L'Americaine

In the airless terminal, we wait. We’ve hit a pocket of weather, the kind that lets the flights before ours and after ours take off on time. It’s the worst kind of delay, the kind that singles you out, that obliterates any chance of impromptu airport camaraderie. The nods to moms holding screaming babies are less than sympathetic.

The destination is Miami, which means that we’re all wearing in-between clothes, coats of the wrong weight for both where we are and where we’re going. We’ll swelter when we land, but for now, we freeze.

I buy a pair of fuzzy socks at Hudson News that don’t go with my shoes. Stuffed into them, my feet look like they belong to a polar bear, or like I have developed a skin disease. I don’t regret them, or the $10, for an instant, because they have bought me a few precious moments of comfort, one sensation that is not sticky or grimy or too dry or lit with pasty yellow florescents.

It’s not that we’re family or dear in other ways. We’re colleagues traveling to a work meeting. So it’s not like sleeping on a shoulder is an option. We read magazines. We watch as the life wane in our phone and laptop batteries. We don’t touch each other. We share few common stories, except for the ones that involve our day-to-day in the skyscraper, and no one wants to talk about those.

After four hours, I decide that I need to walk. Matt and Helen and I walk to Brookstone, to see what buzzing things can distract us for a precious few moments, can make the waiting bearable. Outside the store, something hovers in the air. Silent, none of us can take our eyes off it—a flat black disc as big as a pizza, floating four feet off the ground in the center of the corridor.

“What the hell is that?”

“A space ship.”

“I bet you can buy it at Brookstone.”

You can.

The Parrot A.R. Drone Quadricoptor uses gyroscopes to retain stability in flight. It has built-in wifi that allows it to be controlled using an iPhone, and onboard cameras stream video so you can play “augmented reality” games that make it look like there’s a military skirmish in your living room. It costs $300.

The store clerk who is using it when we pass by is a kid. The look of delight on this face is unmistakable.

There are ultralight suitcases and ergonomic pillows and digital cameras that are James Bond-like in their tininess and sleekness. The only thing I consider—a pair of socks made out of some kind of technologically-advanced chenille—is beyond my target price point.

We leave, unsure of whether we had real intentions of buying anything in the first place. The magazine store is a better bet.

The travel magazines are shoved in a back corner next to the art and photography magazines and the porn, all of it bagged up and blacked out for safety. I waver between Travel + Leisure and a magazine called Islands. Both have palm trees on their covers. The headlines, in canary yellow, promise secret paradise. I finally dismiss both and settle on a practical Budget Travel—although even that is awash in palm trees (Feature story: Hidden Caribbean). I choose another, Afar, that’s larger format and printed on beautiful matte paper and pimping a story about Barcelona. The Gaudis on the cover—wiggly as phantoms—say nothing about the actual story, which is about seafood, but I am hungry for elsewhere, for anything as tall and concrete and blowing in the open air as a palm tree.

Back at the gate, I read about a place called Eluthera, a word so beautiful that it almost tastes good to say it. Allison tells a story about going to Anguilla once, about a seaside mansion in a place that no one can get to.

I flip a page. I rub my fuzzy toes together, unconcerned at this point that my work colleagues are seeing me in my socks. They are also seeing my in-between self, the best and the worst of it, the time before leaving and before getting back.

Slinking along the north coast of Sicily on a train, my sister and I watch the landscape out the windows—blue water on one side and steep, scrub-covered cliffs on the other. In the seats behind us, two American teenage boys are doing their best to woo two mildly disinterested teenage girls, also American. I can only hear one of the boys speaking, his grownup voice booming through the half-empty train, right behind my head. He pretends to know about European history.

The station at Taormina wooshes past and I feel a pang of regret. It would be good so good to get off the train, to spend another day in the sun before shacking up with our relatives. Before days of my impossible, badly-accented Sicilian and host/guest protocol that we barely understand.

We’re half-asleep from our early-morning plane ride, from lulling woosh of the train, from the heady sense of not being anywhere yet. We listen to music, our ears stopped up, to forget where we are or always remember, one or the other. Nothing blocks out all the noise, though.

I ask my sister, “What are you listening to?”

“R. Kelly, ‘Ignition Remix.’ You?”

“’You Dropped the Bomb on Me.”

The Athenaeum Hotel

I am never happier than when I step into the slippers. The whole room is a dream, it’s true, from the cornflower blue fabric on the headboard to the sparkling porcelain sink. The lights brighten and dim soothing slowness, as though a basic switch would be too harsh, too jarring a transition. The climate control system—its intake and outlets mysteriously out of sight—whispers low like a lover. But the slippers.

Their one-size-fits-all design is genderless and basic to the point of being nearly disposable, but that’s beside the point. It’s the way that they feel that counts. Covered in what looks like terry but must surely be the insides of clouds or the fleece of a thousand baby lambs, wearing them means forgetting about discomfort. About sidewalk-nurtured callouses and endless dead skin and an ankle not quite healed.

I seriously consider wearing them out into the city. Before checkout, I stuff a pair into my already-overstuffed bag.

On Picadilly, across from the Buckingham Palace Garden, I decide to splurge. Maybe for the sake of the slippers alone.

The flight to New York to London is a sensory disaster, a 7-hour exercise in time-losing, body-disorienting anguish marked by the smell of thin, stale air and the endless bellow of jet engines. A soft landing on the other side becomes my mission, more than trying to maximize time, or bound out onto the city streets for sightseeing. This is how I know I’m getting older. Instead of needing to crisscross the city at breakneck speed, gawking and eating—the touristic equivalent of rape and pillage, all I want to do now is drink tea, scribble in my notebooks, wander without a map and sit by a river.

Upon arrival, I take a too-long shower and use up just enough of the shampoo and conditioner that I can still take some home. I wrap myself into the enormous white robe, knotting the belt around twice, and finally, when my energy gives out completely, doze on a starchy white pillowcase.

I don’t want to leave. I seriously ponder it, of all the blasphemies—staying sunk into that mattress like a lazy princess—instead of using my theater tickets. Instead of getting out, taking the walk through the bleating chaos of Picadilly Circus, figuring out dinner, spinning a map around in the palms of my hands. This is what a lovely hotel does to a girl who is not used to such things, who spends most of her trips avoiding the hostel she’s checked into, the noisy teenage boys there hogging all the good bunks.

The next morning, I make tea in the neat little electric pot. I use the wireless as though I will never have it again, as though I am headed to some overgrown jungle and will be sleeping in a hut instead of to a budget hotel across the river. My iPhone sits charging on a dock, unfettered from any tangling cords, from double layers of international adapters and surge protectors. I glut on civilization, on floor-to-ceiling mirrors and stacks of white towels. I am cured of my jetlag. I’ve seen nothing of London, of the river or Parliament or the parks or the little shops. The free museums inhabit some hazy elsewhere. Instead I have a cup of chamomile tea, turndown service, as many cotton swabs as I would like, and so much more—all the confines of that little room.

Tune Hotel Westminster

You pay extra for everything. For a scratchy towel and a tiny tube of manly-smelling shampoo. For each day of internet access. For the television. For use of the hairdryer that sits like an overturned turtle on a table, its cord perma-mounted into a wall, silent and dead until you fork over £2.

It is a new concept in hotels, like an earthbound Ryanair—the nickel-and-dime business model. The benefit to the traveler? You can score an incredibly cheap room in a brand new London hotel that does promise a single, notable luxury: a great bed.

And it must have been, because I overslept in it twice, once on a morning where I was scheduled to take a train.

The Tune Hotel, located in South London by the Lambeth North tube stop, has the chipper, new-paint-and-plaster feel of an upbeat college dorm, right down to the Ikea furniture in the rooms and the kids at the front desk who smile like enthused RAs welcoming you to orientation. Even the wallpaper in the rooms is cheerful—the pattern covering mine was grass green and geometric with a whiff of vintage styling—but that, and the wide window, can’t cover the fact that the room is small.

The white slab of a bed fills it almost entirely, like a giant marshmallow.

After the Athenaeum, I try not to be displeased. I really do. I try to appreciate the bed, which is very nice, and the economy of the toilet/shower/sink, which sits in a pod in the corner and seems to be molded from a single piece of plastic. But I can’t. One 5-star hotel, and I’m ruined.

Even though the Tune is spotless, I smell the sheets. (Is that chlorine?) I wonder how the all-plastic bathroom is cleaned, and how it will look after five years of use, after the grime settles into the crevices. I am frustrated by the silent hairdryer, even though I haven’t blowdried my hair in years.

I’ve slept in beachside shacks and hippie commune hostels, and on a bare bunk in Greece for half a summer without a pillow. And here I am, cranky that the air conditioning is too cold, fighting with the window shade.

So I do what I must. I leave. I strike out into the city. I wander markets. I walk across Millennium Bridge. I see two museums, the Tate and the Tate Modern. I walk along the river. I take a day trip to Bath. I travel, finally, in earnest.

Go there:

The insanely wonderful Athenaeum Hotel is located at 116 Picadilly. To get there, take the tube to Green Park or Hyde Park Corner.

The utterly serviceable Tune Hotel is located at 118-120 Westminster Bridge Road.

The island of Stromboli looks like a volcano in a cartoon, in a movie where people get stuck on a tropical island. It springs up out of the blue Aeolian Sea like a perfect jutting triangle, the bottom two-thirds covered in a sheath of rippling grass and brush, like Shar-Pei wearing a green sweater. The top is dark with the rock of new eruptions, a plume of brown and white smoke coughing steadily from the crater.

We approach it in an excursion boat called Paloma that hits the top of each wave with a loud thunk. In an irrational gesture that will neither stop me from getting hurt in case of an accident, or getting seasick, I grip the edge of a wooden table, my knuckles white with desperation.

We have just come from the island of Panarea, a sloping slab of white rock with a single, tiny, exclusive town full of white stucco houses with neon blue shutters and doors, and 4-Euro granita in the port. We’re looking forward to something a little more low-key on Stromboli. If we get there alive.

No one else on the boat seems bothered by the choppy waves, especially not the ship’s staff—the handsome, salt-and-pepper-haired captain or its first mate, a genial old guy who keeps making the rounds, asking if we’re all OK. I lie every time, partly because when it comes to me and seasickness, admitting there is a problem almost assuredly creates a problem, and partly because I have no idea what he’d do if I told the truth, and I have no desire to find out. The third member of the ship’s crew, a teenage boy in a pair of aviator sunglasses, is mostly busy hauling ropes and flirting with my sister. Every time we reach a port, he makes a point of telling her and only her the return time in broken English.

*

Rambling Stromboli town is bright in the sinking sun and full of tourists returning from a day of trekking to the crater. Walking away from the port, we find a restaurant with a terrace and order a heap of antipasto—grilled eggplant, olives, and artichoke hearts—and a half-carafe of white wine. We eat and take photos of the incredible view—a stripe of blue water broken only by a little rock of an island in the distance, the lighthouse just barely visible on the top.

The little offshore island is called Strobolito—literally, Little Stromboli—and it really is nothing more than a jutting rock with a lighthouse on top and a single zigzagging staircase leading up to it from the ocean below. It looks solitary and scary and a little sad at sunset, its sides brilliant with iron ore. On the way to Stromoboli, Paloma got close to it, but the ocean felt so rough that I thought we’d be thrust into its craggy sides.

Everyone who enters the terrace does the exact same thing—eats, snaps photos, marvels. Wonders how reality will feel afterwards, whether their eyes will adjust.

*

On the obsidian beach near the port, I cannot stop touching the sand. It sits in the palms of my hands like piles of silky caviar, sticks like a swarm of insects. The smoke from the crater drifts directly above our heads, a white stripe through the sky.

My sister goes swimming and everyone on the beach stares as though she’s sprung a third arm. The water is freezing in the late-afternoon shadow. The vacationers on their yachts and schooners have wrapped up in jackets and shawls. Only the occasional squall of a gull, or the shout of a wriggling kid breaks the silence.

Paloma is scheduled to return for us in a few minutes, and I savor the still ground under my body, knowing it won’t last. Our footprints in the black sand look like fossils, like nothing could shift them out of shape. When we trudge back up to the dock, I take half the beach with me in my shoes. I need to sift and shake three times to get it out, or maybe just for luck.

*

Paloma sweeps past Stromboli’s flat seaward side, the side that erupts.

A smooth sheet of hardened lava, the chute of so many eruptions, begins at the lip and cascades all the way to the churning sea below. The sun is just about to dip below the horizon, to give the Stromboli by Night tour its name. The captain explains that the eruption from just a few years ago lasted for months, that it created the long lava flow we’re seeing now. And all the while, the boat rocks.

“If you wait,” he says, “You may just see the eruption happening before your eyes.”

We wait. Beside me, a man with a video camera keeps rolling. I try to imagine who would want to watch this video back on dry land, the camera shuddering with the motion of the ship. The boat rolls too, first front to back and then side to side as we make a lazy spin into the waves.

All of my photos are on strange, sloping angles, as though I can’t properly feel the floor.

We crane our necks around like people watching a tennis match, focused on the dim smoking mouth. We circle and circle.

At one point, the captain calls our attention to two distinct colors of smoke pouring toward the sky in separate plumes at the same time—one a milky gray and one a filthy brown. That’s when it happens—a crimson fountain of lava bubbles up in a long, sparkling spout. In the same instant, the boat hits a massive wave and careens forward, tossing half of us off our seats. Everyone on the boat collects themselves and cheers, as the first mate shouts at the top of his lungs in Italian, fists raised, “It’s erupting! Oh my God! Stromboli by night! Stromboli by night!”

That he has probably seen this every single night since he took this job seems irrelevant. It seems likewise beside the point that Paloma’s rocking has reached a nerve-rattling extreme, that people are tumbling over themselves, craning their necks and spinning around backwards to see the volcano, which, by now, has ceased in its pyrotechnics.

As the sun slides lower behind the horizon, the boat continues to turn, and my stomach remains lodged somewhere against the inside of my ribcage. We wait for it to happen again. We wait for an hour, the boat bobbing all the while.

It is dark when the captain decides that we should be on our way, that we’ve seen enough of Stromboli and her treacherous dark water and bright plume. The people on the boat groan in collective disappointment.

*

Facing backwards on one of Paloma’s rear seats, I focus on Stromboli’s shadow in the distance, a ghostly blue-black monster breaking the line of the horizon. It is the only thing to do to keep from getting sick.

As it shrinks away from us, I feel as though I’m falling into a kind of trance. Or perhaps my sister and I are just reluctant to look away, or to speak, out of fear of what might happen.

The captain has turned on Paloma’s interior lights, and their reflection bounces between the windows. We remind each other to look past them at the objects in the distance, at things that are fixed and anchored to land. Others on the boat, apparently, do not share a similar strategy.

Because halfway back to dry land, the woman sitting behind us starts to vomit. The first mate and his assistant—the aviator-wearing teenage boy—leap into action. Stores of plastic bags are hidden all over the boat—under the seats, in the panels along the ceiling. They hand one to her, along with a fat lemon wedge that materializes out of nowhere. The woman hangs her head in misery—the only hint that anything is amiss, along with the wafting smell of lemon.

Then, a second sound arises from the other side of the boat—another woman is vomiting, hunched over herself. An instant later, the man sitting beside her starts to do the same, and is followed by no fewer than three other people. The first mate and the teenage boy move between them as though nothing were amiss, handing out lemon wedges and bags and rubbing backs.

My sister flashes a tight smile. “Everyone on this boat is throwing up right now.”

“Let’s not talk about it, please,” I say, fixating on the island in the distance.

*

By the time Lipari, our home port, comes back into focus, everyone is weary and slumped over and silent.

On the pier, my jelly knees quake. We walk carefully back to our hotel under the street lamps, queasy and in a haze. I mention that it was good to see the volcano erupting, even if we had to wait, had to turn around in circles for an hour to see it.

“I mean, look on the bright side,” my sister says. “I took a tortuga tour in Costa Rica. And the thing with that tour is that eighty percent of the time, they don’t see a single tortuga.”

Go there: The island of Stromboli can be reached directly by ferry from the town of Milazzo in Sicily. Tickets for the Stromboli by Night island tour, which includes stops in Panarea and Stromboli, can be purchased in the main port towns throughout the Aeolian Islands.

There is no real bus stop, but the driver recognizes that we’re tourists and drops us off in the right place. 
 
Walking up the hill toward it, we question why we’re doing this in the first place. If it’s going to be creepy. If it’s going to gross us out.
 
“Well,” I say. “We can’t go to Palermo and not see the place with the dead people.”
 
Somehow, this works as an explanation.
 
The outside of the Capuchin catacombs looks like a grimy post office—a low, peaked building with pock-marked pillars set alongside a parking lot. A souvenir stand bakes in the sun beside it, offering gondolier hats and models of Sicilian donkey carts. All these years, I had imagined a grand church or at least a pretty chapel.
 
After paying the 3-Euro entry and descending the stairs, it starts right away. They’re hanging on the walls, each body nestled into a neat plaster relief, wearing a horror-movie-ready, gravity-dragged grimace, and fully, and in many cases artfully clothed. Some appear to have been stuffed with straw from the neck down so that the clothes don’t sag in unsightly ways or fall off the bodies entirely.
 
Most are cue ball skeletons, even the women, but some bear traces of flesh—a fully-formed ear peeled away from a skull, a tuft of dark hair thrown over a shoulder, the prickly remnants of a beard. Many of the women, instead of hanging on the wall, lie in glass-sided coffins wearing their finest—pretty green linens and silk wedding dresses, all of which are more intact than their bodies.
 
I cough in the dry air.
 
“You’re breathing in dead people,” says my sister.
 
She’s right. The crypt is spotless, but dry with the dust of crumbling fabric and paper and bones, everything that goes straight back into the earth.
 
A wall set aside for children—their bodies so tiny in lace and cotton baby clothes—is more sad and sobering than terrifying, each one a memorial to unfathomable individual loss. In another inset off to the side, a stiff skeletal hand reaches forward from a woman’s body, and seems to beckon visitors as though she were a plastic skeleton you could buy at Walmart, the guardian of a haunted house. She is so small in death, so lumpy and hollow.
 
Toward the end, in her own decorated alcove, is the famous little girl in her cradle. She was two when she died in the early 1800s, and her father knew an embalming technique that kept her body preserved and made her the object of veneration. She looks not-quite real, like a wax doll.
 
At the end of the tour, you can buy a postcard with her face on it, and others with photos of the bodies.
 
“Can you imagine sending one of those?” asks my sister. “What do you write on it? ‘Wish you were here?’”

Go there: Palermo’s Capuchin crypt is located at Via Cappuccini, 1. To get there, take the bus from the Piazza Indipendenza and ask the driver to let you off at the crypt. Because he won’t otherwise.

In a city with almost no working street lights, where filthy dogs lie in the sun on their bloated, wormy sides, we go in search of something—a park to eat our lunches. We never find it.

How this happens in a city planned out on four deliberate quadrants, the main streets dividing them as though they’d been hacked apart with a knife, we have no idea. But we manage it anyway, even with a map and a compass. The map only names half the streets. The compass somehow gets scrambled. We realize these things all at once, and it feels as though Palermo is conspiring to bamboozle us, using the smells of rotting fish and car exhaust as aides.

We walk South with assurance, only to realize half an hour later that we’ve actually been walking West, and well beyond the boundaries of the old city. We adjust our itinerary and try to go North, abandoning the idea of the park, hoping to at least get to a place that exists on our map. We do, but we head East without knowing it and end up in the place we started, a square bookended by two enormous dry fountains, the mouths of the stone heads spouting nothing but air, the basins below filled with bags of garbage.

Starving and having given up on the park, we sit on the steps in front of another dry fountain that’s surrounded by a 6-foot iron fence. The statues—the whole pantheon of gods—watch as we unwrap our sandwiches and green olives. I lean back against a hooded stone lion, his tail curved neatly around his flank. Someone has spray painted something across his hip.

The scooters and cars rush by, the drivers swinging their heads around as though we are the attraction, the only thing around worth seeing.

Go there: The piazza where we stopped to eat, with its dry baroque fountain, is the Piazza Pretoria. It’s right near the Quattro Canti, Palermo’s geographical center.

We sleep all day. But not before we try to accomplish things. We try so hard.

We sit down to plates of pasta and grilled eggplant at an outdoor trattoria that looks like my grandmother’s living room. We walk to the literal center of town, the four corners of the street hemmed in by fountains and statues. Back at our hotel, we study city maps with purpose. We inquire about ferry schedules and Google famous local restaurants, including one that isn’t a restaurant at all, but just a woman who cooks. You need a code word to get in, and a friend who speaks Sicilian. In front of the lumbering, gorgeous Teatro Massimo, a flier advertises a screening of a film about Jeff Buckley; I photograph it with great hope, thinking we’ll look up the web site later and go.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, we realize that our bodies are failing us. That as much as we want to explore. Talk to the fruit vendors. Go to the screening. Find the beach and the botanical garden, we want to do something else so much more.

We want to sleep. We want to curl up on our queen-size bed in the Tropical Room at the Casi di Amici—an amiable, second-floor B&B situated in a lumbering apartment building—and just forget that we’re traveling. And make up the hours and hours of lost sleep in Venice, in a hotel room swarmed with mosquitoes and tiny and hot as a pizza oven.

So we do. For hours.

We lose complete track of time. We sleep through the day and the night, waking only to check our Facebook pages using the free wireless. We vow to become tourists the next day, to see, in the words of our rather poorly-translated guidebook, what’s deserving to be seen, instead of closing the door, and making the city disappear.

Go there: Palermo is Sicily’s capital city. It is located on the island’s northwest coast. A Casa di Amici bed and breakfast, emphasis on the bed, is tucked away behind the Teatro Massimo.

So. I’ll be at TBEX this weekend, talking up L’Americaine and trying not to appear really awkward, which is how it usually goes with me and networking events.

It’s in NYC this year, so I figured it would be fun to go. If you’re going to be there, please say hello.

I’ll be the brunette standing the corner clutching her business cards, wondering why she’s taking herself this seriously.

Also, I just got back from Italy. A monster trip. Venice and lots of Sicily–the Aeolian islands, Palermo, and the area around Catania, which is where my father is from. So you’ll have some things to read, at least.

Happy trails, as always.

It’s 2 am. My sister is asleep and has forbidden me from opening any of the windows in our hotel room. Mosquitoes will come in, she says. And she’s right. I mean, she is. And I’m not really forbidden, but we agreed on it.

Before we turned out the lights, we made a promise that if any mosquitoes buzzed around our ears in the night, we’d immediately turn the lights back on and kill them. We even kept the windows closed all day and swept the room beforehand. She found one and killed it, smearing its guts down the wall, just to have some visual proof of our diligence.

This was a really great plan, we thought: Keep the windows closed at all costs and be vigilant about stragglers after the fact.

The worst that could happen, she said, is that the room could get really hot. But we’d be mosquito-free—a quality that we agreed was more valuable than, say, being properly temperature-adjusted.

The mosquitoes kept us up the night before—you don’t even understand. Chewing away at our backs, risen up out of this sinking swamp of a city.

In fact, this was not the worst that could happen.

The worst that could happen was as follows: My sister, immediately before lights out, takes a sleeping pill. Which renders her unable to hear any buzzing mosquitoes (which appear out of nowhere, in my ear and not hers, as though they’d grown out of the wall like Darwin’s meat experiment). It also renders her unable to sense that the room is stifling.

I kill the mosquito. I cannot kill the hotness.

Which is why I’m sitting on the bathroom floor of a hotel room in Venice, Italy, unable to sleep, writing in the dark, not wearing any pants, unable to open any windows because we agreed, wondering how long I will keep this agreement, desperate for air, because really I’m older, waiting for morning, or for the pill to wear off, whichever comes first.

The storm on Burano coincides with our visit nearly to the moment and gives the impression, at first, that the entire island will run in the rain like a bleary watercolor.

We huddle under the awning in a bar and drink too-expensive hot chocolates while old men rattle away in Venetian dialect around us. Day trippers scamper for the vaporetto and for the lace shops. The town hardly looks real with its low stucco houses painted in rainbow colors—from peppermint twist pastels to blinding neons. It is Italy out of a feverish dream, Italy gone Willy Wonka.

The best colors are in the interior, when you slide through the tiny entryways off the main drag. The buildings form little courtyards in the center. Enter, and you’re swallowed by color, by an umbrella hanging on an outside hook, but three girls jumping rope, by a spluttering fountain. Steps away from the tourist din, Burano is a real place.

In the overgrown churchyard, the brick steeple leans so precariously that it actually seems dangerous—not like that other Italian leaning tower with all of its history, its army of scientists to protect it and the gawking tourists below. We ponder the chances of it tumbling on our heads when an old man comes up behind us and stares. His blue-striped sweater is done in the hues of the town–cobalt and cornflower. It is that time of the afternoon when old men in Italy take their walks or sit outside, their hours of afternoon commiseration.

When I look over, he says, “You probably don’t speak Italian.”

“I understand it,” I say.

“Ah, he says. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, but when I see pretty women, I have to look. I know I’m old, but still. Have a good day.”

I feel bad taking photos of people’s everyday lives, until I remember that in New York City, tourists constantly take photos of my everyday life, and that I don’t really mind very much. So maybe this is cultural exchange of the highest and most literal order—your little houses for my skyscrapers, your canals for the pond in Central Park—a way of seeing what is colorful and bright about the places we visit, and about the ones we come from.

Go there: The island of Burano is located about 12km north of Venice. To visit, take the LN vaporetto from Piazza San Marco (Pieta), or Fondamenta Nouve. The latter is quicker.