He’s the Sheik of Araby (without no pants on!)

My father has finally finished his two-month, four-continent adventure he has termed his "victory lap around the world."  He retired from his job of drudgery as a database programmer at a California hospital back in April, and has since been traveling to various states and countries to visit family and old friends before settling for good in Bangkok , Thailand.

I have been in contact with him on and off for much of his travels,  but I couldn’t be able to do justice to the many stories he has from his trip.  He was thinking about starting a blog (yes, I told him, blogs are awesome!), but I think he was so busy experiencing these crazy things that he didn’t really have time to document it.  Most likely he’ll have something to show soon, maybe on his site .

In the meantime, I know that some of you are actually following my blog, not because you know me at all, but because you’re friends with my dad, so I’ll fill you in with some (highly abbreviated!) stories that he told me along the way.

His trip across America was quite tiring:  a lot of driving, which he wasn’t so thrilled with.  He called me from New Orleans, where it was raining and the Jazz Festival was going on.  He turned out to have a pretty good time there, although when he talked to me on the phone, he was pretty disappointed with the Jazz Festival in general.

When he arrived in NJ to visit me, we had a pretty nice time together, if I don’t say so myself.  He dropped off a truckload of boxes (mostly old books that he didn’t need in Thailand), and we drove to Long Island to visit the Long Island Montalbanos.  My brother joined us for that leg of the journey.  Then he stayed in NY at my brother’s house for a week, visiting friends in the city.

He next called me from Oslo at the house of a guy for which I have very fond memories.  Drew had rented a room in our house in San Francisco when I was very young (I must have been 4?  Maybe 5?).  He and I used to play pretend all the time (this made a big impact, because my dad never liked to play pretend), and I have so many great memories of climbing into the recliner and pretending to blast off into space.  Anyway, he teaches in Norway now, and the last time I saw him, I was 9 years old, the summer that I spent with my dad on the Norwegian Star .  Drew had picked me up from the airport in Oslo (I was an unaccompanied minor) and let me stay in his guest bedroom until my dad’s ship docked.

I say all this because it was such a thrill to actually see Drew for the first time in way too many years.  My father’s laptop had a webcam attached to it, and since I called on Skype , the webcam automatically let me see both my dad and Drew as I talked to them.  Alas, my computer does not have a webcam, so they couldn’t see me…I may just have to remedy that soon.

The next call I got was from my dad in Nice .  He was bummed because his laptop had been stolen a few days prior at a busy train station in Barcelona .  So, not only did he no longer have his fancy (relatively new!) laptop with all his information and documents, but he also lost all the pictures that he had taken up until that moment!  Of course, if he had been writing a blog this whole time, he would have had the pictures somewhere in the blogosphere…but I digress…

After Nice, he had traveled to Sicily to jam with Giuseppe Montalbano (no close relation, that we know of anyway…) and his band .  Then it was on to Egypt , where he stayed with an old Peace Corps friend and her husband.  On his way to Cairo, Egypt Air lost his luggage, so he had to delve into his friend’s husband’s closet.  He sent me this picture, with the following caption (he’s the guy in the middle, in case you can’t recognize him):

"Ever since I arrived in Egypt , I’ve realized I have always had a mission in life, and it must be to struggle for the One True Way, and the One True God. I know you will follow me in this quest. Meet me at the second pyramid on the left. The Sphynx has a riddle for you."

Those of you who know my father will appreciate the humor.

I just heard from him yesterday, and he told me that he was safely ensconced in his new home in Thailand.  If you wish to contact him, send him an email (no, I’m not going to broadcast his email on this blog!  What kind of a dope do you think I am?) or give him a call…his old cell phone should forward to his new international phone.

Arrivederci, Italia

So I’ve been back in the U.S. for 4 days now, and I haven’t written anything since the blackout last week because A) there is so much to write and B) I don’t want to admit that I’m not in Italy anymore. I really fell in love with that country, and I definitely want to go back someday (preferably when I’ve gotten a little more fluent with the language).

The last few days of the festival flew by, mostly because there was so much drama in and around the whole town. The Unicorn concert that had been rescheduled because of the blackout went very well, although our clarinetist was ill from food poisoning and did not play the first movement of the piece. Apparently (and this is rumor, so take it with a grain of salt), because the orchestra hadn’t been getting paid, they couldn’t even afford the cafeteria food they had been getting, and so some of the orchestra members, including our clarinetist, ate some tainted food that they had brought with them.

I don’t believe I mentioned this before, but the festival hired a Ukranian orchestra to do the job because they were super cheap and would work with no breaks (man, that irks me!). They drove for 4 days, 24 hours/day, from the Ukraine to Italy. They stayed in the police barracks and ate cafeteria food, and even though they were getting paid less than us (and that’s saying something), they still were getting paid a good half year’s salary by just playing in this little 3-week festival. They endured countless hours of abuse from conductors that only spoke English to them (their only translator was the concertmaster, who sort of paraphrased in two or three words what the conductor would rage in four or five sentences).

(Actually, a side note on that: it really amused me how the conductors would speak slower and louder English as if that would make any difference. At least our conductor, when he had to work with the orchestra, got an Italian-Russian translator, and spoke only Italian to the orchestra during rehearsal and only in small phrases, asking the interpreter to translate phrase by phrase. See, that’s actually communicating, not yelling in a foreign language and hoping that the orchestra will respond)

As if that didn’t make the situation dire enough, the technical staff decided to strike (they hadn’t been paid in 45 days), so our second rehearsal with orchestra for the finale concert was without light for about 20 minutes until someone figured out how to turn the lights on. Our conductor for the finale concert was less than empathetic with the situation, saying at one point to the orchestra during the dress rehearsal, “Are we going to make music, or are we going to strike?” This is after the food poisoning situation, and keeping in mind that the orchestra has been working nonstop since they arrived, with no days off and very few breaks. He made all of us in the chorus very angry, and not just for that one comment.

The day of the finale, Francis Menotti held a press conference in the middle of the day and said that he still didn’t have the money to pay anyone. He then begged those people who hadn’t been paid to do the concert for free, for the memory of his father. There was a little town meeting in which the orchestra members aired their grievances against the festival and some tourists showed support for the festival, and in which Francis blamed the festival for holding the money ransom because they want him to step down. It was a whole political to-do, and although I understood less than half of what was being said, we had a couple people sitting with us translating the gist of the conversations. The press conference came to a close with no firm answer of whether or not we were going to have a concert that night.

In fact, we did not know if the concert was going up until about 20 minutes before the concert started. I was so sure it wasn’t going to happen that I actually bet 5 cents (that’s Euro cents, so it’s about 8 American cents!) that we would have no concert. Alas, the show went on, and I am now 5 cents poorer.

Before the concert could start, though, the stagehands marched on stage and made an announcement in front of the TV cameras that were there to broadcast the concert. They reiterated that they had not been paid for 45 days, but that they were going to work the concert for the memory of Giancarlo Menotti. They wanted to show that they were the bigger people than the politicos that were holding their money to force Francis out.

Of course, the next day, which was Monday, they had clearly still not gotten paid because the stage and all the chairs in the piazza had not been broken down. I had dinner near the Duomo and saw all the stagehands have a meeting on the stage…I sure hope they are able to get paid! The bus company that had picked us up from Rome was now on strike because they hadn’t gotten paid, and so our manager found a private company to take us back to Rome. We were lucky…I believe it’s that same bus company that was scheduled to take the orchestra members back to the Ukraine, and who knows if they made it back?

On Tuesday morning, all the choristers got on the privately hired bus and started the 24-hour trip home. First the bus back to Rome, and then a flight from Rome to Paris (which half of us almost didn’t get on because of a travel agent mix-up and some surly ticketing agents), running to catch our connecting flight from Paris to JFK (we got an escort to make sure we got through the shorter lines at security), and then a bus from JFK to Philadelphia (we got another idiotic bus driver who got lost on the turnpike and decided to take a detour through Newark Airport. How do you get lost on the NJ Turnpike? It only goes two ways!).

But besides the actual travel part of the trip, I really enjoyed myself in Italy. Now that I am back, I’ve been busy organizing and storing all my photos onto my computer, so you finally get to see some of the places I’ve been talking about.

This first picture shown is the Piazza del Mercato, where I stayed. The building on the far right side of the picture was my apartment building, and the open window above the awning was my window. Every afternoon, a group called Concerto Strauss (or as one of my roommates called it, “The Lawrence fricking Welk Orchestra”) would start playing cheesy opera tunes and fun waltzes, making me feel like I was living on an opera set. I thought that maybe if I looked out of my window, perhaps I could see Musetta in the cafe across the street, or perhaps the commedia troupe would be coming around the bend, with Canio and Nedda at the fore.

This next picture is of the Caffé Collicolla, where everyone always gathered before rehearsal. The people who ran the cafe were so sweet, and I’m sure they were happy to have us spend all our money on coffee at their shop. Too bad they didn’t have gelato, because we would have bought it there!

There were some high school exchange students who also spent some time at Collicolla early in the morning, and one of them painted a picture very similar to this photo. I was inspired so much by her painting that I decided to take a picture of the porch of the cafe, empty because it was riposa (nap time) and at the heat of the day. The cafe stayed open through riposa, which was great, but they did close their doors and turn the AC on.

So that concludes my adventures in Italy. Actually, there are many more stories, but I think I must keep my eye on what adventures are to come. And I definitely know I want to go back to Italy, only next time I’ll bring Ray along with me.

Blackout

A couple of nights ago, one of our concerts was postponed because the entire town of Spoleto lost electricity.  The concert (which is now rescheduled for tonight) was actually one of my favorite pieces we’ve been working on here, and all of us were extremely sad to have it cancelled, so we are very excited to be able to perform tonight.

The venue for this concert is at the Rocca, a castle at the top of Spoleto where Lucrezia Borgia lived, and also where one of the popes in the Renaissance was also rumored to have lived for a time.  The Rocca is gorgeous!  Not only do you have a fantastic view of Umbria, but the walls are full of frescoes (mostly intact) and several lovely courtyards, one of which we are using for the concert.  Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain!  I don’t want the concert to be cancelled again!!

When it became clear that night that the electricity problem in Spoleto wouldn’t be solved any time soon, we gathered in the Piazza del Duomo and sang an impromptu concert on the porch of the Duomo.  TV cameras were already there because of the blackout, and they ate up the fact that we just spontaneously started singing.  I have to admit, it was pretty cool.  We could only get a couple songs out before the sun finally set, and then we just couldn’t see anything, so we had to stop.

After that, we all dispersed to go find something to do in the dark.  A couple friends and I went to a restaurant, where they had torches and candles brightly burning on the deck.  The kitchen obviously wasn’t fully working, so they gave us large portions of everything that was going to go bad due to lack of refrigeration:  huge hunks of cheese, mixed vegetables (raw as an antipasto, and then grilled veggies for me as a first course).  My friends had the same, only they had grilled meat for their dinner.

The electricity came back sometime around midnight, and there was much rejoicing outside my window at the Piazza del Mercato.

A Roman Holiday (senza Audrey Hepburn)

Yesterday, I decided to use my day off to go to Rome with a couple friends (for the purposes of this blog, I’ll call them the Canadian and Georgia Boy).  We planned to go to the Vatican Museum in the morning (one of my friends had a brochure that advertised a tour starting at 9:15, before the museum is open to the public), so we got up really early to take a 5:57 AM train into Rome.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at 8:30, at the meeting point advertised in the brochure, there were no tour guides at all (this actually didn’t surprise me, since I had checked out the website on the brochure, which was nonexistent, and I had tried to send an email to the address listed on the brochure and it bounced back to me).  Undaunted, we started walking around the line that had already spanned about two city blocks, even an hour and a half before opening.  We figured there had to be some tour guides hawking the crowd, getting people to skip the line and go in the group entrance.

No such luck.  We arrived at the museum entrance and found another line going in, this one clearly of tour groups, since many of them were dressed alike or had little walkie-talkies around their necks so to better hear their tour guides.  That line wrapped around the city walls from the opposite direction than the general public line, so we decided to try to find the end of that queue and possibly get onto a tour there.

The tour group line was even longer than the public line, spanning about 8 city blocks.  By the time we found the end, we were halfway around Vatican City from where we had started, and there were no tour hawkers to be seen.  Frustrated, we decided to just walk the rest of the way around the wall to St. Peter’s Square (where the Pope comes out and blesses people on Wednesdays).  We realized that since Vatican City is a different country than Italy, we actually walked around an entire country.  What an accomplishment!  But we still weren’t inside the Vatican, which irritated us.

When we reached St. Peter’s Square, we stopped to take lots of pictures.  I remembered all my Western Civ classes in high school, where we learned that Bernini ushered in the Baroque era by building this oval piazza, a far cry from the classical straight lines and perfect circles.  We decided while we were there to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, which houses Michelangelo’s famous Pietà (the first sculpture to actually show emotion on Mary’s face).  After going through the metal detectors (we were entering another country, after all!) and passing the clothing police (those wearing tank tops and skirts or shorts above the knee were not allowed inside and had to wait sheepishly against the wall for their friends), we waited in another line to get into the church itself.

The Canadian saw a sign pointing to the tombs of the popes and noted that there was no line to go there, so we followed him down the stairs.  We passed all sorts of sarcophagi and marble plaques of long-dead popes (and even not-so-long-dead:  we walked by John Paul II’s headstone, decorated with fresh flowers and flanked by two guards who had roped off an area for folks to pray and mourn).  We were kind of wandering from room to room until we found one room that had no sarcophagi at all, but whose walls and ceilings were painted with all sorts of Baroque pictures and designs.  At the end of the room was a tiny, almost hidden, marble staircase, and the Canadian (those Canadians are so resourceful!) said, “Hey, this staircase isn’t roped off.  Let’s see what’s up here.”

We walked up the stairs, and lo and behold, we were in St. Peter’s Basilica.  How’s that for a back entrance?

The basilica took my breath away!  Everything in the church is made either of bronze, gold, or marble.  They allowed us to take pictures in the church, and it was hard to actually find one thing to photograph, since every inch of wall, floor, and ceiling was a work of art.  I did manage to get some nice pictures, though, and I can’t wait to get home to put them all on my computer.

When we got out of St. Peter’s, we took a look at the public line for the Vatican Museum and saw that it had nearly tripled in size since we had seen it at 8:30 (it was close to 11 at this point).  We regrouped and although the Canadian really wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, none of us really wanted to wait in line for hours for it.  We decided to go across town to the ancient part of the city, since I really wanted to see the Colosseum.

Since the Canadian had already seen the Colosseum last week, he decided to hang out in the shade while Georgia Boy and I took the tour.  Our tour guide was terrible!  She spoke English, but her accent was so strong (I still couldn’t place it…it definitely wasn’t Italian) that even with the little walkie-talkies they provided, I couldn’t understand half of what she said.  And whenever she tried to get dramatic, her accent got even stranger, and Georgia Boy and I kept giggling at her speech patterns.

Language barriers aside, I also feel like she was going through the motions in our tour.  Having given tours myself when I was in Newport, Rhode Island (granted, I was in costume and in character), I know when someone is tuning out and just parroting facts.  And boy, was she doing that.  And most of the facts she gave us was stuff I already knew from taking 3 years of Latin in high school, so I was really bored.  We had the option of getting a tour of the Palatine as well (that’s Caesar’s palace, the original one before Las Vegas), but both Georgia Boy and I had had enough of our tour guide, so we just wandered off to find the Canadian.

The sun was so hot and we found no relief in the shade, so we were all pretty cranky and not interested in walking around very much.  We walked over to the Circus Maximus (where the chariot races were…think Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur).  Unfortunately, the structure of the Circus Maximus is completely gone because in the Renaissance, the Roman citizens dismantled it to use the stones for houses.  All that’s left now is a grassy knoll with a huge track, but if you’ve got a good imagination, you can figure out what things might have looked like.  We took some pictures of the racetrack and Palatine Hill, and then we decided to call it a day.  It was time to take the metro back to the train station and get on the next train back to Spoleto.

Concerts and more concerts

They have been keeping us busy here in Spoleto.  I am definitely working very hard for my money, and although this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sometimes I wish our schedule could be a little less stressful.  The last three days have been full of rehearsals and concerts, all with only one or two hours of rest in between.  The worst of it was when we sang a concert at midnight and had to get up the next morning for an early morning mass.

Now that we have gotten several concerts under our belt, one would think the rehearsals would let up, but that is simply not the case, because we still have two more concerts to prepare for, each with different repertoire.  Today, though, we have only rehearsals, and I intend to relax a bit.  Tomorrow is our second day off, and I am going to go to Rome and take a tour of the Vatican…and hopefully I will get a chance to see the Coliseum as well.

In the meantime, though, I must away to another rehearsal and hope I still have some brain cells left to learn more music.

Musings

On Monday, I went to Assisi, the home of St. Francis of Assisi, the guy who renounced his wealth and talked to animals.  My friend and I took Rick Steves‘ suggested walking tour of Assisi, which took us to some back roads and some gorgeous views of Umbria (I’ll post the pics when I get back home and put them all on my computer).

In addition to the St. Francis Basilica, there are several other churches of note, including the Santa Chiara church, dedicated to St. Clare, who started an order of nuns who are called the Poor Clares.  They also own an olive grove next to the church, ostensibly to provide them with a living.  I want to find the olive oil that those nuns are producing:  wouldn’t that be super extra virgin olive oil?

We weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside the church, but the frescoes (mostly by Giotto) were amazing and incredibly moving.  I walked up and down hills all day, so I was incredibly exhausted by the time I got to bed, and I managed to sleep the night through, despite the hordes of drunkards outside my window that make noise until 2 in the morning every night (I am living in a huge apartment with a gorgeous view of the Piazza del Mercato, which is incredibly centrally located, and has several bars right there in the piazza.  I can’t really complain about anything except the noise, which is excessive, but I guess that’s the price I pay).

Yesterday, we had our first concert, called Umbria Segreta, or “secret Umbria.”  It was about a half hour bus ride away, in an isolated church attached to a deconsecrated monestary-turned-hotel high atop a hill.  The view was gorgeous, and the church (not deconsecrated, so still no pictures were allowed) had some gorgeous frescoes as well (definitely pre-Giotto, though).

Spending the 4th of July outside of the United States is a very interesting experience.  I remember the last time I did so was in 1982, when I was with my dad on a cruise ship, and we were in Leningrad on the 4th of July.  Granted, yesterday’s experience could not be nearly as freaky as an 8-yr-old spending the 4th of July in the USSR (before we docked, I had a vision of the Russians angrily waving nuclear warheads at us on the docks…the only scary thing that really happened was that one of the guys in my dad’s band got strip-searched by the KGB on the way back to the ship because he exchanged his money on the black market).

But I think I kind of took for granted how special the 4th of July is to me until yesterday.  Yes, all the hoopla is a bit much, and sometimes it really seems more of a reason for stores to have sales than to celebrate our history.  But yesterday was just another day for the Italians.  Apparently in previous years, the festival had set up a big fireworks display in the field for the Americans in town, but they did nothing of the sort yesterday, and all I felt was alone and out of place and slightly homesick.

But today is a happier day…and I think when I get back to the U.S., I am going to celebrate my own Independence Day, even if it will be a couple weeks late.

Ciao from Italy

So here I am in an internet cafe, trying very hard not to waste too much money…actually the internet cafe prices are pretty reasonable, but still I would rather be frugal while I’m only working with a small per diem.  So…on with the stories.

My travel to Spoleto took 24 hours.  At 9:45 AM, I met up with a couple friends in NJ and the three of us were driven to our meeting point in Center City, Philadelphia, where we were scheduled to take a bus to JFK at 11 AM.  Although we were supposed to load the bus at 10:45, the bus didn’t arrive until about 11:15.  We all piled on the bus, ready to go, until we realized that we were waiting for 2 people who were stuck in traffic trying to get to us.  By the time they arrived, it was 12:30!

(Warning:  the next couple of paragraphs are really only understandable if you know your way around New York)

Luckily, our flight from JFK wasn’t scheduled until 5, so we still had plenty of time.  But the bus driver clearly didn’t know how to get to JFK from Philadelphia, because instead of taking the Verrazano Bridge from the NJ Turnpike for a pretty much straight shot across Staten Island and the lower part of Brooklyn to JFK, he decided to go through Manhattan.  But he didn’t even go through the lower part of Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel; he decided to take the Lincoln Tunnel right through Midtown.

Since it was Sunday, one would think there wouldn’t be TOO much traffic in the city, but it was the day of the Gay Pride Parade, and we had to wait in traffic for it to pass!  A lot of people who don’t normally have a chance to see New York thought it was fun, but I was not amused.  Then, once he crossed Manhattan into Brooklyn, I thought he would get on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to JFK, but instead he went into the middle of Brooklyn (and through more traffic) to get on the Van Wyck Expressway.  By the time we got to JFK, it was 3:30 PM, and we only had an hour and a half before our flight was supposed to leave.

Once at the airport, the woman at the counter had a problem with my reservation because the people at the travel agency made my reservation under my maiden name instead of my married name.  Actually, what they did was to hyphenate my name, which is not the way it is on my passport.  I had a minor coronary when they told me I didn’t have a ticket on the flight…and it took three people to straighten it all out!  After everything was settled, the woman at the counter told me that I should change my passport to reflect the hyphenated name.  I told her that the hyphenated name was not my legal name, and she told me I was wrong.  I’m not sure why the woman at the airline would think she knows what my legal name is better than me, but I guess they must breed a certain special arrogance at Air France.

I arrived at the gate about 20 minutes before boarding time, with enough for me to grab an overpriced sandwich at the terminal so I didn’t starve to death.  I shouldn’t have worried, though, because 5:00 came and went without a call for boarding.  The crew was a half hour late getting to the gate, and then we had to wait another half hour before getting on the plane.  Once on the plane, we waited for another hour in line on the tarmac to take off.

Needless to say, we missed our connecting flight in Paris.  We also missed the next connecting flight, too, because of the time it takes to transfer and get through customs.  After going through customs in Paris, we had to go back through security, even though we our connecting flight was in the same terminal, and the people at Charles de Gaulle also had a problem with the name on my passport not matching the name on my ticket.  Although they figured out the problem a lot quicker than the folks in America, they did make fun of my poor French.

We also had to wait in the plane in Paris, this time for some connecting flights to arrive.  Once we got in the air, we were yet another 2 hours behind schedule.

We arrived in Rome at about 12:30 PM Italy time, which for us jetlagged travelers was about 6:30 AM East Coast time.  We had to wait, however, for the bus to Spoleto to arrive and be loaded with our bags, so they told us to get some lunch and come back at 2:00.  We ended up leaving the Rome Airport by 2:30, ready for an hour and a half bus ride to Spoleto.

Unfortunately, our bus driver was Ukranian, and he got completely lost!  He circled around Rome a couple times before finally finding the right highway to get on.  Our “guide” was no help at all and sat at the front of the bus with a deer-in-headlights look on her face.

Our bus had some seats with tables, so I sat in a seat facing the back, which was a bad idea.  The ride that was originally supposed to last an hour and a half lasted almost 3 hours, and for the last hour I was terribly car sick.  That was also the part where we started climbing the hills and going around and around in narrow, curvy roads.  Ugh.  While the rest of the singers were exclaiming about the beautiful scenery, it was all I could do to stay upright.

Our first rehearsal was supposed to be the day we arrived, Monday, at 6 PM.  But since we arrived in Spoleto at 5:30 PM (11:30 AM in Philly, 24 hours after we were supposed to leave), they pushed the rehearsal time to 7:45 to give us time to find our apartments and change.  But the folks at the festival totally screwed up everyone’s housing, so some people didn’t have a place to stay that first day!  Luckily, I ended up getting moved to a different apartment, but my new apartment was much closer to the center of town and a larger place, so I couldn’t really complain.

I had some frustrating experiences with the Italian pay phones trying to call Ray.  It was so frustrating, actually that I ended up getting an international cell phone, but that’s a story for another day, I think, since I am almost out of time here at the internet cafe.

Suffice to say that although those 24 hours were particularly hellish, the next morning was so beautiful, especially after a good night’s sleep, that I was finally able to appreciate how lucky I was to be in such a gorgeous Italian town.

4 Days (or, Why the Heck Are You Blogging Instead of Packing, Silly?)

The countdown is on. I had a dream the other night that I was in Italy but hadn’t packed anything, so I got into a packing frenzy and now have a suitcase out in my office, along with half my wardrobe thrown inside it. I think I need to pare down a bit…the idea is to travel lightly because I have to carry all this stuff myself from Rome to Umbria (okay, that’s not entirely true, since it’ll be in a bus most of that time, and apparently there will be porters taking our bags once we arrive. However, I have also been warned that I should travel with the porters just to make sure my bags get to the right place).

I’m so bad at this. I’m all about overpacking so that I’m über prepared. The idea of carrying all the stuff I’m going to need for 3 and a half weeks frightens me. You mean I can’t uproot my life and teleport everything over there? Man, just when you thought technology was working in your favor…

I’m also trying to get a jump start on all the music I have to learn. I received my music in the mail last Tuesday, and I’ve been busily marking my parts, but I still have yet to hear everything completely, so I’m trying to find recordings of all this stuff, some of which is a little obscure. Not that I don’t have confidence in my music-learning abilities–after all, I am a sight-reading fiend–but knowing what the piece sounds like just sharpens my edge that much more, and since it’s a long couple of flights from JFK to Charles de Gaulle and then on to Rome, I figure it would be nice to have something productive to listen to. Call me crazy. (Okay, I know you already do).

Fun With Bureaucrats

When Ray and I got married, the folks at the Hawaii Dept. of Health told us it would take 120 days to process our marriage certificate. Ray didn’t have a problem with that because he didn’t really need the certificate for anything. However, I soon realized that if I was going to change my name with any kind of alacrity, I’d need that certificate sooner than later, so I coughed up the $10 expedition fee.

When I got the certificate, I changed all the usual things; I called up my credit cards to change them, I waited at the social security office for hours on end, and surprisingly, the DMV took the least amount of time and effort.

The only thing I had left to change was my passport, and since I figured I wasn’t leaving the country any time soon, I decided to mail my passport in, along with documentation of my name change, to the State Department for regular processing (10 weeks).

Of course, a week after I had mailed it all in, I got an offer to go to Italy. Go figure. So now that my passport is in the bowels of the State Department, it’s up to me to dive into its putrid maw and fish it out.

I went on the passport website, which says in no uncertain terms that they are very busy, so don’t bother calling the number they’ve provided, because you won’t get through. The best way to get in touch with them if you have a question, they say, is by email…but don’t be surprised if they don’t respond to your email for two days.

So first I emailed them, and, true to their word, they responded 2 days later, telling me that my best bet is to go in person to a passport agency. But oh, by the way, you can’t just walk in, you have to have an appointment, and they won’t give you an appointment unless you’re traveling within 2 weeks.

Oh yeah, and in order for you to get that appointment, you need to call that number that we’ve been warning you not to call because you won’t get through.

So I called the dreaded phone number, which is answered by a message full of dire warnings not to even bother hoping to speak with anyone, because everyone at the passport office is so overloaded, they can’t be bothered with your problems. After their 5-minute dissertation, they present you with the following options:

1. Check on the status of your passport (which then refers you to the website, which in turn refers you back to the phone number of doom).
2. Schedule an appointment; choosing this option takes you to an automated scheduling system. One would think that this would be the easiest option, since it doesn’t involve human interaction at all. However, this system clearly doesn’t have enough phone lines piping into it, since out of the almost 30 times I called, I only got through once. The other 29 times, I got a message saying that the scheduling system was overloaded with calls, and that I should please try again later. Then the automated system hung up on me.
3. Contact customer service with a question. You mean, like, “How come your automated scheduling system doesn’t have the time of day to talk to me? Is anyone really working there? Why don’t you invest in more phone lines?” As one might expect, I could never get through to a real person. After choosing this option, another message plays, reminding me of how busy they are over there, and to expect long wait times. I hunker down for a long wait time on hold, and the damn system hangs up on me. Again.

I went to gethuman.com, my favorite resource for situations like this, so I could find a way to talk to a real person. I followed the directions, pressed the requisite numbers, and got the exact same customer service message I would have gotten if I had gone the regular route. And it hung up on me again.

Finally, at 11:47 PM, I finally got through to the automated scheduling system. I scheduled my appointment, listened to more warnings that they would not be able to see me unless I was leaving or needed a visa within 2 weeks, and got my confirmation number.

Just to make sure, I visited the web page devoted to the Philadelphia passport agency (there are only 8 of these across the country; thank goodness I didn’t have to travel 1,000 miles to go to one of these places). The web page said to make sure you arrive 15 minutes early for your appointment, and if you are more than 15 minutes late, you would have to go through the whole rigmarole again to get another appointment.

So I arrived not 15 minutes early, but 30 minutes early for my 9:30 appointment this morning. As I got to the building, I noticed that there was a long line of people queuing outside. I was informed that this was the line for passports.

“But I have an appointment,” I protested. Oh no, the security guard told me, they don’t work with the appointment system in Philadelphia. It’s first come, first served, and people usually start lining up at 8:30 in the morning.

So I got in line and just tried to stay thankful that it was a beautiful day to be standing outside. It certainly could have been worse.

Once inside and past the metal detector (which by the way, picked up my wedding ring set…not even airport metal detectors are that sensitive), I was directed to a line where they determined whether or not you needed a passport within 2 weeks. I passed the test (I told them I needed enough time for the Italian work visa to process), and I was given a number.

An hour and a half after I had arrived at the State Building, I left, my mission accomplished. No, I don’t have my passport in hand–not yet, anyway–but it will be express mailed to me, and I should have it in plenty of time.

Of course, once I get my passport, I still have to apply for a visa from the Italian Consulate. I’m sure that will be a barrel of fun.

Bleagh

I’m feeling kind of icky right now, so I guess I’m going to use this blog as a personal catharsis machine, just like the rest of the world does with their blogs.

So here’s the deal. I recently got an offer from a conductor I worked with last winter to sing at a music festival in Italy this summer. It’s last minute, and it doesn’t pay that well, but they pay for transportation and housing, plus we get a little stipend for food (enough to live modestly). It’s not solo work, but it’s challenging musically, which is what I’ve been really hoping for recently, since I seem to be stuck doing a lot of the same-old choral stuff (which is great…I’m not complaining, but I’m also not challenged enough, I think).

I’m absolutely signed up for the job, so there’s no dilemma as to whether or not to go. I mean, come on, someone is going to pay for me to go to Italy? And sing? This is a chance of a lifetime, and I’m totally psyched to go. I’ve already got my Learn-Italian-Really-Fast CD playing in my car so I can brush up on the two semesters of Italian that I took 14 years ago.

I know I shouldn’t feel bad, I should feel happy and excited, but I all feel right now is bleagh (that’s a technical term, by the way.  It is that icky, vomitous feeling you get when you say the word “bleagh.”). It’s weird.

Now for the psychoanalysis: why am I feeling bleagh? Well, for one thing, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to prepare for this trip. We leave at the end of June for three and a half weeks, and Ray can’t go with me because he’s got to earn the bread and pay the mortgage and make leather stuff so we can go on vacation together another year. That’s probably the hardest thing, since we’re still in our honeymoon phase, I think…our roommates just moved out and we’ve been redecorating and being all lovey-dovey, and I’ll definitely miss him terribly.

But the second reason I feel bleagh is that I just told my transcription boss I’m going to be gone for three and a half weeks, and she was pretty upset. I know she’s probably not upset enough to fire me (and even if she did, that might not be a bad thing in the long run), but the thing that makes me feel bad is that I made her feel bad. How lame is that?

I also took on a whole lot of volunteer stuff with AGMA, and I may not be able to live up to my responsibilities because of this trip, and I feel pretty bad about that too. Not as bad as missing the job, though, since the AGMA stuff is volunteer, but I still feel pretty bad.

My head knows that I should not feel guilty about getting paid to go to Italy and sing. This is, after all, what my real career is about. Ray is totally on board with it and very supportive. Even the folks at AGMA are supportive, because they understand that one must take these jobs to further one’s singing career. So why do I feel guilty about leaving my piddly little day job who can get a temp to replace me? I really don’t know. I think maybe I just need to push through the guilt and remind myself that I’M GOING TO ITALY!

Yeah, that helps.