Friday, March 25, 2011

fishing


At least, perhaps not exactly fishing, but in the early daylight, when it was still drizzling, a man - at least, I think it was a man - dressed in a great deal of white protective clothing (though not quite at the nuclear decontamination level) stepped into the pond water feature outside my hotel window and started fishing out - well, not a lot.   What might people have discarded there on a Thursday night, anyway?   Old beer cans, useless lottery tickets, drunkenly discarded shoes?   Not much, one would have thought, given last night's heavy rain.   It's not like the time when, back in around 1977, I was staying in a very cheap pensione in Rome that just happened to overlook the Trevi Fountain - certainly one of the best hotel room views I've ever had (now, I see, looking at its website, the relatively chic looking Hotel Trevi - I doubt the management has hung onto my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I inadvertently left there).   And digging out an image with which to make a link, I hit on one covered with school parties, which reminded me that, indeed, I'd been there myself with a school trip in 1969, and had bought Gran a lace handkerchief or two from a little store on the piazza (probably made in a factory in Treviso, but I thought that I was proudly carrying home something authentic and artisanal).   At night, they turned the Trevi fountain off, and street people would jump in and gather up the handfuls of coins that tourists had thrown in during the day ... this may not apply, however, in downtown Los Angeles ...

Technical note: taken in Hipstamatic, and then manipulated as a quad-tone in Photoshop.

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