes and a pristine Mercedes. A better driver than you might expect, although he may have been on his best behavior for the Americanos. He took us to a functioning ATM and dropped us at our apartment on Via della Luce in the Trastevere district. The vaulted dark wood beamed ceilings remind me of Camberwell, on a much, much smaller scale. But it's home, and it's in Rome, and it's beautiful.

Entrance, Via della Luce, 16

The living room, Via della Luce, 16

After sussing the place out, we ventured out to Viale di Trastevere and hit up the local Billa Supermarket for some staples. Our first adventure. Being the good armchair ecologists that we are, we decided to throw our fruits and vegetables, sans bags, into our basket, like we do at home. At the register, we immediately discovered why this is not the Billa way. One must bag each item, place it on a scale, press the button corresponding to the fruit/vegetable, and place the sticker that the machine spits out on the bag. Then and only then is one to bring one's produce to the register. Our checker, a young lady not unlike any other checker in the Western world, began gesturing and spouting Italian at an impressive rate, all of which was entirely lost on Sean and me, who understood all of this to be just the routine chatter of an Italian checker-girl. Only when the chatter accompanied a game of charades that essentially consisted of her picking up each item of produce and pointing out, manually, that she cannot ring us up because these things are not in bags did we begin to understand. And only when she took us all but literally by the hand, still chattering, and leaving a line of increasingly sour-looking customers, back to the produce section to demonstrate for us the Billa way did we finally, fully comprehend her very vocal dumbshow. My response? "Come si dice, 'I am very sorry'?" Her response: "Haha! Very sorry! Haha!" It is hard to convey her unique mixture of ire and good humor in writing. Suffice it to say, we thoroughly enjoyed this introduction to Roman culture. We paid our EU$23, took our bags within bags (which as it turns out is not the environmental atrocity we thought it would be: their plastic bags are 100% "compostabile"), and headed home.

We walked the short stretch home amidst molti graffiti and accattoni (panhandlers) and drivers who desultorily obey traffic signals and made our first meal: espresso. It was awful. I convinced Sean to buy Segafredo because the best espresso I had in Paris was Segafredo. But this was clearly not the same animal. This was "intermezza," which I now realize should have tipped us off. This is medium grade. This is shit.

A very hot, very disappointed Adam sipping a substandard dopio in the kitchen at Via della Luce.

A sleep-deprived, wonky-brained Sean masking his disappointment behind a veneer of delirium.

The Roman Banquet

Sean is washing away the scum of the day-that-was-two-days, and I close this out, to the ameliorative strains of Willie Nelson, looking forward to washing and eating and sleeping and really digging in to the other, non-Billa Rome tomorrow.

Strange News from Another Star

Nice



Picnic in Nice with Shenee: note Longhorns koozy ensconcing tall boy of Leffe.



Tucking into a Leffe, Nice.



Cold beach, shared iRod (my iPod with a Rod Stewart skin), Nice.



Heroic old men and petanque, Nice. Note the flawless hurling form.




The miserable couple.



Franklin Delano Fitzgerald with gut bucket and jug band, Nice.



Playing Barbie Car with Cacapupucine, Marseille.



Dinner with Shenee's freinds, near Notre Dame de la Garde, Marseille.



Caca and Neenee, Park Borely, Marseille.



Fun map of Marseille and fun real life Marseille, Notre Dame de la Garde.



Nee saw some petit garcon doing this and decided we needed to follow suit, Notre Dame de la Garde.



Inside the very nautical cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde, Marseille.

Hamming it up with the Greeks, and other tales of a sailor's life

After a dozen hours of dreamless sleep, I awoke in my room in Bruges on the 13th half-expecting to hear carnival noises, but hearing only the shuffling of breakfast-goers on the stairs next to my door, decided to shower and follow suit. Lord Jim and I had a pleasant petit-dejeuner of wheat bread, swiss cheese, coffee, and orange juice before hopping the train to Amsterdam. Reading Conrad seemed apropos since I'd be lodging on a boat for 2 nights; although the pairing wasn't planned but, like many things of late, serendipitous (the boat idea only came to me while in Ghent, when I changed my itinerary around both to have private rooms henceforth (the dorm thing wasn't exactly my speed) and to squeeze in two more nights in Paris at the expense of one in Lyon). I don't remember much about the ride--in my mind it's all tangled up with the ride from Amsterdam to Paris. Suffice it to say that I got into Amsterdam in the mid afternoon, checked into my boatel (as I soon after began to describe it), and took a long walk around the city, feeling a bit dejected.



My "room," which I loved intensely for 48 hours.



The view at sunset from the deck of the Anna Maria II.

Something of my--call it ennui--is recorded in a previous post, which I began to write while in Amsterdam, beset by a nameless weariness that, again, can be best described if I let me speak for myself:

The past couple of days have passed in a kind of stupor, not bc drunk or under any kind of influence, but bc I think I am cloyed.

I sit in a bar in Amsterdam, alone, w/a tumbler of Heineken, Bon Jovi on the PA, some South American football match on the screens, and I realize that I am simply passing the time at this point. Have I outstayed my welcome? Have I outstayed my own tolerance? I half wrote a blog tonight--half write bc I wrote it and erased it--in which I tried to articulate the indistinct, indifferent mass into which everything has morphed. Everything and everywhere is beautiful in some abstract way but utterly w/o interest to me, unless it be the coutryside of Bruges w/its bleating lambs and canals and rain and windmills--but THIS. This... thumping cliche of city life. This, I cannot abide. So I pass the time as I can, silent, in a kind of stupor, half hoping for a connection but doing nothing to invite one, unreflective (except about my unreflectiveness). When one is alone in a city, only then does one have a glimpse of the banality of cities per se. With friends, a city might might perhaps become unique or specific--but alone, everywhere is people by the same of the same. True, only Amsterdam offers naked, ugly women rapping with rhinestoned fingers on glass windows to call my attention to their available pussies. But can one get more cliche than humanity's oldest profession? This city makes an old man of me, older than I've ever been.

Written while still sticky and choking from the miasma of the red light district, which was funny for about 1 minute (I did crack a smile at the first boob I saw), and feeling like all the hard-won reverence of Ghent and Bruges was slipping away, I must be forgiven if my first impressions of the city that gives the word "notorious" new meaning were characterized by cynicism, boredom, and even a kind of quiet rage.

The second day more than made up for the first, thanks to a long run along the canals and into Vondelpark, a red bike called The Boss, Van Gogh, synchronicity, and jazz.

All this cheese has caught up to me. Or so I felt that first Dutch morning. Determined to counteract the paunch I laced up and headed out into the wet morning air and ran. And ran. And ran. I ran for a hour and fifteen minutes, driven both by a primal fear of the gut and by the Octopus Project. By the time I got to the park, my legs were trembling. So I stretched. And stretched. And stretched some more, until the fear kicked in again and I ran and ran some more. By the time I stepped on board the ole Anna Maria II, I was spent, completely and totally. The upshot of this is that I've been limping on a more or less shattered knee for the past several days. Overexertion is a bitch. Don't worry Mom. It'll be swell in a couple days.

Undaunted by a little weariness, I headed over to Mack Bike where I met The Boss:



The Boss was mine for 24 hours. He took me everywhere, starting with the Van Gogh museum, which utterly and absolutely floored me. I spent 2 hours stepping from painting to painting, looking at every one, closely, listening to Grieg and Marc Ribot, a necessary fortress of sound to protect me from the insipid sputtering of the crushing masses, as I gently noted. I sat for an hour after in the commissary, reflecting, drinking a Westmalle, writing a postcard to Shenee (depicting Van Gogh's "View of Montmartre with Stone Quarry"), which I have yet to send, and on which I doodled an array of gory sunflowers, and munching on a pistolet. Even the photos I took immediately after felt inspired by the Dutchman at his most Japonese:



"Vondelpark, 2008"


"Almond Blossom"

Adam Van Goghenstein? Perhaps not.

The Boss and I then hit the famed Bibliotheek for some free internet, and then to Leidseplein, where I spotted a jazz bar called Cafe Alto, the one with the giant saxophone hanging from the brick edifice. You know the one. This reminded me that I had forgotten to find the address of a coffee shop called De Rokery, which Sean had spoken of with fondness, but I knew it was nearby. One of those moments you see. Letting the big red boss roll where he pleased, it was only a matter of time before he led me to it. It was either his doing or the cat's:



I followed this little one in the door and like the old man that I am, skipped the hash menu, drank a beer, and wrote to Sean from their coin-slot computers. I snagged a couple souvenir coasters on my way to the jazz bar.



For the next several hours, slipping progressively into a Duvel-fueled bliss, I stood rapt before this mediocre jazz trio as it were Bill Evans's--as it were Jesus's. The piano player smoked from a long plastic filter poking out through his stringy salt and pepper locks. The drummer was a doppelganger for Sean too, if Sean shaved his beard into a jagged, close-cropped goatee and sideburns. Which I am not recommending. He played standing up much of the time, which I asked him about at the break. "When you are playing a tree howr gig, your azz gets tired," he replied. I nodded, knowing full well about 3 hours gigs and tired azzes. I then complimented his playing and he smiled gratefully and I slipped upstairs to the loo.

I must have steered home correctly--or The Boss did--bc I only remember curling up in my tiny bunk, nodding to the tiny night presented through my tiny porthole, and was gone.

***

Paris rewards a second viewing. When Shenee and I were there, we did most of our touristy stuff during the daylight hours, basically returning to our room after hours and hours of walking and riding the metro and drinking and making the museum rounds (except the Louvre) and eating baguettes and me getting cranky bc I was still hungry (an alter ego we have fondly named Ammo, who also emerges in traffic and when the internet is inexplicably slow). We always planned to go out again, but after downing a bottle of cheap but spectacular Bourdeaux, or whathaveyou, we just didn't have the mustard for it and inevitably woke up the next day wondering why we failed yet again to see Paris at night. This is all in retrospect of course, bc now having seen Paris at night I know precisely what we missed.



The hunchback on fire, leaping from the belfry of Notre Dame.



The Seine and a giant wrought iron lighthouse or some such structure sending me signals across the city in the dark. I do not, however, speak French Morse.

Even the metro stations are prettier at night:



Incidentally, I think it was on the long walk down this colorful if seemingly endless corridor that I realized the degree to which I battered my knee in Amsterdam. It began to feel as though my bones were made of pain.

After an hour or so in the cool catholic air of Notre Dame, an atmosphere I have come to love with an addict's affection,



I spent the next day almost entirely at the Louvre, sometimes gaping before the ludicrously celestial masterworks of man, sometimes hamming it up with them:



Apollo of Los Angeles



Adam, King of Syria



Hercules Adamus



A face in the crowd, or, Where's Mona?



Gallerie D'Apollon, where Henry James decided he wanted to be a great man.

Aside from the Vang Gogh museum, I have never spent so much time at a museum without shooting pains running up my legs and through my back, destroying my will to live, let alone appreciate the fine arts. I have many thoughts about museums in general, and although recent experience has certainly qualified some of my harsher criticisms, they have not altogether exorcised me of my unpopular opinions. That said, I went back to the Louvre again the next day to see the Dutch and German masters, but alas, those exhibits were closed and I was forced to truncate my visit. Which was not all bad, considering the wooziness I felt for most of the day after my evening on the Left Bank watching Celtic vs Rangers (Scottish Premier League for those out of the loop), at first alone, but then with a quartet of Scots who helped me to get very, very drunk.

Celtic 2, Rangers 1, a truly glorious match, celebrated with a nice game of beer pong.



Needless to say, I cabbed it home bc it was too late for metros and it was that or sleep on the sidewalk, which had crossed my mind. I was that drunk.

I must head to le Gare de Nice to meet my love, who disembarks momentarily. She and I will spend the next 2 nights in Nice, then return to Marseille (on different trains, alas) where this time around we will do all the fun touristy stuff (Chateau D'If, of Count of Monte Cristo fame, the Notre Dame de something or other, and lord knows what else. Then home.

For now, into the rain!