Blame it on the Panorama

Hotel names can be very beguiling. Having left it too late to book one of the conference hotels I selected the Hotel Panorama on this basis, and the view from my window bears out the promise of its name as you can see, being especially seductive when the church bell across the way begins to toll. Above on the Terrace where breakfast is served the view is amazing.

The hotel is also close to the Piazza San Marco, and to the ancient colonnades of the Piazza della Independenza where A room with a view was set. One morning at breakfast there was a VERY earnest (and competitive) discussion amongst some English guests tabling their encounters with different pieces of Art, but the Hotel Panorama is a little more Barton Fink than EM Forster. I did have a fleeting Separate Tables moment when pursued from the breakfast room by a handsome man :
"Madam Madam you have left something."

The hotel begins on the second floor of an undistinguished brown building in the lawyer and court district, and was meant to be accessible via a lift although I couldn't get the lift doors to open on the night I arrived. The staircase leading more or less off the street is open to the world, and probably accounted for the enormous fight broadcast from the stairwell on my first night there. It was the kind of din you'd expect if you were arresting a cat. After a lot of contrapuntal yelling between a woman and several men calm was eventually restored to the Panorama except for me, coughing myself back to sleep again.

The atmosphere here weighs on my lungs like a broth of pollens, car pollution, damp air, old buildings and cold and I've been struggling to breathe ever since I arrived. There is the off-setting 'high' of the various drugs I take, but fresh air would be preferable. On the afternoon we went to the Tenuta di Capezzana I was looking forward to the clean Tuscan hillside breezes. Instead we went straight to the cellars where an industrial strength mould has been colonising since the middle ages.

But it was lovely to get out amongst the vineyards and the crumbly buildings. I especially liked 'Luna' who was pleasingly disobedient and went in through the cellar door although told strictly that she mustn't.

The Conference venue is a beautiful Renaissance cloistre.

It's been a bit scrappy with some papers highly focused on the technicalities of specific legislation processes, by the Austrians for example (who all looked like Sigmund Freud), or on specific XML approaches to making legislation available with different schema (difficult to convey in a spoken paper being simultaneously translated). In any event I prefer the more legal discussion and loved the Constitutional academic from Rome University who delivered his view of the new citizen's rights, including full and free access to both the law online, and to an understanding of it, something he appeared to think achievable. This sort of paper inevitably includes the historical processes of that particular society, which is probably my reason for enjoying them. Of course underneath any discussion of this kind in Europe is the understanding of what happens when basic rights are no longer honoured.

On Thursday night Alex and I drifted towards the exquisite 17th century Teatro della Pergola with our maps aloft (I pretended I could read mine), paused for a stand up coffee in the Piazza san Marco, and generally meandered around the tiny winding laneways until we were in the right place. I liked the graffiti below, although its meaning eluded me. The Conference had the theatre to itself for the night : Mendlessohn's Italian symphony, conductor Christopher Franklin, Orchestra della Toscana.

Florentine days

Although I've spent the last few days hanging out with R, and eating and gossiping with J we've also done a surprising amount of sight-seeing. Staying in J's apartment is a pleasure in itself.
















But I'm slowly getting to grips with central Florence and its complex medieval Piazza and Via, and in particular the location of the site of my Conference which begins on Thursday. Oddly the medieval cloistre where it will be held is a military headquarters. We were unable to go further than the outer door and peek into the moorish gardens visible through a gate.


After tracking the elusive cloistre to its source (street numbering isn't entirely logical), we ate lunch in a tiny ancient place mostly underground and accessible via a series of concealed staircases and rat tunnels. I ate a local Tuscan soup of artichokes and other vegetables, with bread cooked into it, drank a glass of local red wine and it was all simple and delicious.


In this photograph you can just see the narrow doorway (between the shelves of wine bottles). The owners won't open at night. It was once a crypt and spooks them too much.
In passing, at the Conservatorium, we found a cello recital to go to tonight (Brahms and Debussy). I was also to hear the Kronos Quartet on Sunday night but developed a food sickness from eating blueberry ice-cream by the Arno and ended up staying home, ostensibly as the baby-sitter but I think the baby actually sat me.


R is six and attends school across the street. Both J and I went over to meet her at 4:30 yesterday afternoon. The school day is 8:30 to 4:30 for even quite young children, so it's a long day for them. The afternoon ritual is very different from the herd of 4WDs milling daily around Queensland schools. At R's school the children gather in the downstairs exit room and emerge, under supervision, onto a raised platform. The parents wait gossiping in a court-yard below. As a child spots its parent with a cry of 'Mama' or 'Papa' the parent responds to the call and waves a hand in return. It felt like weirdly like an auction, putting in a bid for the preferred child (ones own of course).



It's a lot of fun being around a child again but I'm under R's instructions not to tease, especially about Bababella who has no legs or ears. Here is a picture of Radha in her butterfly dream.





And here some other pix some of which are famous for being post-cards, some of which are famous for being paintings and some of which are .. well, interesting to me.

Tomorrow the LIIs (the Legal Information Institutes) are meeting from all around the world and I am able to go as an observer which I'm very pleased about. Once the meeting finishes (at about 3:30) we will travel into the country side and have dinner at the Tenuta di Capezzana and then be delivered back to central Florence by about 8:00 pm. I decided to stay at a central Hotel for a few nights as there's a possible bus strike at the end of the week. Even though I THINK I've mastered bus routes 14 and 20 sufficiently to get myself home again there may not be a bus to climb onto.

In transit

I amused myself in the very last seconds before landing in Frankfort by photographing the landing information (anyone who has sat in a long distance plane for more 12 hours will understand why).

My companion for this part of the journey was Jorge, returning from the reconstruction program in Aceh. He made me a detailed map of central Frankfurt fanning out from the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (Railway Station) and showing all the best walks to get a good understanding of the city. As it was 2' in Frankfurt when we landed, and about 5' by the time we reached the empty City center (8:00 a.m) I could only dream of the casual stroll across the Main River he had envisaged. My Laplander's woolly hat , cast aside at the last minute, beckoned like a mirage from the top of a cupboard in Wilson Street. Every visible part of my body went bright red with cold.

In the end the best option was to get into the Underground and stay there for an hour or so, which I did. But in passing I did observe some interesting street-theatre in the freezing morning air of the Red Light district, a group of 'slow movement' players creating some bit of impromptu theatre around a brazier. Perhaps they were just a gang of menacing young drunks; I didn't take any pix as I didn't want to find out. But I did capture this poor creature:


The Stadel museum on the banks of the Main is one of the great German art museums and once boasted a huge collection of early 20th century German Expressionists. The Hitler regime purged much of this work; I think I read somewhere that the Stadel lost over 700 paintings during the Nazi era. It still has some impressive Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Ernst Kirchner works. Reminders of the Nazi past arose even in quite small ways. This year's fashion for young men in the shop windows had echoes of storm trooper chic and was strangely sexy (rather like the late Jorge Heider).

At 4:00 p.m. the train to Zurich pulled out and I fell asleep with minutes. By the time I woke up it was dark enough to photograph myself travelling through Switzerland but not the scenery outside and my reason for making the journey by train.

We had a 90 minute wait at Zurich station during which I learned then promptly forgot the German word for pumpkin.

On the other side of the glass waiting room a man in a face mask made out of a magazine cover strummed a single string banjo and pretended to sing. We made a captive audience for him and his group of local Clockwork Orange boys. The whole station teemed with weird Swiss sub-cultures, and the beggars were as podgy as the pigeons.

The first-class sleeping compartment of my imaginings was a bit of a shock in reality. Even Queensland Rail in the 50s offered a more elegant experience. And I was apparently to share the tiny cramped cabin with another 'lady' who would arrive to join me through the night. I pointed out that my luggage was pretty much sharing the available cubic metres of space already and after a bit of negotiation it seemed that E25 might go towards changing the bedroom arrangements. This was a good investment. I had an excellent sleep in spite of the train pulling up all night and collecting ever more passengers. By 6:40 we were in Campo de Marte in Florence and a whole new set of train timetabling to consider.

Anyone for tiffin?

Being met at KL International by 'coach transfer' in the form of a personal Mercedes felt like a good sign. Especially after my passport had been taken away by an official and I was asked to step out of the queue please. The Border Security music began pounding through my head – da da da da da dum! I tried not to sweat and look like a shifty drugs granny but suddenly I became aware of the 10kg boogie board cover strapped to my suitcase… Of course it was all about bureaucracy (and not even corruption). My passport expires in December, something you'd think might be a problem in East Europe, but hardly amongst our ASEAN friends. For Malaysia the seroconversion date is 6 months before expiry, for anyone wanting to know; after that your passport becomes an infected document. Getting into a Mercedes after that to speed along a dark and empty highway felt strangely good.

Before leaving Australia I had an idea of catching one of the local ferries that cart people to Singapore or Borneo or Penang. But it's all a bit time-consuming given the few days I have in Malaysia. I did make an exploratory journey to Port Klang, taking an extremely slow commuter train from KL Sentral which was so like being on my home away from home, the Ipswich train, that I even amused myself by identifying bogans. One particularly good 'toddler mullet' caught my eye. The urge to take a picture overcame any thwarting hesitation that I might be channeling Bill Henson.

KL has a distinctly 50s Queensland look about it when viewed as the panorama of backyards you get from gazing out of a grimy train window. Buildings are often mouldy and decrepit, and banana bushes practically thrust between the train tracks. There's that general air of heat exhaustion that stifles everything except the foliage. But I like all of that given my North Queensland childhood, even being caught in a tropical downpour and stepping into a not so shallow puddle in the middle of the footpath.

(this wasn't it – but nonetheless a surprisingly large space where one might expect a footpath to be)

Port Klang itself, with its 'International' water-front terminal filled with smoking poker-players and men offering to help me do whatever I was there to do, was straight out of Surabaya Johnny. There were no chickens in coops but plenty of guarded strangers. I was told that as a foreigner I could not go on the Indonesia ferry. The heart of darkness was rejecting my call.

So I did the next best thing and went to Malacca for the day. Malacca is one of those interesting pockets of the planet that almost every major colonial power has at one time wrestled from another, sometimes with guns and cannon, sometimes by poison. Only the French seemed to be missing from the brew. The Portuguese have left a Canton, and a fabulous moorish looking Church; Dutch traders brought protestantism and intolerance; the Indians and Chinese went right on worshipping in their splendid temples, standing side by side in Harmony Street. And very close by there's a mosque which has such varied influences in its construction that I photographed its history. This picture is bigger than the others for anyone wanting to click on it and read the text.

The British in the form of Sir Stamford Raffles managed to prevent one or two major buildings being blown up and the Arabs left what is now the official Malay religion. Frankly I became utterly confused by all this historical sediment, especially after our guide changed it between one recounting and the next, re-assigning 1641 to such a variety of important occurrences that it's now the only date which has stuck in my head, although cut adrift from any fact. But the real reason to go to the Malacca Straits is its 'other' history which continues to this day. I took some hopeful photographs but whether there are pirates in them I'm unable to say .

Today I'm meeting up with a Tour Chum from yesterday and going to the Islamic Museum. Last night we were forced by the hideous traffic to get back to our respective hotels on the monorail, the tiny driver-less carriages so dense with people it was impossible not to think of all those capsizing Philippines ferries as we lurched gaily above the trees and bus tops. So I didn't make it onto any of the Straits, and given my history on both the low and high seas that might have been a good thing. Neither did I find where the Jungle Railway began or I might still be on it, stuck indefinitely in a siding as the Bangkok trains go by. I did observe a few Australian medical tourists, heroically getting about in their bandages like the dance partners in Peter Weir's fabulous film The cars that ate Paris. And I fled the bedraggled monks who surrounded me like seagull the minute I gave a few ringgit to one of them. One of them forced this unnerving 'document' into my hand:

I don't want it but I'm too superstitious to throw it away. Help Janice what does it mean?