This man is a god:
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What’s that? Er, no, I’m sorry. Not the man in foreground. The man in the foreground is my husband. He has many lovely attributes, of which “god-like” is not one. He is charitable and kind and good, and he often smells fantastic. While he is one of the best humans I’ve ever been fortunate enough to encounter, he is still human.
Italian interior design hurts my brain. You’d think that for a country so well-known for its clothing, the inside of homes and hotels would be more fashionable. Instead, they’re what I imagine people in communist Russia thought the future would look like. The decor is weirdly sparse. Even in homes where people have been for decades, it looks like they just moved in. And most of the furniture I’ve seen, no matter how new, isn’t sleek or modern looking. Instead, it has an inexplicably pastoral look to it. It’s like someone’s grandmother all of a sudden decided to be a minimalist, but didn’t bother redecorating.
Sadly, I don’t have a lot of photos that depict this concept, though this one isn’t terrible (ignore my passed-out husband on the bed):
Bizarre, right?
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The room was entirely empty save for the bed and a small nightstand. And despite being brand new (the hotel was only a few years old) the design on the headboard looked like a well-preserved relic from the 1900s.
TV outside of the U.S. is such a treasure. After spending the whole day roaming around a foreign city, sampling a dozen or so local desserts (for journalistic integrity is at stake, and if you do not try them all, Fox News wins), and getting lost at least twice, you return to your hotel room, exhausted, and out of habit, you plop down on the bed/chair/holy-crap-our-hotel-room-has-a-couch and switch on the telly.
And that is where, depending on your geographic location, things will land somewhere on the spectrum of completely familiar to bat-shit crazy. Nowhere is this more true than Italy. Are there stranger television programs in the world than those found on Italian networks? Absolutely. But they are often in languages I don’t understand, and so their mysteries remain locked (we’ve watched ourselves on Japanese TV numerous times. We sincerely haven’t a clue as to what any of the screaming, animated angels, and Whitney Houston background music was all about). But in Italy, I speak the language. I know at least some of the local celebrities. And often I have a relative nearby who can put things into a cultural context for me. And still? Despite all of that?
Italian TV makes NO DAMN SENSE.
We're not in hell, I promise. Hell's flags are different.
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You know that old joke about heaven and hell? How in heaven, the police are British, the engineers are German, the cooks are Italian, the lovers are French? And how in hell, the roles are jumbled up? The police are German, the cooks are British, and, perhaps most cruelly of all, the bureaucrats are Italian.
And while the more culturally sensitive of you are rolling your eyes at the broad brush with which that joke paints Europeans, a few of you, like me, are knowingly nodding your head. If you’ve traveled at all, you know that the police in the U.K. are generally lovely, and you know the feeling of pure relaxation that comes after hearing your airplane pilot speak to the cabin in German-accented English. And if you are truly unfortunate, you know the hell of any organizational, governmental, or bureaucratic system in Italy.
Okay, fine. I’m being a little melodramatic. But still. When it rains poop … um … make poop-ade? I suck at maxims, too, it seems. The point is, things are going less than optimally well in the Everywhereist-Fishkin household. Let’s recap:
Sigh. Yes, things were not going well. Last night, Rand told me that he was pretty sure someone had put a hex on him. He told me this over the phone. He should have told me this in person, but, alas, he could not. Because he was stuck in Phoenix. And that gets us to the title of this post.
Lately, there has been a lot of craptacular stuff going on lately, and amidst all of that, I got to thinking about how Alaska Airlines was one of the few things that had not let us down recently (I mean, besides keeping us waiting for hours in San Diego a while back).
And then before I could blink, ALASKA WENT AND LET US DOWN. Rather, it let several thousand people down. And kept them there. Apparently Alaska’s computer system (which they use for their flight plans) failed yesterday morning. So no flight plans. And then, no flights (they canceled 140 of them). Rand was in the air during this time, flying from NOLA to Phoenix, where he would catch a connection to Seattle. And because he was in the air, he ended up being last in line to get rebooked.
Okay, so clearly I'm not ready to move on.
When we got back from Europe this past weekend, I had hoped to spend this week blogging. It’s been ages since I’ve really been able to sit down and write, so I was looking forward to recounting all my tales of adventure (and a few of woe, because, hey, you know me) to you guys. Unfortunately, it looks like all of that is going to have to wait, because right now I have the unexpected task of finding a new place to live and moving out.
Rand and I have lived in a condo (one we rent from a private owner) for the last two years. Though “live” isn’t really the right word, since we’re hardly ever here. Rand and I joke that it’s more “the place where we keep all our stuff.” Our landlord seems a bit AWOL, too. In two years, I’ve met him once (Rand has never met him). He wasn’t even the person to show us our place. Instead, it was a lovely real estate agent whom he described as “a good friend”; the agent later told me she barely knew the guy. He never replied to my emails when anything broke (we had to fix a lot of things ourselves, because after weeks of emailing him, calling the phone numbers I had for him, and receiving no reply, I got fed up.)
We heard from our landlord once – when it was time to renew our lease last year. I politely told him that, as we had discussed when we moved in, we’d like to move to a month-to-month lease. When we first moved in, he had promised me it would be totally fine with him. Of course, it wasn’t in writing, and a man’s word isn’t worth more than he is. So when he resolutely refused to keep his promise, I was upset, but I realized I had no legal recourse. He explained that he wanted long-term renters, and that we needed to sign up for another year, or move out immediately.
As I was composing yesterday’s post, I realized something: the problem with having so many good restaurants in Portland, is that we rarely go any place twice. Even if we really enjoyed it, it’s not worth passing up the opportunity to try a new place. Meals are an endless string of one night stands: You promise the pretty girl at the door – and yourself – that you will call again, but you rarely do. So strong is the desire to test the waters, to see what else is out there.
There are, of course, exceptions. The meal so incredible, it makes you want to forget your culinary commitment issues and settle down. You are hopelessly smitten: and you can’t think of anyone else.
For me and Rand, this place is Broder.
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