Pirates!

It is cold tonight!  The air is cold and damp and I'm puffing it out in clouds. I'm rugged up - coat, scarf, gloves and a big pink wool beret.
            And as I headed out, a family walked in the door.  A small girl gasped.
            "Look!" she crowed, pointing at my beret.  "A pirate!"
            Her face had gone white and eyes were as large as stars.  Every storybook she owned had just come to life in the middle of mundane everyday-world Santiago.
            I grinned and said "That's right." and came very close to screwing up my face and growling "Argh."
            But I didn't.  I settled for a pirate grin, and walked out, feeling rambunctious and yo-ho-ho-y.

Among Friends.

Daniela and Mike have a deep-pile shag rug on their living room floor.
            I was sitting on the rug.
            My earring fell off.
            My big, bright, sparkly, knuckle-dusting Christmas Eve earring - as hard to miss as a Christmas cracker.
            We found two almonds, three crackers, half a walnut and a raisin before we found that earring.
            Mike reckoned that if we expanded the search beyond the immediate area where I was sitting, we might have enough to serve up to his sister's new boyfriend when he came for Christmas day lunch.
            Mike is a composer and a singer. A very good singer. The boyfriend came into money five years ago, bought a guitar and collected a band of like-minded two-chord enthusiasts. As he layered raisins and cracker crumbs on a plate, Mike played us a recording of the boyfriend's latest, and it was a very special recording - like the last Karaoke song of the night before the bar closes and the microphone is pried away from the leftover lush.  We felt for him, and suggested a vacuum cleaner with a stocking tied over the hose. To dig up the good stuff.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone!  Best wishes to all on this totally non-sectarian day of chocolate, finger-paint and bunny ears!

This year, I celebrated by dying chicken eggs with a friend and her two small children.  Bunny ears in place, the kids parked themselves at the kitchen ledge mixing bowls of food-color and vinegar.  Danette and I had a slightly more haute-couture technique in mind. 
            It is very elegant and simple - you take a stack of thrifted silk ties with nice bright patterns, and you cut the fabric into squares, and you wrap and tie the silk tightly around the eggs, and you boil the eggs in water with vinegar for quite a long time, and when the eggs are cooled, you unwrap them and you find that the patterns on the silk have transferred artistically to the eggshells.  It's very simple and very elegant and very lovely.
            Danette and I leaned on the kitchen ledge and snipped and wrapped and tied, while a small child dunked boiled eggs in yellow food coloring and solemnly explained that we did this to honor the Easter Rabbit, who once a year pooped out chocolate eggs for all the good little children everywhere. 
            My eyes crossed.  "Are you sure that's not the Easter Chicken?  I thought the Easter Chicken laid the eggs, and the Easter Bunny gives them away in baskets." 
            "Nope."  The small child fished the egg out of the yellow and held it half-way in and half-way out of the red food coloring, making a sort of ombre effect. "The Rabbit poops, and we get them under our pillows."
            Who am I to argue? The Easter Bunny and the Easter Chicken haven't graced my house with the Big Hop in years - I'm old enough that I'm expected to go find my own eggs.

The kid's eggs turned out fantastic.  Kid #1  did a whole Jackson Pollock thing with dribbles and stripes drawn on with a wax candle, and Kid #2 wanted pure colors - 
            "Not even a stripe?  Or your name in wax?" 
            "No thank you." He said politely.  "I like mine just plain.  They're perfect."  
            And they were. Really.

Ours, on the other hand…
            Our haute-couture eggs didn't come out quite exactly like the ones in the internet tutorial.  We had wrapped the silk as tightly as possible, but somehow the patterns on the silk didn't adhere to very much of the eggshell, and where it did stick we mostly got lumpy streaks and smears, and one of the ties turned out to contain a very unstable dye that gave everything a base shade of purple. 
            Some test-dyes might have been advisable, in retrospect. I might have done quite a lot of preliminary research, because after-the-fact, the deeper I looked into things, the less simple the silk-dyed-egg technique apparently was - there is quite a lot of crosss-chatter on crafting sites trouble-shooting the elegantly simple instructions and suggesting where to get lots of fresh silk ties in a very big hurry. 
            And most of the eggs burst during boiling, and they hadn't been very nice eggs in the first place, so the blotchy swirls smelled unpleasantly sulpherous and not at all like anything an Easter Rabbit would want underneath her in her Easter nest. 
            They were not, in short, our best efforts.

Mr Tabubil was very severe when he came home. "Not a failure.  Don't use that word.  Did you have fun?"
            "Well - " 
            "You all enjoyed yourselves, didn't you?" 
            "I guess - " 
            "Then it wasn't a failure, was it?" 
            "I suppose not." 
            "Right." And then he spoiled it all by giggling. "It's exactly like one of those Pinterest Fails. The instructions look so simple and clear and go step by step so that absolutely anyone can do it - they just don't tell you that doing it correctly needs five years of art school or an apprenticeship with the Culinary Institute of America. The result at home is… less polished.  But you had fun, right? That's what counts."
            The swirls on our eggs were lovely, when you really looked at them, and didn't compare them to the perfect internet version. I went away and ate some chocolate rabbit poop. Non-sulpherously.

Halloween in the Calle Rosas

This morning my mother-in-law  took a little trip into Centro - the old heart of Santiago -  for a little Halloween shopping.
            Our first stop was a little arcade just outside the Plaza de Armas- the arcade was mostly hairdressers and cell-phone-cover stores, but I remembered a little toy store in there that had a wall of boxes full of rubber animals. You know the sort of thing - rubber snakes and technicolor stegosaurus and wolf-spiders with fangs the size of hubcaps. I wanted to see if they had any plastic rats.
            Did they have plastic rats? Does New York have a Big Apple in it? Did Gustave Eiffel design some rather nice train stations in South America? Did they have rats?! -
            We left the shop with a bag full of big black red-eyed rodents, a handful of little black mice and a clutch of nasty rubber spiders. My mother-in-law insisted on carrying the bag.

On the back side of the Plaza de Armas is a street called Calle Rosas. Down the west end of the street there are shops selling fabric and sewing machines and fabrics and parts for sewing machines, but what Calle Rosas really does is parties.
            Chileans take parties seriously. For a start, you need a pinata. And hats, lots of hats. Not the good old Australian party standby - the paper cone with an elastic band to go under the chin and maybe a streamer at the top, but crowns with jewels on, and policeman's helmets, and dragons to roost on your head and coil down around your ears, and Egyptian cobras done in gold lame, and pirate's tricorns, and veddy English top hats, and feather bonnets, and green fedoras and flapper cloches -
            Hatted out, you need your streamers and balloons. And banners, done up in glitter with the name of the guest of honor written three feet high, and horns and hooters and poppers and silly string - 
            Imagine all that and then, add Halloween. Calle Rosas had gone bananas. There was no other word for it - the stores that normally can't breath for confetti and paper streamers were tricked out (see what i did there?!) in balloons and paper bats - there was so much Halloween dangling from the ceilings of the stores that you had to enter in a sort of semi-crouch and sidle around barrels full of rubber masks and plastic pitchforks with plastic blood on to even get inside. 
            We started in the smaller stores that exist wistfully on the fringes of things where Calle Rosas bumps into Veintiuno de Mayo (21 May 1879, the Battle of Iquique. Chileans like to name streets after significant dates) and, creeping bent between racks of vampire capes (basic black, sex-bomb red, virginal white, or cotton-candy pink) we came away with bunting and streamers and bags and bags of little black plastic spiders. 
            And we bought Mr Tabubil a hat - a black bowler with cobwebs and big round eyeballs on it, and dangling wads of grey cheesecloth from around its ears. It is glorious.
            Our purchases were bagged by fellow in a cowl and a hockey mask, who gurgled liquidly when we said Gracias. He had coughed at us when we entered, liquid and hacking, and when we flinched, he had  reeled sideways into the arms of a dancing skeleton and clutched at a plastic pike with plastic blood on the handle - he was having a wonderful day. 
            After that we braved the bigger party stores.  Who knew what we'd see?  
            If we could get through the doors.  It wasn't the flying bats or the whispering ghosts or the jiggling hanged men with battery-operated jiggles - it was the flying bats and the whispering ghosts and the jiggling hanged men.  But mostly it was the people.  I don't know if any stores made any money anywhere else in Santiago today, because the entire city was out shopping in Calle Rosas. The only thing that made the experience bearable was the army of pumpkin-shirted men and women that patrolled the crowd, looking to latch onto anyone sufficiently wide-eyed and desperate, and took you and your shopping list in hand and dragged you bodily through the scrum.
            They did abandon us, sporadically, so that we could be menaced by men in hockey masks (clearly the spook-face of the year) and army jackets that looked as if they'd been shredded by claws and buried for a month. A monster would come close - and closer, and we'd notice that behind the hockey mask was another mask - this one with scars and maggots and a reek of fresh rubber. Bending down, he'd shrug, slightly, and we'd notice that the clinking sound we were hearing was the chains that he wore draped across his shoulders and over his chest, and we'd see that his leather motorcycle gauntlets were shredded by the same steel claws that had done for his coat, and once he'd seen that we'd seen, he settled down to make us feel really uncomfortable.
            Above us, the ceiling howled and cackled and laughed manically, mechanically, because every single square foot of it was occupied by those whispering ghosts and jiggling hanged men, and a little girl, screaming with laughter, was jumping up and down and setting them all off.
            We laughed too, and our hockey-mask maniac winked at us and shuffled off to menace someone else.
 
Outside the store, we walked to the end of the street and there was no more Halloween, anywhere at all.  It was a whole festival confined to that one street, and nowhere else in the city. We caught a taxi and drove home and unpacked our loot on the kitchen ledge.
            It's all about context, I think.  Take our Ghastly Severed Hand, for instance.  At a Halloween store, no-one would look at it twice, but at mid-afternoon outside the Calle Rosas, when Mr Tabubil came around the corner from the laundry and saw it lying on the kitchen ledge, he hit the ceiling. 
            Quite literally.  He screamed and then he jumped.            
            It is a rather good severed hand.  
            Also, there is a small black rat sitting on Mr Tabubil's nightstand.  My mother-in-law and I are trying a small psychological experiment.

Curtains, Part Three

In which we meet the maestros. 

In which the maestros attempt to give us what we, in fact, didn't want and didn't intend to take.   

Someone at the curtain store must have talked to someone, because twenty-four hours after the maestro (workman) and his cut-price curtain rails had jingled their way out of my apartment, the curtain store went into full damage-control mode. They were terribly sweet. The bodega (warehouse) sent regular daily updates on the progress of my new curtain rails, and when, six days later, they called me to tell me that all was ready for a proper installation, they turned themselves into pretzel knots making it clear that they were completely and entirely at my disposal. Any time I liked.

            "Monday, for instance." They said. "Would Monday work for you?"
            "Lovely." I said.
            "Between ten-thirty and eleven in the morning?"
            "Perfect."

            "You will be home, won't you?" They said anxiously. "We're not putting you out?"
            "I'll be there," I said. "Between ten-thirty and eleven."
            "Wonderful." They said. They bowed themselves off the phone and I looked forward to a nice job very well done.
            Accordingly, when the clock ticked round to twelve-thirty on Monday morning with no sign of the curtain people, I found myself feeling moderately miffed, and I called the shop.
            "Yes." The man on the phone said. "We thought we'd drop by around three.  Four at the latest.  Sound good?"
            "You said ten-thirty to eleven!"
            "Well we did say that." He said, as if it were all perfectly reasonable and obvious. "Yes, we did.  Is three o'clock okay, then?"
            "You've got to  give me a heads-up on this sort of thing " I said. "I can't be at home this afternoon.  I've got a dental appointment at three o'clock!"
            "You do?" He cried. "But we have a delivery!"
            "For ten-thirty this morning!"
            The voice on the phone sobered abruptly. "I'm going to have to talk to my manager about this." He said. And he hung up.

"I understand." His boss said portentously, "that there is an issue of a medical appointment."

            "No." I said. "The issue is that you were supposed to deliver my curtain rails this morning. And you didn't."
            "That isn't the issue." He said. "The issue is that we have a delivery to make and you have declined to be home at the hour set."
            "Three and a half hours after you were supposed to be here? I'm happy to be home for you, but you've got to let me know in advance. You told me you were coming this morning, so I made a dental appointment for this afternoon-"
            "Which is when we're delivering-"
            "Which is not what we discussed-"
            "And if you're not there, we can't deliver."
            "Right!" I cried. "Right! Exactly!"
            "Oh." There was a long, thoughtful pause. "In that case, we'd better reschedule for tomorrow."
            "Yes." I said.
            "Tomorrow." He said. "Will you be home tomorrow between ten-thirty and eleven?"

Trapeeze!

Right now I'm watching a movie called Trapeze! It was filmed in 1956, and stars Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida and another fellow with a jaw like a ball-peen hammer. 
            Trapeeze is Technicolor and CinemaScope and dancing girls on elephants! It's about two trapeze artists trying to perfect the triple somersault, and the scheming woman who wants to be a star and comes between them. 
            The woman has a chest like the front of ship and a waist you could pour through a hose - even when she’s wearing leotards. When she walks, her hips sashay like she's a hula dancer going for the All-Hawaiian-Islands trophy and her eyes roll about like they're on gimbals pointed due man-flesh. 
            Nobody speaks. They declaim. Crouched like boxers in a ring, the men square their jaws and stretch clawed hands up to the heavens: 
            "I'm tryin' to give you somethin' pure! Pure, you unnerstand? A flying act like the woild's never seen! But for you it's all about the money! You've got no soul - no soul, I tell ya!" 
            At the top of the circus tent, the Woman wriggles her hips and rolls her eyes and purrs "come fly with me, love" and whispers to the love-sick trapeze artist at her feet that "you don't-a need 'dat man down 'dere. In here -" she presses her palms to her voluptuously corseted chest, "you 'ave all the talent you need!" 
            Far, far below, the cynic is scrunching his face and roaring "Dames! All of ya the same! Born to destroy every thing and every man ya touch! Born cold, born to break a man and destroy his woild!" 
            The cynic is on to something, all right. High above, his puppy-eyed partner rolls over on the platform and wags his tail and you, the viewer, are waiting, just waiting, for Her, a dreamy smile on her painted lips, to reach out one pointed toe and push him off. Off of the side without the net. 
            Any man over the age of twelve who lets himself fall for all that cantilevered engineering (anyone who'll wear a corset on a flying trapeze is clearly planning something not in the training manual) deserves everything he has coming.

Today I saw...

- A young man with an expansive walrus mustache attempting to drink a tub of yogurt.  The dear soul was doing his best.

- A small child lying on the tiled floor of the lobby of an apartment building. She was flat on her face and her arms and legs were spread out wide. A slightly older boy launched himself off the front stoop and began running in circles on the sidewalk. The small girl lifted her head- infinitesimally, and slumped back. She was absolutely, determinedly paralytic. You couldn't have shifted her with a bulldozer. 
            A mother appeared. Hands on hips, mouth tight, she regarded the small child.  Two small slitted toddler eyes regarded her back. Regretfully, I walked on. Regretfully, because the pyrotechnics were going to be technicolor, surround-sound, sword-and-sandals, gods-in-the-desert epic.

- Passing a coffee shop, I saw a gentleman in a Savile Row suit. He was bandbox span-and-spic, with silver cufflinks and a mirror shine. His beard was trimmed and pressed, his trousers broke perfectly across his instep, and his jacket sleeves hung to  a precise 0.8 inches above his cuffs. 
            He had an iced coffee in his hand - one of those enormous iced creations that come in tall plastic cups, with cream and syrup under a domed lid, and ice-cream on top of that, and on top of that more cream -
            Stealthily, he looked to his right. And his left. And right again, and then he lowered his head and positively inhaled that mountain of cream. He slurped, he licked, he dug into the cream with his straw and used it as a shovel, and his face was pure unadulterated glee. I think I loved him a little bit, right then.

Christmas in Santiago

Alice of Wonderland, Scourge of Cobwebs, Despoiler of Halloweens Everywhere

I began sewing this dress a couple of years ago for an Alice of Wonderland party, but I never finished it. I was dressing as the titular Alice - a rather bashy, brutal sort of Alice, with a contract out on the head (complete with frozen glass eyes and a zipper to make a purse) of the Cheshire Cat. On the morning of the party, before the final seams were sewn, Zoe, the party's hostess, called in floods of tears.  She'd found her beloved cat Horse lying in the back garden, dead from a snake-bite.
            We were all shattered. My costume stayed unfinished. There are some things that nice people just don't do. 
           Three years later, Alice of Wonderland, Cheshire Cat Hunter, received her last stitch.  And she was a most appropriately Halloween-y sort of costume - absolutely loaded with horror and dread, and the day after the party, in the cold light of morning, what fifteen assorted people cannot understand is how European Civilization survived half a millennium of hoopskirts. 
            I couldn't pass a decorative cobweb without trying to take it away with me on my pink petticoat - as well as whatever the cobweb had been attached to, which was usually a chair, which meant that whoever was sitting on the chair came too.  I nearly took down the buffet when I leaned gingerly in for a pineapple kebab - the hostess had cleverly swapped out the tablecloth for more cobwebs, and when three people reached out to catch me, i found that the pork platter and a bowl of punch were strung out on a cobweb lead line, teetering on the brink of total party disaster.   
            I was banned from the living room the second time I passed the coffee table - my swinging skirts were setting glasses of punch flying. That second pass had taken out the refills of the ruins of the first, and as I fled, disgraced, the conversation turned from how the hostess had illegally given herself a bye into the semi-finals of the Pictionary tournament, and moved onto candles and farthingales and pocket-hoops and how on earth the Victorians had managed to survive the bustle.  Those inventive Victorians had lit their houses with kerosene lamp and gas burners at the ends of clumsy rubber hoses. Swinging hoops are bad enough, but a bustle you can't see coming or going - the mind shudders.
            I had hoped that the other guests would thank heaven for small mercies and call me back, but instead I was banished to the corner of the dining room and set counting the votes for the costume contest. The seal on my funk was set when I found that people had been writing opinions in the margins of their ballots - my Alice dress had narrowly missed out on the prize for "most genuinely frightening costume" because people were worried that someone would have to present that prize to me in person.

And the evening's true ignominy? The final seal and funk? 
Reader - it was my party.

How I Lost My Innocence

Posting on Tabubilgirl has been somewhat sporadic for the last few months. There's a reason for that. Mr Tabubil and I have bought ourselves a flat - or an apartment, in North-American speak. 
           The flat that we've been renting for the last two years is a wonderful flat.  We love it and we would have lived here forever and ever - were it not for one leeetle issue: 
            The street that runs outside our window is loud. Deceptively pretty, verged with green grass and ancient trees, our narrow little street runs almost all the way from one end of the city to the other. These two lanes are a major cross-town artery, and heavy traffic runs along it from dawn 'til Christmas. Rush hour lasts till ten at night, with all the honking and squealing that go with mile-long traffic jams, and when happily sozzled people, driving with dashing enthusiasm and panache, come back to Santiago from the discotheques in Vina del Mar (a city two hours away on the coast) we have two extra rush-hours at four-thirty every Saturday and Sunday morning. Complete with air-horns.
Sometimes the nicest flat in the world just isn't stay-able.   
            Hunting for a flat to buy is a very different process to hunting for a flat to rent.  The stakes are higher, and the real estate agents are correspondingly more predatory.
            "They'll try anything," my Dad told me. "They'll take you to see places that have nothing to do with what you asked for. They'll guilt-trip you when you tell 'em so - look at you with sorrowful, puppy-dog faces as they explain how they're doing exactly what you asked - only more so, because what they've got right there is better. Don't be buffaloed.  A seasoned estate agent would eat raw puppy dogs for breakfast if it'd help them land a sale. And smile, and offer compliments to the chef."*

After our recent experiences with real estate agents in Australia I wasn't exactly inclined to come down on the side of the real-estate agents, but some of Dad's rhetoric was coming across a wee bit personal - eve bitter. And the very same day that he called me up to talk, a flat showed up on Chile's real-estate website, Portal Inmobilario, that hit every single one of the points on our want-list: it was in the right suburb, situated on the quietest corner of the quietest of streets, and it had a price smack-bang in the middle of our ballpark. There were even photos to go with the listing - not photographs of the insides of bathroom cabinets, or flash-lit corners where ceilings met walls (the people who sell flats on Portal Inmobilario have highly eccentric ideas about what other people want to see) but twenty-six photographs of actual rooms. And the rooms were beautiful. 
            I called the agent on the listing and made an appointment for that afternoon.  Maybe I had just  circumvented the whole puppy-eating circus and found the place on my very first go. I was so optimistic that I invited my mother-in-law to come with me. Just in case it was so much too good to be true that I needed a strong mind to provide a balancing opinion. The price was low, for what we'd be getting. Perhaps there were problems with the drains? We could deal with drains - a week or two with a good plumber and Bob's your proverbial, right? The place was a gem - there were photos to prove it!   

When we arrived at the address on the listing, we found the agent waiting for us outside a smart, freshly painted little block of flats.  There was even a tightly manicured garden of flowers out front.  It was lovely. 
            The agent smiled warmly and held out a hand. "Charmed"  he said, and turning his back on us, he walked briskly away up the street.  "If you'll follow me -" he called over his shoulder, "we don't want to be late."
            Running after him, I caught his arm and very politely (I like to think) asked him what the heck he thought he was playing at.
            "Oh!" He said. His eyes were very wide and very surprised. "You thought that this was-?  Oh no. Oh dear me, no. We don't give out the real addresses of the places we're selling." 
            He explained to me that in Chile, real-estate agents have to give out inaccurate addresses so that apartment owners aren't bothered day and night by people who've seen the apartment on the Portal and aren't really serious about things. It's the caring thing to do. 
            Four blocks of fast-paced rationalizations later, we came to a stop on the corner of one of the most chaotically noisy intersections in our half of Santiago. There is an apartment building there. It is a building that Mr Tabubil and I walk past almost every day. And when we do, we look up that that building and shake our heads and say "Spare me from ever having to live next to this sort of chaos. Ever." And we shake hands and affirm that we won't.
            So I looked the agent firmly in both eyes and said "No."
            The agent put on a puppy-dog face that would have won a muddy Labrador Retriever a reprieve from a year's worth of bath-times.
            "And I came all this way…" He sighed a sigh. "What in the world are you looking for?"
            Raising my voice to be heard while a fire-engine donged past and six taxis took him on with screaming car horns, I told him what I was looking for-  the whole Tabubil spec: square footage, price-range, wants and not-wants -
            The agent's doleful face cleared like a wet Sunday afternoon before an unexpected ray of sunshine.
            "I understand."  He cried. "I understand. Absolutely! You're so incredibly right. Do you hear the noise?" He swept his hand through the air, taking in the whole honking, heaving intersection. "What you want is quiet! I've got another flat - it's exactly the size you're looking for, just a few streets away. Would you like to see..?"
            And, because the address he gave was on a street we knew - and because it was a quiet street, we said yes. We were practically right there anyway.  

When we got there, the street was empty, as advertised, the building was pretty, and according to the agent, the flat in question was at the back, facing out onto a garden. While he rhapsodized, we were joined by his wife. She had armfuls of forms, and it turned out that to even enter the building I had to fill out those forms in triplicate, hand over my RUT (national ID number), and make written promises of exclusivity and follow-up.
            And yet, we still went inside. After all, we were already there. The flat the agent had praised to the skies was barely a quarter of the square footage he'd promised me - and only if you included the building's emergency stairwell - all six flights of it- and the little cupboard in the elevator lobby where you threw out the trash. The kitchen was a swing-door closet fitted out with a single gas burner and a sink the size of a postage stamp, the "matrimonial bedroom" might have fitted a single mattress if you squeezed and didn’t care to close the door, the 'garden' was a rubbish-filled parking lot, and the rest of it, well - my mother-in-law took one look at the beaming agents and leaned toward me and said, out of the corner of her mouth, "Do I ever wish you spoke Dutch right now" and came down with an acute case of the coughs.
            We couldn't get out of there fast enough. 
            Literally. The agent and his wife had blocked the door.
            "Perhaps" they said, fixing me with two pairs of beady eyes, "your expectations are too high. This place is every thing you asked for. Were you imagining a palace?"
            "I was imagining something that half-way approximated what I said I wanted." 
            Standing with his hands gripping both sides of the door, the agent shook his head. I was the most optimistically optimistic gringo who ever tried to buy a property in Santiago. Did I even know how lucky I was? Why - these two flats I was seeing today were the only two flats in my price range in this half of the city. Double what I was quoting was the bare minimum for a place smaller than this. Why - they were dealing with apartments at triple my price fifteen times a day! 
            Considering that his own agency listing on Portal Imobilario had had no less than sixteen properties in or below our price range, I admired his poker face.  Behind me, my mother-in-law's coughing fit had given up all pretense and turned into full-blown giggles.  Ducking under the agent's arm, I slipped neatly through the door into neutral territory.   My mother-in-law followed me, shooting the agent a rather-too-decipherable look and laughing all the way.
            Back down on the street, we found ourselves back in puppy-dog- territory again. The agent and his wife trailed us all the way to the end of the block, thrusting out handfuls of papers and promising that we'd regret not taking the specs of the best place we'd ever see in a year of looking.       
            We didn’t turn back. Blessed are they, it is said, who have not seen, and yet have believed. Blesseder still, I reckon, are those who come to belief sufficiently far in advance that they might go apartment-hunting in very pointy heels - the better for bringing down on the insteps of insufferable real estate agents! 

*I appreciate that this is painting real-estate-agents with a very broad brush. If anyone chooses to feel offended, go sell your real estate with hearts and flowers and bunny-rabbits laid on, and come back to me with testimonials. We'll talk.

There Possibly IS No Business Like Show Business

On account of being sik, I spent my evening on the sofa, snuffling pitifully and watching old Hollywood musicals.  I started out with There's No Business Like Show Business because it has Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe AND Donald O'Conner in it, but the film didn't seem to do much with any of them.  There was a great deal of noise, but not much music.  There was a great deal of technicolor drapery and swirling, but not much dancing or choreography.  Lots of jokes, not much humor, and a great deal of Marilyn Monroe wearing not very much at ALL.   Her character sings in nightclubs, but her costume has chrome nipples on tips of its spangled pneumatic front and that's all I have to say about that.  Poor Donald O'Conner was forced to dance the highland fling to a New Orleans Blues version of Alexander's Ragtime Band - and Ethel Merman?  She had precisely two speeds - full throttle and off, and no-one seemed to be able to get near the off button.

            After ten minutes and six musical comedy numbers, Mr Tabubil looked up from his book and said "You know what?  This is just like porn.  A tottery, badly acted plot to give a thin string of connection to the noisy bits.   And the noisy bits? They're an aesthetic abomination.  And the apparent sincerity of the actors?  Yeah, they're faking it."

            So we put on Broadway Melody of 1940 with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell instead, and Mr Tabubil forgot that he isn't supposed to approve of movies that aren't in color, and we watched happily until bedtime.

Paint and Exhibitionism.

Our apartment building is being painted.  A flock of painters on bosun's chairs hang all over the building at all sorts of hours of the day and the sunny, cheerful yellow that the building was is slowly being replaced by a flat, unutterably dull and deeply trendy whitish beige.

            The thing is - and this is the ranty part, so feel free to skip forward - color theory is difficult.  Color theory is HARD.  What looks good on a test patch two feet wide by two feet tall painted on a side wall of the garage may have little or nothing to do with what looks good all over a building nine storeys tall. 

            People spent years becoming really good at color.  Architects hire experts to play with color and scale, and buildings go up painted to be sharp, and clean-cut and full of personality, and even magnificent, and twenty years later, when the paint is getting scrappy, expert opinions are also scrapped by a majority vote of people with neither taste or discrimination who 'like beige because it's inoffensive' and the lowest common denominator gets exactly what it asked for. And the rest of us have to live with it.

            I've been through this circus before.  In Australia, on the Gold Coast, we lived in a building that was pink, with touches of celestial blue, and other pinks, and slightly darker blues.  The first time you looked at it, you groaned, and then you looked up at the bright tropical sky and thought for a bit, and then as evening came on, you realized that the architects had managed to find the exact colors that happened all of the big horizon every night at sunset - and faded into the skyline at twilight, and by morning you were staring at one of the prettiest buildings on the coast, soft and attenuated, with an elegance of line that just plain WORKS.  And becomes a feature on the landscape.

            And two years ago, it was time for repainting, and the lowest common denominator decided that the architect opinions (which were offered) looked very extravagant and silly on swatches, and voted for a flat, unassuming grey, with trim that is the exact same red-brown color of the rust-proof paint that you use as an undercoat on paintwork, and one of the prettiest buildings on the coast has become a blocky naval battleship that rears up twenty-three stories tall, and is considered, in the opinion of the locals, to now be a blot on the landscape and existing only to spoil the view.

            The actual painting was another circus.  For months we lived with blinds half drawn, because you could never tell  who was going to be painting what, or when -

People grow complacent, living more than a few meters above the ground, out of the sight of passers-by. The things painters must see!  Peering into kitchens, and laundries, and sitting rooms, and bedrooms - Imagine the messes!  The painful neatness!  The fights, the scenes of passion - all of the human condition being played out for the edification of a man on a rope -

Everyone gets got. 

WE got got. 

We had been so very careful DURING the painting, living behind sheer blinds,  drawn tight.  When the building had been made flat and grey and entirely dreadful the painters went away, and we relaxed and opened wide again -  and three weeks later, they came around to touch things up a little, here and there.

            And one morning, in the bathroom, on the lavatory with my trousers around my ankles, a shadow fell across the window and I looked up to see a young man grinning in at me, nose to nose through the glass -

Fifteen storeys up.

It's a very…. specific sort of shock.

The very next I knew, I was at the other end of the apartment, yelling incoherently, with my trousers still down around my ankles. 

My mother and my sister thought that it was all very funny indeed. 

            Three days later, my sister was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth and wearing not much more than a very fetching lace bra, and the young man came back AGAIN.  I was in the living room, reading a book, and heard a scream, and Dr Tabubil and her brassiere came hurtling out of the bathroom yelling something about "awful bloody perverts!" and then you couldn't see her for the dust.

            She went after him later, too, but couldn't find him.  I suspect one of the skills of house-painting is a finely honed sense of when it's  prudent to knock off early and take the rest of the shift off sick.

Segways in Florence.

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence. 

On our last afternoon in Florence, we rented a pair of segways from a little shop across the street from the Pitti Palace.  A Segway is second in fun only to a barrel full of puppies.  When you know what you’re doing, control is very near telepathic – the subtlest shifts in balance and inclination are transmitted directly to the wheels and that barrel full of puppies starts looking as if it has a very VERY narrow lead.  It’s the next best thing to flying. 
Presuming you’re doing it right.

We weren’t. 

The rental shop gave us exactly thirty seconds of instructions, than aimed us at the door and sent us buzzing gently out into the street. 

In a corner of the palace wall we made a few experimental swoops and curvettes, and then we were off – we had our eye on the Piazza Michelangelo, a hilltop overlooking the city, whose approach is a series of steeply raked switchbacks that would be rather less pleasant in the summer heat on foot than on two wheels –

It wasn’t quite as much fun as I’d expected.  I didn’t appreciate how subtle the steering control really was, and I had some idea that I had to horse the machine around by main force with my upper body, shoving it hard into the curves and throwing myself forward and to slow myself down and to speed myself up – I could hardly manage the weight of it on the turns, and as I leaned into the hills the thing accelerated like a good Italian racing car and it was all I could do to hang on for the ride. 

We took a trial run straight up the face of the Costa dei Magnoli. Despite the heavy handling, it was an absolute JOY to go whirring up the steep stone streets, buzzing past the walkers and climbers puffing along in their drooping sun-hats and hiking boots, smiling magnanimously at them as we came rocketing in and out of view, dipping daringly into the turns without a breath or a hair out of place, and leaving sighs of appreciation and rueful envy in our wake –

Horsing the segway through all of those turns was exhausting.  At the top of the hill, as we turned out of the last switchback and onto the promenade of the piazza, I lost control of the machine and drove head first into a lamp-post.  The segway recoiled and shot off sideways.  I flew off in the other direction.  It was a busy road and I was falling toward a group of elderly ladies –

            “If I land on THEM” I thought, “I’m going to take out at least three hips -”

Throwing myself forward and sideways, I missed the ladies, but landed hard on the pavement on my left hand.  It hurt.  Coming up for air, I took stock - I'd sprained my wrist and dislocated my thumb.

The elderly ladies were impressed.  Descending on me in a mass, they picked me up and carried me into a café and demanded ice – 

            ‘Lots of it!  Your husband will take care of that infernal machine, you sit, cara, sit and rest. Are you bleeding? No? Oh, your poor hand-”

They petted and soothed, darting and fussing and around me like a flock of small birds, till one of them pointed at her watch.  Bird-like, they shrieked and with a profusion of final pats, fled out of the café and onto a waiting bus.

Exeunt Omnes.

I sat in the café with a bag of ice on my wrist, and a bag of ice on my knee, which had begun to swell, and felt rather lost.  And, I suspected, rather foolish. 

Up on my feet again, my thumb put right, the view from the top of the hill was worth quite a lot of the bother.  And on the ride back down the hill, I couldn’t use my hand at all, and I discovered just how subtly and elegantly the segway had been designed.  Control was effortless when I was no longer trying to control it.  I forgot my hand and dipped and soared and FLEW down the hill – a bird myself.

After we had returned the segways, I began the process of lying my head off to Mr Tabubil about just how much my wrist hurt.  I wasn’t going to waste any of my holiday in a doctor’s office – my goodness, no!

Lying to Mr Tabubil became lying to myself.  My wrist refused to improve, but I refused to notice, and it wasn’t until I was back home in Santiago that a friend bullied me into seeing a doctor.  The eight weeks since have involved a parade of X-rays, CAT and MRI scans, threats of surgeries, hand, thumb and wrist immobilizers, and a lesson in just how badly you can bruise bones.

Keeping up with this blog has involved spurts of typing, followed by protracted periods of serious discomfort, during which Mr Tabubil looks righteous, puts his nose in the air and makes vaguely religious pronouncements about the karma of lying one’s head off to a Loving Spouse about a Serious Injury, and wouldn’t it all have been easier if we’d just Come Clean and had it seen to when it First Happened? And have we learned our lesson yet? 

And then he cuddles me, and feeds me chocolate.  So that’s all right. 
And the immobilizer splint came off a week ago. 

It’s almost all better now.

The Instant Expert’s Guide to a Foreign City (Florence Edition)

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence.

Florentine drivers are as bad as South American drivers, but they are more phlegmatic about the situation.  The narrow streets are not EVER going to be wide enough for the traffic, so the lunatic in front of you dancing his Fiat across the cobbles on two wheels can be given the finger in a relatively relaxed fashion.  You’re not stopping, he’s not going to ram you, and you can call down the imprecations of God and Man in a purely philosophical and speculative sense.  Neither of you will take it personally.

Old Florence is a tourist town. There’s no getting around it.  Florence is the fount and fountain of one of the great advancements of western philosophy – the Renaissance.  This city is where all the good stuff happened – it is a city of FIRSTS.   Here Brunelleschi built the first great free-standing dome since the Romans, here Donatello re-discovered the lost art of bronze casting and sculpted his David and Goliath.  Renaissance architecture began here in Florence, when Bruneleschi built the Ospedale degli Innocenti in the Piazza Due Fontane, beginning a movement that would span all of Europe and return here to be at last overturned, when Michelangelo grew up and designed a façade for the church of San Lorenzo, and a staircase for the library next door.  There are splendid things on every street corner, and the best way to explore (in my opinion, and I am never short of opinions) is go out and get yourself thoroughly lost.

Start in the Piazza Due Fontane.  Close your eyes and turn around three times, then open your eyes and orient yourself toward the façade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti.

The Ospedale was an orphanage commissioned by the Arte de Seta (Silk Guild) in 1419.  The commission was given to an architect named Filippo Bruneleschi.  Brneleschi is widely regarded as the true father (or instigator) of renaissance archutectire, and the Ospedale degli Inocento was one of the very first buildings that he designed in the trendy new style.  It was (and is) certainly the best known.  Admire the regularly spaced columns with their classical capitals. The Ospedale is built of simple geometrical volumes, piled one atop each other in individual, disconnected units, which isn’t quite how the Romans did it, but the new style certainly looked pretty.

Turn right and walk down the Via dei Servi until you come to the Piazza del Duomo.  Admire the splendid bronze doors of the baptistery (another bronze-casting first) and spend some time admiring the big fat Victorian façade on the Duomo.

The outside of the Duomo looks like nothing else anywhere – with the exception of the chocolate-box frontage of Santa Croce.  The two facades were perpetrated at the same time at the same persons, but while Santa Croce is JUST petite enough to look like a victorian valentine, and rather cute, thereby, the Duomo is so enormously large that is looks like nothing as much as a carved and buttressed marzipan mountain.

The Florence Duomo has survived several facades over its long life (the blue and white pinstriped version, like a vast stone petit-four layer cake was a good look)   The current – and hopefully authoritative - version dates to the 1880s.  It is splendid and terrible pink flamingos all over the place and I adore it without reservation.

Reserve your admiration for the marble façade – the inside is a barn, and has horrible acoustics, to boot.  I’m terrified of heights, but if you aren’t, the climb to the top of the dome is very much worth the time and entry fee.  Mr Tabubil enjoyed it enormously.

Disapproving Madonna disapproves of your uncritical approval.

Continue down the Via Calzaiuoli in the direction of the River Arno, until you come to the Piazza della Republica.   This pizazza was the site of the original pre-roman settlement here, and it has remained variously prominent and notorious ever since.  Used as a market and gathering space for more than two thousand years, by the 19th century it had become the site of Florence’s Jewish ghetto, which made it, in Italian eyes, a natural choice  for “reclaimation” by the state to create a grand piazza to celebrate the founding of the Italian Nation in 1856–  from which occasion dates the monumental arch on the west side of the Piazza.

I love this Piazza.  Although right in the tourist heart of the city, it is still very much a civic space.  Fairs pass through; families sit there in the evening, and at night there is.   While Telecom Italia couldn’t seem to pipe phone connectivity into my little apartment on the other side of the river, I was usually able get a phone line of a sort on my cell phone if I was in the very center of the Piazza Republica, and I spent many half-hours here at all hours of the day and night, listening to people shouting at me through a storm of Telecom Italia static, and hollering back at them through the same.

Continue on down to the river and cross the Ponte Vecchio.  Once all of Florence’s bridges looked like this – cobble-stoned medieval bridges built out on each side with shops and commercial establishments – all of the smelly, water-requiring businesses, like tanning and butchery, that cities like to site far away from the populace.  The Ponte Vecchio is the city’s only remaining medieval bridge ; the others perished as the Germans abandoned the city in WW2 – they dynamited the bridges behind them as they retreated, the Ponte Vecchio surviving only because it was reckoned too  narrow to support an American tank.

Cross the Ponte Vecchio.  Stop in the centre, climb onto on the parapet, tune out the tourists and sit for a while.  

And pretend that there aren't more bloody cherubs everywhere.

A side note –Unlike most of the rest of Europe, the cities of Florence and Rome largely escaped the artistic pillage of the Nazi regime.  Goebbels cared very much for art (if not for much else – people, for instance, he thought worth very little), and recognizing the historical value of these two cities, brokered an agreement with the Allied forces that neither city was to be bombed or looted regardless of how heavy or hostile the fighting.  This agreement actually held throughout the war, even during the German retreat – the only bombardment that Rome received was over the rail-yards, which were reckoned to be sufficiently distant from the historically and artistically significant areas of the city to be legitimate targets.

The far side of the Arno river is the Oltraro (lit. Beyond the Arno)  I used to live on this side of the river.  Tourists cross the river and mostly turn rightup the Via Giucciardini, heading for the Pitti Palace. I turned left,  passed through an archway cut through a building and climbed half-way up the steeply vertical Costa dei Magnoli .  I lived in a small third-floor walk-up flat just before the point on the hill where steeply-vertical became purely vertical and the engines of delivery motorcycles gave up the ghost, delivery men forced to tack back and forth across the narrow street, nursing their rev-counters, and cursing the residents who’d paid for their pizza BEFORE they’d given the address. 

It’s a worth-while climb, if you have muscles like a mountain goat – it’s a straight shot up to the Belvedere, a star fort overlooking the city.  If your legs are less like steel and more like molasses, veer left up the Via Guicciardi when you come off the bridge, and saunter up to the Pitti Palace, because the Pitti Palace is worth a look and saunter.  And a second look – spit-take style.

The Pitti palace was begun in 1458 by an upwardly mobile banker hoping to out-grandiose Florence’s free-spending hard-building ruling family, the Medici. In one of life’s little ironies, Signor Pitti went bankrupt, the Medici bought the palace, moved in, and it became a symbol of THEIR wealth and power for more than 250 years.


It’s been thumbing its nose at Florence ever since.  The Pitti Palace is one of the oddest buildings in Italy. Every time I walk away from it I’m certain that I must have been imagining things – no building could possibly be so impossible, but when I turn back to it and look again, there it is – a vast brooding lump of badly piled stone, rough hewn boulders and piled up sandbags.  It has all the hulking presence of a squat, seven-story toad.  The inside of the Pitti Palace houses a rather nice museum, and the sprawling gardens behind it are a marvelous place to spend a summer afternoon, with a Rococo grotto, and formally geometric promenades, and a cultivated wilderness leading down to a lake.  And you can barely see the palace from most of it.

Or pass on – past the palace, turning right, and lose yourself in alleys and cobbled streets of Oltrarno.  You’ll pass open doorways and see craftsmen carving mirror frames, restoring old furniture, building violins –

It’ll be a GOOD afternoon.