Upon returning from a trip I’m amazed by 1) how many pictures I took, and 2) the number of said pictures that are similar. I mean really, just how many pictures of streets and alleys do I need?
Pisa:
Madrid:
Florence:
The antennas caught my eye:
as did the satellite dish:
Avignon/Palace of the Popes
Zaragoza:
Montecatini Terme
One thing that surprised me about Spain, at least the places we visited, was the amount of graffiti; there was a lot. I’d venture to say there was even more than I’ve seen in Oakland or L.A. I appreciate graffiti as an art form but the amount I saw in Spain was borderline too much. On our walk to the old city center of Florence I came across something a little scary and Santaesque:
So I stood next to it.
Wandering around Florence occasionally I’d see posters like this:
I know this isn’t ‘graffiti’ per se, but it is wall art and graffiti is often pained on walls…so…I guess this can be graffiti. Anyway, I thought, “Hmm, these are a little odd.”
…And a tad disturbing. Apparently they’re some part of a larger narrative:
Other graffiti I saw around Florence:
Never did find the beginning of this story; maybe it’s related to the other one above that looks like a group of soldiers.
Walking to the Palace of the Popes I found Scarface
Some sort of autograph wall
And President Obama.
Ok, this is obviously not graffiti, but it is street art; right? Ok, I just thought I’d include it.
One last shot of some more conventional graffiti from Madrid:
There were many times on this trip that I wished I was not on a package tour. The tour was good for showing a plethora of amazing places in a short amount of time and for infecting our students with the travel bug, but there were numerous times I wanted to sit, appreciate and absorb where we were. One such place was Park Guell designed by Antoni Guadi. (BTW anyone know how to add umlauts or accent marks to text with WordPress?) I was stunned and amazed that #1 he had the visions for this park in his head and #2 he was able to translate those ideas into a tangible place, a place that ebbed and flowed though the structures themselves did not move. I especially enjoyed the mosaics. I’ve dabbled in mosaic and can appreciate the time and effort put into constructing the ones in the park. I wish we had had more than an hour and a half…..
On the day we visited Assisi I was feeling a little under the weather so I only took a few shots. Assisi is a beautiful walled city with lots of narrow streets and passageways to explore and is surrounded by a gorgeous landscape which people associate with this region of Italy.
One of the interior courtyards reminded me of others I had seen like the cathedral in Toldeo. I really enjoy the arches and stonework.
As with many of the centuries old treasures we visited reminders of how far we have progressed (insert sarcasm here) were not hard to find.
This is my favorite shot from that day:
One of the many things I enjoyed about Spain was the plethora of public spaces. After we checked in to our hotel I went for a short walk before dinner to get the lay of the land. The street our hotel was on intersected with several others near one entrance to a large public park by the Bridge of Toledo that ran along a river. According to our tour guide the park was only recently, within a year or so, completed. (I feel like that last sentence is grammatically bad. Meh, I move on.) Our guide said the mayor of Madrid had decided to move a couple of the major roads underground and reclaim the river for the people of Madrid. I’d say he had a good idea:
View from the Bridge of Toledo looking Southeast.
View from the Bridge of Toledo looking Northwest.
After my walk I had dinner, near Labors of Love, and had decided to run along this park the following morning. Mind you we had just arrived in Madrid after a 15 hour or so journey from SFO. I awoke early the next morning to get in my 3 miles, donned my running gear and headed out. Everything started well, it was a lovely morning, the park was beautiful. I passed playgrounds, cafes, playing fields for futbol or whatever and things like this:
Then, less than a mile in I was puffing and wheezing. “WTF?” I thought. “Damn, I must really be jet lagged.” I pressed on pausing several times, something I never do at that distance. Then it dawned on me to check the elevation. Duh. Turns out Madrid is like 2,000 ft above sea level and I’m used to running at 97 ft; I didn’t feel so bad about resting.
Before leaving I took a photo of the entrance to the park that I used near the Piramides tube station and saw that maybe I should have been more wary about running there
Why?
Because there were:
One of my goals as a teacher is to help my students embrace their ignorance. Too many of them are afraid to participate in class discussions because they’re worried they’ll be wrong, or worse they feel they don’t know anything. I try to emphasize that not knowing things is okay, it just means there is more stuff to learn! To make them feel better about their own ignorance I teach them about the concept of schema. A person’s schema is everything they have learned over their lifetime. People use this accumulated knowledge, or schema, to make sense of and interpret new situations. Since everyone’s life experiences are different we all have different schemas. I know a LOT about geography and history but much less about science and math. I encourage my students to think of their schema as a library they can reference when trying to understand new things. I demonstrate this concept by having them interpret things like this:
One of the students saw this sign and observed, “Hey, they messed up that sign, one leg is shorter than the other on the people.”
“Well, that’s to indicate they are walking.” I replied.
“No, I think they just messed up the sign.”
“Ok, I’ll buy that, then that means they messed up all of the signs we’ve seen like this in each of the countries we visited.”
Silence.
This next photo I took over 10 years ago in Spain and show it to my students every year. I ask them to use their schema to tell me what they think it means:
“Illegals running across the border!” Is a typical response I get every year, I’m still not sure how they get that from this. I point out the briefcase held by one of the figures and say it indicates a school crossing.
“Ohhhhh.”
This year I’ll show them this one which is more clear:
I wonder what my students schema will tell me about this one:
Every year my students complain about our school dress code, so I’m looking forward to showing them this photo from the Pantheon
Travelling through France, Spain and Italy I was struck by the number of signs that had no text, just images or caricatures like the first photo I posted here. I started to wonder why there were no words, then I realized, duh, there’s like a gazillion different languages spoken in Europe, pictures are easier than having every translation on a sign. So if you’re travelling to the Museo de Prado with your dog you’ll know what this means:
Another teaching goal I have is to encourage my students to travel. Many of them are hesitant because they don’t speak another language. I tell them not to worry, with their schema they’ll be just fine. Finding food for example:
A pleasant place to eat….
Or a bathroom…(a little fuzzy, I was in a hurry)
or a place to buy souvenirs…
I’m not sure how well myself or my students could have navigated medieval Carcassone though, even with our schemas. Without a proper frame of reference, this makes no sense:
Here’s a close up, any ideas what this indicated?
One of the things I enjoy most about travelling is reading, or attempting to read signs. I like trying to figure out what the signs are indicating, other times the signs just make me smile either because they are clever, or because reading the signs literally is hillarious. For example, on the way to dinner on our first night in Madrid I saw this restaraunt:
The restaruant is called “Fatigas del Querer”. When I saw the sign I knew enough Spanish to realize the first word meant fatigue and the last word had something to do with desire. So when I got home I went on Google Translator, began typing and had a good laugh. I laughed because as I typed and Google instantly translated I got this:
typed: fatigas, Google: fatigue; I was right!
typed: fatigas del, Google: fatigue of; right again!
typed: fatigas del quer, Google: fatigue of poker; HA!
typed: fatigas del querer, Google: labors of love; Holy cow, conjugation does matter.
I was proud to figure out that this shop had something to do with renting bicycles; the graphic helped 🙂
This one is great because you don’t need to speak a language to know what the place offers:
The incorrect grammar and claim of street cred on this one got me, oh, and the dog bowls, very thoughtful as there were lots of people con perros in Spain:
On the way to the Churh of the Holy Family we passed this:
which made me crave carne asada tacos from Taqueria San Jose by my house. Then I thought, “Wait, what? A taqueria in Spain?”
In Avignon I appreciated the directness of the signage
Not exactly sure what the cow is advertising; does the place cater to, or serve cow? Maybe I should clarify. Does it cater to cows as patrons or serve them as food?
These next two I found clever:
Must be a town with lots of mathemeticians.
Wholly unoccupied.
Interpreting the sign for this place in English rather than Spanish could steer people away from tasty treats.
One of my favorite places in Madrid that I wish we had had more time to hang out in is Plaza Mayor. Surrouned by restaraunts, cafes, and street performers it captures what plazas in Spain are all about.
I enjoyed the entrances being a little askew.
According to our guide there is a new trend in Europe which involves putting padlocks on public features to mark significant events like a first date, proposal, whaterver. Several of the light posts in Plaza Mayor had several locks.
The start to the day of our return trip was fairly normal; as normal as a 2:30 a.m. wake up call could be.
The day before we had spent our last day in Italy seeing virtually all of Rome, at least that’s what it felt like. We started with an hour bus ride from our hotel to the Colesseum. Upon arrival we were accosted by hovering hawkers of postcards; I think they’ve been conditioned not to hear the word “no”. Well, it was a pretty good deal, 10 postcards for 1 Euro, I guess they were just stunned no one wanted to take them up on such sweet deal. We had about 10 minutes to snap photos, and dodge postcard hawkers, while our tour guide went to fetch our Colesseum guide. When the guides returned we donned our “Whispers” (audio receivers so we could hear the guides narration over the din of the hundreds of other people touring the site), and began the tour. I should note that the “Whispers” were crap; too much interference and static, couldn’t hear much of what the guide said. No matter, the Colesseum was sufficiently awesome without the narration.
After the Colesseum tour we sauntered, ok, rushed over to the Forum to continue the tour. On our way we lost a few people and had to wait an extra 20 minutes or so for them; totally worth it; though it was hot. (Thank goodness it was overcast, it would’ve been a lot worse.)
From the forum we got back on the bus with our driver who I’ll call “Disco Dominico”, his ringtone was Mr. Saxobeat, and he had a mix of 7o’s and 80’s disco/pop tunes that he played for us, who took us to the Vatican museum. Tourning the Vatican Museum then St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel was both awe inspiring and annoying. Awe inspiring because of it’s opulent decadence; annoying because we really never stopped moving and often lost sight of our guides yellow hankie on a stick she was holding above the mass of people; there were a LOTS of them. Though we only spent a few minutes in the Sistene Chapel shoulder to shoulder with other tourists, it was…I was going to say beautiful or gorgeous, but those words don’t really convey what a masterpiece it is. Photos are not allowed, but I snapped a few of the museum and basilica.
Just a few people. Can you see the yellow hankie?
Startled me a little.
After Vatican City we met Disco Dominico for a lift to Trevi Fountain and we walked from there to the Pantheon, then Piazza Navona. The Pantheon is an amazing feat of architecture. Piazza Navona was cool as our guide told us the church in the plaza and the monument in the middle where constructed at roughly the same time by rival architects. The architect of the monument sculpted the figures in a way that showed they were disgusted by the church. None of them are looking directly at the church and most of them are demonstrating open disdain.
In the last two photos, note the expressions of the men on the monument.
After Piazza Navona Disco Domincio drove us to dinner, after which we took the hour long ride back to the hotel and arrived at about 10:00 p.m. As you can see, it was a full day, so the 2:30 a.m. wake up call the following day was just awesome.
We arrived at the Rome airport at something like 4:00 a.m. to catch our 6:00 a.m. flight. Fortunately we had a person meet us there with our boarding passes already printed so all we had to do was show our passports and drop off our luggage. Standing in line to drop off my luggage I realized that in the fog of the morning I had left my souveneir posters on the bus! Meh, I did the same thing when I was in Spain the last time, guess it means I’m coming back in a few years.
The flight from Rome to Frankfurt was 20 minutes early and thank goodness because the Frankfurt security was SLOW and we only had just over an hour to catch our connector back to SFO. First we went through the passport check station, then we went through the security screening where several of our kids had their bags pulled and looked through (nothing found); and one was even pulled aside by security! After the security screening there was another line to check our passports again, by this time our flight had been boarding for a good 15 minutes or so. I ran with the bulk of our kids to the gate while the other teacher with me waited for the kid pulled aside by security. I wasn’t sure they were going to make it but they did at the last minute. I wasn’t able to sleep more than an hour and a half or so for the 10 hour flight from Frankfurt to SFO, thank goodness Lufthansa has the monitors with TV and movies, as well as cool cameras mounted on the plane to get different views of the flight.
By the time we arrived in SFO I had been awake for a LONG time which is probably why I thought my luggage was lost. Everyone else had found theirs and split, but it took me another half hour or so with the help of some Lufthansa people to find it on the conveyor belt. How many times had I actually not seen it as it passed by me on that thing?! Man, I was out of it. Thankfully I had someone to drive me home, who knows where I would’ve enede up if I drove myself. After returning home I was starving so I got two carne asada tacos from Taqueria San Jose, had them with a beer at home and collapsed on the sofa.
Great trip.
1. Why are the toilets in each country different? More specifically, why do the flush differently?
2. Why does Italy have toilet paper dispensed like tissues and not a roll?
3. Who made the driving rules and why don’t they have more accidents? (Ok, that’s really two questions so…)
5. Why did Pisa smell like piss? (To be fair parts of San Francisco and other famous places do too; I’m just going for the cheap laugh).
6. Why don’t Americans adopt the European attitude and just go out and chill with the neighbors and friends every night? I mean just tonight one of the hotels here had a lobby full of elder people dancing.
7. Why is the McDonalds logo green?
8. Does the Disney store really need to be in Florence, and if so, do Americans need to buy stuff from it? Apparently
Adventuring in Europe 