Shadowfiend23 @ Wrocław

“Come Downstairs And Say Hello”

Comments:

I love this song for many reasons.

First, I think the first two lines brilliantly summarize the main problem of the narrator of the song (and the problem I have felt many times when listening to this song):

Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes
Right in tune with “Dark Side of the Moon.

A person is applying the: “turn on, tune in, drop out” mentality to escape from their problems. Dorothy is escaping from her nightmarish Oz by clicking her shoes in tune with “Dark Side of the Moon”, an album by Pink Floyd. The song progresses by proposing what I always hoped to hear when I was in one of these moods “Be calm…be brave…it’ll be ok”. But the song acknowledges that it doesn’t happen, that it could have happened:

Someone, someone could tell me:
Where I belong;
‘Be calm, be brave, it’ll be okay…”

The song continues to drive home the point that media provides a point of solace by saying that the voices on MTV have lips moving, saying “It’ll be ok…” The way this line is delivered has always echoed the superficiality that condolences have carried in my opinion. The singer delivers this line so ephemerally that I believe it parallels perfectly the short-lasting effects “It will be ok” has on my psyche.

The first “chorus” is very interesting and very, very, profound in understanding the meaning of the song:

To tell you the truth, I’ve said it before
“Tomorrow I start in a new direction”
One last time these words from me
I’m never saying them again
and I shut the light
and listen as my watch unwinds…

The first three lines are especially important, because the narrator makes a vow to change soon, he says that he will change starting tomorrow. He echoes the call to action in the beginning of the song “no more…living underground on New Year’s resolutions”. And he says that this is the last time he will say these words. Then, he describes the act of shutting off the light, a night time prelude to sleep, a symbol of what is done each and every day. Then, he listens as “his watch unwinds”, that is, he is a passerby to his life passing before his eyes while nothing changes. The pace of the song changes here significantly – it picks up to show the passage of time.

The next stanza confirms the foreshadowing in the chorus, as the narrator repeats what he said he would never say again. But there is an added thought, something new to the mix. He states:

Every night as I’m falling asleep
These words repeating in my head:

And then we receive the climax of the song, the take-away message:

“Voices calling from a yellow road
To come downstairs and say, ‘hello.’
Don’t be shy, just say ‘hello.'”

We are told that the narrator can still break free from his escapist mentality, we see that he can choose to rejoin reality and just “come downstairs and say hello”. And this message is delivered with an homage to the imagery in the beginning of the song, to the image of Dorothy trying to come home.

The song ends by repeating the chorus again, cluing the listeners in on the fact that the narrator is still working on living in reality, on not tuning out the world. (There is also a subtle change from “these words” to “those words”, indicating a change of tense) We are left with a beautiful, peaceful, image (which is close to my heart since dreams hold such value to me):

Every night as I’m falling asleep
Those words repeated in my head.

I’m going to try out a slightly different style for this post about our second day in Rome. Again, I will upload the pictures later. You know the drill!

General Thoughts about the Day:

Awesome Tourist Sites We Visited:

More to add later (like descriptions)

Colosseum –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum

Roman Forum –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum

Palatine Museum –  http://www.historvius.com/the-palatine-museum-735/

Spanish Steps –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Steps

Trevi Fountain –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevi_Fountain

Pantheon –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome

Santa Maria Sopra Minevra –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_sopra_Minerva

Four Rivers Fountain –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontana_dei_Quattro_Fiumi

Sant’Agnese in Agone –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant%27Agnese_in_Agone

Sant’Andrea della Valle – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant’Andrea_della_Valle

Musei Capitolini –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitoline_Museums

Food:

For breakfast, we tried to go to Victoria Emmualle 2 square (or something like that) because Deanna had read that they had a market there Monday to Saturday 7:00 – 2:00, but we saw nothing of the sort. There was a weird lady with a witch-cackle of a laugh. So that’s something. Anyway, since we couldn’t eat there, we went to a small caffe place right alongside the square. Three Chinese people were working there when we arrived, which I only mention because I was impressed that they knew Chinese, English, and Italian at the very least. I got a cheap caffe (  0.80 euro), Deanna got a small cup of juice, and we both got croissants. French croissants are way, way better. Seriously.

For lunch, we ate at a crappy-ish food stand in the metro station near the coliseum. We each had half of a pizza, and they were pretty good. Greasy, but good. Not nearly as good as the pizza the night before.

For dinner, we ate at a nice-ish restaurant near our host’s place. Deanna and I never really had an anniversary this year, so we treated this dinner like it was the anniversary dinner we missed out on. Needless to say, it was amazing. We had a caprese di buffalo, a bruschetta, a calzone, some awesome pepper and cheesy noodles, and two desserts. One of the desserts was a chocolate cake with ricotta cheese, and it was pretty good. What was the other dessert, you ask? Well, my friend, it was a tiramisu with five different kinds of berries – a red berry I don’t know, a similar green berry I don’t know, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. A red sweet sauce was poured over the berries. I’m not sure what it was exactly that made the tiramisu so heavenly (but I think it might have been the unknown berries), but all I know is that I absolutely loved it! As did Deanna. Both of us greatly preferred the tiramisu.

Sorry readers out there for not posting more often! Since I have such a steel trap, I’ll definitely just retroactively describe what’s been going on for the past month or so. Don’t worry!

Anyway, Deanna and I have begun our exciting trip to Italy! The internet isn’t too great here, so I will just add the text for now – the photos will come later.

Our trip began on the morning of October 22. We woke up, did last-minute packing, then headed out from our room in MontFerrand. We got some pastries from the local boulangerie on our way to Jardiland  (  http://www.jardiland.com/  ), the spot where we had agreed to meet with Jeff, the driver for our “covoiturage” to Lyon. It was a dark and windy morning, and after sitting on the bench waiting for Jeff for about a half hour, I decided that I wanted to bring my sweatshirt along on the trip in case it was going to be cold. So I ran back to the room in MontFerrand, grabbed the sweatshirt and some other important papers, and ran back to Jardiland. It was only 8 or so at that point, and Jeff wasn’t supposed to show up until 8:10, so we weren’t too worried. Jeff ended up being a bit late, but we found him nonetheless. Apparently another woman was traveling with us, so we all introduced ourselves. Deanna and I sat in the back while the woman sat in the front with Jeff. In hindsight, this setup might not have been ideal, because apart from the first 30 or so minutes, the front became the “French area” and the back became the “English area”. I didn’t want it to happen that way, but once they started talking they never really made much of an effort to include us. I listened for quite a bit of their conversation. I remember that they were talking about underage drinking and how they thought it was a growing problem in France. Anyway, the trip was rated as taking about three and a half hours, but it ended up being maybe one and a half or two. After arriving in Lyon, Deanna and I got our grub on at Mezzo di Pasta, a French attempt at Italian pasta (like Noodles & Company in America). We waited a while before deciding to finally buy the train tickets to go to the airport (it was only 12:00 at this point and our flight wasn’t until 3:20). The train tickets were 12.50 euro each! Seemed like a ripoff…

We did all the normal airport stuff and made our way to the gate. It was only 12:40 or so at this point and the entire gate was deserted. So Deanna napped while I played some Plants vs. Zombies for about 30 minutes. Then we bided our time until we could board the plane at 3:00.

The plane ride was mainly normal, although I would say that the view was gorgeous as usual. The in-flight instructions were interesting because the crew was all clearly French, but most things were broadcasted in both English and French. Sometimes in Italian also. We landed in Rome right on time, somewhere around 5:00.

After making our way into Rome airport, I walked up to a man at a Tourist counter to ask him, in Italian, where we could find the bathrooms. He pointed us down the hallway, to the left. I was very satisfied that he understood me. The classes had helped me somewhat, apparently. After that, we bought the Rome Passes and tickets for the bus to Termini station. The bus ride was ok apart from a screaming child in front of us (whom the parents did not even seem to try to calm…). Deanna and I were surprised to see how shabby the outskirts of Rome were. There were dumps, shantytowns, and dilapidated buildings galore. I suppose all that makes sense though.

After arriving in Termini station, we were baffled as to our next course of action. My French sim card was only valid until the end of the day, and we needed a phone in the next few days to call our hosts and to call the next driver for the covoiturage we were taking from Rome to Florence. We wandered around the station for a while hoping to find a 3, an Italian phone carrier like Verizon, because we knew they were offering a nice deal, but to no avail. We stopped in a cybercafe and paid for 15 minutes of internet to search for the store, but even after going to one of the “supposed” locations in Termini station, it was nowhere to be found. We finally settled on Wind, another Italian phone carrier. We stood in line for about 45 minutes to finally be helped by one of the Italian cashiers. I spouted out all the info I could think of and asked for advice about what we should do (in Italian). The cashier ended up recommending a certain package to us that seemed  like a deal, so we took it. Essentially, we paid 20 euro for a sim card, 250 minutes, 250 sms, and 2gb of data for a month. I thought that sounded like plenty, and the data especially was enticing since I really wanted a reliable way to have a good map of Rome on hand at all times. There was some trouble activating the sim card, finding the pin code for it, and getting the data to work, but by the next morning we had finally gotten it to work. After following the map we had taken a picture of back to the cybercafe, we made our way to the host’s apartment on Via dei Latini.

We were shocked by how big the place was! Essentially, the host Caterina is renting us an empty apartment for the next few days! Crazy. After dropping our stuff off, I collapsed into bed and fell to sleep almost immediately. Deanna was kept up by the ambient noise and by the neighboring apartments (because some tenants were talking almost right outside our place).

And thus ends our first day in Italia!