Scrapbook Sunday: First edition!

Scrapbook Sunday is a feature I conjured while in the shower, which, as you probably already know, is a place in which all inspiration is born: I cannot even count how many plots and characters and blog posts and photographs I've brainstormed while naked and soapy. (Sometimes I also sing Disney songs in the shower, but only when something particularly remarkable has happened, like my finally managing to stuff my short hair into a ponytail.)

I keep a travel scrapbook. The book itself is a leather-bound handmade thing that my brother gave me, and the scraps that go inside it range from plasters to old gummy bears to postcards to receipts. I don't write in it; that's for my journal. My travel scrapbook is like a giant found-object collage, jumbled in no particular order, filled with things that jog my memory, sometimes in a good way, and sometimes in a bad way, but all in good fun. Also, I love gluing stuff.

The first page I'm posting here is sparse, but it's one of my favourite pages, because it's so tangible to me: I look at it and I'm back in Rome, in hot April air, under starry skies, shoved up against the Trevi Fountain by hoards of tourists tossing coins into the water (which is a shame for the buskers, really, whose guitar cases are generally chintzy). I remember the neon laser pens being fired at Poseidon's face and the strong meaty stink of street food, and the way the gelato stick cut my mouth when I bit down too hard on it. I never go anywhere without my camera, but photographs pale in comparison to lived things, the things we touched, when we went away. 

Ah, the sweet chemical stench of Pritt-Stick. 

Being polite Canadians, my friends were determined to leave a note behind on the television screen to thank the woman who cleaned our hotel room as best she could, and I say as best she could because the room was pretty fucking janky: a balcony with a broken window, a shower with no door, a bidet with an alarming crack in it, bed sheets thinner than cellophane, and a strange greenish carpet that, should one fall on it, might scuff off patches of skin. I remember standing on that carpet as a friend showed me the tattoo she'd gotten at a studio in Hamilton just weeks before, that was now disappearing before her very eyes like Kool-Aid crystals.

(Just before I left Canada, I met a woman in the library who couldn't stop gushing over my tattoos, and she showed me hers: some unintelligible flowers on her ankle that had probably started out looking lovely but were now fading like all hell after a couple of months. She was extremely upset about it, so I asked her where she'd gotten it done, and she quoted the same studio that my unwitting friend had used, and that I had used for my monroe piercing, which was a massive disaster as two days after I got it pierced the cheap shitty jewellery they'd used popped right out of my face. I had to wear an earring in it until the mall opened and I could rush out and buy something else.)

One of us flooded the bathroom, and another one of us broke the balcony window more, so that it wouldn't shut, and our guilt was overwhelming (mine less so than theirs. I felt bad about it, yeah, but try as I might, I could never quite capture that self-deprecating abstract regret that Canadians have nurtured so well) so we figured we'd leave a note on the TV screen for the maid. The problem was that none of us spoke Italian, and the WiFi was cruel in its apathy, thus we were forced to haphazardly spell, "Grazie", which took several tries but did probably culminate in the maid not cussing us after we left. 

I snaffled one of the failed post-its. That's it, stuck into my scrapbook, with the gelato stick that I jabbed my mouth on in front of the Trevi Fountain, and the two-euro change I got for my fiver.

And so, behold: Musei Vaticani.

Vatican City, like the Eiffel Tower, is the bane of its city-fellows existence: just as Parisians have campaigned for the ousting of the Tower, so too have Romans dubbed the Vatican "a knife in the heart of Rome". This is interesting, considering the hulking beast of the Coliseum that crouches among them, the site of a hundred years of slave murder, but I guess you pick and choose your battles. Being very much not Roman, I opt to keep my nose out of the matter, and to enjoy the almost unbearable beauty of St. Peter's Basilica, and the Sistine Chapel.

I've misplaced my photographs of the Basilica, which sucks, and I have no photographs of the Sistine Chapel, which is typical. None but those sanctioned by the Pope and taken professionally exist. Photography is barred inside the Sistine Chapel, which you can bitch and moan about until you see it, and consider how spectacularly preserved it is, from floor to ceiling to walls. 

And in any case, do you really want a photograph? Do you want to waste time looking through a viewfinder that can't possibly capture brush strokes, or the silence, or the chill in the air? You shouldn't. The Sistine Chapel feels like another planet, like stepping out of the far reaches of the solar system, away from that thrashing sun and the roaring of Roman traffic. It's peace in brick and paint and wood. It's spiritual, and these words are coming from someone who is utterly disconnected from any semblance of religious faith. That you can have a religious experience without the actual interference of religion speaks to how powerful the Sistine Chapel is in its atmosphere.

I feel like this is the essence of the travel scrapbook. Why would I bother with photography, when touching the torn edges of the paper my chorizo baguette was wrapped in can tear me back to sitting at the edge of St. Peter's Square, while some extremely bold Italian pigeons had a gang gathering around my feet? My ticket to Musei Vaticani reeks of the cold dust and absolute silence of the Sistine Chapel, filled with the ghosts of Catholicism's long (and oftentimes volatile) history. The euro and my gelato stick ought to be haunted, with all of the things that live inside them.

HYOH. Photographs are beautiful, but seeing is easy. Feeling things yields a far greater reward.