This would have a really cool cover photo but I still haven’t uploaded any of my photos to my computer because I am a huge mess!!
So in May I went to Italy, and when people have asked me how my trip went, I’ve responded pretty generically, as if they were asking me how I liked a dessert they had personally prepared. “Cool. Awesome. Great,” I’ve replied in monotony. And it was all of those things, but it was also confusing and broadening and sometimes sad. I loved Rome and the sea. I missed America and fried eggs and clean cut, pastel clothed boys. Do you see how this is going?
Here’s a little more: Italy ruined coffee and pepperoni and Olive Garden for me, but as I type this I’m drinking coffee from the Keurig with CoffeeMate creamer in it, so I guess if I’m anything, I’m consistent. I cried when I stepped off the plane in DC and saw a Starbucks. But I can drink espresso straight now, so I have broadened my horizons as every study abroad brochure advertises. Speaking of studying, I barely studied at all. We’ll leave it at that.
I thought a lot about ownership while I was in Italy. Some days we had nothing planned, and I didn’t want to spend 20 euros for a train ticket, so I would sit in the park near our hotel and just think. I was peeved at iTunes for putting all of my music in the Cloud, because now I couldn’t listen to it without WiFi and I didn’t have a data plan abroad. It seemed strange to me that songs I had “owned” two years ago were now inaccessible to me, like an ex-boyfriend or a pair of size zero jeans from middle school. I thought about 99-year leases on land in Hawaii and all sorts of other ways we fool ourselves into believing that our possessions are constant. I developed a sort of espresso fueled angst, which is to say I assimilated with the Italian youth culture. There are a lot of candid pictures of me looking pissed off from this trip, but I had a good time, I swear.
While I sat in the park, people often tried to talk to me and guess my nationality. I had a solid background in 100 level Italian, so I felt pretty prepared to engage them, as long as they followed a predetermined script and enunciated as though I was deaf. Often, I could physically feel my synapses firing slowly, as though I were a career meth addict trying to take the ACT. The answers were there, somewhere, but I was slow. I was mistaken for French several times, which I attribute to pure confusion because I am both blonde and curly-haired and not particularly thin nor sophisticated. Italians know about California. I explained Kansas a lot.
I never got pickpocket-ed but I’m not sure if the wallet I bought is real leather, which is fine with me because I like it regardless. I grew strong knees (we stood and walked all the time) and a weak alcohol tolerance (I had to lay off the midday wine). I liked dressing simply but hated the clothes I had brought with me by the end of the month. I felt uncomfortable not knowing all the cultural norms. The front desk man at my hotel listened to American country music and I sang along under my breath. I texted my boyfriend, but we lived in a perpetual state of night; it was always 3 a.m. for one of us. I swam in the sea and let my hair get sun bleached. Our hotel in Rome brought us breakfast in bed (coffee and pastries) and it made their microscopic shower worth it. I drank wine and ate pasta and road on a gondola in Venice (the lights on the water at night are magical). The cities never felt romantic, but they were often beautiful or sleepy or exciting. This paragraph, much like my trip, is a grab bag of ideas. No apologies. Some confusion.
anything for a joke 