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Laughing out loud

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Recently, I heard about a psychology study that counted how often children laugh in a typical day (by the way, the study of laughter is called gelotology, apparently). The number is something around 300 times a day for a typical four-year-old. The striking thing is that the researchers found that an average forty-years-old adult laughs only about 4 times a day.

The hypothesis for explaining such a huge difference is that children acquire language skills at that age, and the English language (similar to most other languages, I suppose) has many expressions that are funny or absurd when taken literally (e.g. “to pick one’s brain”). The adults have heard these expressions so many times that they immediately perceive their implied meaning, without stopping to think, and to laugh at, the actual words.

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Here is an example supporting this theory. After leaving in Milan for a few months, we are starting to pick up a few Italian words, and I find myself if not laughing out loud then at least chuckling when my daughter cries “Mamma mia!” when I drop a piece of pizza on my lap.

So my personal extension of the theory is that going on sabbatical makes us younger by forcing us to be child-like when faced with new languages, custom and everyday situations. We just need to come back home when things stop being funny.

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Swords and pencils

“It is said the warrior’s is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways.”
— Miyamoto Musashi

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A katana, or any Japanese-style blade for that matter (as well as some Middle-eastern blades like in the image above), is similar to a pencil in terms of the principle of its physical construction.

Both a blade and a pencil have hard materials at their core (a katana can have many layers of different hardness, but the general principle is to have a hard metal surrounded by a softer one). For the pencil, it’s the graphite, and for the katana, it’s the steel with high carbon content. For both instruments, the hard core forms the working part, which can be sharpened to a fine point/edge.

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The hard core is enclosed in a relatively soft material – wood in the case of the pencil and low-carbon steel in the case of the sword. Without the outer set shell, neither instrument would be practical to use, because the core it too brittle to withstand the pressure of the artist’s hand or a strike of an enemy’s sword. Likewise, a soft, mono-layered instrument without a core would be a compromise at best in terms of cutting/drawing quality. Think about a bronze sword or a crayon – neither is particularly strong, and neither can be sharpened to a fine point or edge.

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A pencil that we use today is a European invention. Hand-carved wooden holders with graphite core were first made in England in 1564, and a Czech company Kohinoor patented and mass-produced pencils that were very similar to modern ones in the 19th century.

Europeans also made multi-layered blades, but the technique was refined and taken to the level of an art in Japan in middle ages.

I find it curios how these tools from two unrelated fields of application (cutting and writing) evolved along similar design paths, because in both fields similar qualities are valued – sturdiness and ability to be sharpened.

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Physical fitness

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Before spending three weeks traveling around Italy with my parents, I read somewhere online that the key aspect of sightseeing with seniors is adjusting the itinerary so that they are not exceedingly stressed physically. I can now confidently say that this goes beyond taking an elevator instead of stairs or a taxi instead of public transport whenever there is a choice. Accommodating the entire family, from five- to seventy-years old meant taking things much slower and doing fewer activities in any given day than I could imagine, even though I thought I was making adjustments for age in my mind.

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Fitness is a huge part of it, and here our daughter had a clear edge in terms of physical toughness and mental resilience. Every day, I am amazed by her cheerful attitude at whatever the traveling lifestyle throws at her – different weather, food, entertainment, etc. Sadly, my parents can no longer keep up with our and their own image of themselves and what they can physically accomplish in any given day.

Throughout the trip, I saw images of divinity represented by human body by the Renessanse masters. They were definitely onto an important message – our body, this machine, as Dorian Yates puts it, is the only vehicle we have to go through life. If it doesn’t function properly, the best intentions and aspirations don’t mean much.

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Thankfully, my parents are doing alright for they age in terms of health. But when the world is so big, and there is so much do and see alongside one’s children and grandchildren, ‘alright’ seems not to be enough. So I will remember this next time a need a bit of motivation to exercise, the all-important ‘Why?’ question – I hope to be able to do more with my daughter as I get older. I also hope that I will be content with what my abilities will be in reality. In this, both my daughter and my parents are great examples.

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Janus, Carmenta, past and future

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In the gift shop of the Coloseo, we bought a children’s book called “Roman Myths”, which I started reading to my daughter on our way back to Milan. It is difficult to say how much of what we are reading sinks in for a five-years-old, but I am enjoying the stories and the references to the ancient Roman civilization that we still encounter in modern life.

The story starts with Janus, who transformed Chaos into order and created the world. I find it insightful that even at the time when these stories were created, people were greatly concerned with the past and the future (Janus had two faces – one looking forward, to the future, and one looking back, to the past), while not really dwelling the present. In the book, there is even a reference to Carmenta, a far-sighted goddess, who protected childbirth and had the power to look forward and backward in time. According to the myth, her special ability was writing, and it was her, who gave people the Latin alphabet. “Yes, this alphabet, the one I’m using, the one we use even now.”

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It is curious and somewhat discouraging that we, humans, still largely fail to comfortably live in the present moment, even now, thousands of years after the myths of Janus and Carmenta were created. When our daughter became upset that her grandparents were leaving home after travelling with us for three weeks, we consoled her by recalling the nice moments that we had together with them and planning how we would get together again soon. For our daughter, as the world that she became used to over the fast three weeks started to crumble, the emerging chaos transformed back to order when she connected the past and the future.

Even at my age, the sadness of saying ‘goodbye’ to parents, even for a few months, is still very real. My remedy is this writing. It makes me think about the past and hope that someone, perhaps myself, would find it somehow insightful in the future. Quite fitting the context of Roman mythology.

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Florence second time around

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Rick Steves says that visiting a foreign city is like reading a novel – it is more enjoyable the second time. This time, we are travelling with my parents, for whom it is the first visit to Italy. For my wife and me, this is a second visit to Florence, but the first time we were here, we didn’t have our daughter. For her, it is the first time, naturally.

Traveling with two seniors and a child has its specifics. They physically cannot absorb the sights at the rate that I am used to, even considering that I stop at every corner to take pictures (because I never really turn off the “photographer mode.”) I remind myself to adjust my expectations regarding the sightseeing and focus on the interactions with the family, particularly how they unfold in the context of travelling.

In terms of Rick Steves’ analogy, I feel like I am not quite reading a novel for the second time, but flipping it to the pages I liked the best earlier and hope that the others would like them as much as I did.

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Leaving Venice

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When I travel to a new place, on the back of my mind, I always have a question whether I would prefer living there permanently. I am not sure why I do this, because I do like living in Victoria very much. Still, I have this ongoing process of weighing pros and cons of different towns, and the outcome is rarely clear-cut. Every city has something particular that would make it an attractive home base.

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Venice is an exception. It is a fantastic place to visit as a tourist, but living there permanently would be so impractical that it is not even worth considering seriously. So as we are leaving Venice after a short stay there, there is no aftertaste of regret. Perhaps, this is a part of the Venetian charm – almost everyone there is a visitor, so nobody associates strongly with the environment, and the permanent state of decay of the buildings only adds to the atmosphere without creating any stress.

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Rainbow over Venice

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Venice greeted us with rain and cool (compared to Milan) weather. Taking advantage of the short line for the campanile at San Marco, we decided to wait over the rain at the observation deck.

Last time we were in Venice with my wife, we also went up the campanile on the first day of our trip, which, in fact, was our first-ever day in Italy. It was the middle of a summer, the air was brutally hot and humid, and there was not a cloud in the sky. That is how I remember it now – I should revisit my pictures, because they tend to help me keep, if not form, better memories of past events.

Today, my expectations of the photo opportunities were low. In fact, a sign at the entrance to the campanile warned, in several languages, that the conditions were foggy, rainy, windy, and the visibility was poor. So, we basically went up there to wait over the rain.

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But it tuned out that the weather and the lighting conditions were changing every minutes. The wind scattered the clouds, the rain stopped, and we even saw a beautiful rainbow on the background of the lively sky with tremendous clouds. I couldn’t wish for a better lighting and scenery. Unexpectedly, it turned out that the timing of our visit to the campanile was perfect.

And of course this time I had a much more capable camera – a Sony a7RII, which has a sensor that blows my old Canon 5D Mark II out of the water both in terms of resolution and dynamic range – perfect for the contrasty cityscape. I still carry the very same two lenses that I brought to the campanile nearly eight years ago – Canon’s 70-200 f/2.8L IS and 16-35 f/2.8L. They are still doing a good job, although the wide lens is showing its limitations in terms of sharpness on the Sony’s high-resolution sensor. This shows that optics doesn’t age nearly fast as electronics. Sadly, this also shows that we age pretty fast – just to think of it: eight years have past since I was shooting the very same scenery, and it seems just like yesterday!

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A day at Lago Maggiore

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With my parents, who are visiting us for a few weeks during our sabbatical stay, we are taking every opportunity to spend time with them. Our daughter’s school holiday starts tomorrow, but we decided to go into the sightseeing mode early and took advantage of a beautiful Spring day.

My wife, daughter and I already visited Lago di Garda a month or so earlier, so we wanted to explore another lake. Last night, we were deciding between lakes Como and Maggiore. We didn’t want to rent a car, and the five of us do not move very fast on foot, so island hopping at Lago Maggiore was a perfect agenda – maximum of sightseeing with minimum of exercise. Still, it turned out to be a long day.

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After wondering through the palaces and the gardens at the islands of Madre and Bella and having lunch at Pescatore in between, we were just in time to catch the second-to-last boat to the mainland. If this sounds like a rushed day, though, this was not the case. Full of impression – yes, but not rushed. I even had a chance to sketch the terraces at Isola Bella sitting on a bench next to my daughter, who was drawing a mermaid (she was inspired by one of the statues).

Perhaps, we were able to go through the entire three-island route because it was a workday. There were no crowds or lines, even though Spring is the prime time for visiting the gardens.

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Duomo terraces by elevator

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Yesterday, I went up the roof of the Milano’s Duomo for the third time in my life, and this time, I did it by the elevator. The first time, I was travelling alone, so I took the stair’s option. The second time, it was myself, my wife, and our five-year-old daughter. They are both seasoned travellers, so again, we took the stairs. This time, we went together with my parents, and although I think that they are still young, we decided to take the elevator (or the lift, as we say in Europe).

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First of all, the visit to the Duomo’s terraces is the most spectacular part of the cathedral tour in my opinion. Going up there three times is certainly not too many. The atmosphere at the top, the city views are just magical, especially if you catch a sunset on a warm Spring evening.

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Another note is that ascending by lift is a very nice option, even if you are reasonably fit and do not mind climbing some stairs. The lift option offer some unique views from the top, in addition to the ones you would see if you climb on foot. The reason is that the lift is located at the back of the cathedral, and after you take it to the lowest terrace level, you walk along the roof to the place where you climb to the very top together with those people, who climbed the stairs. You get more views of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle II and Eastward city views (which are in good light during evening hours).

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Working from home (or not)

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Sabbatical travel gives a unique freedom of choosing how I work every day. Since I have no teaching and administrative obligations, technically, I don’t have to come to the office. I could do nearly all my work, which mostly involves academic writing, from our apartment here in Milan.

However, there is a unique challenge in staying focussed on work, which comes with working from home, even a temporary one. I think there are just too many distractions at home, because I associate too closely with the environment and therefore feel more responsibility for it than, say, an office or a cafe. Hence, the impulse to do “home things” like tidying up, for example, instead of working. Basically, it is easier to procrastinate if I am surrounded by potential tasks that I can rationalize as having a high priority at the moment.

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Regarding the cafes, before coming to Milan, I imagined myself sometimes working at a cafe, in the spirit of varying the working environment. Visualizing this scenario back in Victoria, I thought that it would be very extremely easy to find a cafe do work at in Milan. After all, wouldn’t it be a genuine European experience? As it turns out, this is not such a popular way to work here. At least, it is not as popular as it is in North America, where the image of a writer working away in a corner of a crowded cafe it is a bit over-romanticized.

Indeed, there are cafes here on every corner, but the locals mostly come in to quickly chug a tiny cup of espresso, sometimes without even sitting down. This custom reminds me of Japan, where in front of major train stations, I often saw salarymen devouring ramen while standing around a food stand, sticking their heads through the curtains that separate its interior from the busy street. They quickly empty their bowls, thank the cook, extract their heads from behind the curtain back into the world and go off on their way. It’s efficiency of delivering food to the body taken to a very high level.

Having said this, there are excellent places to sit, eat and relax here in Milan and, of course, in Japan. In fact, I am already looking forward going to Tokyo later this year. And by the way, the ramen that is served in those food stands is excellent!

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