When in Rome

I'm in Rome, and I feel like I'm in a giant playground: it's exciting, it's unruly, it's full of strangers, and it makes me feel very small. The first three I expected. But the sheer size I really didn't. Rome's geographically no bigger or smaller than other European capitals, I guess -- but the hills are huge and steep, and the buildings are enormous to compete. So, I'm starting to realise things like

• the Trevi Fountain is big enough for serious bathers
• the Pope's proclaimed from a balcony because the watchers underneath are far away
• the decorative Spanish Steps are in fact meant as a useful means of scaling a big hill
• the Colosseum is aptly named

Excitement and unruliness come mainly from minor hazards. So many cars, so many motorcycles -- after well-planned bicycle-friendly Germany, the traffic's quite a shock. At red lights the motorcycles (when they deign to obey them) rank up like horses at a race start. So much litter, so much peeling paint, so much broken pavement and dodgy asphalt, so many neon tourist shops. I guess a city that survives on its joie de vivre alone makes a few practical sacrifices.

And strangers? I can't remember a city in which the locals are less in evidence. Tourists are everywhere, even in winter. We (that is, I, and Emily and my Australian friend Alyssa) are staying in the sort of dirt-cheap garish cheerful crowded under-25s backpacker hole that I haven't even been able to find in Germany or the Benelux -- a pity, really, because, well, it's so cheap. But there are certainly no Italians staying there, and I'm not counting the people that sell me museum tickets or stop me on the street to invite me in for some Genuine Italian Cuisine as locals either. I've seen a few packs of Italian teenagers wandering the streets, jeansed and booted; a couple of pairs of Italian men arguing loudly in front of gorgeous palazzi; a row of street vendors outside the Vatican pack up their wares and run off in ten seconds flat at the rumour of an arriving police car. But it's probably partly my own fault. I want to see classical Rome and Renaissance Rome and baroque Rome; the rest is passing under my nose.

Weekday winter mornings are definitely the time to see the Vatican. We got there before ten today, when the lines were minimal and the priests and nuns were visible. Security in was low. Security where it mattered -- that is, when a Swiss guard in yellow and blue leggings politely stopped me from going in a forbidden door -- was somewhat better. (And the Swiss guard was actually Swiss -- as I realised only some minutes later, when it occurred to me that he'd asked in German if I spoke Italian and then in English if I spoke French.) St Peter's Basilica was lovely, and, of course, big. The gardens were lovely, but closed to the public. Then we went into the Vatican Museums.

These had a fantastic collection of ancient Roman sculpture, organized by subject: three cherubs shouldering urns, four boys with swords, two men saluting. I admired them for a while, then went inside. And inside they turned out to contain all sorts of marvellous things that I'd known about without ever really realising they were in the Vatican. Like, er, the Sistine Chapel. And also an entire apartment painted by Raphael, full of half-familiar stories: a saint freed from prison; a pious youth growing old; Constantine converting to Christianity; Euclid doing geometry . . . .

That, and coffee and gelato, kept me going for the day.

Some evangelism

I wrote an email this morning.

TO: The Hon. Judith Tizard, MP for Auckland Central
SUBJECT: Plastic bag tax

Dear Judith,

As a University of Auckland student on exchange this semester in Germany, one of the first things that struck me about life here was that supermarkets don't provide plastic bags. It was inconvenient the first few times, when I'd forget to bring my own cloth bag and have to waddle my overladen way home. Then I got used to it -- it's really not that hard to deal with -- and now, knowing what plastic bags do to the environment, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'll be back in Auckland next month, and intend to carry on the anti-bag habit I picked up here. I heard about a New Zealand group (www.bagtax.org.nz) of people with similar feelings, who are calling for a plastic bag tax in New Zealand. I think it would be a great idea. I hope you do too -- it'd be wonderful to have it implemented.

Sincerely,
...

And they'd sing, and they'd sing . . .

Early this evening I was lingering late in the maths building, which was quiet, and dark, and had almost emptied for the weekend. And then suddenly I heard singing -- three or four voices, perfectly together, perfectly in harmony. I went exploring, and tracked it as far as a closed door, and listened for a while, and then went back to work.

Half an hour later, the singing stopped. A couple of girls and a couple of guys emerged -- one or two of them I knew by sight -- and ran downstairs, whistling.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard of a university with a sweet little maths-department a capella group. But my mind started wandering, and I thought back to the large and excellent village choir I'd heard in 2000-inhabitant St. Märgen just before Christmas. Then I remembered that at least a couple of the not-too-many people I know well here sing in small semi-organised choirs -- one of them I discovered one day during a particularly boring differential geometry class, quietly skimming the score and (Russian) words for a new song. And then I thought of the brilliant YouTube video of a University of Mannheim lecture hall breaking into song:



and of buskers in the Freiburg town centre, and realised -- well, that I was altogether very impressed with the local grassroots choir action.

Germany's known for its proliferation of superb music schools and orchestras, or so I'm told. But it seems that the national enthusiasm that supports them starts deep down.

The weather at the moment is weird. On Wednesday it was brilliantly sunny. Yesterday was nice too, and at night the wind started to blow in whooshing big gusts. I felt it, cycling home, and with my Christchurch-trained instincts assumed it'd be dry and hot for the next few days. Then it started to hail . . . .

Germans' opinions on the general situation vary. Someone said joyfully, it's spring! But someone else gloomily predicted a relapse.

Flights and mountains

A floormate greeted me this morning by asking if I'd "heard about Edmund Hillary".

I had, indeed. Everyone else in Germany had heard too; it was front-page news.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine called him "one of the greatest adventurers of the twentieth century", and added:

In New Zealand, where Hillary was revered as a national hero, people reacted with distress to the news of his death.

"He's on your money, too, right?" asked Hans. "Yes," I said, rather proudly. Of course I don't want to give Germans the impression that New Zealand goes in for apotheosis -- but by all accounts he was a wonderful man.

Moving from the international news on to the very very local, I had my first experience with the famous European low-cost air carriers this week: I booked a weekend trip for late January on Ryanair. As I'd been warned, the original FIVE-EURO FLIGHT!! steadily accumulated extra charges for return trip and taxes and baggage and check-in, finishing at 80 € on the actual credit card bill. Still, it costs more than that for a trip home from Auckland to Christchurch.

And where am I going on this 80 €?

Rome.

Murdering the time

It's 3 am on a weeknight. But when you're friends with Emily and Matthew, sleep becomes a random and unscheduled pastime, and when you have an old friend to stay for a week and a half, your to-do list tends to grow merrily unattended. Fortunately, I'm energetic and stubborn enough these days that telling myself "you can't go to bed until you've done X properly" produces good work rather than an infinite insomniac loop.

Princeton Simon left for Princeton on Sunday morning, leaving ice cream and a representation theory texbook behind to console me. Before Helene and I met Oxford Simon (down for another day's visit) for dinner yesterday, we killed time for half an hour by hanging out in the maths common room at uni. The maths common room is a nice little place -- there's no equivalent tiny room at Auckland squished full of blackboards and posters and sagging couches and a coffee machine, just for the use of the undergrads. It's also always full of people, so I avoid it when I'm not with friends -- my German's not yet up to large groups of strangers. I can still sort of listen in to the chat, though.

Anyway, I'd never been there in the evening before, and was delighted to find that at about six pm it's full of maths students happily loitering and swapping their plans for Monday evening, just like the schoolyard at middle school after class finished for the day. The nicest part of the common-room crowd -- eat your heart out, supposedly-egalitarian New Zealand! -- was the total lack of hierarchy. Little first-years (well, they're still mostly older than me, but . . . .) didn't get in the least ignored, and a postdoc and a lecturer were there too, chatting totally casually with the undergrads about who they were going dancing with that evening.

A woman from an investment bank sent me an email last week, and I replied today. Selling out? No. Curious? Yes.

Book of the yours

(Guest post by Simon. The writer of this blog likes anonymity -- yes, so much that she reserves it here only for herself. Her name has therefore been censored.)

Hello folks and world, slip into a pair of skin tight leather pants, slap on a wispily high Tcherman accent and clip a stainless steel mug full of Schwarzwalder kirschwasser (like vodka, but the lady on the front of the bottle has bowling-ball sized cherries covering her hat) onto your belt as I have done to hear exciting stories of wandermoglichkeiten! Freiburg is a smart little city covering an area of roughly one Guelph, which is defined as the area of land one man can plow with three drunk oxen on an overcast day. I have spent a lot of the past week on the floor of XXX's room, which is large for something hostelish although her residence doesn't have a big communal area. No lazy evenings together in front of the television for these students... The walls appear to be made of a mixture of plaster and Swiss meusli. We spent today in Basel, a charming quiet city frontin' the Rhine, and having had enough nutritious museums we decided to goof off a bit, going to see a huge collection of teddy bears and puppets and dolls and muppets. The model houses were astonishing, you could find just about any shop you could think of, except for possibly assorted small arms. We crossed two of the borders that wander through the city, the German/Swiss leaving the train station and the Swiss/French in town. We weren't stopped at all, there was just a police whare with a roof extending over the road, and suddenly all the signs and TV were in French. The people even looked more aloof! It was cool to be able to have the following exchange: "How about we buy some real swiss chocoloate from that shop?" "Nah, let's go to France first." For some reason XXX was mad keen on looking around a drug company, as Basel is full of them and is responsible for LSD and antidepressants (I suspect living in Basel in the winter would benefit from one of them), but they turned us away as comercially infeisable and containing insufficient quantities of tallow. But we did see a very impressive smokestack.

I had my first taste of the Black Forest the day before. Ah, you like the ambiguity there? You're thinking, "does that mean he went for a walk in the woods, or tasted some yummy cake, or perhaps even stepped in some cake or ate some pine scented air freshener?" Well, it was both! (The normal ones, I mean. XXX gave me rather a lot of Schwarzvodka kirschwald...) We went tramping with a friend of hers from Auckland, also called Simon, presumably so that if one of us got hurt or lost in the woods she would have one left. It was beautiful and dark and steep, with the trees enveloping the slopes like a spiny cloak, just like I had imagined from fairytales. We followed alongside deer and wildcat tracks, and even found snow in the higher reaches. We half walked, half ski'd going downhill, and came out where someone was logging and were greeted by a refreshing pine scent. I had to dig deep, getting by for five hours on a (solid, half oak, half bread) German sandwich, an apple and a few lesser breads, and by half past seven when dinner finally arrived at a cheap pasta restaurant I was undaunted by the sight of a bowl of bologhnese that could have filled a kid's bike helmet. The Schwarzenegger Kirschthingy happened in between, while we were showing Simon around Freiburg. It was surprisingly light, and I probably should have lingered over it a bit more but I was sooo hungry...

The two days before that were quite lazy, a rest after four days of travel finishing with new year's celebrations with friends of XXX in Freiburg. It was the new year's I've always wanted, spent with drunk people you can have fun with without knowing, learning dance steps and trying on each other's accents, and passing midnight just above roof level on a hillside packed with revellers while the city went nuts letting off fireworks. I've never seen a display covering such a huge area, it was like watching a sea under the moonlight except much, much sparklier. The feeling of wide-eyed togetherness with everyone there was lovely. Almost everyone, actually - I could have done without the people letting off bangers everywhere, especially right were you were going to walk. We started searching for a friend we had gone to the hill with at half past midnight, pushing our way through jubilant unaware crowds up and down the various levels while I got more and more anxious about finding him, and the bursting firecrackers and charred skyrockets littering the ground gave it a strange battleground feel.

And the rest of the travel? It was done near Koblenz, based in a little town on the Rhine called Boppard where we stayed with a genuine German metalworker called Axel with a old sportscar whose back seat wasn't designed for people with legs and his wife, Inne, who ran a tanning and nail salon. We know this because our guest room was also her workplace, and I did a quick double take when I saw the room for the first time with it's single bed and tanning bed and thinking "They're not expecting one of us to sleep in that thing, are they? They're not expecing BOTH of us to sleep on that thing, are they?" Every coloured accessory in the house was blue, apart from the glittery silver toilet seat, and while Christoph and Werner's bathroom had an anatomically correct sign indicating that men shoud sit while peeing, our hostess bought it up (not at all awkwardly) in conversation. We didn't do much in Boppard apart from go to their little christmas market, which gave me my fill of foliksh German music which people gently shifted their weight to. We had a kind of eggnog and lots of junk food and I sung along enthusiastically and grinned at the wooden stalls and pretty lights, and then we went for a walk along the Rhine (I climbed the fence and touched it, so there). The next morning we visited Marksburg castle, which was highly authentic and gave a very strong impression of how drab life was even for nobles 800 years ago. They were also very short - the four poster bed was roughly a metre and a half long.

Of course, Germany wouldn't be the same without it's food, designed to thicken the arteries aganst the winter cold. We've tried making spetzle and cooking sausages, but we weren't sure how successful we were - I felt like I was frying a salami. Chocolate, mulled wine (which can be bought from Ikea! Maybe they use it to stain furniture), a shop in town that sells nothing but gummi bears... the old American "dirt, sugar and palm oil" isn't going to be the same.

And I finally lived my dream and bought a fedora! My angular face finally has something to ballance it.