May 2003 Archives

One of the stranger shopping experiences Rome offers is a visit to Mitsukoshi Roma, the ‘local’ branch of the upscale Japanese department store.

Mitsukoshi is a cultural frontier outpost the likes of which i’ve never before seen: a full, multi-level department store catering solely to Japanese tourists. Every price is in Yen, every product listed in kanji, and every floor swarming with impeccably-uniformed Japanese salespeople.

The big kicker is that they don’t sell anything Japanese, nope, nothing so fun. Vended instead is a dull and clichéd assortiment of ‘Italian’ goods. (Think heavily-branded Gucci, Prada, Armani, and Diesel items, plus little gift-sized packs of olive oil.) The entire store, you see, is designed for package-tour tourists needing to snap up souvenir goods and gifts, but unwilling or unable to navigate the shopping experience in Rome proper.

The most delightfully bizarre aspect of Mitsukoshi is the purgatorial waiting room in the basement, near the bus garage, I suspect. It’s been done up in a sort of Mediterranean-meets-Sanrio motif, with a large and colorful paper-mache apple tree in the center, featuring a built-in bench seating a dozen bored-looking husbands, each one quietly chain-smoking while a Muzak’ed rendition of ‘Tico Tico’ plays in the background.

A slightly less surreal shopping experience awaits you at M.A.S. (Mas Allo Statuto), not a kilometer away from Mitsukoshi. No, the average ‘Romano Romano’ doesn’t hang out here much, either, but the budget-conscious (esp. Rome’s immigrant population) do. An unsavory amalgam of Price Club, Pic-N-Save, and a Goodwill shop, the massive M.A.S. hawks things like surplus army blankets, cheap Chinese cutlery, and amazingly unfashionable footwear by the basketful. Additionally, there’s lots of low-low-price sweatshop textiles, mostly poly/cotton blends with dubiously-licensed logos, like the ‘Fruit of The Lover’ T-shirts on sale for 3 euro each.

We’re back from a week in Madrid, and still trying to sort out impressions from the place. Though this much i can recommend right away: rent yourself a rowboat at Buen Retiro park, since euro-for-euro (or dollar-tentytwo-for-dollar-twentytwo), it’s one of the best buys on the continent.

Oh, and i don’t know if it was because I had churros for breakfast, or what, but ‘Guernica’ underwhelmed, while Rothko’s ‘green on maroon’ just socked it to me. How’d that happen?

Remember how Pippin wails, “But what ‘bout second breakfast?” at Aragorn in Lord of The Rings? That line’s our new in-joke about italian cappuccino.

Okay, so it’s not particularly novel to note how things are smaller in Europe than The States — after all, these divergent cultures respectively regard Smart Cars and Hummer H2s as acceptable, non-comedic commuter vehicles. Swap continents, though, and these cars would draw more laughs than a clown ambulance. (It’s probably been that way since classic Cinquecentos and Caddies first rolled onto the streets.)

So the car thing is obvious, but it’s the pervasiveness of this sizing switcheroo that’s harder to convey to folks back home: everything here, from shower stalls to soda cans, seems of skewed scale or diminished heft.

Right then. And what was that about Italian cappuccino?

Best. Coffee. Ever. And nobody who’s sampled it would ever argue the point.

And yet… coming from a country where the ‘Thirsty-Two Ouncer’ was long ago deprecated to a mere ‘medium’ versus a ‘large’ 64-oz. pail of carbonated beverage, a nation where the words ‘super’ and ‘size’ are not only combined, but also conjugated in an imperative verb form, and where a zillion Starbuckses huck percolated swill in ‘Venti‘-ounce units, I can’t help but have my heart sink, just a bit, every time i’m served my Morning Cup here.

‘Cause it’s better coffee, sure, and it’s better milk, no doubt, but it’s just so damn… dainty. Hell, I’ve seen Java Jackets boasting double the diameter of the cappuccino china here.

But you can’t order two. It’s bad manners, against the rules, something only silly stranieri would do. (As, btw, is ordering cappuccino after 11 or so in the morning.)

Hence the little Tolkien joke. Our solution, you see, is the hobbit-inspired ‘Second Breakfast’, cunning and conniving, and awfully elegant, too: we’re two-timing the local cappuccino bars.

We’ll have a cappuccio at the bar closest to home, happily trading the morning ‘buongiornos’ all around, quaffing our coffee, and then stealthily slip around the corner, where we repeat the routine, down to the last drop. Topping off the tanks, so to speak.

So is this gluttonous? Yeah, probably. But, then again, one doesn’t get to drink Italian coffee every day of their lives. Rr do they?

The pet store behind the market has a parakeet who screeches “Ciao!!” when you walk in the door. He’ll say other stuff in Italian, too. And for some reason, this impresses the hell outta me.

Vaguely similar: today, a vespa cruised past at quite a decent clip, carrying just an old man (a veritable geezer, in fact), the crook of his walking cane wrapped around his neck, and its staff clutched between his knees. We wagered he must’ve been clockin’ an honest 25-30mph, and that over cobblestones, to boot. bello!

Elsewhere, an introductory “Sharing Your Site with RSS” bit i wrote for Webmonkey is up.

The big news of late: our little ‘Pinguino’ just got delivered.

You see, old italian palazzos like ours lack internal HVAC infrastructure (obviously), but some still avoid the brutish business of jamming air-conditioners above every window and doorway. In these buildings, you’ll notice at least one window in every unit features a small, porthole-like opening.

Turns out that when temperatures start cranking towards summer, a white truck shows up and delivers a rather cute A/C unit (a.k.a. ‘the Penguin’) to your doorstep, complete with a handy vent-hose which attaches to the window-porthole-thingamabob.

Anyhow, having a squat, strictly-seasonal air conditioner suddenly appear in your living room, Tardis-style, is a kinda funny thing. At the moment, i’m terribly tempted to decorate it, like it’s a Christmas Tree, but for SummerTime…

How’s this for a gripping opening line: “Yesterday, i had the oddest haircut.”

Let me qualify that, then: I’ve had my fair share of curious coifs back home — attributable to whatever fast-and-loose franchising policy drove the relentless expansion of the so-called “Fantastic” Sams’ grooming enterprise.

This was a tad different: I was playing ‘barbershop roulette’, walking into a barbiere at random, but — keeping the metaphorical safety-switch on — I requested he simply shear my head with clippers (and at the basically-bald ‘0’ setting). Hairdo-wise, that’s a tough one to screw up.

And screw-ups there weren’t: I walked out the door with exactly the super-short buzz cut I had in mind stepping in. The experience, on the other hand, was unexpected.

Ever seen those East-German or Russian-made flashlights that don’t need batteries, but instead have a hand-crank built into the grip? They’re tiresome, but if you repeatedly squeeze one fast enough, it provides light enough to get you around in a blackout. (You’ll find them today at yuppie-friendly Restoration Hardware, of all places.)

Turns out the poor barber’s clipper set worked on the same principle, completely mechanical throughout. He had a whole set of ‘em, covered in bright chrome and really heavy-looking, each for a different hair length. Obviously, this barber was an older fellow, but his wrinkled hands got those things running speedily, so they’d whirr like a push lawnmower.

(Looking back on it, I now recall seeing men getting their hair cut with similar clippers in pokhara, nepal — but that town was used to being without electricity for days at a time.)

Well, it felt odd. And in fact somewhat unpleasant, since the clippers’ blades pulled pretty hard — more like a manually-powered depilatory device than hair-trimmers. The barber, though, was about as nice as they get, and we talked about the weather some.

Remember J.F. Sebastian’s little car in Blade Runner? The one not unlike a mini airport-shuttle van conversion, which Syd Mead had remodeled and re-shaped with his trademark rhomboid angles?

I did a double-take last week, certain that I’d spotted the thing jammed into a tight Trastevere parking spot. Now, any auto buff will tell you Rome’s streets sport many a moto-carriage cute and strange, this town being the nexus of All Roads and whatnot, but this particular futu-rustic transport looked to have surreptitiously rolled out of Epcot Center back in ‘78, and been on the ‘lam since.

Actually, turns out it’s British — an ‘Elswick Envoy’, to be exact. Of note, it’s accessibility-designed from the chassis up: devoid of seats and pedals, the hatchback trunk pops open for a wheelchair, while arm-height accellerator and brake controls protrude from the dash. Just load, lock, and drive — plus, you can park almost anywhere.