The Vatican: What Could Be Worse

We're waiting in the lineup to get into the Vatican museum, and it's endless.

Every ten minutes we shuffle forward about three feet. We also repeatedly fend off local 'guides' who offer to tour us through for a 'special price'. I actually took one of those tours once before and it skips huge, important chunks of the museum so I'm not falling for that. The kids have been great so far, abut we've been in line for about forty minutes already and this is what it looks like ahead of us:


"Well, it could be worse. It could be raining," I say to Hannah. The other day at the Forum we had to keep running in the rain to hide under ruins.

"Or there could be thunder," she adds. We had thunder at the forum too.

"True," I say. And then, to keep up the downer vibe, I add "Or we could get to the front and they would say, 'Sorry, we just sold the last ticket.'"

"Nice, mom." says Hannah. She decides to keep going with the 'what could be worse' theme. "Or maybe when we finally get there, a huge building will fall and block the entrance right in front of us."

"Ooh, well played, Han. Um, okay, maybe when we get to the front they'll say 'What are you talking about? This isn't the Vatican!' I say, in a squeaky, old person English accent. "And we'll say, 'yes it is, there's the sign,' and they'll say 'what sign?', and pretend they can't see it."

"My guess is bubonic plague," Steve chips in, and we ignore him, since we are obviously taking turns. Humph. Men.

Hannah actually looks excited now. "Maybe when it's finally our turn, they'll say we look like famous art thieves, and won't let us in because they're worried we'll steal all the good art."

I feel this isn't the moment to explain that some of the art is actually painted directly on the walls and ceilings. My kids often groan openly when I try to take advantage of a teachable moment, so I let it go.

"Maybe this isn't the lineup for the Vatican at all, but for another, lesser know museum called the 'Catican', where all the art contains pictures of cats." I suggest.

"Does that exist?!" she asks excitedly.

"Probably, somewhere. But we won't be going there."

"Oh." She smiles anyway.

And the lineup moves.

This One?

Before we left on this trip I was determined to learn some Italian. I listened to a few different Italian language CDs, but sadly, I only came away with a few phrases. One of them is “io capiscoo un po Italiano”, which means “I understand a little Italian,” which is, of course, a lie. The other phrase that stuck with me is “Questo qui?” which means “this one?” I was especially excited about the latter, since it could be a question or an answer. I had imagined myself walking through the streets of Rome, forcefully saying ‘questo qui!”, pointing out things I would like people to buy or lift for me….but now that I’m here, I realize learning how to ask where the bathroom is would have been way more useful. In a pinch, I suppose I could mime sitting on a toilet, pointing to the space beneath my butt, and ask ‘questo qui?” but Hannah is almost twelve and would die of embarrassment and most certainly never speak to me again.

Of course almost everyone I’ve spoken to here speaks quite a bit of English, and there are so many people around that I pick up a few more Italian words, and can soon say hello and thanks and goodbye. After actually using the phrase ‘questo qui’ in a café to point out a pastry I want to buy, I get cocky and figure I should go see the new Woody Allen movie, which has just come out on in Rome. Oh sure, it’s all in Italian, with no subtitles, but I figure I can wing it. I’ve always liked Woody Allen movies, and this one is especially fitting – it’s called “To Rome with Love”, so won’t seeing it in Rome be great?

I head to the theatre by myself, since Steve and the girls think this is a preposterous idea. What’s weird is that there are no snacks or drinks anywhere in the theatre, and I’m twenty years younger and very underdressed compared to everyone else. Before the movie they don’t play any ads or anything, and it’s so quiet, I can hear someone’s cell phone ringing in their bag. It’s ringing forever and ever, and I start to feel embarrassed for whichever oldie can’t hear or figure out their phone, before realizing….it’s me. I’m the oldie. One of the girls’ ipods is in my bag and they must have accidently set the timer earlier, and I didn’t recognize the sound. Great start.

There is short trailer for a Bernardo Bertolucci movie which has two young people with really bad skin, one of whom seems to have a pet aardvark. Huh? And then my movie starts.

Rome looks beautiful. Just like in his other recent movies “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Midnight in Paris”, Woody showcases all the beautiful tourist spots around the city… the scenery is magnificent. And it’s a good thing, because…I cannot understand the movie at all. Why does Alec Baldwin keep showing up when he wasn’t there a minute ago? How did they find an Italian guy who can exactly mimic Woody Allen’s voice? How come Ellen Page can’t tie a proper ponytail in her hair? I enjoy the scene where a woman is making coffee in her espresso maker…because it looks exactly like the one in our apartment and I could use some instructions.

I’ll tell you the best parts, but there’s no need for a spoiler alert since they are sort of personal: at one point, all the characters go to a movie and come out of the movie theatre we are actually in! All of us in the audience, including me, ooh and aah at this. (Look at me, in Rome, doing as the Romans do.) But the highlight for me, is of course, when Woody and his movie wife bring a bottle of wine to someone’s house when they go for dinner, and she points to the bottle and actually says “questo qui?” I howl at this, but no one else in the theatre does, since it isn’t a funny part. But secretly I am thrilled. Io capisisco un po Italiano!

Random in Rome

Here's the Collis' at the Colosseum, eating sandwiches in one of the covered archways and trying to stay out of the rain.


Every night, outside our window we hear a cheesy lounge set by a guy who brings his electric guitar and portable amp to the fountain at the Pantheon. He's there every night without fail, playing a pastiche of mellow songs by Pink Floyd, the Police, and Cat Stevens. He's also particularly fond of the Titanic song. But one night, a real opera singer came out and sang to a gathering crowd of about 70 people, and they went CRAZY. He was good. I think he probably made about 200 euros. In Tsawwassen all I hear outside our place at night are drunk teenagers yelling at their boyfriends.


Not a 30 second walk from our apartment are a series of shops that sell religious clothing for nuns, priests, cardinals, and, I'm guessing from this photo - the Pope. I've even seen nuns stand in front and check out the latest fashions in hot, sensible shoes. But what confuses me is that the Pope has to buy his own clothes. This photo implies that he chooses the ridiculous hat, and it's not forced upon him. What gives? I hear he tweets now, so he should be hipper. I've seen some cool cardinals in wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, who walk against the traffic lights and it makes me wonder if they have to mention it in confession. Another interesting fact: nuns love gelato. They congregate outside our downstairs gelato shop so much that I have to exercise true restraint not to sing Sound of Music songs to them. (It's not the sort of restraint they have to exercise in their jobs, of course, but it's something.)


We bought this box of wine for .60 euros, or roughly 90 cents Canadian. It's a quarter of the cost of water, and holds 3 full glasses. Are these like juice boxes for grown ups lunch boxes? How is everyone not gooned all the time? The wine was not even that bad.


Steve told me that the official day of Rome's founding is April 21st, more than 2000 years ago - and that the Pantheon was designed so that the sun would shine through the occulous (the big hole in the ceiling) every year on that exact date and make a natural spotlight on the Emperor as he walked in the doorway. Since we were there that day, we checked it out. Cool, eh? Man, those ancient romans had egos.


I'm ending with this picture of Steve showing off his disco moves in the deserted area of the Capitoline Museum, because I can.

Au Revoir Paris...

So we have left magnificent Paris. On our last day it was bitterly cold and we waited in long lines to go up the Eiffel Tower and then took the metro over to the charming area called Monmarte. (It’s where the movie Amelie is largely filmed and is enormously less charming in the pouring rain.) I guess my French pronunciation isn’t as zippy as I thought, since when I explained that we were going to Monmarte, one of the kids asked “Why do we need to go to Walmart now?”

You imagine that it is the big things like going up the Eiffel tower that you’ll remember, but in reality, it is the goofy stuff. Like every night, when we’d get back home to our tiny, sweaty apartment and compare the photos we took, and mock each other mercilessly in our fake French accents about all the times we took pictures of our thumbs and feet. Or the time we decided on a whim to buy some warm chocolate crepes in paper cones to share on our evening walk and they tasted so amazing that we all briefly turned into wild animals with long talons and huge spikey teeth, making ravenous sounds like the Tasmanian devil as we circled around each other and devoured them right there in the street where we bought them. (Sorry, no pictures of that – too busy eating.) Or the beautiful walk we took in the Tuileries gardens on our last night, when after a day full of rain the sun finally came out just in time to set, and we felt like we were the only people in Paris, and Steve told us who all the statues in the park were meant to be, and I offered my marginally less sophisticated interpretations. (Steve: “That’s Abraham sacrificing his son.” Me: “No girls, that’s just a big guy smelling his armpit to see if his deodorant is working, cause he kind of likes that girl statue over there.” Or Steve: “That’s Cain, he’s hiding his face because he’s ashamed he killed his brother.” Me: “I personally think he’s hiding his face because he’s embarrassed that he’s not wearing pants.”)

How can this blog not evolve, or perhaps devolve, into being mostly about photos? We have so many beautiful ones. Here’s a few collages of my favourite parts of Paris:




And now we are in Rome. Check out the view from our apartment. (This is the spoiled bitch part.)

Let Them Eat Cake - Versailles

It turns out the phrase "let them eat cake" was probably never uttered by Marie Antoinette, but for whatever reason, it was stuck in my head as we spent Sunday wandering around Versailles. Here's a selection of the photos:












This gold isn't fake.
















Thumbs: they can break.




















Check out this flake.











Dude with a snake.











Make no mistake.














Here's a leaf that won't shake.















Will Ferrell double-take.













Okay, and here's a few more:

Attending a Fashion Show in Paris

Here’s some shocking news: I’m not that into fashion. You’ve probably noticed that almost everything I wear is black and meant to draw as little attention to me as possible, and would likely be unsurprised to learn that I spend a good deal more on soccer cleats than on any other footwear. Sophie, my nine year old, is another story. When she was four I gave her five dollars at the Ladner market to spend however she liked and she bought a scarf. In my usual dodgy parenting style, I tried to convince her that she’d probably rather have candy or toys, but she insisted, and damn it if she hasn’t worn that scarf to death in the ensuing years, and sometimes even worn it in ways interesting enough that I’ve kind of wished I had a scarf like that. Even before we came on this trip, she told me she wanted to be a fashion designer and move to Paris when she grows up.

After hearing about it from my friend Roberta (who did this last year) we decided to go to a fashion show in Paris. I booked our tickets for it three months in advance, and Sophie was so excited about it she made up a big poster for school, did a presentation about it to her class, and literally jumped up and down every time it came up in conversation.

The tickets said the show had a ‘smart casual’ dress code, so the girls, and Sophie especially, meticulously planned their outfits – and I’m proud to say that those outfits did not include reeboks. But how can the phrase ‘smart casual’ mean so many things to so many different people? Looking across the runway before the show started, I counted at least eight audience members in t-shirts with printing on them. One of them was a Hello Kitty t-shirt, and even with my severely challenged sense of fashion, I can tell that kind of sucks. (Although if it had been one of those ones that said “Goodbye Kitty” and had a picture of someone throwing their cat into the clothes dryer, I could have accepted that as an ironic interpretation of the word smart, and perhaps even been slightly impressed.)

Everyone around us was American, or so it seemed. At one point, right before the show started, I heard one woman behind me say, in a southern accent “Oh what I would give for some Pizza Hut with chip-oat-a-lee dipping sauce right now,” – an appalling thing to hear in Paris, a city with such sophisticated, magnificent food. When I turned around saw that the woman who had said it was wearing mom jeans and a flowered sweatshirt, I wanted to feel especially superior, but then I realized that upon hearing it, I was totally craving pizza now too, and that it was with a heavy sigh that I admitted to myself that we were not so very different after all.

But you know who else was probably thinking about food? The models. From our seats in the second row, the first thing we noticed was not the clothes, but rather how shockingly skinny the models were. It was actually kind of gross. (Take either of my tall, beautifully well proportioned daughters, add 8 or 9 inches in height, and that’s what they looked like. The models probably weighed the same as a normal sized 10 year old.)

Otherwise, the show itself: cool. The music was loud and funky, and the clothes were pretty, although there seemed to be a lot of orange and green stuff and one model wore a seriously ugly gold sweater that would have looked good on Michael Jackson in the 80s. With all the planning and waiting we did before the show, it was surprising to see how quickly it all went. The kids loved it.

At the end, the models all stood onstage at once in their final outfits, put their arms around each other and had a big group hug before they left the stage together as we clapped. What happened next? Here’s what I imagine: they all went backstage and sat down sighing. Then one of them would have said “Hey, it’s Friday night, shall we all go get something to eat?” And there would have been this awkward pause, and then one girl would have burst out laughing, saying “she said ‘eat’!’ bahahaha!” and then they would all join in and laugh hysterically, except the one who had eaten half a celery stick before the show, who would start crying out of guilt and then fall to the ground and start doing crunches.

After the laughter died away, they probably gathered around a tiny window that showed us, the great unwashed masses, all slowly exiting the audience area through one gate, like cattle. Maybe they even made mooing sounds as they watched us, to hide the grumbling noises their stomachs made.

Paris

It's already started.

While waiting to board the plane in Vancouver, Steve starts telling the girls random facts about Paris. He does this. I think it's the professor thing. You can't go for a walk in the forest without him pointing out all the types of trees and the berries, and getting a lecture about when they'll be ripe, so I suppose it's not surprising it's happening now, since we're all pretty excited about embarking on this European vacation. We're going to be gone for a month.

"Did you know there used to be a shanty town in the middle of the open area where the Louvre is? Where the glass pyramid thing is now? And did you know that people used to find Paris so confusing that they'd grow up in a certain arrondissement and never leave it since they couldn't find their way back home? And that there were no ancient maps of Paris?" he says.

I actually think this is pretty interesting, but Sophie just raises one eyebrow and looks at me. "Is this how it's going to be for the whole month?" she asks me.

"Is this how what's going to be?" I ask.

"The talking. Dad."

"Yes," I admit.

Steve hears this, but doesn't care. "And did you know that the french fry was named after a French lord with the last name 'Fry' in 1771?" he continues, unabated.

"Really?" Hannah asks.

"Uh, no." I say.

"Too bad. That would have been so cool."