Remembrance of Summer Past
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Still in Paris, where Lee’s mom is visiting us. The weather is beginning its inexorable shift; yesterday we sat under the awning at a sidewalk cafe and watched as a heavy downpour overtopped the curbs. The trees are beginning to let go of their summer greenery, one leaf at a time twisting slowly toward earth. We won’t be here much longer.
Remembrance of Summer Past
In the last two months, I’ve been to a buttload (measured scientifically, of course) of museums, cathedrals, churches, palaces. I’ve been to the Doge’s Palace, the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Kunsthistorisches, the Belvedere, the Louvre, the Orangerie.
Sadly, it’s all sort of a blur. I took lots of pictures, mostly of paintings and their identifying signage. I’m embarrassed to admit that in a lot of those museums, I was marching through the galleries like an automaton, elbowing past the other visitors, whipping out my phone to snap photos, and moving on. It was boiling hot almost everywhere I went, I was pouring sweat beneath my mask, and the torn tendon in my foot was hurting. I can look at the photos later, right?
This has been an unusual European experience for us. More typically, several years ago, we spent the month of June in Verona, Italy (home of the Montagues and Capulets, for those of you who don’t remember your Shakespeare in great detail). It’s a medium-sized town, pretty far down on the list of places people really want to see in Italy, but it’s well-located, and big enough to have a good market and some historical sights. It was perfect for us. We flew into Venice, where we had six hours to wait for our train.
Venice was a mob scene. Just heaving with people. Lines everywhere, hordes on every bridge, so crowded it was miserable. We both swore we’d never return, and if we did, it would have to be in the dead of winter, when there are fewer tourists.
Fast-forward to Covid Times. In the early days of the pandemic, we all saw images of an empty Venice, dolphins swimming in the clear, clean water of the canals. How did my brain process those photos? Gotta get to Venice, ASAP. I’ve spent the intervening months making a list of all the usually-impossible things I wanted to see before tourism got back to full swing.
So that’s what the last few months have been: Lisa’s Grand Tour, including several of Europe’s most popular tourism destinations.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime (we all hope!) opportunity, so we jammed in as many top-tier places as we could.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. Do I remember the details? Sadly, not as many as I would like.
I understand the appeal of those Six-Countries-in-Ten-Days trips, but I think I also have some sense of the reality, and it doesn’t work for me. I want to settle in, stay for a while, see what ordinary daily life looks like. Lee likens the typical American vacation in Europe to a college survey course—skimming across the surface of lots of places. And I understand the impulse—if that transatlantic flight seems daunting or difficult or expensive, it might seem logical to cover as much ground as possible on the other side. I can completely relate to the urge to see it all, do it all. It’s tempting, but in my experience, it’s ultimately more exhausting than enlightening.
While we were in Iceland, I didn’t go to a single museum. But I have clear, vivid mental images of the way our local grocery was organized, the peace I felt in our little house in the north, the omnipresence of delicious soup, the dominance of the North Atlantic in Icelandic life, the smells of sulfur and dried cod and sheep shit, and the specific quality of the midnight sun, a feeling both vast and suspended, as if life itself was an irrelevant ripple happening somewhere below that endless horizon.
To see what normal, everyday life looks like in a place so different from my own? That was really the once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Take care,
Lisa
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