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amethyst73(A note from one of my non-LJ readers: she finds that it works well to click the first picture in one of my posts and view the whole slideshow before reading any of the post. Then she'll recognize the small versions of the pictures when she comes to them in the post itself.)
NEXT: Rain, pearls, and a concert
After our usual earlyish breakfast, we were taken to the Shanghai Oriental Art Center for our rehearsal with the orchestra. The hall is a relatively recent construction and is really quite nice. On the outside, the building looks like a pair of black glass globes with the tops cut off. Unfortunately, we were never in a good position to get a decent photo of it (you can see photos from another source here); about the best we could do was this sign that obviously forbade horn players from sounding their instruments outside the hall.
It's on the inside that the Art Center really shines. The hall is roughly oval, with the stage 2/3 or 3/4 of the way along the long axis. Seats are arranged in layered tier sections all around the stage - yes, including behind it, looking down onto the performers below. This really dark photo was taken from the front of the stage, looking towards the back wall of the hall. You can make out the organ pipes and the row of seats below them.
The chorus (which included the Stanford Choral Union, the LACC, and the choruses of Shanghai Jiaotong University and Fudan University) was seated in the tiers above (behind) and to the sides of the orchestra. This arrangement was fantastic for a few different reasons. First, it meant that the entire chorus could sit comfortably (and silently, thanks to a distinct lack of squeaky seats) while the orchestra played the other pieces of the concert. No shuffling around trying to line up to enter the hall as intermission began! As a corollary, the women in the chorus could sit during the "In Taberna" section of Carmina Burana, which is sung only by the men, and the entire chorus could sit for the three brief solo movements that follow "In Taberna." Not having to stand for the entirety of the 50-minute piece was a real treat.
The other aspect that endeared this arrangement to us was that, for the first time pretty much ever, we weren't standing in one linear rectangle where sopranos and altos were placed at either end with the men in the middle. Instead, we were arranged in a true curve. As a result of the arrangement, we could actually hear the other parts clearly and distinctly! This almost never happens when we perform on campus, particularly when we're in that vilest of music halls, Dinkelspiel Auditorium. In this hall (better known as "Dink"), the acoustics are such that sound gets sucked upwards into the ceiling cavity, where someone thought it might be clever to put an organ someday but never quite got round to it. The sound bounces around up there for a while and eventually finds its way back out to the audience. If you're standing in the middle of a sea of sopranos, believe me, you will never hear any other choral voice part. Ever. We're all looking forward to the new concert hall, which will be similar to that wonderful space we used in Shanghai and which is scheduled to open in just a few years.
Here's a picture of momentarily distracted me next to two of the Stanford sopranos with whom I sit most often.
One of the side benefits of singing with Chinese choruses was that I got a look at some Chinese sheet music. Here's the first couple of measures from a movement of Carmina Burana:
Curious, isn't it? Here's how it works, inasmuch as it was explained to me.
• The number indicates the scale degree. (1 = doh, 2=re, 3=mi, etc)
• (One of the) dot(s) below the number indicate how many octaves below some standard reference the note is. It's unclear to me whether both dots in this case are octave-reference dots, or whether one of them is a staccato marking (see next photo).
• The number of lines underneath a number indicate its duration: for each line, divide a single beat in half - so the first note is a quarter note, and the four notes after that are all eighths.
• You can kind of see up at the top of the photo that 1=A, the time signature is 2/4, and the tempo marking is one quarter note = 160.
• I have no idea how accidentals are notated.
You can compare the picture above with the one below, which shows the exact same passage in Western notation.
Rehearsal went quite well. We got to hear our soloists for the first time. The tenor, Chi Liming, was the most impressive of the three. I have rarely heard the dying swan movement done straight, and I'd never heard it done without resorting to falsetto, as our soloist did.
I was able to get a few pictures during the rehearsal itself. They're blurry because - as usual - I decided that a long exposure would result in a better picture than using a flash, as the subjects were so distant.
After rehearsal, we were bussed back to the hotel with the dual directions to be back at the bus by 6, and to eat a big lunch since dinner would not be till after rehearsal that night. We made a side trip to the hotel that the orchestra was staying in to pick up the per diem payments for meals on our own. This little waterfall was outside that hotel.
We hooked up with a small group interested in going to the Jade Buddha temple for the afternoon. But before I get to the temple, I have a small digression on traffic and personal space in China.
We had all been warned, both at a pre-tour meeting and in the Medium Red Book, that pedestrian right of way effectively does not exist in China, and that we all needed to be extremely careful when crossing streets. No warning was given that similar caution was required when one was walking along a sidewalk. As a few of us walked along the sidewalk crossing the driveway into the hotel, we were given quite a scare by a car that came merrily barreling down the driveway with the intention of entering the busy roadway apparently regardless of any pedestrians who wished to share the same space. We all scattered, panicked but uninjured.
The group of us who wanted to go to the Jade Buddha temple piled into a pair of taxis. I ended up sitting in the front seat of one of them.
I have ridden in taxis in a couple of big cities before (New York and Boston), but never have I been made so nervous as I was during the ride to the Jade Buddha temple. Clearance for pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars felt like it was measured in scant inches. Nothing was thought of swerving into the opposing lane of traffic in order to take advantage of a barely-car-sized gap a vehicle or two ahead of where we were. I spent the first two minutes of the ride desperately squelching my squeaks of terror... then decided that our driver had presumably been driving around Shanghai for some time, and would probably get us to our destination in one piece. He did, of course; otherwise I probably wouldn't be writing this journal! But I will note that our taxi got to the temple in only about 15 minutes. Our companions were left behind in the first 30 seconds of our journey, and apparently took a good 30 minutes to get there.
I believe I've since figured out why traffic was so frightening in Shanghai.
In addition to being told about the extra caution needed as a pedestrian, we'd also been told that personal space is considerably smaller in China than it is here in the States. For the most part, I never really experienced this phenomenon while I was there. My theory, however, goes like this: Personal space is smaller in China than in the U.S. This is true no matter the size of individuals involved - whether it be human-human, human-car, or car-car, personal space is just a lot smaller.
Once we arrived at the Jade Buddha temple, we hung around outside for a while wondering where our companions in the other taxi were. While we waited, a nice fellow came over and told us some stuff about the temple. The temple is named for a pair of large jade statues given to the temple by Burma in the late 1800's. During the Cultural Revolution, the monks plastered the outside walls with pictures of Chairman Mao so that the army wouldn't destroy it. He ended by giving us the business card of the store he worked for: a pearl factory down the street, where you could see how oysters were opened and stuff like that. We thanked him sincerely and decided to go ahead and pay our 20 yuan (a little under $3) to enter the temple grounds, figuring that the other part of the group would get there eventually.
The temple is actually a fairly large complex, which makes sense as it's an active temple with monks and all. The main courtyard has braziers in it that visitors light bunches of incense at. The incense bunches are then waved in the directions of each of the surrounding sacred buildings.
A pile of crumbs was placed on the top of this stone lotus platform, which attracted a bunch of sparrows.
The aspect of the temple that struck me again and again was the tremendous size of the statues present in the various worship spaces. I don't think I'd ever been in a Buddhist temple before this. I'd seen the occasional statue in museums, but the experience is somewhat different from walking into a dimly-lit room and looking up - and up! - to meet the faces of the statues in their proper homes. The four statues below were probably 12-15 feet tall.
This Buddha was about 18 feet tall. Apologies again for the blurriness; we wished for a portable tripod on numerous occasions for these long-exposure no-flash shots, but we didn't have one.
While this other Buddha isn't as large as the previous one, I found him impressive because of the huge array of human figures carved on the screen behind him.
Leaving the front temple area, we made our way up a set of stairs into what turned out to be the gift shop. Some smaller pieces of artwork were on display here, including this beautiful embroidery of Quan Yin.
In a case nearby was one of the most amazing pieces of woodcarving I've ever seen. It was a single piece of wood about 5 feet long by 4 feet high by 6-8 inches deep, and every bit of it was lovingly carved into the Buddha and the 100 disciples. It took two monks 3 years to carve this piece of art.
Details in the carving:
A nice docent fellow told us about the carving, then showed us some of the items available for sale in the gift shop. We didn't know it, but we were experiencing our first example of Chinese shopkeeping and selling. Jade dragons were shown to us and we were given an explanation of how to tell whether a piece was really jade or not; this was followed by entreaties to purchase, with the dual promises that all proceeds benefited the temple and that he could get us a discount. The thing we were most tempted by in the gift shop were what one might loosely term 'finger paintings'. A fellow (scion of one of only 4 families in China who knew this skill, supposedly) was sitting at a table with some paper and a plate of black ink. He would dip various parts of the pinky edge of his right hand (hand, finger, fingertip, or fingernail) into the ink and then stamp or stroke the paper to create marvelous landscapes. It was fascinating to watch him work, but we chose not to purchase anything.
We continued wandering the complex. After all, we hadn't actually found the jade Buddhas yet. These signs provided us with some guidance, though we never found the koi.
We wound our way up some stairs after paying a little extra to get into the area where the jade Buddhas were. As turned out to be the case in virtually all older buildings in China, the rooflines were decorated with figures. We learned later that the dragon is a particular favorite to carve on rooftops: it's a creature of water in Chinese mythology, and thus is supposed to protect the traditional wooden buildings from fire.
Detail of the roof:
We only managed to find one of the two jade Buddhas. I think I was expecting to see another mammoth statue, uniformly green and without detail. My expectations were totally confounded when I saw the skin-pale slightly smaller-than-life-sized creature reclining in a large display case at the far end of the room. I'm not sure whether the details of facial features and jeweled decorations were paint or gemstones. Unsurprisingly, we were not allowed to take photographs of this stunning yet totally serene devotional statue.
We wound our way back downstairs and found yet more courtyards and walkways. Here's what one walkway looked like, completely bedecked with red lanterns.
In this area were a whole lot of etchings on rectangular pieces of slate (you can see them on the right-hand wall in the picture above). There's the usual blurriness, but you can still get a sense of the detail. There were easily over thirty of these works in the complex, each of them unique.
By this time it was getting to be kind of late in the afternoon and we were all hungry. We ate our belated lunch in the restaurant that was part of the temple complex. Being part of a Buddhist temple, all the dishes were naturally vegetarian. However, this restaurant made a specialty of dishes that appeared to be meat while actually consisting of 100% vegetarian materials. I had a "seafood" soup: the "scallops" were obviously little custard-like egg things and were only vaguely convincing, we guessed that the "squid" pieces were some sort of kelp and were completely convincing, and the "shrimp" pieces were unfortunately the same substance as the "squid" and thereby completely unconvincing. Someone else had "chicken croquettes" which, if one assumed that the chicken meat had been ground rather finer than usual, were quite convincing as well.
We caught a pair of taxis back to the hotel. Our driver took a look at the hotel card (a small piece of cardboard upon which was written the name and location of the hotel in Chinese that you could get from the hotel reception desk) we handed him and drove along confidently, dropping us at the hotel with no mishaps. Our companions in the other taxi weren't quite so lucky; their driver was apparently illiterate! They pointed at our taxi and indicated that he should follow us. More traffic laws than usual were broken in Shanghai that afternoon as their driver kept up with us. Thus ended what we felt was our first honest-to-goodness adventure in China.
After a long rehearsal that morning, the second rehearsal was exhausting. But the chorus was lucky; the orchestra had been in that hall at work essentially all day, and we found out later that our conductor for the evening (the Stanford orchestral conductor) was ill in addition to being exhausted. Everyone was very tired and tempers were short. When we rehearsed "Cosmic Flames," a piece that had been commissioned by the orchestral conductor for our concert series in China, the conductor caught the chorus in confusion. There was about a page of the piece that we had barely worked on during our three rehearsals back at Stanford, and which at one point it had been determined that we simply wouldn't sing: the section was rhythmically quite complex, and all our parts were mirrored in the orchestra. However, after several minutes of work devoted to that section, we finally got the hang of it. We were all very glad when rehearsal ended at 9PM.
We were bussed to a restaurant for dinner which was - somewhat astonishingly after our earlier tour dinner experiences - quite tasty! There was plenty of food and a wide variety thereof. We ate well, delighted by the mysterious upswing in food quality. We found out later via the choral grapevine that there had been a spontaneous late-night conference between the Americans in charge (the conductors and general overseer) and the tour company after the river cruise and its questionable dinner. The quality of the food was discussed; it was eventually settled that the Americans would be in charge of choosing the menu at all future places where the group ate. The arrangement was certainly satisfactory as far as we were concerned, as every tour meal after that meeting was yummy.
It's on the inside that the Art Center really shines. The hall is roughly oval, with the stage 2/3 or 3/4 of the way along the long axis. Seats are arranged in layered tier sections all around the stage - yes, including behind it, looking down onto the performers below. This really dark photo was taken from the front of the stage, looking towards the back wall of the hall. You can make out the organ pipes and the row of seats below them.
The chorus (which included the Stanford Choral Union, the LACC, and the choruses of Shanghai Jiaotong University and Fudan University) was seated in the tiers above (behind) and to the sides of the orchestra. This arrangement was fantastic for a few different reasons. First, it meant that the entire chorus could sit comfortably (and silently, thanks to a distinct lack of squeaky seats) while the orchestra played the other pieces of the concert. No shuffling around trying to line up to enter the hall as intermission began! As a corollary, the women in the chorus could sit during the "In Taberna" section of Carmina Burana, which is sung only by the men, and the entire chorus could sit for the three brief solo movements that follow "In Taberna." Not having to stand for the entirety of the 50-minute piece was a real treat.
The other aspect that endeared this arrangement to us was that, for the first time pretty much ever, we weren't standing in one linear rectangle where sopranos and altos were placed at either end with the men in the middle. Instead, we were arranged in a true curve. As a result of the arrangement, we could actually hear the other parts clearly and distinctly! This almost never happens when we perform on campus, particularly when we're in that vilest of music halls, Dinkelspiel Auditorium. In this hall (better known as "Dink"), the acoustics are such that sound gets sucked upwards into the ceiling cavity, where someone thought it might be clever to put an organ someday but never quite got round to it. The sound bounces around up there for a while and eventually finds its way back out to the audience. If you're standing in the middle of a sea of sopranos, believe me, you will never hear any other choral voice part. Ever. We're all looking forward to the new concert hall, which will be similar to that wonderful space we used in Shanghai and which is scheduled to open in just a few years.
Here's a picture of momentarily distracted me next to two of the Stanford sopranos with whom I sit most often.
One of the side benefits of singing with Chinese choruses was that I got a look at some Chinese sheet music. Here's the first couple of measures from a movement of Carmina Burana:
Curious, isn't it? Here's how it works, inasmuch as it was explained to me.
• The number indicates the scale degree. (1 = doh, 2=re, 3=mi, etc)
• (One of the) dot(s) below the number indicate how many octaves below some standard reference the note is. It's unclear to me whether both dots in this case are octave-reference dots, or whether one of them is a staccato marking (see next photo).
• The number of lines underneath a number indicate its duration: for each line, divide a single beat in half - so the first note is a quarter note, and the four notes after that are all eighths.
• You can kind of see up at the top of the photo that 1=A, the time signature is 2/4, and the tempo marking is one quarter note = 160.
• I have no idea how accidentals are notated.
You can compare the picture above with the one below, which shows the exact same passage in Western notation.
Rehearsal went quite well. We got to hear our soloists for the first time. The tenor, Chi Liming, was the most impressive of the three. I have rarely heard the dying swan movement done straight, and I'd never heard it done without resorting to falsetto, as our soloist did.
I was able to get a few pictures during the rehearsal itself. They're blurry because - as usual - I decided that a long exposure would result in a better picture than using a flash, as the subjects were so distant.
After rehearsal, we were bussed back to the hotel with the dual directions to be back at the bus by 6, and to eat a big lunch since dinner would not be till after rehearsal that night. We made a side trip to the hotel that the orchestra was staying in to pick up the per diem payments for meals on our own. This little waterfall was outside that hotel.
We hooked up with a small group interested in going to the Jade Buddha temple for the afternoon. But before I get to the temple, I have a small digression on traffic and personal space in China.
We had all been warned, both at a pre-tour meeting and in the Medium Red Book, that pedestrian right of way effectively does not exist in China, and that we all needed to be extremely careful when crossing streets. No warning was given that similar caution was required when one was walking along a sidewalk. As a few of us walked along the sidewalk crossing the driveway into the hotel, we were given quite a scare by a car that came merrily barreling down the driveway with the intention of entering the busy roadway apparently regardless of any pedestrians who wished to share the same space. We all scattered, panicked but uninjured.
The group of us who wanted to go to the Jade Buddha temple piled into a pair of taxis. I ended up sitting in the front seat of one of them.
I have ridden in taxis in a couple of big cities before (New York and Boston), but never have I been made so nervous as I was during the ride to the Jade Buddha temple. Clearance for pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars felt like it was measured in scant inches. Nothing was thought of swerving into the opposing lane of traffic in order to take advantage of a barely-car-sized gap a vehicle or two ahead of where we were. I spent the first two minutes of the ride desperately squelching my squeaks of terror... then decided that our driver had presumably been driving around Shanghai for some time, and would probably get us to our destination in one piece. He did, of course; otherwise I probably wouldn't be writing this journal! But I will note that our taxi got to the temple in only about 15 minutes. Our companions were left behind in the first 30 seconds of our journey, and apparently took a good 30 minutes to get there.
I believe I've since figured out why traffic was so frightening in Shanghai.
In addition to being told about the extra caution needed as a pedestrian, we'd also been told that personal space is considerably smaller in China than it is here in the States. For the most part, I never really experienced this phenomenon while I was there. My theory, however, goes like this: Personal space is smaller in China than in the U.S. This is true no matter the size of individuals involved - whether it be human-human, human-car, or car-car, personal space is just a lot smaller.
Once we arrived at the Jade Buddha temple, we hung around outside for a while wondering where our companions in the other taxi were. While we waited, a nice fellow came over and told us some stuff about the temple. The temple is named for a pair of large jade statues given to the temple by Burma in the late 1800's. During the Cultural Revolution, the monks plastered the outside walls with pictures of Chairman Mao so that the army wouldn't destroy it. He ended by giving us the business card of the store he worked for: a pearl factory down the street, where you could see how oysters were opened and stuff like that. We thanked him sincerely and decided to go ahead and pay our 20 yuan (a little under $3) to enter the temple grounds, figuring that the other part of the group would get there eventually.
The temple is actually a fairly large complex, which makes sense as it's an active temple with monks and all. The main courtyard has braziers in it that visitors light bunches of incense at. The incense bunches are then waved in the directions of each of the surrounding sacred buildings.
A pile of crumbs was placed on the top of this stone lotus platform, which attracted a bunch of sparrows.
The aspect of the temple that struck me again and again was the tremendous size of the statues present in the various worship spaces. I don't think I'd ever been in a Buddhist temple before this. I'd seen the occasional statue in museums, but the experience is somewhat different from walking into a dimly-lit room and looking up - and up! - to meet the faces of the statues in their proper homes. The four statues below were probably 12-15 feet tall.
This Buddha was about 18 feet tall. Apologies again for the blurriness; we wished for a portable tripod on numerous occasions for these long-exposure no-flash shots, but we didn't have one.
While this other Buddha isn't as large as the previous one, I found him impressive because of the huge array of human figures carved on the screen behind him.
Leaving the front temple area, we made our way up a set of stairs into what turned out to be the gift shop. Some smaller pieces of artwork were on display here, including this beautiful embroidery of Quan Yin.
In a case nearby was one of the most amazing pieces of woodcarving I've ever seen. It was a single piece of wood about 5 feet long by 4 feet high by 6-8 inches deep, and every bit of it was lovingly carved into the Buddha and the 100 disciples. It took two monks 3 years to carve this piece of art.
Details in the carving:
A nice docent fellow told us about the carving, then showed us some of the items available for sale in the gift shop. We didn't know it, but we were experiencing our first example of Chinese shopkeeping and selling. Jade dragons were shown to us and we were given an explanation of how to tell whether a piece was really jade or not; this was followed by entreaties to purchase, with the dual promises that all proceeds benefited the temple and that he could get us a discount. The thing we were most tempted by in the gift shop were what one might loosely term 'finger paintings'. A fellow (scion of one of only 4 families in China who knew this skill, supposedly) was sitting at a table with some paper and a plate of black ink. He would dip various parts of the pinky edge of his right hand (hand, finger, fingertip, or fingernail) into the ink and then stamp or stroke the paper to create marvelous landscapes. It was fascinating to watch him work, but we chose not to purchase anything.
We continued wandering the complex. After all, we hadn't actually found the jade Buddhas yet. These signs provided us with some guidance, though we never found the koi.
We wound our way up some stairs after paying a little extra to get into the area where the jade Buddhas were. As turned out to be the case in virtually all older buildings in China, the rooflines were decorated with figures. We learned later that the dragon is a particular favorite to carve on rooftops: it's a creature of water in Chinese mythology, and thus is supposed to protect the traditional wooden buildings from fire.
Detail of the roof:
We only managed to find one of the two jade Buddhas. I think I was expecting to see another mammoth statue, uniformly green and without detail. My expectations were totally confounded when I saw the skin-pale slightly smaller-than-life-sized creature reclining in a large display case at the far end of the room. I'm not sure whether the details of facial features and jeweled decorations were paint or gemstones. Unsurprisingly, we were not allowed to take photographs of this stunning yet totally serene devotional statue.
We wound our way back downstairs and found yet more courtyards and walkways. Here's what one walkway looked like, completely bedecked with red lanterns.
In this area were a whole lot of etchings on rectangular pieces of slate (you can see them on the right-hand wall in the picture above). There's the usual blurriness, but you can still get a sense of the detail. There were easily over thirty of these works in the complex, each of them unique.
By this time it was getting to be kind of late in the afternoon and we were all hungry. We ate our belated lunch in the restaurant that was part of the temple complex. Being part of a Buddhist temple, all the dishes were naturally vegetarian. However, this restaurant made a specialty of dishes that appeared to be meat while actually consisting of 100% vegetarian materials. I had a "seafood" soup: the "scallops" were obviously little custard-like egg things and were only vaguely convincing, we guessed that the "squid" pieces were some sort of kelp and were completely convincing, and the "shrimp" pieces were unfortunately the same substance as the "squid" and thereby completely unconvincing. Someone else had "chicken croquettes" which, if one assumed that the chicken meat had been ground rather finer than usual, were quite convincing as well.
We caught a pair of taxis back to the hotel. Our driver took a look at the hotel card (a small piece of cardboard upon which was written the name and location of the hotel in Chinese that you could get from the hotel reception desk) we handed him and drove along confidently, dropping us at the hotel with no mishaps. Our companions in the other taxi weren't quite so lucky; their driver was apparently illiterate! They pointed at our taxi and indicated that he should follow us. More traffic laws than usual were broken in Shanghai that afternoon as their driver kept up with us. Thus ended what we felt was our first honest-to-goodness adventure in China.
After a long rehearsal that morning, the second rehearsal was exhausting. But the chorus was lucky; the orchestra had been in that hall at work essentially all day, and we found out later that our conductor for the evening (the Stanford orchestral conductor) was ill in addition to being exhausted. Everyone was very tired and tempers were short. When we rehearsed "Cosmic Flames," a piece that had been commissioned by the orchestral conductor for our concert series in China, the conductor caught the chorus in confusion. There was about a page of the piece that we had barely worked on during our three rehearsals back at Stanford, and which at one point it had been determined that we simply wouldn't sing: the section was rhythmically quite complex, and all our parts were mirrored in the orchestra. However, after several minutes of work devoted to that section, we finally got the hang of it. We were all very glad when rehearsal ended at 9PM.
We were bussed to a restaurant for dinner which was - somewhat astonishingly after our earlier tour dinner experiences - quite tasty! There was plenty of food and a wide variety thereof. We ate well, delighted by the mysterious upswing in food quality. We found out later via the choral grapevine that there had been a spontaneous late-night conference between the Americans in charge (the conductors and general overseer) and the tour company after the river cruise and its questionable dinner. The quality of the food was discussed; it was eventually settled that the Americans would be in charge of choosing the menu at all future places where the group ate. The arrangement was certainly satisfactory as far as we were concerned, as every tour meal after that meeting was yummy.
-------
NEXT: Rain, pearls, and a concert
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Date: 2008-07-28 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 04:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 05:28 am (UTC)I remember having a similarly terrifying experience in a taxi in Rome. Careening down medieval alleys, with stone walls on either side maybe 3 inches from the mirrors, mixed with crazily busy streets and pedestrian dodging. Scary!
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Date: 2008-07-29 02:58 am (UTC)I've heard that a lot of the world has much scarier traffic than we do in most parts of the States. India is said to be particularly horrendous - my brother had some interesting experiences being driven around when he was there on a business trip. WRT Rome, I remember an old travel tape my mom had when I was growing up, which explained how to be a pedestrian in Rome this way: Look carefully to the right, then to the left... then throw caution to the winds and run like hell!