In a deli restroom:

It’s hard to “use” a toilet if you “can’t put anything” into it.

Since we apparently have a number of clothesline fans on the blog, I thought I’d share one of my favorite pieces of art with you all. It’s called “Fruit Bats,” by Lin Onus, an aboriginal Australian artist, and it riffs on the laundry hoists that are ubiquitous throughout Australia. This bit is a detail — check out the whole piece and its critical description.

When we got back from Italy last week, we returned to a surprise: a power outage. There was about an hour of daylight left, so we were able to dig out some tea lights and flash lights and get ourselves set up. And fortunately, we have a gas stove, and were able to get some tea going.

It was all very London-during-the-blitz, as we sat around drinking our tea by candlelight for a couple of hours before the power came on, and it wasn’t half bad. Normally, when we get home, we pounce right online and back into our normal work lives. It was rather nice not to have that as an option, to simply relax with tea and candles, however involuntarily, for a few hours before resuming everyday life. I wonder if we’d have the discipline to do that without a power outage. I suspect we wouldn’t.

Are there any American women alive who are comfortable with their own fashion sense when they are in Europe? I’m certainly not; it’s really quite sad. Eventually I suppose you just give up trying to look good while you’re actually there, and simply take notes on interesting looks to attempt to replicate when you get home. Here are a few major trends I noted:

1. Big wrappy things in chunky knits and constructed of various hybrid forms of shawl/cardigan. Like your grandmother started knitting you a sweater (using needles the size of dowel rods because her hand/eye coordination isn’t what it used to be), but forgot halfway through and made it a poncho instead. Should look rather like a large, unraveling fishing net. Usually in grey, because

2. Grey. In every hue from pale dove to charcoal. Grey is very, very big in Genoa. Also,

3. Purple and blue. Specifically, deep, neurotic blues: midnight, peacock, cobalt.

3. Colored tights or leggings. Purple, pink, green, occasionally orange. Worn with

4. Short dresses, and

5. Boots. Every height, every style.

So the iconic Genovese outfit is a short dress worn with a roughly knit grey shawligan draped around the top, leggings, and boots. For a handy reminder, here’s an annotated picture I took of the interior of a dress shop in Corniglia, one of the Cinque Terre. Corniglia is at the top of a mountain (you have to climb 382 steps to get to it!). As you can see by the rock wall, the dress shop is cut right into the side of the mountain:

After the Science Festival in Genoa, we went to Cinque Terre for a few days. The Cinque Terre are five small villages nestled along the coastline. You can walk from one to another; the walks range from mountainous hikes on narrow trails to a kilometer’s stroll across a paved walkway (with a pub halfway between). We did one of the mountainous hikes last time; this year’s visit was less strenuous. We stayed in Monterosso, the largest of the villages:

(More after the jump)

The first one is for the ConductMom, because she likes pictures of laundry lines:

This is a big fancy palazzo:

This is a mosaic around the fountain of the big fancy palazzo. The mosaic went all the way around it and was made of long stones, which Mr. Improbable said (and I agree) is an impressive feat of engineering:

I told you I was going to learn to shoot!

Cousin Gary, behind me, is wearing the Sox cap I brought him in exchange for shooting lessons.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City is famous for its wide expanse of green lawn. In 1994, giant shuttlecocks were installed on it. From the museum’s website:

The husband and wife team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen were commissioned in 1994 to design a sculpture for The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. They responded to the formality of the original neoclassical building and the green expanse of its lawn by imagining the Museum as a badminton net and the lawn as a playing field. The pair designed four birdies or shuttlecocks that were placed as though they had just landed on opposite sides of the net. Each shuttlecock weighs 5,500 pounds, stands nearly 18 feet tall and has a diameter of some 16 feet.

From Robin’s camera:

And a picture of me at the Rainy Day Books reading. This is that black dress, by the way. You can see how comfortable and easily accessorized it is. (Yes, it does look smashing with the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan.)

The New York Times Magazine ran an article this Sunday about the Uniform Project, the brainchild of Sheena Matheiken, which “involves wearing the same dress every day for a year, and seeing just how aesthetically creative she could be despite that limitation.” As you can see if you click on the second link, Ms. Matheiken can be very creative.

I was tempted to do this on my recent trip to Kansas City. One of the dresses I took with me is a mid-calf, sleeveless black dress from the Chico’s Travelers line. These clothes are all wrinkle-resistant and quick-drying, so you can wash them out every night, hang them up, and be good to go in the morning. (An extra bit of advice: Traveler’s tank tops manage to be snug yet forgiving, and because the fabric is slippery they double brilliantly as undershirts in the winter.)

Anyway, that dress was so comfortable that although I did wear the other clothes I brought, it occurred to me I would have been fine with just that one garment, and enough shawls, t-shirts (for layering under or over), scarves, and other accessories to go with.

Have any of my globe- (or country-) trotting female readers ever tried this? Traveling with just one dress, or just one skirt or pair of pants? I don’t mean in situations where you’re doing the youth-hostel-and-single-backpack postcollege Eurotour, obviously, or hiking the Australian outback. That would be too easy. I mean the kind of trip–maybe, as mine did, mixing the business and personal–where social norms or your personal choice would dictate some variety of outfits. How did it go?