Take metro line A from Rome Termini. Exit to the right at Ottaviano. Check that your Piccadilly journal hasn't been pick pocketed then check your day bag for holes. Up the stairs and left down Via Ottaviano. Pass seventeen tour guides who speak English and Italian. One will seem nice and give you a deal for being students. Her name is Sarah but don't trust her. The tickets cost eight Euro and the other twenty seven go in her pocket. Plus if you skip the line you won't meet the four Germans, two couples, who will worry about the wait with you. Next pass the many crippled, the one sitting on the skateboard with both feet clubbed, the one with no hands who sits on rug like he is performing the Salah and waves his stubs at you, the one who can barely lift his boiled face to you but taps his cane in patterns of four at the tourists, the many you can't count. Give seventy cents to one, a Euro to another and feel sorry for the rest. Pass through TSA grade security, your bag on the conveyor belt, and cover your shoulders. See The School of Athens, The Sistine Chapel, and enough rooms of art and antiques to feed the worlds hungry by selling a fifth.
Very cool, Josh. I think that, after this generative exercise, you can probably lose the second person. Though it functions well in this short reportage, it would likely become exhausting in a longer piece. I’m less interested in the way you wrote it and more interested in this theme of numbers/money that unfolds the further into the post. The obvious interpretation of this would be "traveling to/around Europe is very expensive but it gives money to countries that need it." Clearly, you can go deeper than that--what type of expensive is it, and what is the exchange that occurs? Not just money for product, but what else? What is the price of tourism, of being a tourist? Who does it tax more--the country or the person doing the touring? What is the difference in "price" (metaphorically) for a tourist vs a traveler vs a citizen of the toured country? What, exactly, is the exchange that is occurring, and where does it manifest? Is it beneficial or detrimental—to whom? You already have interesting moments, with the beggars and with the tour guide. Keep going.
ReplyDelete