exo : blah

A Saturday afternoon in late October turns out to be a bad time to visit the Trevi fountain. We’d expected it to be busy but it’s not only the piazza itself but the surrounding streets that are jammed. Wall to wall people shuffling along to try and find some space where they can even see the fountain while volunteers blow whistles at the overly enthusiastic. We leave almost instantly having barely seen the fountain.

This is probably the worst of the excess of people found at the popular sites of Rome but the feeling of being in an endless queue of people slowly milling past sights is one that becomes familiar over a week.

The colosseum and forum lull us into thinking it won’t be too bad. There are queues and a lot of people but it’s not awful and well managed. There are moments where there is space around us and time to contemplate free of the press of fellow tourists. This is especially true in the forum which is large enough for the crowds to spread out. It’s also not really got a blockbuster sight so there isn’t the same funnelling of everyone to a single destination.

St Peter’s is a different thing. We visit on a Sunday morning so we can see the Pope give his little homily from a balcony far above the packed square. The shout outs at the end to the pilgrims from across the world are both charming and a little odd. It empties remarkably quickly afterwards and we wander off for some lunch while we wait for the church to open. It only takes five minutes walk to get to somewhere with a free table.

Lunch done we head back, wander through the now reasonably empty square following the signs for St Peter’s. There’s a load of x ray machines lined up under the portico and a queue that leads round the corner and onto a side street. And then down the side street. Really quite a way down. It’s at least eight people wide and extends far enough that we have time for a whole conversation about if this can really be the queue, if we want to join it and if we should do something else instead.

We join the queue.

In fairness it moves quite quickly and it’s probably only twenty five minutes before we’re through the security checks. There’s another brief queue on the other side for unclear reasons and then we’re walking up to the church. Inside it’s a mass of people. It’s not much of problem because the building is vast, and surprisingly quiet given the crowd. It’s hard to appreciate the size, partly as we are bad at scale and also because, magnificently, it’s been designed to look smaller than it is. It’s only looking up to see the people on the dome walkway that gives away the size. The crowding is made worse by the central floor being given over to a sea of clear plastic seats. I don’t know if they are always there or it’s related to it being a Jubilee year but the main body of the church is essentially closed to visitors, which is a shame as I very much wanted to see the markers on the floor to shame other churches for being so smol.

The crowds mean that you have to actively step out of the procession of people to view things. You can’t really just stop and look without the throng pressing round you. Possibly other times are better but it’s still a bit off putting.

The next few days we avoid the sights and just roam. It’s a lovely city to wander round and a great place to sit and watch people.

We do go to the Vittoriano which I highly recommend as an example of the Italian inability to do subtle. It’s hard to avoid seeing it as it’s right next to the forum and huge. Monumental for the sake of being monumental; both impressive and comedic in its scale. There are probably good views from the top but 18 euros to go up a lift seems a bit much.

On our last night we go to see the Sistine Chapel. This was the only bookable slot we could get despite booking weeks in advance. We turn up an hour before, walk past the enormous queue of people without a booked time and get to the slightly less enormous queue of those with booked slots. Having been assured we can join 15 minutes ahead of our slot we go for a coffee, and return with 25 minutes to spare to a queue of hundreds. Once again it’s fairly well managed and it moves reasonably quickly and we get in only ten minutes or so after our booked time.

Inside the museum again feels line one long line of people processing through. We try to check out of it where we can which is reasonably often as they route you through pretty much the whole place before the main event, and the place is huge. I assume this is deliberate to keep a handle on numbers in the chapel but it does lead to the feeling of being in the longest, best decorated queue in the world. In total we are in there two and a half hours and only scratch the surface. The Pope has collected a lot of stuff. We barely look at the modern art section after the chapel as it’s late and we’re tired, hungry and all out of looking, but even with the barest glances you sense it’s got another hours worth of stuff.

The Sistine itself deserves the hype. It is luminous. We’re in there for I guess half an hour and only leave because it’s closing time. Getting to wander in when it’s empty is surely one of the great fringe benefits of being the Pope.

It’s 25 years since either of us have been to Rome. We’d expected it to be busier, not least because previously it was mid March, but it’s slightly shocking to see how much more so. We didn’t do much touristing then but I recall popping into St Peter’s for a quick look in a way you clearly cannot now.

Second year running. Officially a streak!

cycling

I think a good year. I did a lot of doing the rides I wanted and not a lot of rides for the sake of it.

I did finally manage to nudge over 250km in one ride which has been on the list for a while. One of these things that it’s good to have done but unlikely to be repeated. I’ve realised 200km is the limit of what is enjoyable for me to ride in a day which seems like a good thing to learn.

There were five weeks in the second half of the year with no riding because we were away and I never really got fully going after that which is a shame. The weather in the autumn wasn’t great. That said, I still got out and did some decent rides, it just felt like I was treading water. And then a worse than usual December cold hit and knocked out a chunk of that. I’d normally hope to finish strongly over the Twixtmas period but the weather was very much not favourable.

Once again I would have liked to do a bit more gravel stuff but it’s just that bit more annoying to plan out. The more I do the less I need to plan but if I want to do a decent length ride it’s so much easier to head out on the road bike.

pictures

There is something of a theme in that I did ok with the proper camera for the first half of the year and then it too fell off. As with last year I still have not really got a workflow for getting the photos off the camera and sticking them somewhere. I think I should decide not to care about doing much with the photos and just take it as an excuse to enjoy the act of pointing a camera at things.

Not sure this is my fav of the year but it is one I was pleased with. Taken with the phone on the sort of walk that frankly the SLR is just a bit too heavy to carry, or at least for me to want to carry.

One nice thing has been getting a little photo printer. I probably need somewhere to put the photos, ideally a frame that’s easy to swap things in and out of, but even just pinning them to the fridge has been pleasant and a change from everything disappearing into the internet.

The phone got an upgrade so I’ve now got a telephoto lens there which has been good. If nothing else I’ve taken several squirrel photos that would not have happened without it. Another nice thing with the new phone is being able to use a physical button to access the camera which is a significant boon when wearing winter cycling gloves. The days of trying to swipe open the camera with my nose are finally at an end.

work

More climate things, more crowdsourcing things, including using it for an internal project, and a bit of prodding TheyworkForYou which was a bit of a gear change.

Having mostly been working on small and new codebases I mostly wrote shifting back to a project that’s over twenty years old is always a bit of a shock. I do not think I did my best work there for various reasons not least of which it came at a point when I was just sleeping terribly.

No real big achievements, again with this theme, but lots of small improvements and a chunk of making previously tedious processes that required a developer, I.e. me, self serve which is always pleasing.

books

As before there is a mostly complete list of books read over the year so you can go look at that for the raw details.

I stalled out a bit on reading in December through a combination of seasonal malaise and actual illness but otherwise it was a pretty good year. Not sure I quite kept up with the incoming pile but the five weeks out of the country mostly reading ebooks from the library didn’t help with that. Although huzzah for ebooks from the library which are just great for travel. Also so much easier to just nope out of a book that cannot physically manifest your misplaced sense of failure at abandoning the story half way through. Especially as if you ignore it long enough the book very politely returns itself so even your virtual shelf is free of guilt.

The definite recommends for the year were The Book of Love, Ink Blood Sister Scribe, which I am still unclear on how to punctuate, Molloy Molloy and the Angel of Death, Catfish Rolling, The Saint of Bright Doors and Frontier. Some Desperate Glory was also good but didn’t quite stick the landing.

I gave up on 6 books and I really should have given up on The Terraformers and The Buried Giant. There former was just a bit too “let me tell you about my research and did you know capitalism was bad?” and the latter just annoyed me.