Love Songs of Asia

Do not believe that ink is always black,
     or lime white, or lemon sour;
You cannot ring one bell from two pagodas,
You cannot have two governors for the city of Lang Son.

I found you binding an orange spray
     of flowers with white flowers; 
I never noticed the flower gathering
     of other village ladies.
Would you like me to go and see your father and mother?

                                                      Song of Annam

This is one of my favorite books of poetry.  It is a book of sensuous, passionate love songs and poems from Afghanistan, Persia, Vietnam translated, I believe,  by a young British official posted in Afghanistan during World War I.  His name was E Powys Mathers.  I found this book in the Duxbury library years ago.  I recently remembered it and ordered it online.

Love Songs of Asia

Do not believe that ink is always black,
     or lime white, or lemon sour;
You cannot ring one bell from two pagodas,
You cannot have two governors for the city of Lang Son.

I found you binding an orange spray
     of flowers with white flowers; 
I never noticed the flower gathering
     of other village ladies.
Would you like me to go and see your father and mother?

                                                      Song of Annam

This is one of my favorite books of poetry.  It is a book of sensuous, passionate love songs and poems from Afghanistan, Persia, Vietnam translated, I believe,  by a young British official posted in Afghanistan during World War I.  His name was E Powys Mathers.  I found this book in the Duxbury library years ago.  I recently remembered it and ordered it online.

Juan Rulfo is so Strange

I was squatting on a rock, not doing anything,
only sitting there with my pants down 
so they would see me like that and wouldn't come near me.

Yo estaba acuclillado en una piedra, sin hacer nada, 
solamente sentado alli con los pantalones caidos 
para que ellas me vieran asi y no se me arrimaran.
                                                
                            Juan Rulfo, Anacleto Morones

I just finished reading El Llano en Llamas by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.  These stories are fascinating, very Mexican, creepy, Poe-like.  He only wrote two books, the other was Pedro Paramo a short novel with strange distortions of memory and mixing of the real and the supernatural.  Always grim, fatalistic, morbid, but these are stories with characters, motives, plots and mood that transcend common writing.

Using the Trains in Italia

The Trains

On our recent trip to Italy we traveled by between cities by train, going from Rome to Naples, then by ferry around the Amalfi coast, stopping for three days in Positano and then another ferry to Salerno where we trucked our luggage 3 blocks to the train station and tried to figure out how the system worked. There were two train companies with ticket offices in the Salerno station.  One was Trenitalia, the government owned system and the other was Italo Treno a supposedly private company.  We started in the Italo-treno office but could not get a good schedule to get to Venice by nightfall where we had an Airbnb room waiting for us.  We ended up going to the Trenitalia station, at first standing in a long, non-moving line, until a woman asked us if we needed help.  She took us into a private office and arranged our trip.  I am not sure why we were treated differently but it was a big help and we got our tickets on a good schedule, although not cheap.  We got off the water bus in Venice about dark and our host met us to take us to our apartment.

We only stayed one night in Venice, eating at a small Osteria in a medieval alleyway late at night and the next day having breakfast in Saint Mark’s square.  When we left, we took the water bus back to the train station and took our place in a long line again to get tickets.  Again, the line was hardly moving, but I had searched online the previous night to find the train we wanted to take, including the price, departure time, and train number.  So I left Pam in line and went around to one of the ticket machines where I found it was easy to buy the tickets I wanted for the train I wanted, although only first class was still available.  The ticket machine easily switched to English and took my credit card, printing out our two first class tickets.  Then all we had to do was watch for the track number on the board, check our coach and seat numbers and be ready to get on board at the right place.  Our first train ride from Rome to Naples we had randomly boarded and sat unknowingly in first class with coach tickets.  We were summarily asked to leave and go to our appropriate coach and class. Once we had learned the ropes the trains were a lot easier to use. 

     My advice on using the trains in Italy:  Know which train company and line you are going to use, there are different companies and some lines stop at every stop, and others go city center to city center.   Know ahead of time the train you want and get your tickets early, they do sell out.  Find the right track on the board, find your car, usually there are numbers on the track so you know where to stand when the train comes in, your seat number seems to matter, but most people are flexible so you can move to sit next to your traveling companions.  The machine bought tickets did not always print out with proximate seats.  On one trip, a woman realized that she had got on the wrong train and was in tears.  She probably had spent a good amount of money on the ticket and would miss whatever appointment she had had, and would have to spend the day returning and re-buying tickets to get to her original destination.  This was always my fear in the early confusion we had finding our way.

     The Trenitalia trips were pleasant enough.  We found ourselves rocketing through the Italian countryside.  As we moved south the rolling hills and mountains got drier and drier.  There are forests, farms and fields in Tuscany, (Just like the Illinois Central),  more farms, less forests and vegetation on the mountainsides south of Rome.  The trains are air conditioned.  Italians do not use air conditioning as much as Americans do.  One bookstore at the train station was oppressively hot and miserable to be in.  When there was AC it was generally turned lower than at home.   The seats on the trains were comfortable although economy class could get crowded.  First class had leather seats, more room and an attendant served drinks and snacks from a mobile cart.  The train information along with news and weather was displayed on Monitors at intervals along each car.  The speed of the train was usually about 240 kilometers per hour.  But it did not feel that we were going that fast.  While we were in Florence, there was a bad train crash in the south, but it was not Trenitalia.

We did try to take the Circumvesuvio railroad from Naples to Sorrento but the train was so hot and crowded that we had to get off, especially after people kept jamming into the already overloaded car.  We forfeited our tickets but they were cheap enough and dragged our luggage onto the Metro to get to the waterfront where we found the ferries.