A post for my shutterbug friends

As I’ve said before, I learn a lot each time I go somewhere and shoot pictures for an extended period, and last weekend’s MotoGP event was no different. I’m still going through the thousands of photos I took over the three days and so far have pruned the selection down to about 800 images in Lightroom.

I thought I would share what I learned this time in case it helps any of you. Some pertains specifically to shooting racing, but I think the most important bits apply to the general situation of going someplace to shoot all day.

Here is what I’ll try to do next time:

Think more carefully about composition. I took lots of pictures where, even when I got a sharp focus, the composition was boring or there was nothing I could do with cropping to make in interesting photo out of the original. Either there was a distracting background, or the riders were doing nothing interesting at that moment, or the colors of the bike and rider bled into the background colors, etc etc. Getting the picture in focus is the technical part—getting that done in a situation where the camera is looking at an interesting angle with a suitable background is something else.

Think more carefully about light. I remember reading that Ansel Adams put enormous effort into being at a certain spot on a certain time of a certain day so that the position of the sun would put shadows right where he wanted them for an exposure. I did the opposite at Laguna Seca. I was so preoccupied with finding a clear shot of the track that when I discovered a section of fence I could see over I shot there regardless of what the light was like. So I have loads of nice clear shots of bikes in darkness because the sun was behind them. I hope the process of deleting hundreds of dark pictures that might otherwise have been keepers will help me remember this in the future. And I don’t mean simply to make sure the light isn’t behind my subject, because a few of those shots look kinda cool—I just mean to make sure I’m seeing what I’m after before I spend 45 minutes in a given spot. The reason I was able to get a good view was likely because the better photographers were somewhere else where the light was better!

Constantly reconsider my settings to make sure they fit the situation. For example, I tend to open the aperture way too much and leave it like that. I’m so fond of pictures with blurred backgrounds that makes the subjects pop out of the image that I tend to open the lens up all the way or nearly so. This makes getting the entire bike in focus very difficult sometimes. Even when I’m pre-focusing on a part of the track and waiting for the bike to ride into that zone before taking five or six quick exposures, I often make the area of focus so shallow that I miss the shot. Then I leave the lens set like that when I move to a new location and am trying for a different type of picture. I just deleted a lot of pictures where I wanted a much deeper area in focus, but I shot them all at f/5.6 so I didn’t get one with the look I wanted.

Remember that a long lens is not truly a substitute for track access. Even with the 300m f/2.8 with a 2x converter, it was getting my camera close to the subject that made a difference. The long lens helped and was better than not having it, but getting the camera close is better than trying to compensate with focal length. Does this mean I’ll try to sneak inside the fence more? Maybe. But I’ll try to keep in mind that comparing my pictures to those of a pro with complete track access isn’t exactly fair.

Bring a laptop!I learn more reviewing my photos than I do while shooting them because it is impossible to judge accurately if a photo is focused properly or not on the 2.5 inch screen my camera has. To improve more quickly, I need to bring a laptop with me and at the very least review the day’s pics each night, so that the next day I can go back with whatever I learned from that review.

A laptop would also solve a problem I barely escaped from this time. On the Italian trip, I didn’t fill up my 12 gigs of memory cards in ten days. But at the track, I can fill them all up ini a single day because I’m shooting so many 5 or 6 shot sequences as the bikes pass. If my friend Dave hadn’t brought his Archos portable DVR with him and let me dump my pics each night to that 80 gig hdd, I would’ve been in bad shape. So in the future I will try harder to bring a laptop for proofing and clearing memory cards each night.

The next scheduled photo day at the races in August 18, at the Historics at Laguna Seca. I guess I need to get my laptop’s hdd fixed!

Big Guns

A friend asked about the equipment we brought to Laguna Seca. Thanks to my good friend Derek, we had plenty of glass!

I rented the 300mm F/2.8L again, but this time added a 2x converter, making the lens a 600mm f/5.6 equivalent. Derek and I each brought a 24-70mm f/2.8L. The other three white lenses are, left to right, his new 70-200mm f/2.8L IS (which ROCKS!), his older 70-200mm f/4L, his 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L (which also ROCKS!), and his new 1.4x converter. That’s his 20D on the left and my 30D on the right. We took the photo with Mark’s new Rebel XTI, known abroad as the 400D, I think. Derek was amazingly generous about letting us use his fantastic equipment over the weekend. Thanks again, D!

ROSSI'S EATING!!!!

On Sunday we were wandering in the paddock before the main event and noticed a crowd standing around in a rather unlikely place. I decided to stop and see what was up. Someone whispered, “Rossi’s inside that tent, eating!”

WOW!

I had yet to get a good photo of him, so I decided to stay. As the word spread, the crowd grew larger and larger. I had gotten what I’d hoped was a good spot for a photo if he came out on our side of the food tent. We watched Yamaha personnel come and go with plates of food, both AMA team members as well as mechanics, technicians, and so on from the MotoGP team. VIPs were occasionally hustled in to see Rossi chew. The crowd grew nervous. What if Rossi ducked out the other side? What if it was all a hoax?

As time passed, the other photographers in the crowd grew antsy, bringing up their lenses each time they sensed movement at the tent door, only to relax when someone other than The Doctor appeared.



A woman pushed her way to the front, pen and hat in hand, and asked the man guarding the barrier to let her in to get Rossi’s autograph. “They’d hang me alive if I let you in there,” he said in his southern drawl. She kept her stolen place at the front however, as a nervous Italian beside her fiddled with his Sharpie and general admission ticket, excited and terrified to be so close to Vale.

At last Rossi emerged, looking shy but full. He signed just about everything that was pressed toward him before leaving for the safety of the motor home behind the large green fence. But even after he’d reached the inside that area a crowd gathered for a glimpse either through a gap in the fence or over it.



After reading his autobiography, I didn’t know what to expect from Rossi in person. In the world of MotoGP he’s at the peak of adulation. No one has nearly as many fans at the race, and I suspect it is even worse in Europe and simply crazy in Italy. The only rider in the Laguna Seca paddock who received near as much attention was Nicky Hayden, but the Rossi fans outnumbered the Kentucky Kid’s by a huge factor, judging from the yellow shirts, hats, backpacks, etc etc.

Rossi was pleasantly congenial and generous to his many fans. I saw him several times and unless it was right before he was going to ride, he was approachable and even, as I mentioned, shy. He’s taller than most of the riders, who are decidedly short, and he’s slender and gangly when on two feet. He doesn’t look strong enough to wrangle a MotoGP bike around, but then again Dani Pedrosa weighs about 65 pounds.

I guess Rossi’s popularity with fans is due not only to his supreme skill and amazing success, but also to how, unlike the rarely smiling and usually aloof Pedrosa, Rossi seems to appreciate those who appreciate him. I admit I like him more and more as I learn more about him.

I don’t have a Rossi shirt yet, though. :P

Red Bull US MotoGP at Laguna Seca

Just a quick post for the mo' to say we're back from the MotoGP event at Laguna Seca. I have thousands of photos to sort through before posting the best on Flickr and will tell a few tales of the weekend here as I can find time to do so. Stay tuned!

Peter Moore leaving a leaky ship?

I was surprised to hear that Peter Moore had resigned as senior VP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business until I started thinking about some issues with the 360 that have been bothering me lately.

For years I have been a devoted supporter of the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming service, on the Xbox forums and to people who, on learning I’m a gamer, ask me about the platform and my experience with it. Xbox Live literally changed my life—not in a religious way, but in a very practical one. Through it I met new friends, some of whom I’ve gotten to know well away from gaming. Three of them are visiting this week to attend the MotoGP race at Laguna Seca, and if not for Xbox Live I’d never have met them.

Microsoft won’t say how many 360s have been sold, but a market research company called NPD keeps track, somehow, and releases sales numbers for consoles and games on a regular basis. So current estimates seem to be around 11 million Xbox 360s sold so far. MS just announced six million Xbox Live members a few months ago, but MS considers those who have the free Silver accounts to be members, even though these accounts don’t allow online multiplayer. Within the community it is well known that many people have multiple accounts, either Silver or Gold—I had two gold accounts last year and used both until my gaming time dropped to the point that I don’t get that much use out of a single account anymore.

The point is that it’s hard to say how many individuals are on Xbox Live using the online multiplayer features, (which is where the 360 experience is truly different from those of Sony and Nintendo, and which is what draws people like me to gaming) but the percentage is lower than MS would like. In spite of the Playstation 3’s high price and flubbed launch (only Sony sees it as other than a disaster, surprise, surprise), the Playstation brand still dominates gaming. The PS2 has sold well over a million consoles and continues to outsell all three ‘Next-Gen’ consoles due to its low price and huge library of games. Video games are for the most part still the domain of the guy who prefers solitary activity to social ones, in spite of MS’s huge efforts to make online gaming the way to go.

Xbox Live is growing all the time, which is good for MS and the 360 because it is Live that differentiates the brand from what Nintendo and Sony currently offer. There are millions and millions of Playstation fans who have yet to switch to the 360, and MS is trying hard to lure them over by securing key games like Grand Theft Auto IV and producing 360 exclusives like Gears of War and the Halo franchise. But it’s really Xbox Live that makes the 360 a different animal in gaming.

One of the key elements to Live’s success is that it lures new customers into the word of video games. I’m not alone among my group of gaming friends when I say that it is Live that makes me a gamer, not the games themselves. Sure, the games need to be appealing, but it is the social aspect of gaming that has kept me at it for the past several years. I don’t sit in a dark room for hours playing by myself as so many gamers do. For me gaming is way to enjoy spending time with friends I’ve made over Xbox Live. If Live were discontinued tomorrow, I would cease being a gamer right then and there.

And finally we get to the leaks in the ship that is Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business and the reasons why I suspect Peter Moore is getting out. All is not well in the land of Xbox.

The first and biggest problem is the appalling failure rate of the 360 console. I am part of a relatively small group of gaming friends, about 20 of us try to play together every Friday night as our schedules and time zones allow and meet daily or nearly so on an online forum to enjoy each other’s company while at work or otherwise away from gaming. Of this small number of 360 owners, we have had an astounding rate of 360 failures. I just did a quick survey and found that among our small group, we have had failed 360s go back to MS for repair or replacement at least twenty-seven times . This counts the poor soul who is currently on his SIXTH 360, having sent units into MS five times for repair or replacement, and another who is on his fifth. Several are on their third or fourth “repaired” or replaced 360s, and the majority have had only one exchange. Others not counted in the twenty-seven are currently nursing their 360s along with the ‘towel-trick,’ a method of wrapping the failing 360 in a towel and turning it on to bake for several hours. In spite of the possible fire hazard, some prefer to risk this because it seems to add some life to the console and it allows one to avoid, at least for the time being, the pathetic turnaround time for 360 repairs. Our current poster boy for MS abuse waited two weeks for MS to ship him the box needed to return his console for repair, and has been without a working 360 since mid-June. This is what I’m hearing from other friends outside our core group about their experiences with MS repairs—2-3 weeks to receive the shipping container, and another 2-3 weeks for the repair itself. And calling MS support to inquire about your 360’s status? Get ready to explore new levels of frustration and suffering.

Two weeks ago Peter Moore talked briefly to Major Nelson about how MS is ‘doing right by its customers’ and extending the 360’s warranty period for the second time in response to all the console problems. This is certainly the right thing to do, but the overall situation still really sucks. It’s too late to have a design that doesn’t fail, but at least we should be able to get them repairs in a timely manner.

I am one of the few people in my circle of friends who has his original 360 console. I have see red ‘trouble’ lights twice in the past, but so far have not had to send my 360 back to MS. I feel VERY lucky that my 360 hasn’t failed, but I’m also angry that so many of my friends’ machines have failed and thus prevented us from enjoying our Friday night game together. It has been ages since everyone had a working 360—almost two years, I guess. There was a short time, right after launch, when they all worked. But ever since the failures started, those of us who make the most of Live’s online multiplayer features have suffered the loss of not being able to play with our friends because of broken 360s. Our Friday night game, which used to be so popular you had to wait to get into a match if you were late, is a shadow of its former self as some of us do other things because we don’t have a working console and those of us who do sit in half empty rooms wishing our missing friends were there.

Another disappointment lately has been a general disillusionment with the responsiveness of the Live team. The xbox.com forums are full of haters and complainers who gripe about this or that without acknowledging how good the service is. Aside from the hardware issues, Xbox Live is fantastic. Overall it is reliable and offers wonderful features for getting together with friends and making new ones online. If it weren’t so compelling, we wouldn’t be quite so angry about the hardware situation.

In the past I have been a constant supporter of Live and the people who make it happen, individuals who work hard and to my perception go largely underappreciated. It is mainly Major Nelson’s podcast interviews with the Live team members that reveal how hard these people work.

Live is not yet perfect, of course. We still can’t invite a friend from the message screen, for example, and every time a friend messages me asking if there’s room in our game and I have to stop playing to cancel his message, go to the Friends List, scroll down to his name, then invite him instead of being able to do that directly from his original message, it rankles as I’ve asked for this exact feature for the past two system updates. The Live team said for the last update that they want to make it as easy as possible to get together with friends, yet they left this feature out again.

In fact the Live team says some other things that sound good but don’t necessarily happen as advertised. MS boasts a strict code of conduct for the forums and use of its Live service. When choosing a gamertag or motto, for example, lots of naughty words are disabled, and rightly so. Even adults who choose not to turn on the parental controls to insulate kids from racy and offensive content appreciate not having to see some idiot’s latest leet spelling of genital parts in his gamertag. There is a robust system of reporting new offenses which are supposed to be addressed in a timely fashion by the Live cops.

Sure, some are going to slip through the cracks from time to time, but how long should it take when a clear offense is reported multiple times?

Example: a few months ago I got a blind friend request from a guy I’d never met. When you achieve any sort of notoriety on a Live scoreboard you start getting these, as well as hate messages and insults, compliments and kudos. I checked the guy’s profile to see what I could learn about him before I accepted the friend request, which I usually do if I have room on my friends list. Most of the people on Live are nice enough, after all.

This individual had listed in his profile motto a URL, which I naively entered in a browser to see why he’d put it there and if it would give some clue about whether I should accept the friend request or not.

The URL was easily one of the most offensive I’ve ever seen, featuring links to porn sites around a main photo of a naked woman, up ended in a bath tub, defecating into the air. Ha ha. I declined the friend request.

I then reported what I considered inappropriate content to MS. No reply, nothing happened. A few weeks later I sent a message one of the team’s more visible members, Trixie360. It took almost two weeks, but the guy heard about it because he replaced the URL with “Code of Conduct” to mock the rules. A few days later he changed it back to the original URL, and I reported it again to Trixie, but it has remained unchanged since June 2.

So anyone who is unlucky enough to get a friend request from this guy, or who happens to see his name on a leader board and check his profile, might innocently see this appalling content, brought to us via Xbox Live. Either it’s more offensive to me than it is to Trixie, or she’s too busy to do anything about it. Either way it’s a big problem that this URL remains part of someone’s public motto.

And sadly it’s not the first time I’ve had a problem with responsiveness from the Live team. I know they work very hard and can’t get to every complaint the same day. I know they can’t add every Live feature people request. But when it comes to making the Live experience a safe one, they need to do better. Another neighbor, this one 12 years old, just got a 360 Elite for his birthday, and sadly I recommending to his parents that they not grant his desire for a Live account. The depravity of the evil Live members still trumps Microsoft’s efforts to make Xbox Live a safe place.

With the above comments in mind, you can see why I’m unhappy with how Live is treating me and my friends. As much as I like the service and appreciate the efforts of those who make it happen, there is just so much going wrong these days that it’s very depressing. It seems to me only a matter of time before a class action suit is filed on behalf of those who have lost weeks of gaming due to multiple console returns. And how long before someone sues Microsoft for failing to enforce its own code of conduct?

Perhaps Peter Moore knows something we don’t, and is heading to EA before the poop really hits the fan.

A Scab's Greeting

Here in the Bay Area, the Teamsters Local 70 workers have been locked out by Waste Management. A couple of articles can be found here and here if you're interested in the details. I was passing by the entrance to the dump today and paused for a while to observe the scene. At the Waste Management entrance, two guards were videotaping each truck that came or went as it passed the groups of locked out workers on either side of the road. The biggest group was holding up LOCKED OUT signs to the trucks and cars coming to the facility to dump trash, but on the other side of the road the man pictured above and an associate were shouting at the replacement drivers of the garbage trucks as they left the facility. The f-bomb was flying, as were several uncomplimentary modifiers of 'scab.'

It was pretty tense, let me tell you. I think those video cameras were a very shrewd move to avoid possible violence.

Another good lesson...

When I decided to go to Sears Point for the AMA races in May, one of the first things I did was look on Andrew Wheeler's website, AutoMotoPhoto, to see if his schedule showed him attending that event. I really enjoy Mr. Wheeler's photographs and when shooting cars or motorcycles I try to emulate his work as best as my level of experience allows.

Turns out he was there, though I didn't know it at the time and didn't recognize him on the Saturday I attended. I've been looking through his pictures from that event and boy, it's pretty humbling to see what a pro came up with looking at the same subjects I had before me. True, he almost certainly had the orange ribbon that I wanted so badly and thus was able to get much closer to the track, but it's really his photos in the paddock and pit lane that I like the most. You can see them here. Enjoy!

While watching the latest F1 race on TV recently, I was noticing how pro photographers on the pre-race starting grid are not shy at all about taking pictures of people. They just get right in the drivers’ faces and click away. When I was at Sears Point in May, I had good access to the paddock and saw many of the riders. I got a few good ones of Ben Spies on his near sprint to the pit lane. Matt Mladin stood around talking to people for half an hour, though, and was an easy target for photographers with more guts than I. Even though I’d rented the big lens that day, in my heart I was just an amateur and a poser and was too shy about getting close for the pictures I wanted.

I suppose that photography, like driving in Sicily, is a situation where fortune favors the bold. I hope I can do better at Laguna Seca!

Cefalu

After somber Corleone, arriving in Cefalu was like arriving in paradise. Sure, it’s touristy, but a little touristy isn’t a bad thing when you’re, well, a tourist.

Cefalu is a beach town, fishing village, tourist stop and destination for vacationing Italians. The beach was packed with pay-to-stay businesses selling access to their little tracts of sand and use of their chairs and sun umbrellas. The guy shown above walked back and forth on the beach, hoping someone would buy something and lighten his considerable load. I got the feeling this gig wasn’t what he had in mind when his uncle said he could offer him a great opportunity in sales.

Also unlike Corleone, there were lots of quaint little shops of ceramics and local food items and so on for the serious shopper to amuse herself in while her husband took photos of things that only he found interesting. The streets were lively, even in the siesta part of the afternoon, which, to be fair to Corleone, we caught the tail end of. Lots of villages we would soon visit nearly completely shut down after lunchtime, but came back to life a few hours later. And even when all the stores were closed, there were signs of life. Cefalu pulsed with activity all afternoon (a big benefit of going someplace that welcomes tourists), and there were interesting things to look at everywhere.



We walked out on the quay and watched the old man and the sea untangle a net he’d used for the morning’s work with the help of a few friends who’d arrived on a decrepit scooter. They laughed and joked as they worked in the hot sun, all of them as tanned as saddles as kids played on the beach behind them.



The main church has a fantastic ceiling and Christ above the altar, and until we got to Monreale I thought I had seen something that would never be equaled, let alone surpassed. As much as I like photography and pictures, sometimes an image just doesn’t convey what seeing a thing with your own eyes is like:



After a very good lunch, we climbed to the top (almost) of the mountain behind the town. The view of the coast was great, and it was interesting to look down on the city we’d been exploring.



As a reward for our exertions, we sampled the local gelato, which was fantastic. Well-fueled for another drive, we continued north to one of the island’s ceramics meccas, San Stefano di Camastra. This is the town known for that distinctive red ceramic look of the first trinacria I posted last week, a style shown here in a serving dish:




We bought a few gifts from a guy whose wife was born in San Francisco and who had returned to Sicily to join her new family’s ceramics business. That guy was so excited to talk to someone from San Francisco (which is where we say we’re from when abroad because no one has heard of Oakland) that he just went on and on about how much he enjoyed his visit a few years ago and how nice the city was. He kept remembering places he’d visited and his face brightened with each recollection as he shouted out in his thick accent, “Golden Gate Bridge!” “Fisherman’s Wharf!” “Coit Tower!”

I should mention that nowhere in Rome or in Sicily did we pick up any bad vibe about being American. Even the jerk at Caccamo seemed not to care. Although, come to think of it, I’m pretty sure he thought we were English, not American. When he said ‘Inglese,’ I thought he was wondering what language to speak, so I said yes. But now I think he understood me to mean we were English. Oh well.

Driving in Sicily

I tend to grouse a fair bit when something rubs me the wrong way, and a lot rubs me the wrong way about what I perceive as bad or just plain rude driving in California. One of my biggest gripes is that it used to be illegal to pass on the right, but on the freeway everyone does it now, even CHP cars. Why does ‘everyone’ pass on the right? Because there is almost always some jackass in the fast lane going slower than the flow of traffic.

I’m not a fast driver. I’m a ‘take it to the track’ guy who gets mad enough to call the CHP when I see someone going over 100, and I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket in my life. But I like to go as fast as I feel is safe, which is generally as fast as the general flow of traffic allows. So when some buttclamp is parked in the fast lane talking on his cell phone while even those in the slow lane are passing him, I get angry.

When we arrived in France in 1999 and I started driving every day in Lyon, I was a bit overwhelmed by the take-no-prisoners approach to getting around in a car. A British friend who lives in France and is married to a French woman explained to me that all Frenchmen think they’re Alain Prost or at least pretend they are. But that idea fell apart when I noticed that as often as not it was women and even elderly women in Twingos and Peugeot 106s who were blazing past me on narrow roads.

I adapted, though, and soon got to enjoy driving in France. I especially liked how religiously the French follow the freeway etiquette of NEVER passing on the right and how the slower cars automatically move as far right as there is space until it comes time to pass someone. Even fast drivers stay right until they want to pass another car. Perhaps we just have too many cars on the road to make this feasible, but I think there’s another explanation. Too many California drivers fear having to merge with other cars. Half the time when you see someone come up the onramp and go directly to the fast lane and hunker down for the duration of his day’s trip, it’s someone who looks nervous, lacking confidence, both hands gripping the wheel tightly. The other half of the time it’s clearly just some inconsiderate tool who thinks he or she owns the road and doesn’t care about endangering the lives of others.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I had also driven in Northern Italy on several occasions during trips from Lyon. At the time, Italian freeways seemed chaotic compared to the order and politeness of France. The Italians seemed to go as fast as they wanted and use whatever lane they wanted and it was amazing we didn’t see an accident about every two miles.

But even that experience did not prepare me for driving in Sicily, which is a land of narrow, two-lane roads. The autostrada is not so bad, since it has two lanes in each direction and is a high-speed path that, with fuel being so expensive, is much less populated than the smaller roads. The real craziness happens when you have a narrow road with only one lane in each direction. You can get on one of the ‘highways’ in Sicily with anything from a powerful Mercedes-Benz to a two-stroke scooter to a donkey with the flu. So you find yourself sharing the single lane with vehicles going 100 mph to look important or 20 mph to save gas (or because that’s simply as fast as that beloved hunk of junk can go).

This presents a challenge for the middle of the road vehicle, one who doesn’t want to noodle all the way from the top of the island to the bottom, but who also doesn’t want (or who lacks the horsepower) to make others eat his dust. There are so many slow (and I mean S-L-O-W) cars (or micro cars, or tiny three-wheeled junior pickup trucks powered by lawnmower engines) on these roads that someone is always passing someone else, and –here’s the troublesome part—this is happening in both directions at the same time. These two lane roads are effectively four very narrow lanes.

I can’t count how many times we observed a slow car in each opposing lane being passed at the same time, the faster passing cars coming very close to each other in the middle of the road. This is possible because the slowest cars pull to the right, sometimes right onto the shoulder, when they see that one of the kamikaze double-opposing-passes is about to happen.

As a spectator event this can get pretty exciting when one or more big trucks and a blind curve are involved. We didn’t actually see any accidents (though we came across a few that had just happened), but there must occasionally be horrific head on collisions in Sicily because the drivers do some insane things trying to get around slower traffic.

And trucks, no matter how slowly they’re going or how many scores of cars are stuck behind them on winding narrow roads, will NEVER pull over. On one stretch of road we got stuck in our puny diesel Fiat Idea climbing a hill and fifteen or so cars behind a very slow truck that was vomiting thick black smoke as it trudged upward at 25 miles per hour. BMWs zipped around us, passing three or four cars at a time before ducking back into our lane to give some room to opposing drivers who were passing on their downhill route. But we of little power just didn’t have the pep to pass anyone on those hills. The road had turnouts, too—sections where a slow truck could pull to the side for a bit and let us by. But this goes against some gene, apparently.

Following that truck was an extreme in our experience, but there always seemed some much slower car to get around, which made driving almost anywhere very stressful. I think it would’ve been fun in a fast car and without concern for the cost of gas. A rich guy in a Ferrari could really get some use out of a car like that. But if there were truth in advertising, the Fiat Idea would be renamed the Fiat Bad Idea, at least in such a mountainous region as Sicily.

As insane as the Sicilian norm seems to my sensibilities, I can only imagine what a Sicilian would think while driving down 880 or pretty much any other freeway around here. Madon! They have four wide lanes in each direction but you never know where the slow cars will be, left, right, in the middle, and the fast cars pass on all sides whenever they want—it’s madness!

What works for us because we as a culture have gotten slowly accustomed to it and know what to expect would likely seem just as strange to Sicilians as their system seemed to me, but likewise theirs is what has developed over time for them and it works there because they know what to expect. Driving in Sicily redefines for us what is ‘safe’ driving, and makes some of the rules we choose still to obey seem overly cautious. I suppose the natural progression of driving is that it will get crazier and crazier until the very edge is found by the number of fatalities becoming too great. We tolerate the number of deaths we have now (forty thousand a year, apparently) as acceptable.

I don’t know how many they have each year in Sicily, but I feel lucky to have survived those roads. I’ll try to keep that experience in mind the next time I pass someone on the right.

Caccamo

On our way east to Cefalu we stopped at a small town called Caccamo because Kathy recommended seeing the castle there. It’s a steep, winding drive up from the coast to the top of one of Sicily’s many small mountains, the view looking down on Termini Imerese, a port town that was welcoming a freighter as we ascended.

The castle at Caccamo is charming, surrounded by turrets in the distinctive style shown here:


As we approached the main gate, we were welcomed by the first and only real jerk of the trip. He came down the wide stone ramp we were climbing and said jovially that he was a volunteer at the castle who would be happy to give us a free tour, and wanted to make sure we understood that there was no fee, only a tip if we desired to give him one. He immediately started off about the castle’s date of construction or something without waiting for our reply. We like to be free in places like this, because we usually want to move more quickly than tours, live or recorded, wish us to go. We like to follow what interests us rather than listen to a presentation. So we said thank you anyway and continued up the ramp. He clarified that there was no fee, and resumed his spiel. When we L said, more forcefully, thanks anyway, his manner changed as if a switch had been flipped. Gone was the sunny and welcoming visage. He scowled malevolently as he spied another pair of tourists coming around the corner below and left us with a colorful Sicilian expression surely familiar to fans of the Sopranos. We saw him later, having nabbed the other couple, giving his polite history but not acknowledging us as we passed.

When we returned to the car we found a wedding under way at the church, which was at the end of a very narrow street. If you’ve ever visited an old European town you probably know that just about any American car produced before 1980 simply would not fit down some of those old, skinny streets. As the wedding party prepared for the bride’s arrival and the guests made their way down the narrow street to the church, I couldn’t help wondering how that narrow access increased the general anxiety involved with any wedding. The area in front of the church was PACKED with the cars small enough to get there, and as we drove away we saw larger cars parked along the main street’s few parking spots, and some of the guests had to walk quite a distance because of owning larger cars.

We descended the mountain and continued east to Cefalu. More on that, tomorrow.

Corleone

I chose Sicily for my wife’s trip based largely on pictures of the spectacular coast and a history that far predates the mafia, so I’m not sure what I expected to find inland in a town like Corleone. But our visit to the place made famous by The Godfather was strange and eerie, and for a while I was thinking that Sicily might have been a mistake.

It’s a bit hard to say from a short visit what affect the Godfather novels and movies have had on Corleone, and how much of its somber creepiness is due to the nonfictional mafia presence, which in the last several decades especially has been considerable. Salvatore Riina, for example, had two judges murdered, and apparently was the straw that broke the mafia’s back; his crime family, based in his native Corleone, drew so much attention that the Italian authorities made a huge effort to wipe out the mafia in Sicily once and for all. According to the reports of Riina’s arrest and imprisonment, Sicilians in general and inhabitants of Corleone especially were jubilant that “The Devil” had finally been successfully prosecuted and run out of town.

A September, 2006 article in the TimesOnline states that “Some Corleone citizens have become so fed up with visitors looking for traces of the Corleone family that they have suggested changing its name.” Kathy and Toto told us that they have tourists come from all over the world just to drive to Corleone and have their pictures taken in front of the town sign. Corleone’s mafia presence existed long before and long after the novel and movies, but most of the world knows Corleone as the ancestral home of Don Vito—I doubt the town would get as many tourists looking for mafia lore as it does without the Hollywood connection.

Even before we got out of the car, Corleone had a very strange vibe. On the surface it looks like most other inland towns we visited, though perhaps a bit more run down than some that can boast a great church or other non-mafia tourist draw. Everywhere we went we saw old men gathered in groups, plain slacks and white shirts the standard garb. I wanted to take pictures but recalled that this is frowned upon in the underworld, and though we didn’t really think we were seeing groups of retired Mafiosi, we weren’t confident about that. I snuck a few shots here and there, but frankly lacked the guts to photograph any of the men openly. It was that creepy.

We saw almost no women, very few kids or teenagers of either gender, but around each corner another group of old men in white shirts sitting around talking quietly. We searched for the mafia museum, which is supposed to have an interesting history of the fight against organized crime, but found it closed. L managed to do a little shopping in a small ceramics store while I stood outside on the nearly deserted street, looking for something to photograph and finding very little. People eyed us suspiciously. Obviously we were tourists, and perhaps the locals have grown so accustomed and so bitter about movie fans seeing their town as nothing more than a mafia icon that they assumed we were the same.

We didn’t stay long. It was hot and to our perception hostile with the exception of the two teenaged girls in the tiny tourism office who cheerfully handed us a map and recommended the mafia museum. I guess they didn’t know it was closed that day. We left Corleone after no more than an hour and a half of wandering around and drove back toward Bolognetta. About five minutes out of town we saw this sign:



We wondered was Ficuzza was like, since Corleone had been a wash. We followed a narrow winding road to a small town that seemed to be a kind of Corleone annex. The small square around which sat several small shops and cafes presented the same city sign and map that we’d seen in Corleone, but we couldn’t find our current location on that map. Even though this place, whatever it was, seemed technically to be part of Corleone the people were completely different. There were women and younger men, even a few kids playing in the street. We parked and got a coffee at a café that was at first deserted inside. When I asked one of the few occupied tables if anyone was working the counter, one of the women popped up apologizing and when her calls for help inside went unanswered, she served L a pistachio gelato and me an espresso.

Some others came into the café’s courtyard and chatted happily with those they met. Two elderly grannies stopped in to say hello in baffling Sicilian before going on their way, arm in arm.



It was a nice contrast after downtown Corleone and we seemed to be getting the trip back on track. The next day we would head east along to coast to Cefalu, and all our travel prayers would be answered…

Firefox problems

A friend just pointed out that his Firefox browser isn't showing the pictures I include at the beginning of each post. I just checked my Firefox and found the same thing. I see the pictures in Safari, Netscape, and IE, but not Firefox. So if you're reading this blog in Firefox, try it in another browser to see the photos!

The Sicilian Adventure Begins

When we arrived in Palermo, Sicily on Wednesday, we expected that the weather would be cooler because we were going to an island. It was still 30 degrees Celsius, same as Rome, but we learned that it had been 45 (113 Fahrenheit!) the day before. Whew!

The lodging I found for us in Sicily was the Home From Home Bed and Breakfast, a place that had consistently shown up on travel sites with glowing recommendations from past guests. I had originally intended that we would fly into Catania, but changed this plan because Home From Home is 23 miles from Palermo. I just had a feeling that staying there was the right thing to do.

A little background on Home From Home: it’s run my Kathy, a British expatriate, and her husband Toto (short for Salvatore), who was born in Sicily and who worked in Rome for over thirty years. One thing we find too little of these days is people who take pride in what they do and demand of themselves that their endeavors represent the very best they can offer. Home From Home is an example of such pride, a small oasis of clean, tidy order for the weary traveler. But the real treasures found here are Kathy and Toto, the kindest, most helpful people we met on our trip. I can’t believe I don’t have a picture of them…some photographer.

An example: I had forgotten to print the email with directions from the Palermo airport to the B&B, so I phoned from Rome asking for help. I got a message back that Toto would meet us at the airport, and when we’d collected our bags, there he was to guide us smoothly through an airport that, though small, seemed to have more of itself under construction than not. He drove us to the car rental and waited while we collected our silver Fiat Idea (I’ve got an idea, Fiat—how about 50 more horsepower!), then let us follow him back to Home From Home.

I had driven many kilometers in France and other European countries, including northern Italy, so I expected no real difficulties behind the wheel. But driving in Sicily is another world altogether. I may do a separate post on that part of our experience.

Getting from the airport to Palermo is a nice drive taking in the coast on the left and the looming stone mountains on the right. But while driving from Palermo to Bolognetta, the small town where HfH is, I’ve never been more grateful for someone to follow. A coastal town, Palermo has half a ring road that allows traffic to bypass the city on its way past, and those several kilometers are like something from a Bosch painting on a Wednesday at high noon. L commented that it was almost as insane as India. If so, I never want to go to India.

Two lanes are indicated by the white paint, but cars go through the same space four wide, no one wanting to be behind anyone else, constantly merging and looking for the smallest advantage to sneak slightly ahead. It’s less like driving as we know it than like being a blood cell in a clogged artery during a heart attack. Add to the madness of the cars the masses of moped and motorcycles that zip past on all sides, honking and weaving when forced to slow down, usually with two passengers, sometimes one of them a child or even a toddler on board.

This road has several stoplights and at one of them a mass of windshield washers attacked the helpless traffic with grimy rags and dirty water. I think the idea was that for a small tip they wouldn’t wash your windows. Toto deftly anticipated this and guided us briefly onto a side road that bypassed this invasion. Bravo!

Once through the valley of the shadow of death, Toto introduced me to driving on Sicilian highways, and I’ll just have to comment at length on this later. I still haven’t quite recovered and just thinking about it is causing my hands to shake.

Eventually we arrived at Home From Home and found Kathy waiting for us with a snack of cheese, olives and white wine on their patio. Though she and I had been conversing via email for six months, it wasn’t really until then that I was sure I’d made the right choice about where to stay in Sicily. It’s difficult to resist going on and on about how warm, interesting and kind Kathy and Toto are—they became very dear to us during our stay there.

After our snack and chat, we still had an afternoon to begin exploring Sicily, so we decided to visit nearby Corleone. It was not what we expected…

The Real Deal

It took some time to recover from the trauma induced by the Vatican Museum, but being experienced travelers we rallied and decided to do something we’d never done before: buy tickets from one of those tourist buses that circle the city and let you hop on or off as you choose. We had only a day and a half in Rome before leaving for Sicily, our true destination on this trip. I’d intended for this short time in Rome to serve as a kind of reconnaissance mission, allowing us to get a feel for he city and develop an idea of what we’d like to do when we returned to see Rome properly. The bus seemed a good idea, letting us cover more of the city than we could on foot.

We took a coffee just off Piazza San Pietro while we waited for the bus to arrive and continued the ruination of our palates where it comes to good espresso. In Rome they only fill the tiny cup up half way, and that coffee is very strong and very good. So good in fact that I fear we may no longer find our Nespresso filling the bill. I suppose coffee has in common with wine that once you’ve tasted the really excellent stuff, it’s hard to go back to the everyday product.

We’d chosen the bus tour whose brochure we’d found in our hotel lobby, but I think that we’d have been better off to have compared the route of each of the at least four or five competitors before making our decision. Our bus’s route hit many of the high points, the Coliseum, lots of fountains and piazzas, etc. But part of the appeal is supposed to be that you can jump off and get back on as you wish, thus using the bus tour as a kind of cheap transportation around the city. For this use ours was nearly worthless. It took much longer than the stated hour and fifteen minutes to make its circuit, and since it only went in one direction, if you wanted to get to somewhere near the end of its path you’d get there faster by walking than riding the bus all the way around the city. So for a single use trip around town to see what was where, that was fine. But previous comments on taxis notwithstanding, we could have done a better tour of the city for fewer Euros in a cab.

Still, we did get where we wanted to go once, and sort of where we wanted to go a second time, which led to our getting lost and stumbling across this:



How we would’ve missed Il Foro Romano, the Roman Forum, if we hadn’t stumbled across it is a mystery, but I was amused to think of my first trip to New York City, where each time I turned a corner it seemed I found another iconic building or store. In Rome, turning a new corner reveals something a thousand or two years old that you had no idea was there. Having lived in Lyon and Paris, France, we were accustomed to finding things that were, by California standards, ancient. But Rome’s old stuff makes Paris look brand new, and the presence of these sudden ruins is a big part of what makes exploring Rome so much fun.

Suffering for art

We found that the line for the Vatican Museum was much shorter at 1:30 than it had been in the morning. We figured we had time for some gelato, which I collected before moving as quickly as I could with it streaming down my hands in the intense heat all the way to the front of the line where I found L waiting for me, sending others ahead. We ate our nearly melted gelato quickly and moved into the museum as I tried to clean the sticky mess off my hands as best I could.

The museum itself is an interesting mix of modern and ancient, and after a brief visit to a souvenir shop we entered the older section in a mass of sweaty humanity seeking one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel.

There is a vast amount of art from various periods to see on the way, but the conditions inside the museum were so unpleasant that it was difficult to appreciate any of it. I stopped only a few times to take pictures of things when there was a brief break from the close, clammy intensity of being crammed into a narrow corridor in 100 degree heat with a thousand unfamiliar people from all around the world.

It was hot, smelly, sweaty and terrible in there, and it seemed to go on forever as we followed the signs to the Sistine Chapel. Each corner we turned or room we exited led to yet another hallway and another sign encouraging us onward and prolonging our discomfort. The time data on my photos confirms that it took nearly an hour to reach the chapel, an hour of this miserable claustrophobic contact with equally miserable strangers as like sheep we moved clumsily from one room to the next. The conditions were terrible, but what made the situation worse was that the whole time we were passing things I wanted to stop to look at, yet the idea of staying even a moment longer than absolutely necessary in this endless hallway of misery made that unthinkable. I took only a fraction of the photos I would otherwise have done.



Finally, FINALLY, we arrived at the Sistine Chapel. My poor, miserable wife could stand it no longer, even though we had reached the goal, and headed straight for the exit. I had waited years to stand in that room, so I forgot my physical sorrows once I arrived and tried to find a place with at least some elbowroom from which to observe the ceiling.

As with the piazza, it was amazing to stand below such a famous thing as the chapel’s ceiling. I thought again about Michelangelo on his back on that high scaffold, painting in his sketches of the various bible stories, Pope Julius II bearing a strange resemblance to Rex Harrison and shouting “When will you make an end!?!” Standing below it you understand why it has earned so much attention over the centuries. It’s simply amazing to behold.

Many people were ignoring the posted signs forbidding photography, so I took a single, non-flash image of the ceiling:



I then followed L’s path and we raced to reach the outdoors again, thinking about how wonderful the experience might have been under other, more human conditions.

They sure know how to build a church

We checked in to learn that our room wouldn’t be ready for half an hour, so we started meandering down Viale Vaticano and noticed a huge line that continued around each corner we turned. It seemed to stretch on and on into infinity, tourists five and six wide on the sidewalk below the huge walls of Vatican City. We took our first espresso of the trip in a sidewalk café with a great view of the sweltering pilgrims who shuffled slowly forward in the oppressing heat.

We returned to the hotel to ask what the line was for, and learned that our first hotel was directly across the street from the entrance to the Vatican Museum. This was the path that led to, among other holy marvels, the Sistine Chapel. We inquired further and learned that the line usually started around 7 am, but that the museum didn’t open until 10. A knowing smile introduced the fact that the line usually shortened considerably around lunch time, and that the thing to do was to wait an hour or two and see the museum when the wait was at its shortest.

This left us with some time to kill, so we decided to do our first errand of the trip: we’d been asked to visit the tomb of Pope John Paul II and ask some favors at his Holiness’s shrine.

The entrance is in Piazza San Pietro, one of those locations that give you chills when you find yourself there. This may be because the square has religious significance for you, because you’ve read and heard about it all your life, or simply because you’ve seen it in movies so many times. Even in the heat it was very cool to be walking through the square, the dome looming above, the many stone figures that circle the square looking down.




Secured in an area under the basilica at St. Peter’s, The Tombs of the Popes allow one to visit many, many of the past popes in their stone reposes. Though others were taking pictures, there were many signs saying this was forbidden so I honored that and put the camera away. We found John Paul II’s tomb and delivered our message on behalf of a dear family member.

Emerging back into the sunlight and heat, we decided to enter the basilica and compare it to other cathedrals we’d visited in the past, such as Notre Dame in Paris. St. Peter’s basilica was the first of many churches we saw on this trip that were simply astounding in their detail and design. The photo at the top of this post shows the light streaming through the opening of the dome onto the frescoes and other ornaments below. The altar is quite elaborate, too:



As is the rest of the place:



Unusual in a church of this importance is the statue of St. Peter, which anyone can touch, and judging from the way his feet are worn down, many people have done just that.



I had a personal moment of great satisfaction when I stood in front of the first of Michelangelo’s pieta statues and the only one I had yet to see in person. Two are in Florence, one is in Milan, and I had seen all of those on previous visits to those cities. But seeing the last one on my list was a fine moment for me. Each one is moving in its own way, and the Rondanini in Milano is my personal favorite, but this one is amazing, especially for the incredible skill involved in making the folds of fabric so realistic.



We left the basilica having seen some pretty incredible things and went looking for the end of the line to the Vatican Museum. Little did we know that we’d soon be surrounded by heavenly things but feeling closer to hell…

Rome-Fiumicino’s Baggage Handling System gets an…

…out of 100 for efficiency.

We flew into Rome's main airport twice on our trip, once from Dulles and once from Palermo and each time it took AGES for our suitcases to appear. I give the system an 8 instead of a zero because our bags didn’t get lost, they just took forever to arrive from the plane. (And also because I have a picture of a big orange 8 from the airport baggage claim area.) It took almost as long on the Palermo-Rome flight as it took to fly from Palermo to Rome. At least for that shorter flight it had cooled considerably in Rome.

But when we first arrived from the US, it was Africa-hot in that airport’s un-cooled baggage claim, filled with surly, weary and unwashed travelers. When the bags finally arrived and we stepped outside for the taxi line, it felt slightly cooler for a moment. Then it felt even hotter as the thick cloud of diesel exhaust from the long line of taxis gave us an oh-so-European embrace. Say what you will about the expense and inconvenience of California’s emissions laws, but the Land of Diesel has much in common with Mordor when it comes to air quality.

We learned a few things about Roman taxis that might help you out if you ever head that way. First, there is a fixed fee of €40 to Fiumicino from Rome or vice versa. Second, some Roman taxi drivers are likely to try to get around this if they think they can charge you more. Third, that €40 fee does not seem to allow for the usual additional one Euro surcharge per suitcase you find in many other European cities’ taxis—i.e., it’s €40 even if you have two or three pieces of luggage with you. And four, if your hotel offers a private car for €65, it’s worth the extra to ride in a new, clean Mercedes instead of the average or worse Rome taxi, which may or may not be driven by a heavy smoker, may or may not have air conditioning when it’s 90 degrees in the shade, and may or may not play disco hits for an hour as you sweat in your travel clothes and wish to be struck by lightning if that’s the only possible end to your suffering.

It’s also worth the extra €25 because in spite of all the may or may-nots, you can be sure that your taxi driver will be striving for the national Most Fearless Driver award, which he can’t hope to win without sailing into crowded intersections without touching the brakes, or seeing how close he can come to stationary objects without scraping the mirrors off his doors, or scaring countless tourists into soiling themselves in public crosswalks.

During our trip we took that ride three times in taxis, all of which sucked in some pretty distinct ways, and one time in a private car, which sucked in only one way. Our flight home started at Rome-Fiumicino at 7:15 am, which meant we were supposed to be at the airport at 5:15, which meant we should leave the hotel at 4:30 to allow 45 minutes for the trip, which meant we needed to wake up at…

We decided to live dangerously and count on no traffic at that hour and on a short line at the First Class counter, which meant we were really only risking a long line at Security. So we left the hotel at 5 am and got in that beautiful, clean-smelling Benz for a slow, safe trip through a darken Rome.

It was slow because the driver decided to practice his English by donning the guise of a tour guide as we drove through town. He was a friendly little guy, about 40, with a heavy accent and a small English vocabulary. He had great passion about his subject, however, and spoke earnestly if not fluently about several landmarks as we drove along. The concentration required to translate his thoughts into English, though, took something away from his ability to focus on driving, and we started going more and more slowly as he struggled to find the English words he sought.

We were on nearly deserted streets, where a typical Roman taxi driver could easily have gotten his rickety rig up to its top speed, and suddenly were being passed by every vehicle that happened along and a meandering cow who seemed lost and was wondering where his farm had got to. We were already leaving much later than prudence demanded, and there we were, listening to that stuttering rambling in the driver’s seat as we crawled toward the airport. But it only lasted about five minutes, I think, though it seemed much longer. When we reached the ring road and the notable landmarks ended, boy we really started flying and made it to the airport in a total of about 30 minutes.

If not for the slow start and having to hear Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” for the third time that trip, it would’ve been the perfect ride to the airport. But at least it wasn’t disco, and for that alone it was worth the extra 25 Euros.

Good to be home...

We’re back from our ten day visit to Rome and Sicily. We’re tired, have tons of laundry and gifts to sort through, but are very glad to see Emily and the dogs again.

Everything went well for us: no car accidents or valuables stolen or food poisoning. We saw some amazing things and met many charming and delightful people. I didn’t bring a computer, first time in many, many travels that I left the Powerbook at home. Instead of keeping the usual journal of our adventures, I wrote brief notes each night of what we’d done so I could remember later. But now I have the task or using those notes to reconstruct our trip for the archives. It’s a worthwhile thing to do, though—it’s enjoyable years later to reread the details of where we went and what we did. This trip is unique, however: because I brought the big camera I have over a thousand pictures to sort through, hoping all the while that I got a few good ones that will make revisiting the trip even more enjoyable.

I will be putting the photos worth keeping up on Flickr as I go through them, and will also post here some of the more interesting things we saw and did. For today, though, here is the first of my photos: a trinacria, the symbol of Sicily, composed of a Medusa’s head and three legs which represent the three corners of the island, or its three most important cities, depending on who is explaining the symbol to you. Sometimes the head also sports stalks of wheat which represent Sicily’s main product in ancient times and the product with which the island paid its taxes to the Roman Empire. Other versions include instead the Medusa’s snakes.

The version shown above is in the ceramic color and style produced in San Stenfano di Camastra, a town specializing in ceramics and which makes many different objects in this distinctive red base with blue details.