Bella Italia

{Dare I even try to post with Blogger being all temperamental and crapping out every 29 seconds? I suppose I'll risk it.} Yesterday I was in the little cafe here at work waiting for my lunch order to come up. I strolled over to the freebie stand and glanced at a few real estate guides. Then I noticed that they had a study abroad brochure for the university here in town where I did my undergrad. I picked it up and flipped through the pages and then was suddenly in tears. I did the study abroad program in Florence back in 1996, and it was most definitely the best time of my life. I didn't realize until I started looking at these young people smiling and laughing in front of the Trevi Fountain or Il Duomo how much I missed it. It was 5 months of complete joy. It was the first time I ever spent away from home for an extended period of time, and it was only my second time being abroad. I lived in an apartment in the city center with three other girls. For five months my mentality was "do it -- you might not get the chance again." And it was a blast. I remember trying to find a room for the night in Cinque Terre. We'd made no reservations, assuming we could find a room when we got there. No such luck. We ended up drinking wine in the train station with some fellow travelers, then getting lucky and having a local lead us to a random room we could rent. We stayed there with the boys we'd just met and couldn't sleep for all the laughing. I remember the next morning how bright and cool the water was along the coast. Then there was the time we all did shots of Jaggermeister and peed in the park outside of club Meccano and all the transvestite prostitutes looking for Johns. I remember wandering around Venice with a truly miserable cold but not caring because of all the gorgeous architecture and how the light struck the canals and created a glittering tableau. I remember being completely fascinated with my Art & Archaeology professor. To me he was Indiana Jones in the flesh. I remember listening to him with rapt attention as we explored the ruins of the forum in Rome. Over fall break some friends and I traveled up to Scotland where I got to visit my family's ancestral home, including the son of the laird who was too handsome for words. I remember being blown away by the feeling of standing in the castle at Edinburgh. It was one of the most spiritual moments of my life. From there we took the train to Amsterdam to meet up with Duck, only to keep missing her at every location we'd agreed on, leaving desperate trails of notes saying "meet me here at such and such a time." I finally tracked her down eating McDonald's french fries at the Flying Pig, where she told me of her harrowing trip down and how she'd had to sleep in the train station and been kicked awake and told to leave by security guards. What do you think we did after that? It is decriminalized, after all. (Then I think we might have gone to a sex show, but I can't recall if it was that trip or a subsequent trip to Amsterdam. I went to the show a few times.) Later there was the boy I met at Octoberfest in Munich. The one who I kissed for 3 or 4 hours straight and got the worst beard burn of my life. I miss Full Up, Kikuya, Noe, the Yellow Bar, shopping for shoes, drooling over the jewelry on the Ponte Vecchio, eating at our neighborhood tavola calda, Danny Rock, the Via Ghibellina, drinking wine on the steps of the Duomo, the Andean band, The Red Garter (aka the Gutter), the American bakery, the markets, the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce, Standa, the Irish pub, gellato, Club Andromeda, and so much more. I miss how alive I felt there. I miss being surrounded by beauty and history and culture and strange, foreign things. I miss walking everywhere and the food and the clothes and the train rides and the worn patina to everthing. I miss the cobblestoned streets and speaking Italian every day and being open to whatever was going to happen next. As I stood there softly tearing up, reading about the study abroad program that changed my life, I knew they were happy tears. Happy because I'd been there; I'd been one of those joyful, eager, smiling young people.

"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living." --Miriam Beard