The Swine Flu had more of an impact this June and July in Brazil than it did in the United States. Schools closed up for weeks to prevent the spread; and even now, when the threat has died back, everyone carries everywhere a little bottle of hand-sanitizer, clear gel in a small clear bottle. Sometimes for the sake of conversation they will swap bottles and invite one another to compare the smells: like offering around your snuffbox, I suppose.

In Brazil there is also a kind of artificial dieter’s sweetener. It comes in liquid form, clear liquid in a small clear bottle.

No actual mishaps resulted that I saw, but I did double-take when I saw an acquaintance hand-sanitizing his coffee.

In the US and Europe, I’m used to those signs that allow priority access for security lines to people with airline memberships or who paid princely sums for their tickets.

Brazil prioritizes in a different way: “Priority lines for disabled, elderly, pregnant women.”

Next month I’m attending a conference in Brazil. This is an unexpected treat, and something I’m really looking forward to. But I find that it’s a step up in travel challenge from anything I’ve done before.

I need a visa. All my previous international travels have been happily visa-free jaunts around Canada or Europe. Getting a visa for Brazil requires mailing away your passport (something I am not at all comfortable doing: my passport is the most important document in my life), together with a host of additional documentation concerning your birth, parentage, employment, plans in Brazil, ability to support yourself there, and entry and exit plans. “Some visitors will also need a yellow immunization card,” the website informs us coyly; but I am very relieved to see that my destination is not among the places so designated.

The process of applying for the visa requires stepping carefully through the website of the Brazilian consulate. The program that handles this is actually fairly robust, and allows you to go back and make modifications if you have chosen your options unwisely, and to review the Receipt document you get at the end (important, because you must print and mail this document). What it doesn’t do is seem robust. There are lots of instructions, scattered over many different pages. Sometimes you think you’ve read all the pertinent instructions about a particular thing (e.g., the requirements for the sort of photo to be submitted) only to find that there are more instructions, on another page, more specific than the first. Some of the instructions are apparently contradictory unless you apply fairly legalistic thinking to exactly what they might mean. And don’t call the consulate for clarification: you’ll get a voice recording that tells you to email with any visa-related questions. (I did so, but the email went cheerfully unanswered.)

It’s obvious that they’ve gotten complaints about this website because it comes with a document you can download that claims to give you step-by-step instructions on filling it out. Said document basically reproduces the web forms… and the step-by-step instructions that appear on those pages. More of almost-the-same information, but absent is the sort of feedback and glossing that might be reassuring — such as

(1) being told how your entry on the ‘purpose of visit’ drop-down relates to the visa categories listed elsewhere on the site (two different purposes of visit seemed applicable to me, and I had to try both before determining that the second corresponded to the correct visa);

(2) being assured that you will be able to come back and correct errors, should you make any;

(3) being given the option to email yourself a copy of your registration number and receipt, to prevent the loss of data (or better yet, having that happen automatically, as your email address is among the information they require you to submit).

Also unnerving, and in this case justly, are the warnings that the processing time will be four business days unless, by chance, it isn’t. In which case it will be longer, without warning; you can’t pay for expedited service. The whole site inspires me with fear, on the one hand, that something will go wrong and my travel will be made impossible, and rueful sympathy, on the other, for the perhaps harassed and overworked people who have had to write all these things to fend off importunate and unreasonable visitors to Brazil who expect instant service.

We’ll see how I feel about this in two weeks’ time, shall we?

Subsequent update: I was right to be worried, for on the first occasion the consulate returned my whole packet without visa, on the grounds that I didn’t have a sufficiently clear letter of invitation from the host organization. With fear and trembling I replaced this and sent the packet in a second time, aware that we were now within the three-week window of my trip during which one is no longer supposed to submit visa applications by mail. (But what else could I do? Fly to Chicago to oversee the submission? Impossible, with my work schedule.)

In the end it all came out right, however, and I got my passport with its colorful visa image, and the stamps denoting the money I had paid; and at the border crossing there was no trouble about the matter at all, not even the usual questions.

So I guess a visa is good for something.

…that French border police never seem to ask why you’re entering their country. Possibly that is apathy, but I prefer to think a person’s desire to enter the awesome country that is France just never needs explaining.

The architecture of theaters is a curious thing, because it often contains subtle messages about what it considers the relationship between the audience and the plays. And I don’t mean the shape of the stage and the arrangement of seats, important as those are. The message begins out in the lobby, or even on the façade. Some theaters pitch themselves as small and hip, theater for people who just like going to shows. Some (especially the ones that do musicals) pitch themselves as glittering and glamorous general-purpose entertainment, some as high cultural meccas.

The Globe Theatre seems designed as the goal of student field trips. In addition to the reproduction Shakespearean-era theater, there is a modern support building in which tickets are sold. The lobby area is tiled, floor and wall, in ugly brown-red tiles, like a school cafeteria. There is a little diorama of the theater building one is about to enter. There is a gift shop containing mildly educational souvenirs but not necessarily, say, the actual text of the plays performed. The whole set-up so valorizes the reproduction that I imagine many visitors consider the plays an accessory to the building, like the waxwork dioramas installed in stately homes.

Even the food is like food at a museum, which is not a compliment.

At the play I attended — disorientingly, a production of Euripides’ Helen in a new translation by Frank McGuinness — the standing-room Yard was full of young adolescents who plainly had been dragged along by their parents. The adolescents held instructive muttered conversations during the action. They shuffled. They snickered openly at the dramatic reunion of Helen and her husband Menelaus: not because it was badly performed, but (I suspect) because it is a rather stylized scene and because these kids were just too young to have any notion of the human experience underlying it.

I’m not against the reproduction of older styles of theater as a route to understanding the performance realities of the plays performed there, but I’m a bit against the reliquarist’s mindset that makes the reproduction Globe an object of thoughtless pilgrimage. The lasting monument of Shakespeare is not this building that sticks out foolishly on the Embankment and looks like a supersized Renaissance Faire prop. It is the living drama, which can be performed under all sorts of circumstances, provided the audience comes there to be an audience.

The same is of course true of Euripides, and fortunately the people behind the production of Helen knew this, even if some of the young people present did not. The translation was sprightly and felt accessible without being self-consciously Modern and without discarding much of the original content; the actors played with considerable heart, especially Paul McGann as Menelaus; the blend of laughter and pain, and the sense of human dignity in the face of a senselessly unfair divine order, were true to their origins; and when at the end the play dissolved into dance I felt I at last understood this curious and stylized way of finishing a story.

So it’s not a bad company, and the theater’s not a bad theater, and there is something to be said for looking back to older performance techniques. But if you go, don’t go to be a spectator or a museum-goer. Go to be a member of the audience, which is more dangerous. Go to hear what the playwrights and the actors have to say to you.

Mojito: brown sugar, lime, rum, a shot of something greenish from a squeeze bottle, and freshly spanked mint– I saw her do it. And yet it tasted as though the glass had been washed with bug spray.

I blame the greenish stuff from the squeeze bottle. What else could it have been?

(Here.)

By the standards of cathedrals, Glandèves cathedral is very small; but that should not surprise. It is in Entrevaux, a walled town of narrow off-true alleys, as constricted and picturesque as the contents of a snow globe.

The cathedral is dark when you go in, and it’s hard to make out too much of the big paintings or the star-painted ceiling or the columns that look oddly as though they’re swathed in red velvet. Then a man in a clerical collar passes you with a small acknowledgement and goes to the back of the church. The meditative silence for which you stepped inside is broken by workmanlike bangs, the clangor of metal on metal. The meditative dimness is, a moment later, broken also: lights come on one by one in answer to the bangs, showing up the gilded excesses in full electric-lamp glory, more than you wanted to see. The baroque was in good taste only in the age of candlelight, if then.

The paintings are of no special distinction. You think that, on the whole, you’d like to leave again, but it isn’t quite clear whether the clerical-collar man went to all that bother to turn on the lights for you, so that you could see the paintings, gildings, Corinthian columns, moldings, roundels, etc., in their full glory, and it would be rude to leave after–

Mercifully the lights snap back off. You stand, and walk purposefully toward the back.

The man in the clerical collar bangs and bangs again and from what little you can hear of his muttering he may be using words not entirely suited to the ecclesiastical environment. He barely acknowledges your going out. He is still struggling to enlighten the place.

One of the challenges of making a train connection through Paris — as through London — is that the train you came in on is pretty much guaranteed to come to a different station than the one on which you need to leave; and this entails a somewhat hectic trip via Metro and some unpleasant tactical decisions. If you have a layover of several hours, what do you mean to do with it? Will you put your luggage in consignment in order to let yourself wander the city? If so, do you put it in at the station where you came in, or the one where you mean to go out? Either way you have to go back to one of the stations twice, which is a bother, so perhaps you should just drag the luggage with you, prop it next to your chair at cafés, and turn a cold touristic obliviousness on anyone who expresses by word or gesture that you’re being a little inconsiderate.

For those traveling through the Gare d’Austerlitz, however, I recommend this possibility: spend some time in the nearby (very nearby) Jardin des Plantes. It’s a botanical garden, with statues honoring many French scientists of note, and there are some buildings you can go into if you like; but that’s hardly necessary if you don’t want to. There are also benches and long tree-lined avenues and you can sit and breathe fresh air, a welcome thing post-couchette.

In the morning there are joggers: not only solitary joggers such as one might see in any city, but jogging teams of fit men in t-shirts that say “SAPEURS-POMPIERS”. Literally this means SAPPER PUMPER, which sounds like a club for plumbing obsessives, but is actually French for firefighter.

My iPod has long been a traveling companion, and before that I carried a portable CD player — an expensive fragile piece of equipment that skipped on especially rattly trains and quickly drained its non-rechargeable batteries. Once upon a time I took a night train from Paris to Florence to an unending cycle of George Michael because that was the only CD I had with me. For similar reasons (and to similarly embarrassing effect) I associate Alanis Morissette with the city of Rome, and the soundtrack to Such a Long Journey with the castles along the Rhine.

But music and audio books are not always the ideal companions for a journey, or are not always enough; on loud enough transportation they can be hard to hear properly. Sometimes one wants reading material — but books are heavy and bulky to pack.

Recently I’ve been whiling away a lot of travel time with Stanza, an eBook reader for the iPod and iPhone. On my most recent trip I got through Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost; Balzac’s Petty Troubles of Marriage; Turgenev’s First Love; some dozens of short stories by L. M. Montgomery; Sabatini’s short The Abduction; and (it must be admitted) a couple of romance novels Harlequin was giving away in honor of its 60th anniversary. I also tried, before I got bored with, Stephen Baxter’s Manifold: Time, most of the other Harlequin novels on offer, etc. I would have had to bring a whole separate sack for these books if I had been carrying them in physical form.

There are other advantages: with the built-in catalogs, it’s easy to add to the collection any time I’m on a wireless network, and the screen is readable even at times when a book wouldn’t be, as for instance in a dimly-lit couchette. I wouldn’t mind if I had a larger range of reading fonts available — the installed ones are fine but don’t include any of my real favorites. Then again, I can’t revise the typesetting of a physical book at will, either.

There are a couple of disadvantages as well. One is just an extension of the same old problem: the iPod/iPhone can run out of battery power. But it does so very slowly when doing something so low-processing as running Stanza, I have to say; a single charge is good for a lot of page-turns. I only ran out of reading power once or twice.

The more significant issue is the lack of visual or tactile hints about how far one is through one’s book. The little bar at the bottom of the screen gives some information about position within a given chapter, which is useful, but it doesn’t indicate how long the whole book is. And it turns out that I want to know that more often than I had ever imagined, because in the past it has always been an instant and unconscious matter to check how far I was through the book’s binding.

Still, that’s a small price to pay for the entertainment.

If I were to suggest you spend a few hours’ layover in Nice some summer Sunday afternoon — arriving by air-conditioned TGV from Marseille or Avignon or even further off, and leaving again that evening for a pleasant medieval village in the foothills of the Maritime Alps — well, what would you imagine? Yourself perhaps sitting in a terrace overlooking the beach, eating a vastly overpriced lemon ice, a very tiny bit cross not to be able to ditch your luggage and join the frolicking in the waves?

What most likely you would not anticipate is the grim aspect of the streets around the SNCF station and the smaller Gare of the Chemins de Fer en Provence (France’s only remaining independent rail service). The remains of a monring market still fragrant (see: rotten) on the sidewalks; the special shabbiness of buildings left too long in the sun without repainting.

Now suppose it is a hot day, and you have two hours to kill, and a thirst and hunger exacerbated by having looked at (but not eaten) a very nice hotel breakfast that morning. You might wander the streets outside for a café but you would quickly find that everything — every café, boulangerie, patisserie, restaurant, and mini-market is shut tight for Sunday and that the only outcome is to involve you and your aging roller suitcase in a slow-motion dog-shit slalom: the inhabitants of Nice are no more particular about the behavior of their animals than anyone else in France.

Returning to the station, you find three vending machines. The one selling cold beverages is, first of all, openly out of water, and second, secretly out of sorts: it will not accept coin for the diet soda, though it claims not to have run out.

Beside it is a vending machine for hot beverages. Now the station is not air-conditioned and already your skin has begun to adhere to whatever it touches, but hot liquid is still liquid; with time and cultivation it might even become luke-warm liquid. The lemon tea looks most likely to be refreshing under the circumstances. You make the purchase: but what gushes into the tan plastic cup provided for its reception is not lemon tea by any imagination, cannot have encoungered either leaf or fruit in its life. It is tooth-batteringly sweet, highly artificial, and dingy brown in color. It agrees with its advertisement only one respect: it is exceedingly hot. You grasp the flimsy cup at your own peril.

The third vending machine contains nothing but sweets calculated to compound the awful dehydrating effects of the piping lemonade. The most substantial is a sort of round pastry full of almond paste, which crumbles when you try to extract it from its plastic sachet. But you really are that hungry and so you consume the crumbs. Then down the wretched, still very warm fake-lemon-flavored drink after it, tasting however little you can.

While you eat you have time to gain some sense of surroundings. The station is a big triangular room with a white marble-like floor, a specimen of that mid-20th-century architecture that attempts grandeur and achieves sterility. Around the sides of the empty floor (almost a ballroom) are three or four blue metal benches designed by someone who does not approve of sitting down. On the wall there are three landscape paintings of the train in its native habitat: a town, a village, and a hilly track in Provence, all executed as if seen from another car, by the Van Gogh of train-sickness.

Outside wait train cars. They are not trains, because “train” suggests a sequence of multiple items, and these are disconnected, mere trolleys. Though there is only one line and departures occur no more than every two hours, the station has granted itself the dignity of having three platforms and the necessary electronic sign to announce which platform to use next.

The station slowly fills with people. Something in a basket trills and howls and you are never sure whether it is a baby, a cat, a wounded dog. Passengers try the cold drink machine even though you explain to the first few that it does not work. Several turn away disappointed; but a fourth, a white-haired man of perhaps more than usual spiritual worthiness, somehow comes away with a diet Coke sweating frost, which he strains through a frost-colored mustache. His “ah!” of refreshment would suffice as an entire Coca-Cola advertising campaign. The evil eye of everyone is on his back but he does not care.

You clutch in your hand your ticket, which the ticket-seller printed off on discontinuous scraps of receipt paper and had to tape together with cellophane tape, so to be fair it was not very legible even before your sweat smudged the letters.

When at last the train departs, it departs trolley-fashion down a street of Nice and stops every 150 feet to let on another grandmother with a woven straw shopping bag. When it goes again the conductor honks a horn that sounds just like a bicycle horn. No one announces stops (like a trolley) and you can see out the front window (like a trolley). It is slow, rattly, uphill going, up into residential terraces. Outside are weedy gardens strung with laundry, and inflatable pools on the roofs of apartment blocks, and piles of bricolage junk. It’s like glancing accidentally up someone’s sleeve and getting an eyeful of armpit hair: Nice is not designed to be seen from this angle. No one takes this train seriously. The sun is flatly brilliant through the window and your hair becomes so hot to the touch that it might spontaneously combust. Still the slow progress, still the frequent stops.

Once the conductor gets out to look for several minutes at the front wheels. “Is it a crisis?” one passenger asks another in French, and the other replies “it is nothing serious,” as though this happened often.

Progress resumes, and slowly one leaves the city entirely and is traveling through a valley with steeper and steeper walls until the sun is at last mercifully blocked out and there are only trees. Beside the track is the river Var, low at this time of year, running in shallow channels over a wide bed of rocks and cracked white mud. Next to the usable track and the usable roads are others, derelict: wooden train cars painted a brave periwinkle but now left on sidings to rot, swaying rope bridges with the slats falling out, a shack with a sign over the door that says DANGER. Where the cliffs are bare they expose strata of rock that have been laid down and then upended, so what were horizontal layers have become vertical. The hillside is held back with walls of honeycomb masonry, and rockfalls prevented with netting on strong poles. It is a place where nature has been violent and people have had a violent struggle with it.

As the train-trolley rattles around steep bends and up slopes, it increasingly resembles a ride at a cheap amusement park. Underneath the jaunty air of simulated adventure is a faint apprehension that the car will genuinely fall into a ravine or (more likely) just stop dead.

After two hours or so you begin to worry about your stop. You are clearly not traveling on schedule, so you won’t be able to tell from the time when to get off, but on the other hand no one says the names of the stations when you reach them, and there aren’t even consistent signs. Everyone else just seems to know when to get off. The conductor is chatting with the other passengers as though they are all acquainted. He asks a question and some of them raise their hands and you are not sure what you missed or whether it matters that you did not raise yours. But — aided by a downy French boy with an electronic keyboard in a bag — you do manage to find your stop: Entrevaux, a walled and gated medieval city held in a bend of the Var, watched by a fortress high up the cliff.

It is just as well: it would have been another two hours, or two and a half, to Digne-les-Bains at the upper end of the line.