Category Archives: Series: The Tourist (2013)

The Tourist #6: The Soundtrack To My Holiday

07 Monday Oct 2013

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My music collection is on my laptop; I took with me my tablet, with just 150 of my 3778 songs. Who knew 150 songs would come to feel like so few, repeated again and again over the headphones and through the slivers of speakers? It feels like so few when I keep skipping half of them, and going back to the same few. Lisa Mitchell, “Land Beyond the Front Door”. Mazzy Star’s droning shoe gazing rock each time the coach guides put on their music. The comfort of Nick Cave’s title track “Push the Sky Away” without the rest of the album.

Then there were the buskers. Both times we walked to the basilica in Florence, the electric violinist was waiting for us in the square. She was trying to be Andre Rieu; my wife, a violist, hates Andre Rieu. In the busker’s own version of soulfully (sentimentally) she would play those overfamiliar classical pieces, and then throw in renditions of pop songs like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It was a kind of interesting torture standing in the queue.

I wanted to reward the buskers I thought were good. Above the ruins of the Roman Forum, a handful of Italians were playing catchy songs in their own language. I went up to put a Euro in their plate; the lead singer put his arm around me, wanting to know where I was from, and dragged me back, insisting my wife take a photo of me with them. He put his hat on me. She took the photo; I went to put a couple of Euros in his plate and escape, but his voice changed – it was 10 Euros for a photo! He was insistent, angry. We started walking away quickly; it was an unpleasant encounter, left me cautious of the buskers.

A musical highlight. In Cinque Terra, walking one morning between Vernazza and Monterosso along the cliffs, glorious saxophone music floated toward us. We came around the corner and the player, a man of seventy, was standing on a rock above the narrow, isolated path. I should have given him so much more than I did.

The other musical highlight. Arriving in Rome after a long day’s bus ride, late at night we venture out for a walk to the Pantheon, right near where we were staying. As we come to the massive ancient edifice, the Cure’s “Charlotte Sometimes” is playing so loudly, so freshly, the moment is so enchanted, that I tell my wife, “They’re playing a concert, right now, outside the Pantheon – we’ve stumbled on a free Cure concert!”. It seemed the sort of thing Robert Smith might do, but it does sound a little far-fetched, writing it down. It wasn’t the Cure, it was a taxi driver on his break, with an excellent sound system and the door of his taxi open. It was still magical, beholding the ancient pillars against the night sky to the sound of my favourite band, an unlikely but befitting soundtrack.

Sometimes I’m dreaming
Where all the other people dance
Sometimes I’m dreaming
Charlotte sometimes

The Tourist #5: Souvenirs

22 Sunday Sep 2013

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A week ago, we were on the island of Murano, the island of Venice famous for its glass-making. A thousand shops on the tiny place sold glass ornaments; many of the cheaper ones were selling Chinese-made ones. Trinkets were made in factories in a different world and shipped to this island to sell to tourists to have their piece of Venetian memorabilia. It seemed a strange thing to do. The authentic shops, or the ones trying to seem so, had up signs declaring that there was no Chinese glass to be found in their shop. Overwhelmed yet underwhelmed, we left Murano without having purchased anything but a hot chocolate.
Souvenirs must have meant so much more in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the possibility of travel opened up to so many more people, and each traveller was delighted to bring home a piece of the place they visited to remember it forever. But what do souvenirs mean in a globalised world when anything can be bought over the internet? And in our cluttered houses, with too much stuff, where no object can truly be treasured, only drowned out in the noise of our possessions.
We packed with no spare room in our bags at all. Our expectation was that we would bring home nothing but photographs, given our dislike of shopping and ideological disdain for souvenirs. Then, on the bus between cities, I was talking to an Australian couple who were collecting shot glasses from each city they visited; they showed me their latest from Lucerne. I said, “That’s going straight to the pool room!”; they laughed, but I’m not sure they got the reference. I was kind of jealous, imagining their cabinet full of slightly kitschy shot glasses to remember forever their great Europe trip. What was I going to have to show for my holiday? Did I really think my memories and photographs were enough?
I’d missed four cities already, but next city, I bought a fridge magnet. It would hold up documents on our fridge, and remind me of the exotic places I had been with an iconic image of the place in question. Never mind where it was made. Never mind how tenuous the link between the image and my experience of the city. I decided I would join the souvenir game.
I have done this knowing there’s something despicable about souvenir stands. (There’s one every twenty metres in the Vatican, it’s the worst for them.) They remind us we are tourists. They remind us we are a herd. They remind us we trying to capture our moment, capture the place in a trinket, and that, really, we have failed.  And still, today, before I left Florence, I made sure I’d got another magnet.

The Tourist #4: The Pleasure of Ruins

17 Tuesday Sep 2013

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  Sitting on my shelf at home is a book, bought at a booksale two or three years ago, I am looking forward to one day reading: ‘The Pleasure of Ruins’.
   We are staying in a medieval apartment a few hundred metres from ancient ruins of Rome, and we have spent today looking at them. We saw great marble pillars fashioned at the time of Christ, inscriptions which have lasted centuries, the skeletal remains of the grandeur of an empire, the bricks and broken stones of it.
   As a child, I thought I was fascinated by archaeology, but more than that I was fascinated by ruins. Today I realised the photos in books about ruins present an idyll which is not otainable in the real world. The viewer of ruins is an explorer cutting through the overgrown forest to come across the ruins, the first to lay eyes on them for centuries. From a perfect angle, in beautiful light, the ruins shimmer and fill the viewer with a kind of longing which is hard to explain.
The idyll of ruins is the quester contemplating the fate of Ozymandius in solitude and silence. The reality of Rome’s ruins is the viewer in a sea of tourists, all straining to have their ruins experience, or at least a good photo of them. The reality is iron bars and fences and signs and relentless sellers of novelty toys and souvenirs.

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This is just an observation; the truth is that today my inner-six-year-old was elated, which is to say my whole self was elated, because I have never lost my love of ruins. (All three of my novels are partly about ruins. In ‘The Fur’, it is a whole state in ruins, the beauty of abandoned towns and houses in a plague. In ‘House of Zealots’, the ruins are obscured, but the whole novel was inspired by the mood of living in a rundown house from 1950 which was one step off being abandoned to squatters, a contemporary ruin. In ‘Immortalities’ the ‘ruins’ are the archival remains and traces which individual lives leave behind, waiting for the quester to piece them together. I wonder how different my interest in ruins would be if I lived in Europe where the ruins are ancient?)
I had my moments of contemplation jostling among the tourists, my moments of connection to the past. In fact, it was an overwhelming dose of ruins – it seems too much for one person to be allowed to experience in one day.

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Wasn’t it the Romantic period when the beauty of ruins was recognised? (I will find out for sure when I finally read that book which awaits on my shelf back home.) Faux ruins were created, and others ‘improved’ to make them more picturesque. It is an instinct I fully understand. I hope they do not attempt to restore too many of the grand crumbling monuments and buildings I saw today – it is more poignant to see them as time has rendered them. Recover and preserve, but not to make them shiny and new. Leave the weeds growing out of the old bricks. Leave them with their sense of centuries which we cannot have ourselves.

The Tourist #3: Staying in a Haunted House

17 Tuesday Sep 2013

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Friday was a long journey from Munich to Venice, finishing with a slow “vaporetto” (water bus) journey to the far end of Venice.

We had booked a place through airbnb; ‘urgent maintenance’ meant that at the last minute we were moved to a place in St Elena, the furthest edge of the island; it was a bigger, more expensive apartment, our host reassured us. He met us at the vaporetto stop and took us through a park loud with all the local children playing to the house.

The apartment was a shrine to a dead man.

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The dead man was a doctor, a paedetrician, a plaque in the entrance told us. Inside, the apartment was surely much as he left it when he died nearly ten years ago. A good collection of novels in Italian, frozen in the early noughties. Knick-knacks in the cabinet from his travels around the world – a boomerang, even. The atmosphere brought to mind the house of my dead grandparents, and that of my wife’s dead grandparents: the accretions of a life centred on the late 1950s. Old furniture mixed with new. A green kitchen with odd crockery and cutlery only years of living could produce. A smell of many years of living in that one place.

In the spare room, on the wall, his framed degree remains on display.

A tour guide told me there is no room to bury their dead on Venice. They take them out to an island and bury them there for a decade or two until the gravesite is required again and the bones are transferred to a communal ossuary.

Yet this doctor, even as he lies in the ground on the next island, has a great shrine right where he always lived. Tourists come and live in his shrine each week, as if on pilgrimage. The apartment awaits his return.

The Tourist #2: What is the Meaning of Tourism?

09 Monday Sep 2013

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   Two days ago, we found ourselves eating lunch in a carless Swiss village, 1300m altitude. It was a sunny afternoon and we ate facing a snow capped mountain, its top in a halo of light, as paragliders floated down into the valley. The tables were close to each other, and next to us were two aging English women, who lived up to a certain stereotype. At one point, the more talkative of the two said resignedly, ‘Oh well – we’ve crossed another one off the list, getting to here.’ (They also spoke of how early one could go upstairs for a Scotch, and when the bill came, a polite disagreement arose – ‘Mine was only twelve fifty.’ Unhappy wealthy widows forced to travel together?)
   These poor women felt an obligation to their tourism, a list mental or physical which must be ticked. As amusing as I found them, I believe the sense of obligation is usually present in tourism, albeit less pronounced. I know we have been tempted by guilt some days at the sights we have not seen, at the experiences we have not had. Perhaps, as much as anything, imagining the disbelief, disapproval even of others – ‘You went to Paris and didn’t see the Mona Lisa?’
   Of course, it’s silly, and I am determined to balance some sightseeing with leisurely eating and unashamed relaxing. Yet the feeling remains, and really it is to revisit the theme of my previous post on photography: tourism as consuming. At what point is a sight consumed? What sort of satisfaction does it bring?
   It is, of course, better to think of sights experienced rather than consumed. We see sights to experience them: to encounter something wondrous, quaint, inspiring, or at least interesting.
   Yet to confuse my use of the word ‘experience’ by returning to the tour bus full of young adults I mentioned last time, I think we could distinguish two different approaches to the meaning of tourism: tourism as sightseeing and tourism as experiences. The divide is generational, and it it is a blunt generalisation. But the same backpackers unmoved by the Swiss mountains and lakes were signing up to white water rafting and rope climbing. The attraction is not the sights, but activities. And events: the bus host told of the hordes about to descend on Munich for Oktoberfest, and the hordes who had just come from La Tomatina, the tomato throwing festival.  It would seem that tourism, for them, is tied up to experiencing events and activities – and probably just as much, backpacker culture itself. Not the culture of the place one is staying in, but the solidarity of being there with other young people finding themselves. (Of course, it is an illusion or conceit of tourism that we can ever experience anything as the locals experience it; I don’t know if it is more authentic to not even try or to be proud of the  little moments which seem authentic to us.)
  And now I leave this post unpolished in order to be in time for my reservation at Lucerne’s best restaurant. I have not even discussed food and its role in the meaning of tourism! 
  
 

The Tourist #1: Reflections on Photography and Tourism

08 Sunday Sep 2013

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When I was a child, Dad’s advice used to be: make sure you have someone in the photograph; otherwise you might as well buy a postcard. His advice rested on the idea, perhaps, that each photo of a sight was interchangeable. In the age of the internet, it seems advice which needs updating.
But perhaps he was right – what does my photograph of the Eiffel Tower mean to people who are not me? Everyone knows what it looks like. For people who are interested in me, seeing me in the frame adds something to it; Dad’s advice holds up. And then perhaps if it’s artful or striking or unusual in some way it might be worth looking at on its own terms.
On the other hand, perhaps photos are not for others at all. Perhaps they are for the self – a record of where one has been, what one has seen. A prompt for memory, or probably more likely, they become a substitute for the memory itself. Or not quite either of these ways of saying it – perhaps we can say the photo becomes canonical for how the moment is remembered.

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