American Fez

St George and the Airport Shuttle

Despite the relentless sun with its blazing heat still beating down upon my head, I'm already in an autumnal frame of mind. There ought to be apple cider instead of lemonade, I feel, and brown leaves rather than green and thunder showers should be replaced by driving rain ... which is a bit of a problem since I'm leaving for the pink beaches of Bermuda on Thursday morning and probably won't enjoy myself now. I've briefly considered changing the booking to Malmo or Bucharest at the last minute, but alas my wife does not approve, so tropical island vacation here I come.
According to our hotel's website, they provide a complimentary shuttle from the airport that merely requires booking with the concierge a day before your arrival. But, as I discovered, information about this service should also be included in the phantom stagecoach section of "Myths and Legends of Old Bermuda."
The concierge was very vague when I spoke to him over the phone. Yes, he had once heard tell of such a thing when sitting around a camp fire late at night, but nobody had actually ever seen the shuttle service.
But it has its own pop-up window on your website's homepage, I explained.
Some guests have regaled TripAdvisor with weird tales of a minibus and strange comings and goings, he replied dismissively, but it's best to ignore the ravings of jet-lagged lunatics. These crazy tourists also claim to have witnessed instant room upgrades and free WiFi, he added, but no-one in their right mind believes such superstitious nonsense.
So apparently the Bermuda Triangle has moved inland and our hotel's complimentary shuttle service from the airport is lost within its misty, isoscelesian confines. I imagine that the concierge is just afraid to admit this disturbing fact to his guests, since such paranormal activity might scare the golfers and honeymooners off. But I don't mind. The mistier and creepier the better as far as I'm concerned. Bring on the fog. It will suit my browning mood much better than cyan skies, blue seas and and pink sand.

Scene Changes

Sometimes, in the early morning, I walk through the grubby backstreets around Central Square, observing the human debris sprawled across long-suffering benches and huddled in urine-dampened concrete alcoves: the indifferent rubble that remains after social conventions are abandoned; apathetic refugees living in the ruins of themselves, once more preparing to sacrifice their day to some sort of grimy Chthonic sewer deity. But I don't observe for very long. These demolished lives are a too visceral reminder of how fragile and precarious standards of living can be. And besides, the smell is appalling. This must be how fresh air feels when brushing against a sweating, fetid armpit: "Get me me out of here!" It's all rather depressing, to be honest. So quickening my pace, past the empty banks and crowded Starbucks, I walk onwards in the direction of leafy Cambridgeport.
Suddenly, a fellow pedestrian and myself are knocked sideways by a wild-eyed jogger wearing Vibram foot gloves and a CoolMax bodysuit. He leaps out from between two parked cars like Spiderman, slams into us, vaults a trashcan and sprints up the street without apologizing, propelled by the obliviously unstoppable force of his own insatiable arrogance. I silently hope that he might trip over the slumbering vagrants and break his neck when he reaches them, but he is unfortunately far too agile to be toppled by such insignificant obstructions. In fact, I suppose he will merely employ their prostate torsos as a series of springboards for extra velocity when running through the thick wall of atmospheric stink.
Now I'm passing the neo-Byzantine stronghold that is the Church of Constantine and Helena, named after the Roman Emperor who relocated the center of civilisation from West to East - always a bad move - and his sainted mother. There is much inconvenient rubble here, too, mostly around the foundations and spilling out onto the sidewalk, although comprised of cascading masonry rather than flesh and blood, and contained by orange colored plastic netting. "Please pardon our appearance during renovations" an adjacent placard pleads. At least there are some indications of polite society this morning.

As you can see, I am making vain attempts to add illustrations to my blog. I would have taken pictures of the vagrants and the jogger, also, but I was afraid of the vagrants and the jogger was too fast. Consequently there is only this rather innocuous photograph of the Greek church. I'm not really sure what purpose it serves, but at least it's something.

Miniature Worlds

I'm at the seaside: always a pleasant, perspective restoring experience. While my wife sleeps on the sands, I explore the nearby rock pools; miniature worlds of unidentifiable lifeforms and unbeatable colors. Since it's impossible to describe a rock-pool in words unless you are Marianne Moore, I took the pictures below with my phone and arranged them into a sort of poor man's triptych.