Up, Down and Around on a Motorbike with Ewan and Charley

Ever since Ted Lasso ended, I've held onto my Apple TV Plus subscription, because I decided I wanted to finally knock out some of the shows I've had my eye on for a while. These shows include season 2 of Little America, Slow Horses, For All Mankind and Foundation. But first, I wanted to watch all three of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's travel shows, Long Way Round, Long Way Down and Long Way Up.

I actually got the idea at the beginning of 2022. My sister and her fiancé were visiting, and while I was working they'd be watching episodes of the newest one, Long Way Up, which is an Apple exclusive. It looked interesting, particularly since they were riding electric motorcycles up through Latin America to Los Angeles, but I wanted to start with the first show.

Reader, I didn't get to it then. I finished off season 2 of Ted Lasso, which had lain fallow for a few months, and cancelled my subscription, in order to save the princely sum of $7 or so per month. My one concession toward this quest was reading the book version of Long Way Round, which I serendipitously had nabbed from my stepdad sometime in 2016. I happened to finish it when I was visiting him in April of last year, and he was happy to receive it back, so at least I closed that loop.

Then this year's season of Ted Lasso came out, and as I said, I decided to hold onto the streamer to finish up some of the shows I've been meaning to catch up on. First up was Long Way Round, which I'd actually seen before, back when I lived in London. Shot in 2004, it had them riding from London to New York via Russia, Ukraine and Canada. It was in heavy rotation on Freeview channels like Dave, so I got to see pretty much all of it back then, also because my flatmate at the time was a big motorbike fan.

Long Way Down, from 2007, passed me by, and I didn't even know about Long Way Up, which came out in 2020, until my sister told me about it. Long Way Down reunites Ewan and Charley with their producers, Russ Malkin and Dave Alexanian, as well as cameramen Claudio von Planta and Jimmy Simak, for a ride from London to Cape Town via Italy and most of Eastern Africa. Long Way Up, on the other hand, starts at the very southern tip of Argentina and goes up to LA, where Ewan had moved to between shows.

Overall Ewan and Charley make good traveling companions. They look like they're having a great time, apart from the bits where they're fighting with one another or one of the producers - there's a bit of a blowup in Eastern Europe, and another in Southern Africa, but one assumes that kind of thing is par for the course when you're spending months at a time with the same couple of people, day in and day out, including camping and eating together constantly. The book version of Long Way Round, which is essentially a diary written by the two leads, has a little more conflict than is seen in the show, so I assume there was some friction on Down and Up as well.

It's also kind of fascinating to see the amount of planning that went into each expedition. I say kind of, because the first episode of each series consists entirely of that planning, so you're left feeling a little anxious to get started by the time they actually set off at the end of that episode. But they show the difficulties in getting visas, getting their bikes set up, learning the local languages and even the security training required, since they'd be riding through a few rather hairy neighborhoods.

When they're riding through they take the time to see some sights, frequently motorcycle-related. Long Way Up is where the sightseeing really comes into its own because it's shot in HD and so it looks loads better than the previous shows. They also have a drone, so they can get some amazing shots of Patagonia, Bolivia and Colombia, in particular.

They also stop off for some Unicef-related meet-and-greets, learning about the street kids of Mongolia (one of whom got adopted by Ewan and appears in the Central America portion of Long Way Up), about the former child soldiers of East Africa, and the Venezuelan refugees transiting through Ecuador, among many others. You can see how much these stops affect Ewan and Charley, who each have a couple of kids at the start of the first show, and it's good for me as a viewer to see the work these groups are doing for these children.

The third show, taking place so many years after the previous two, has a certain sense of melancholy about it. They're both visibly older, and Charley in particular looks a little fragile, given that the start of Long Way Up refers to a pretty serious crash he was involved in that put him in hospital for a while and put the whole venture at risk. But also the years seem to have mellowed him - whereas in the previous shows he was always a bit more impulsive and quick to anger, he seems a lot calmer in this latest one. 

In the section in Panama, which he has to do on his own because Ewan's bike needs repairs, he also does a nice job of presenting, showing the functioning of the Panama Canal, among other things. Watching the three shows, and the way fans mob Ewan when they recognize him, you get the feeling Charlie feels a little overshadowed, so it was nice to see a couple of segments where he was the main guy.

I also liked the electric bikes part of Long Way Up. They decided on them because they were interested in the technology, and had some custom bikes built for them by Harley Davidson. Meanwhile, Rivian provided their crew with support vehicles that were prototype R1Ts, so it was interesting to see how they managed to get charged every night where the grids weren't always so reliable and where the infrastructure for EVs wasn't always present.

There's a bit of Boy's Own Adventure to these, given that it consists of two guys leaving their families for months at a time to ride motorcycles in exotic places. Yet it's also a little moving when they ride into their final destination flanked by friends and relatives on a convoy of motorcycles, and they look so happy to be home. There are a couple of lovely moments in the first two shows where they fly one of Ewan's parents in secretly, and surprise him. Also, the moment where they get reunited with their families, just before the final ride into Cape Town or New York or LA, is always heartwarming to see.

In any case, the shows are fun to watch and are good views of these remote parts of the world. I hope they'll be on Apple TV Plus for a long time to come, but either way, I recommend them highly.

I'm a Guy Who Thinks About Ancient Rome. Here's Why You Should Too

There's always some controversy happening on social media. Sometimes it's an ambiguously colored dress, or a YouTuber turns out to have a more exciting personal life than they've let on. In September 2023, it was the revelation that "most" men think regularly about Ancient Rome, to the bemusement of their partners.

I put "most" in quotes because presumably some men are denying that they think about Rome, and therefore not being recorded on TikTok. But as is the way with such things, the ones who do are taken as evidence that all of us do.

Regardless of how prevalent it actually is, the tone in the thinkpieces discussing the meme is of affectionate bemusement at the idea of thinking about Ancient Rome at all. Sometimes it's attributed to toxic masculinity, but overall it seems to be treated as this funny thing that guys do.

Well, I can confirm that I'm also a guy who thinks about Ancient Rome quite a lot. Part of it is patriotic pride: as an Italian, the Roman Empire sometimes feels like the only time we aren't seen as corrupt buffoons or louche aesthetes. In contrast to how Italians are seen now, people think it was full of manly men doing manly things like conquering Britain and, er, slaughtering Germanic tribes (sorry about that, Northern Europeans).

There's an age component to this too. I suspect that popular historians like Antony Beevor owe their entire careers to men like me who've reached the age where it suddenly seems important to know what happened at Stalingrad or during the Punic Wars, and have the financial wherewithal to shell out for five hundred-page tomes that describe them in excruciating detail.

I also like thinking about the parallels between the Late Roman Republic and our own current moment. Rome's transition from a republic, however limited the franchise, to a corrupt and violent despotism wracked by centuries of civil war, is instructive for those of us who don't want to see the US go the same way. Unfortunately, too many other people who think about the Roman Empire a lot actually would like to see the US go down that path. 

I should note right here that I'm not any kind of expert on Ancient Rome. My knowledge of that subject comes, in descending order of how much I've retained, from Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, Asterix comics, family trips to Rome in the 1980s and 90s, Ridley Scott's Gladiator and Mary Beard's SPQR. I haven't read any primary sources, like Tacitus, Cassius Dio or Suetonius, nor have I made much headway with Stoic philosophy, despite it having had a bit of a moment here in the Silicon Valley in the last decade.

But not being an expert is, to my mind, precisely why it's worthwhile to consider the similarities of Rome's slide into authoritarianism with our own. All you have to do is describe an unequal society, with elites that grew more interested in consolidating their own power than in civic engagement, and you already see the parallels between late-republican Rome and the contemporary US.

It's also not much of a stretch to imagine parallels between certain people in our own era and in theirs. For example, if Donald Trump or Elon Musk had been alive then, it's easy to imagine them earning their riches in much the same way Marcus Crassus did. A member of the First Triumvirate alongside Julius Caesar and Pompey, and the richest man in Rome, Crassus made most of his money through speculative real estate purchases, stakes in silver mines and slave trafficking, but his side hustle really takes the cake. He apparently set up Rome's first fire brigade, but he only put out fires if the owner sold the property to him at a discount. He'd then rent the rebuilt properties back to their original owners.

Leaving aside comparisons to contemporary troublemakers, the story of Crassus, and the ongoing fascination with the Emperors of Rome, comes down to the fact that there are just so many colorful characters. Caligula made his horse a senator; three centuries later Valentinian died of apoplexy after furiously haranguing a diplomatic delegation; in between them Vespasian made light of the tradition of deifying emperors after death, with his last words, "Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god." He died of dysentery.

That said, these characters were able to be colorful because, as emperors, they had unlimited power. They only had unlimited power because Julius Caesar and a number of other generals put their ambition ahead of respecting Rome's rules. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, bringing his armies into Italy, he was doing something that centuries of precedent in Roman law hadn't considered a loyal general might do. When Donald Trump claims, against all evidence, that he's the rightful winner of the 2020 election, he's following a long tradition.

Speaking of Trump, do you know who else is thinking about Ancient Rome? The extreme right. Though they aren't just thinking about Ancient Rome. They also like the Spartans, thanks in part to Zack Snyder's 2007 film 300 and the 1998 comic by Frank Miller from which it is adapted. Comments by both Snyder and Miller seem to refute links to the "clash of civilizations" that was in vogue during those years after 9/11, but many critics have drawn the parallel between the white Spartans and the non-white (and monstrous) Persian army. 

Snyder and Miller aren't the first to portray the Spartans as the Classical equivalent of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. That myth goes back to Roman times – which I suppose means that what Roman men thought about several times a day was the Spartans. Historian and fantasy author Myke Cole devoted an entire book, The Bronze Lie, to dismantling this myth of Spartan martial prowess. From what he could tell, the myth seems to come from the fact that Sparta was the only Greek city-state that actually trained for war from time to time.

You sometimes get the sense Cole is tilting at windmills, including when he criticizes the overabundance of the "moron label", as he calls the Molon Labe tattoo that shows up on a lot of Second Amendment activists' arms. Molon Labe being Ancient Greek for "Come and take them", which is what the Spartans apparently said in response to a Persian demand to lay down their arms.

Cole isn't the only writer combating some of the myths that we have about the ancient world. Many scholars push back on the idea that Ancient Greece and Rome were "white", an idea that comes from the Enlightenment. They argue that our conceptions of race wouldn't have made sense to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, whose populations drew from ethnic and cultural groups from all over the Mediterranean. Still, this hasn't deterred White Nationalists, Nazis and other accelerationists from linking the supposed whiteness of the Classical world to Victorian conceptions of Whiteness, which get sanitized into the concept of "Western civilization".

According to Donna Zuckerberg, author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (and the sister of one Mark Zuckerberg), the far-right sees Ancient Greece and Rome as racially pure, patriarchal societies that were superior to our own supposedly decadent multiculturalism. The irony is that Rome became even more unstable after it transitioned from a republic to an empire.

The period in which Augustus ruled is held up as one of the golden ages of Rome, and the Empire hit its peak more than a century later under the so-called Five Good Emperors (not all of whom were good, and there weren't five of them). There were several violent transitions in that period, notably 69 AD, the Year of Four Emperors, but Nerva, the first "Good Emperor" was also installed thanks to a coup.

That point gets glossed over because of worse times later: there would be a Year of Five Emperors and a Year of Six Emperors, with pretenders to the throne popping up all over the Empire for the next few centuries. One emperor got the post because the Praetorian Guard murdered his predecessor and then auctioned the throne off to the highest bidder. The reign of Augustus may have ended the chaos of the Late Republic, but its genesis as a murderous power struggle meant that the Empire would always be vulnerable to whichever general or governor could get enough legions to support him.

Despite that, there are still many who fetishize Augustus. A number of personalities at the Claremont Institute, like Donald Trump's former advisor Michael Anton, have floated the idea of a Caesar-like figure, "halfway between monarchy and tyranny", who would be able to pull the US away from what they perceive as everything wrong with the country: wokeness, transgenderism, censorship, etc. The concept is called Caesarism or Red Caesarism.

Augustus has fans beyond extreme rightwing White House advisors. None other than Mark Zuckerberg is said to be a huge fan of the first Emperor, even apparently modeling his haircut on the Roman style sported by Julius Caesar, Augustus, and any number of dapper early Empire gentlemen. In a 2018 interview Zuckerberg mused to the New Yorker that Augustus established world peace "through a really harsh approach". This isn't to imply that Zuckerberg wants to make that tradeoff, but it's a little worrying that the man who gave us the Cambridge Analytica scandal is weighing the pros and cons. Mike Duncan's response to this, when interviewed by Rolling Stone, was to note that this "isn't great. Because just for the record, Augustus was kind of a sociopathic murderer."

The thing that jumps out to me about the whole "thinking about Rome" bit is that, if we're talking analogies, we're probably just at the first stage of the collapse of the Republic, when some of those great generals were finding they enjoyed being dictators. Julius Caesar is famous because of Shakespeare's play, and his ties to Augustus, and the fact that his assassination, instead of ending the crisis, brought it to the point of civil war.

Augustus took advantage of the Roman fear of kings – very much like ours – to call himself "princeps" or first citizen. He wrapped himself up in familiar iconography to assure the Romans that he wasn't doing what he was clearly doing. Crucially, he also managed to stop the wars tearing Rome apart.

However, his taking power ultimately was the start of Rome's chaos, not the end, and it'll be the same if the US falls into Caesarism. That's something worth thinking about three times a day, and not just for men.

RIP Keith Giffen

For the moment I'm still able to find things out on Twitter (yes, I'm still calling it that), and unfortunately, what I found today was an article in the Guardian saying that Keith Giffen, one of my favorite comics creators, had died. He was 70, and had recently suffered a stroke, which I hadn't heard about.

It's hard to overstate the influence Giffen had on me at a formative age. My first encounter with his work was on an issue of Justice League America, which he plotted and co-wrote with JM DeMatteis (who eulogizes him nicely at his own blog). It came as part of a random grab bag of 50 comics that I ordered from one of those ads you used to find in comics back in the 1990s, and featured Guy Gardner arm-wrestling with Kilowog on the cover, while Kilowog used his power ring to tickle Guy's nose.

Not that I knew any of that at the time. All I knew was, this was A Green Lantern, but not THE Green Lantern I knew about (Hal Jordan), and it was funny. When I looked inside, it was even funnier. I was hooked. I'd previously been an X-Men and Marvel acolyte, but I think it's fair to say that's the moment that turned me into a DC fan.

From there I gathered all the back issues of Justice League America, from its start as Justice League to its renaming as Justice League International. That also led me to the Justice League Europe spinoff, and somehow to Volume 4 of Legion of Superheroes, the dystopian Five Years Later era that also served as a foundational document. I also got the Legion of Substitute Heroes Special that he drew and wrote, as well as his Ambush Bug miniseries and the Heckler.

His most immediate influence on me was in my drawing style. I went from trying to emulate Jim Lee's work on X-Men to the Giffen's chins, profiles and squinty eyes. I doubt my copies were any good, but I don't think I've ever been able to shake it. My love for Giffen's style (at that time, because it changed numerous times) also influenced how much I like other artists' work. For example, one reason I like Charlie Adlard, who drew the Walking Dead, is his style's similarity to Giffen's.

The JLA/JLE/JLI run is probably my favorite sustained run in comics ever. Over 60 issues of JLA, the tone changed several times, from a seriousness grounded in 80s comics realism, to the silly comedy that everybody associates with that book, and even to horror in several storylines. It also took a bunch of characters that were, quite frankly, C-listers at best, and turned them into an ensemble with different personalities and tones. I don't know what Guy Gardner was like before JLA, but turning him into a know-nothing fan of Reagan and Stallone was beautifully apt for the time.

Legion of Superheroes is my second-favorite comics run. Like JLA, Giffen didn't script it, but he did draw it for most of the first couple of years, imbuing it with a used-future aesthetic that made the 30th Century feel like a real, lived-in place. While the tone was generally bleak - when it started the Legion was disbanded and Earth was secretly under the control of the Dominators - there was time for some humor, usually whenever Matter-Eater Lad showed up. It was also notably adult: there was violence, drug use, and same-sex relationships, though it never quite tipped over into "Mature Readers" territory.

I was struck by all these things when I reread those books a few years ago (the Justice League being my first port-of-call in the big comics reread). I was also struck, reading the ads for other books DC was publishing, just how many books Giffen was working on. With the exception of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, he seems to have been plotting just about every other DC Universe title between about 1987 and 1991, which is amazing considering that he's not better known outside of comics. Judging by all the off-the-wall references in Ambush Bug, he must have had as good a knowledge of the DCU as Mark Waid, who's famously the most knowledgeable man in comics.

Now, I call myself a Giffen fan, but I didn't keep up with his work much after his JLA and Legion runs ended. I'd kind of moved away from comics by then, and it's been hard to get back into the continuity after so long away. On the other hand, it was fun to see his creation Lobo show up on DCAU shows like Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited.

I do have one final story. Back when the internet was new, and America Online was the way most people accessed it, I was at a friend's house exploring the DC Comics hub on AOL. I found myself in one of the message boards, and who was there but none other than GIFFEN-1. He was very gracious about my requests for him to return to both JLA and Legion, pointing out that Dan Jurgens and Mark Waid were doing a good job (this is true of the latter). I never got to meet him in person at any of the conventions I attended during high school, but this was one of my "I'm not worthy!" moments.

Reading DeMatteis's tribute to Giffen, I need to go check out their JLA followup, Formerly Known as the Justice League, and especially their creator-owned book Hero Squared.

Goodbye, Keith - thanks for the laughs and the tears and the thrills. Luckily I have all the books and can revisit them anytime.

Munich 2023

The final part of my trip was Munich, which I visited on my own. That makes it my first trip abroad without family (either accompanying me or that I was visiting) since before the pandemic. It was also my first time back in Germany since 2012, when I went to a conference for work, and my first time visiting Munich since early 2001, when I went with my friends during my year abroad in Göttingen.

In a lot of ways Munich was the perfect place to go after Rome. It was a little quieter and more orderly after the chaos of Central Rome, and apart from the Marienplatz on my last day it wasn't overrun with tourists. That said, I lucked out in my choice of hotel because it was very centrally located, with most attractions and the main train station easily accessible by U-bahn. Some sights were even reachable on foot, which I also appreciated.

Hohenschwangau, with its eponymously named castle in the background

My first day was taken up by a trip to "Mad" King Ludwig II's castles, just outside Füssen and two hours away from Munich by train. I hadn't gotten to see Neuschwanstein or Hohenschwangau on my previous trip, so I made my plans meticulously, even booking a tour of Hohenschwangau in advance. Neuschwanstein was already booked up, so all I saw of that were a few views from the village below or from the windows of Hohenschwangau castle.

This was also a good counterweight to Rome, since Füssen is pretty small and rural, and the village of Hohenschwangau even more so. It's also right at the foothills of the Alps, so it was inspiring to see the mountains right there, at the other end of the valley. As it turned out, they were actually in Austria, which somehow impressed me even more.

The castle was pretty nice: it's well-maintained since the Wittelsbach family's days in charge, and features frescoes of courtly romances painted on the walls of most of the rooms. You can see a few signs of Ludwig's obsession with the Wagner cycle, but mostly it seems clear that those surroundings are what drove him to that obsession. Overall it's a trip worth taking, but I think I didn't appreciate how much planning would be required for it, since the trains from Munich to there and back are only about one per hour (and the direct ones are every two hours); I ended up walking back down to Füssen from Hohenschwangau after the end of my tour, and catching a train that I needed to change halfway through, and even so I didn't get back to Munich until almost 7pm.

The second day's main attraction was Oktoberfest. I hadn't done it on purpose, but I managed to schedule myself in Munich right in the middle of the festival. I'd always been leery about it, because I'd assumed there'd be enormous crowds all over the city, but as it turned out I needn't have worried. I booked my hotel well in advance (I think even as early as July, soon after I'd bought my flights), and during the days I was there I saw a lot of people, locals and tourists, wearing the traditional lederhosen for men or dirndls for women, but they were mostly gathered at the Wies'n, as the festival is known.

It helped that I arrived in town on a Wednesday and went to Oktoberfest early on Friday afternoon - who knows what the crowds would have been like on Saturday? Entry is free but if you're carrying a large backpack, like mine, you have to pay 5 euros to check it. When I got in, I wandered around the funfair for a bit, but then made my way to the Paulaner tent. I found an empty table at the back and observed for a bit, while also figuring out how to order a beer (which came in a liter glass, of course) and some food. I went for some Weisswurst to start, and then a sort of roast pig with caramelized skin, which was pretty good. But a liter of beer is no joke, and to be honest, I was a bit ruined for the rest of the day, even though that's all I drank.

This is, I think, a good point to mention that drinking liters of beer in Munich is associated with one of my most disgraceful episodes in my year abroad. When my friends and I came over, we weren't around for Oktoberfest (it was January or February), but three of us did go visit the Hofbräuhaus, which is basically the same experience. I'd say one of my friends in particular came to grief, because that night none of us stopped at one liter, but I was just as hungover the next day, thanks to a night spent on the tiles figuratively (i.e. drinking) and literally (i.e. vomiting once we got back to our pension).

Luckily there was none of that this time, though the incident was very prominent in my thoughts when I was sitting on the bench and watching the Germans drink, eat and sing along to DJ Otzi's Hey Baby. I may or may not have sung along when the oompah band played the Wild Rover and John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads, but there are no witnesses to confirm or deny.

The Residenz at night

My final day was spent visiting the Residenz, where the Wittelsbachs lived in Munich, and then walking back to my hotel via the Englischer Garten. For the former, I hadn't really planned on seeing it but then decided to visit it when I wandered to there from Marienplatz the night before. It's probably a little smaller than Versailles but the older part is easily as glamorous as any royal palace, sumptuously decorated and just crawling with paintings and art. 

A lot of the written descriptions and audio descriptions highlight how much of the palace was destroyed during Allied bombing raids in WWII, which just makes the state of it now more impressive: apart from some conspicuously blank spots where a painting should be, you'd never guess that it had been pounded to rubble nearly 80 years ago.

Apart from the sights, it was quite an experience being back in Germany after so long, and my mind kept going back to my year abroad. I was quite near the university, which helped, because it made parts of that neighborhood look and feel similar to Göttingen back in the day.

It was also interesting seeing the people dressed up for the Wies'n, because it brought home how I was in a different part of Germany than I'd lived in back in 2000-2001. It's possible that Bavarians make a little too much of their dialect and "peculiar" customs - after all, crossing from Niedersachsen, where Göttingen is, to Bavaria isn't like finding yourself in a different country, like when I travelled to Edinburgh from London in 2012. But it's interesting how every official is expected to dress in traditional clothes when Oktoberfest is on, sort of like how American politicians have to wear the US flag lapel pin.

Those three days also brought home how much I love Germany, and continue to do so after that year I spent living there. I don't know that I'd want to live there now (although there are worse places), but it's true that Germany has a special place in my heart, so it was nice to get in touch with that again. In fact, I liked it so much that I'm sort of wondering how I can tack on more visits when I go back to Europe in coming years. After all, I feel like I need to properly see Berlin, and I've never been to Hamburg or Cologne.

Marienplatz from above

Which, of course, is the effect I was hoping for when I booked these days in Munich. After the pandemic and the shelter-in-place orders I needed a spur to get out into the world for some exploring again, and this trip, both the days in Rome and those in Munich have reawakened that in me. And while I'm looking at visiting or revisiting other spots for next year, I'd be happy to go back to both, since both cities feel so big that there were plenty of other sights I could have visited.

Rome 2023

Yesterday I wrote about my experience flying on United's business class, and today I'm going to write about my week in Rome. In a separate post I'll talk about my impressions of the three days I spent in Munich, so you can see I'll be milking this trip for as much content as I can.

The trip to Rome was long overdue, in many ways. I was originally supposed to spend a few days there with my mom last year, as part of my first international trip since the start of the pandemic, but at the last minute my mom caught conjunctivitis and I had to just go straight to Turin for the full three weeks. Also, the last time I'd been to Rome was in 2017, and the time before that was all the way back in 2002, so it was clearly time to spend some time there again.

We used to visit both Rome and Turin every year for our family holidays in the summer, so I have some memories of the place and the sights. I associate it with staying with my grandma at my great-aunt's place, enjoying the large terrace overlooking a quiet residential street just a few metro stops from the touristy center. But all the same, Rome's always felt a little less like my place, because my mom's family is smaller than my dad's and there were never any cousins close to my age. In the years when we were going there regularly, I was also generally too young to venture out on my own, so this was the first time I got to explore Rome on my own.

Piazza Venezia from the Vittoriano

I had a couple of ideas of things I wanted to see, mostly in the round of really touristy things: the Capitoline Museums, the Galleria Borghese, various Roman ruins, and St. Peter's Basilica. I also ruled out a couple of sights, specifically the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums, mainly because I didn't feel like dealing with either the lines or the process for booking them.

(As an aside, trying to book sights online in Rome is brutal: not only are there innumerable fake sites, which tripped us up in 2017 when trying to see the Galleria Borghese, but when you do finally manage to find the legitimate site from the Culture Ministry, it doesn't always work properly)

I was also open to other suggestions, so was happy to go to the Baths of Diocletian with my mom and stepdad on the first day, even though I hadn't been planning to see it (it gets only a short mention in my tiny guidebook), and to check out the Domus Romane at Palazzo Valentini. I'd also gotten myself ready by rewatching Rick Steves' and Stanley Tucci's shows about Rome, though in the end the Rick Steves programs were more of an inspiration.

Bernini's David

Of course the ancient Roman sights dominated my sightseeing, in part because the Forum is just a block or two from my mom's front door. It also helps that the city center is so compact, meaning that most sights are within walking distance of one another. Popping out into the Forum, I could turn one way and walk past the Colosseum, or turn the other way and end up at the Vittoriano, Piazza Venezia and from there make my way to the Pantheon. And just behind the Vittoriano were the Capitoline Museums, which overlook the Forum. The only times I used public transport were when we went to visit my mom's cousin at my great-aunt's old place, and when I took the bus to St. Peter's.

The other thing that made me gravitate toward the Roman sights is, of course, my newfound appreciation for Roman history, thanks to Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast. I've mentioned before that his approach let me put the history of the Roman Empire into its proper context, and that context allowed me to better appreciate the sights in front of me. For example, the Baths of Diocletian had a room featuring inscriptions and tablets from religious rituals taken from pretty much every emperor from Augustus to the start of the Crisis of the Third Century, and knowing the sequence of emperors made it easier to understand the shift from one dynasty to another.

Incidentally, it was around this time that the meme about men thinking about the Roman Empire showed up, so I had it in mind when I was scurrying from sight to sight. I question how accurate a talking point that originated on TikTok could be, but it's true that Ancient Rome has always held a particular fascination for me. As near as I could tell, beyond the usual reasons relating to toxic masculinity (but without minimizing that, basically everything some women say about men on social media boils down to toxic masculinity), Rome is important for Italians because it's the last time we were powerful, rather than characterized as the effete aesthetes of the Renaissance or the corrupt buffoons of the post-WWII period. I certainly don't wish I lived during the Roman Empire, though.

As far as non-Roman sights, the Galleria Borghese and St. Peter's Basilica stuck out for me the most. My mom and I got a tour for the Galleria Borghese, which ended up focusing mostly on the Bernini statues (David, the Rape of Persephone, Apollo chasing Daphne), at the expense of most of the paintings. I may have seen less that way, but I understood a lot more about the statues thanks to our tour guide; the danger of such a sumptuously equipped gallery as the Borghese is that the artwork blurs before your eyes after a while, but the tour made me better appreciate the works that we did focus on.

If I had to pick a standout, though, it'd be St. Peter's. This is one of those sights that you encounter a lot on TV or in photos, but those don't prepare you for the real thing. I made the clever decision to go on a Monday (rather than Sunday, when Mass would have been in session), so it didn't take long to get in. When I did, I could hardly believe my eyes: every square inch, it seemed, was covered in decoration, from the floor to the ceiling. It was so riotous that I missed the artworks that everyone comes to see, like Michelangelo's Pietà - I just couldn't take my eyes off the ceiling.

To put it another way, the only sight that remotely compares, for me, is the Grand Canyon, which takes your breath away whenever you see it. This comparison came into my mind as I made one of several circuits of the church, and was undoubtedly helped by the thought that the alcoves on either side of the main altar were themselves bigger than most churches I've seen in my life. 

I rounded off the trip with a visit up the cupola, which gave me some amazing views of the city - even more amazing, I think, than the ones from the roof of the Vittoriano. I appreciated how there was a bathroom and a cafe midway up, which seems odd to have on the roof of the mightiest church in Christendom, but was undoubtedly welcome, since it was a hot day.

St. Peter's Square from the Cupola

As far as food, I got to try a number of local delicacies, though none of the restaurants mentioned in Stanley Tucci's show. The nice thing about Italy generally, though, is that most restaurants and cafes are just about as good as each other, so if you don't go to one place, the next one you find will also be pretty great. The important thing is that I got to have my pizza al taglio, my supplì, and my bucatini all'amatrician, as well as liberal helpings of ice cream. And all of it was at prices that you don't really find in the Bay Area.

This trip was a nice experience, because as I said, I'd never really been able to explore the city on my own. I don't know if I can cope with the chaos of the neighborhood where my mom has her house, but I felt like I was starting to understand it a bit better by the time I left. Maybe it'll never become my place like Turin or London have, but it was great getting to know the place. And the best part is, it's so saturated with things to see and do that I could probably spend another week there without repeating any of the sights I saw on this trip.

Review of United Polaris Class Cabin

Little bit of a different post this week. I'm collecting my thoughts on my trip to Rome and Munich, from which I returned home yesterday, but I wanted to start with my impressions on flying there in business class, which I bought as a last-minute upgrade when checking in the day before my flight to Rome. I've been wanting to treat myself to something like that on a long flight, especially after the grim experience I had in economy on Swiss when I flew to Italy in February, and so I took the opportunity for this trip.

I wasn't able to do the same upgrade coming back, because I was code-shared onto Lufthansa (otherwise I would have waited to buy the upgrade for the trip back, of course). However, it wasn't as much of a comedown to go back to coach as I'd feared, for two reasons: the seat beside mine was empty for the flight, so there was some extra room to stretch out, and more crucially, I felt like I had more legroom than I did on the Swiss flight in February. This could be down to the two companies using different planes, or just that Lufthansa doesn't crowd us in as brutally as Swiss does.

Anyway, here are my thoughts:

The seat in Polaris is pretty nice. It's not super wide, as I discovered when trying to sleep during the flight, but all the same, it was nice not being hemmed in on either side, like I tend to be when flying in economy. The lie-flat seat is a nice touch, which I took advantage of at various points to stretch my legs while seated. There's also loads of storage, from a little alcove under your screen, to a shelf beside you where you can put bedding, electronics that are charging in the power plug (both an outlet and a USB-A port), to a little cabinet with a mirror for a water bottle and the headphones they lend you for the flight.

The inflight entertainment screen was nice and big too, though it's not clear to me if there's actually more content to watch than in economy. To give you a sense, on both flights I counted the number of movies available that I'd already seen; on the United flight I topped out at over 100, meaning there were probably around 200 to 300 movies in total, while on the Lufthansa flight home I counted about 25 or so, suggesting up to 100 total. But that difference could stem from Lufthansa not licensing as much movie and TV content as United?

The other thing that makes me wonder if the entertainment is actually better than in other classes is the games and music on offer. I always check both out, because games are a good way to pass the time, while music is good for listening to while doing something else, whether playing a game, reading, or trying to sleep. The games were the same as I've seen on other flights in the last year or so (but not the same ones I had on Lufthansa yesterday), while the music consisted of a few playlists for various genres. 

Oddly, these playlists weren't on-demand: when I started one, it was in the middle of a song, and when it came to the end it just started over again from the beginning. I haven't encountered anything like that on a plane since about 2006/2007, when I first experienced on-demand entertainment, and TBH, it was a flashback to flights I took in the 80s and 90s.

The one negative about my seat was kind of my fault. In the Polaris cabin, your access to windows depends on whether your seat number is odd (which comes with more windows) or even (which has fewer). I, in fact, managed to choose the seat that didn't even have one window - this is due to the architecture of the cabin, with each seat set at diagonals to enable privacy. Because I couldn't see, I got really airsick on the landing, though it wasn't a problem during the rest of the flight. I'm just mad because when I was selecting my seat, I was originally assigned to a better row but moved up to the seat I eventually got. If you ever find yourself in Polaris class, avoid row 12, is all I'll say.

I had some apprehensions about the food, because of some reviews of Polaris class that I watched on YouTube. One, which flew on the same model of plane as me but a different route, got a pretty lackluster inflight meal, while the other (on a different model of plane and a different route) got a much better meal. This latter YouTuber then ran another video reviewing Polaris on the same kind of jet as I flew, and had a bad meal, as well.

My meal was pretty great, though. The starter was a king prawn cocktail with a couple of giant prawns on offer - shrimp is one of my favorite foods, so I was happy. The main dish was a beef short rib with broccolini and mash, which wasn't huge but was pretty tasty. It reminded me of the premium meals I'd always reserve when I used to fly on Aer Lingus to London via Dublin.

Mainly, though, it was nice to be served with proper cutlery and have my drinks poured into actual glasses. In business class, when you order a Coke they also give you the full can, which is a nice touch.

The service was okay. I don't know what I was expecting, but it didn't feel particularly special. Rather, the staff treated me like I usually get treated on planes (when I'm not flying American carriers or Lufthansa), which is to say, mostly invisible. This is fine, of course, because on quite a few other long-haul United flights I've seen staff argue or snap at customers, and generally exude an air of menace, so maybe that's the difference with economy?

As for the bathroom, it was your bog-standard (no pun intended) airplane lavvy. I suppose I'd hoped for something a little bigger, but maybe that's in first class? Anyway, compared to my Lufthansa flight yesterday it had a few more lotions, including a crease removal spray for your clothes. 

I'll finish with some thoughts on the lounge, which was, of course, the first part of my experience. It was pretty nicely appointed, with quite a lot of seating along the edge of the building, giving a view of the outside of the terminal. I'm not enough of a planespotter to really appreciate that, but it was nice looking out through the huge window while I enjoyed my snack.

The food was pretty good: I had some noodles and other odds and ends from their buffet, though I didn't have a full meal in the restaurant because, my flight being at 4pm, I'd already eaten lunch and knew that I'd get dinner onboard. I also skipped the cans of Coke in the lounge's fridge because they'd just been put in, so they weren't cold yet.

Another aspect of the lounge left me a little cold, but it isn't really United's fault if shitty humans fly their airline. While I was snacking and looking out the window, I heard a couple beside me complaining about SFO and the lounge we were in. It started innocuously enough, when the woman was complaining about not being able to get a plastic water bottle "because it's San Francisco". This is actually kind of fair, because I'd brought my own bottle, but had to fill it at the fountain outside the lounge, because inside they only had the lime-infused water that somehow always makes me need the toilet.

From there, the couple moved on to bitching about "their tax-dollars" being spent on free Covid tests. This is bad enough to hear, because I love getting free Covid tests, but her husband's reaction nearly killed me right there: all he said was, "Well, it's so they can rig the election."

Which. Um. What the ACTUAL fuck?

But again, it's not United's fault if crazy rich right-wingers fly on their planes. Though it feels telling that I never encounter that kind of nonsense in coach (mainly because everyone's too miserable while waiting at the gate).

As a final verdict, I'd say it was a pretty good experience, apart from the window thing. It certainly beats my business-class flight on ITA from Rome to Turin last year, where "business class" just meant the same seats as in economy, two banks of three separated by an aisle, just with the middle seat blocked so you had no one sitting right next to you. It also beats first class on Virgin America, because the seats were actual lie-flat seats and it was designed so you could get in and out if the people around you were reclined. Frankly, it also beats those other two on duration: I got to experience Polaris class for 12 hours, rather than the 3 hours (aggregate) that I spent on those other two flights.

I think I'd like to do it again, but ideally on long-haul, transatlantic or transpacific flights, and ideally with more miles, rather than cash. For business upgrades, my rule of thumb is to consider it if it costs less than $1,000 dollars (and, er, if I have enough in my bank account). Though as I always point out, check-in is a great time to upgrade: I once scored a premium economy seat on British Airways for about $50.