The World's Biggest Shoes

23:43. November 30, 2011. My Apartment in Firenze.

These past few weekends I was lucky enough to go to Switzerland and England. These particular trips were different from the rest of the traveling I’ve done because instead of staying in a hostel I had the privilege of staying in two lovely homes. I happen to have a good friend who lives in Switzerland and she and her husband were kind enough not only to host Lacey and I for the weekend, but also to show us a very good time. In England we stayed with an old coworker of my mom’s who I haven’t seen since I was six, she also was a fantastic host to us. There are many things I could say about these experiences but I think it really boils down to just this: there are really wonderful people out there.

When you’ve spent weeks upon weeks sleeping on trains, constantly locking your luggage up, cooking for yourself, cleaning for yourself – basically doing the things that all responsible adults have to do for themselves – you forget how nice it is to have a place to go where someone will cook you dinner, a place where you can spread your things out and not have to worry that they will be taken from you, a place where you don’t have to think so much. To anyone on the outside looking in, a semester abroad sounds like a vacation, but to think so much is difficult sometimes. To consider every action grows tiring. I believe that doing this for myself has taught me many valuable lessons and I hope to take them back with me when I return home but I appreciate the time to relax a bit. These last weekends were not quite like a vacation but rather it felt more like going home. It’s hard to explain how much it meant to me. Even Lacey, who was meeting my friend for the first time, felt like she could breathe just a little easier. There’s a sort of incomprehensible comfort I’m trying to describe here that I guess is just summed up in the simple knowledge that someone is taking care of you.

Granted I never expected to go to Switzerland or England and be taken care of (I guess it’s always a good idea to assume you will take care of yourself). However, it was the most pleasant of surprises to, in a place so very far from the states, find myself at home (in a way). There is an interesting thing here – the relationship between kindness and gratitude. On the bus ride back to the train station Lacey turned to me and said, “I hope I can do that for someone someday.” It really struck me. I too hope that someday I can provide a home - whether it be to a friend or just some wayward traveler, I hope my home is a place of rest and kindness that inspires people to “pay it forward” in a sense.

When I comes to my friend’s house in Switzerland, I really thought I would get to her earlier in the semester. Yet, here I am with just two weeks left. I know I’ll be returning to the states soon and it makes everything seem so vibrant and precious. Every moment is one of the last in what I can already recognize as the experience of a lifetime. Were in a season of gratitude right now and I think I am more thankful for these past weekends now than I could have been at the beginning of the semester, if that makes any sense. I would have certainly appreciated the kindness two months ago, but after weeks of being constantly pushed beyond the bounds of my comfort zone, of examining my life and my every action, the kind actions of a friend and the welcome warmth of a home mean more than words can say.

I’d like to say I had the foresight to recognize the irony in the name of this blog but I guess it’s ironic that I didn’t. “It’s All Part of the Plan,” I imagine in some greater sense of God and the Universe it might be. However, the irony is that it’s all a big surprise to me. Every corner brings something new, and like I said before, there are some really wonderful people out there. I hope one day I can offer that type of hospitality and warmth to a friend (or in the case of England,) a couple of relative strangers. And I realize now, more than ever before, I have big shoes to fill.

Poco A Poco Tutti Giorni

19:59. November 13, 2010. My Apartment in Firenze.

Lacey has been begging me to write a blog about her for months now, the whole time I’m pretty sure she’s been joking. However what she doesn’t know and I guess, you know, since this thing goes on the internet, she soon will, is that for months now I’ve tried to write a blog about her. Here’s the thing though, I can’t. It sounds cheesy and cliché to say that there are no words to describe what her friendship and mere presence mean to me but that’s it. It’s cheesy and it’s cliché and it’s the truth. Yet I’m still going to try.
I don’t think I would have ended up here in Italy had I not decided that I wanted to travel abroad with Lacey. When I told my father that I wanted to go to Europe he was both shocked and thrilled that I wouldn’t be spending the semester weaving loincloths in the middle of some rainforest (by the way I would still relish the opportunity to participate in that dad). That being said, this blog, unlike all of my other blogs, isn’t supposed to be about me. It’s supposed to be about Lacey. When (thanks to Hurricane Irene) I had to arrive in Florence without her, I was sad. When she finally met me here, I was elated. And through this whole experience: of learning to find my voice, taking in all that Italy has to offer me, the ups, the downs, the buses, the trains, the travels, the changes and the crossroads – I’ve been blessed beyond words and measure to have the most wonderful friend standing there next to me. She jokes and tells me every week to write about her. She doesn’t know how difficult it is. This is the week though and maybe it’s not as eloquent as it could be but it has to be said. Through every lesson that I learn she is here and there is something of immense value in that. This blog is about sharing my understanding of my encounters abroad with those of you out there kind enough to listen; so I can no longer defer this subject because it is an essential element of this life-altering experience. How does one begin to express the value of friendship? Not only that but how do I express it brilliantly, not because I want to sound brilliant but because it deserves brilliance, because it is brilliant. Rather though, I have this throw up of text, it’s not brilliant, it’s messy. However, life is messy and this is a process. The thing is that I am overcome. I imagine that some people have best friends with whom they merely enjoy spending time. Some people have best friends who keep them company and stave off loneliness. Some people have best friends who they keep around because they are loyal, or kind, or generous. These are all honorable human qualities and I would certainly use some of them to describe Lacey but (in my humble opinion) her best quality, and oddly enough the one that is also most pertinent to my experience abroad is her persistence. It may sound odd, I know, but hear me out.
I spend many afternoons in Florence sitting in a particular café near my apartment pondering life and making small talk with the barista. The other day he said to me, “Everyday is English, why do you never speak to me in Italian?” A simple but direct question. I replied, “I don’t speak Italian very well and I worry that I won’t be understood.” To this he responded, “poco a poco tutti giorni.” Which means, little by little every day. These are the hints of clarity I find in everyday life. They always come from unexpected places and as I contemplate them, they twist their way into the fabric of my whole experience here in Italy and in life in general.
What does this have to do with Lacey you might ask. It is (as I see it) her method. This persistence - her most valuable contribution to our friendship and her most striking addition to my life. Sometimes this means that we fight. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the road she can set in front of me. Sometimes it becomes unbearably frustrating when I am trying to focus on the good aspects of a present situation and all she can focus on are the things that would make it better. But when I see a huge mountain, impossible to overcome, she can see it like my barista. Poco a poco tutti giorni. And she never gives up. It is precisely because she is here, because she has this invaluable ability to persist and to challenge me to become something better that I consider myself so blessed. This blessing and all that it brings leaves me without words and the ones I’ve just said don’t scratch the surface. This blog is about sharing my understanding of my encounters abroad with those of you out there kind enough to listen; so there it is. My messy expression: of gratitude, of love. It may not be as brilliant as it deserves to be but I learn to express it better as I am compelled to persist in the effort. Poco a poco tutti giorni.

Poor but Sexy

17:41. October 30, 2011. Astor Café in Firenze.
I know that it has been way too long since my last blog. However, I hope that my readers (all seven of you) forgive me because I have so many things to say now and I’ll do my best to make up for the lost time. Essentially, I spent the last nine days on a mad dash through northern Europe with nothing but a tiny backpack full of clothes and two wonderful friends as travel companions. We had train passes and very few plans, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I’m sure that the three of us will take away many things and different things from the trip as a whole but for now at least, I only want to talk about one thing. Berlin. More specifically, a little redheaded American girl named Trish that lives in Berlin.
Ok, I’m sure you’re all reasonably confused by now, so here’s how it went: We, meaning me, Lacey and our new friend Lauren, wanted to visit Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague, more because all of these places lay in one convenient train path than because we knew much about any of them. So we began. We took an overnight train to Paris (which is an amazing city in and of itself but I feel like everyone knows that so I don’t need to focus on it) where during our stay, we received the most wonderful suggestion from a fellow hostel-mate to take a certain free tour in Berlin. As fate would have it, the train to Amsterdam never happened because it turned out to be far less expensive and far more intelligent to just ride straight through to Berlin. However, while we had arrived in Paris with the classic list of renowned sites to see in that particular city, we arrived in Berlin with little more than a hostel reservation. As our train rattled into Hauptbahnhof the view was somewhat dismal; grey skies met a horizon of broken, graffiti-covered buildings and I’m sure we all took a minute to wonder why we ever wanted to stop there in the first place. Then, after the very cold, forty-minute walk through nowhere-ville to our hostel I’m sure we all took another minute to wish we had stayed on the train. However, the day was young and so we dragged our tired bodies and low expectations out to Alexanderplatz on the U-Bahn (the subway system in Berlin). There, we met a young and spunky looking Trish (remember Trish, I mentioned her about a paragraph ago) outside of a Starbucks and the following odd conversation ensued:
Us: “Is this the free tour?”
Trish: “Yes.”
(Awkward silence…)
Us: “Can we go on it?”
Trish: “Why wouldn’t you?”
At this point we chuckled… awkwardly, and sat down on a nearby wall as group of people leisurely formed around Trish.
Trish: (nodding towards the three of us) “You want the alternative street art tour, not the historical tour right?”
Us: “…sure, whichever one you’re giving.”
And so this began the most eccentric yet enlightening tour I have ever been on. Trish, an American artist from California, has spent the better part of the last five years living in Berlin and her passion for this German city and the beautiful street art contained within it was so vibrant and refreshing, it was contagious. Berlin is a young city, it’s been only 22 years since the wall and communism fell, much of the buildings are still deserted and it is a new frontier of sorts. A city in the process of developing its own identity. Blank walls are the canvases of a new generation of artists who deeply desire to speak to their city, to shape their world. And their art isn’t cooped up in galleries and museums, it’s everywhere. I spent nearly four hours walking through Berlin with this combat-boot-wearing-red-haired-five-foot-nothing-system-fighting, passionate little woman, and as the hours flew by, those broken and graffiti-covered buildings took on a whole new identity. I fell in love with Berlin. This woman allowed me to see that this city, in all of its brokenness is a lot like me. She implied that maybe it’s a lot like all of us, like humanity. Berlin was one way for a long time but now it is beginning anew and it’s so beautiful when you can look at it and understand where it’s been and how far it’s come. The physical surfaces are the voices of thousands of artists right here and now. These people and their art actively shape the culture and deeply impact society. Oddly enough, because this talent is displayed on sides of buildings, tunnel walls and light poles it is both free and priceless at the same time. It is also ever-changing and developing. In recent months especially, I feel a lot like Berlin. And while it costs €11 in Paris to see the top of the Eifel tower, €10 in Prague to tour the Prague Castle, and €12 in Capri just to enter the Blue Grotto for five minutes, this wonderful young woman walked with 20 people for 4 hours, shared her passion, and inspired each one of us to love this vastly under appreciated city in all its beauty and resilience… and then didn’t ask for a cent in return. I wanted to empty my whole wallet.
It was just a few hours of a nine-day trip, but maybe it’s the most important thing to share. In a world full of over-priced, mass-produced, low-quality junk I was shown something truly genuine. For this, I have nothing but gratitude. As always, I’m still learning and I could be wrong but this is the journey – This is the experience I am blessed enough to be having. The mayor of Berlin says that the city is “poor but sexy.” It lacks structure and wealth but it is young, and passionate, and full of potential. So, it is poor, and it is sexy, and it is another lesson for me; to look for beauty in brokenness, to get by as I must, but to do what I love, not for the money but simply because I love it, and to find joy in that wonderfully unexpected surprise. It’s not a bad thing at all to be “poor but sexy.”

Halfway

14:38. October 14, 2011. Astor Café/My Apartment in Firenze.
Somehow I am already halfway through. At first the days seemed to go on forever and the semester seemed like a lifetime, now though, standing squarely on the halfway mark, it all seems like a mass of time that rolled through my life kind of like that boulder that rolled through the tunnel in Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now I’m standing at the halfway point of this tunnel, shocked I managed to make it here, and I have absolutely no idea what adventure might lie ahead of me.
I found myself in a bar the other night deep in conversation with a friend I met a few weeks into my time here. We were trying to assess just what it is that makes Florence special and how we could somehow not do that thing where you go away and have an amazing experience and then you come home and before you know it your life rescinds back into exactly what it was before you left. A simple question: How can a person retain change? My friend says that it’s all in the little things; it’s your cup of coffee accompanied by fifteen minutes of pure and unencumbered time. It’s the ten extra minutes you take to make hot chocolate from scratch rather than pouring a packet of Swiss Miss mix into a cup of water. It’s the red-cheeked little old man in the newsboy cap that plays violin outside the Duomo. It’s those seemingly expendable entities in your life that just, for whatever unexplainable reason, make you happy. Florence is full of these little treasures. The trouble is I only have four months here and back home there’s a whole life waiting to fall right back on my shoulders. I’ll have papers to write, books to read, people to see, floors to clean, obligations, responsibilities and work to do. There’s no time to drink fifteen minute cups of coffee, to make non-instant hot chocolate and to watch adorable old men play violins; these things are the time wasters in my life – the things I do while I could be more productive and adding something to society.
Yet I don’t know that this is so. I know I have things to do and history to make but I am also a person and underneath my busy life I’m a little weary and hoping that some sliver of time might fall into my lap. Am I the only one? I just want a little time for these little things. These little things that matter far more that most of us allow them to.
I’m only halfway through and I have so many more lessons to learn but I hope that my Swiss Miss days are behind me, I hope that when I’m 30, and 45, and 70 years old I can sit for fifteen minutes and have a cup of coffee because I learned to allow myself that during the semester I spent in Italy when I was just 20 years old. Even though people might tell me that I shouldn’t, I hope I remember what I’m learning now. I hope I change and stay changed because I think that if I can permit myself the time to do those little things that make me happy, I can add to the world in a way that only a person who allows themselves these little things can and that is where I want to make my history, it’s the place in which I hope to stand when I reach the end of the tunnel.
The whole experience so far reminds me of my favorite Shel Silverstien quote, something I was lucky enough to have both parents read to me several times. (I must thank you for those bedtime stories mom and dad, I hope that they were your “little things” because I know that back then, they were most definitely mine.) My parents told three and four and five and six year-old me, “Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” So here I am mom, dad and anyone else who’s happened to read this far, I’m halfway through… and anything could happen, anything could be.

Righting Words

1:30. October 9, 2011. My Apartment in Firenze.
Like I’ve said in previous blogs, Italy is a place that takes you by the arm, sits you down and makes you face a world of human history just so you might contemplate what it is you want for your own contribution. You may reach any old piazza and you are presented with the fact that millions of generations of people have stood on those very stones; martyrs, murderers, saints and sinners alike have reached the same place in which you stand and made their own contemplations and subsequent contributions. The language is the same way. You don’t get to say that you love a chair the same way that you say you love a person. You must order your feelings and decide what is important enough to love. You might say, of an object, “mi piace la sedia,” or in English, “the chair is pleasing to me,” in other words, you like the chair and it pleases you but you don’t love the chair. It doesn’t end there though. You don’t even say “I love you,” to your friends, these words, this phrase, “ti amo,” is reserved for the most intimate and precious of human relationships.
You may have heard before that Eskimos have 26 words for “love.” In Italy they have just one and they use it sparingly. I found this out while sitting next to a new friend I recently met at a coffee shop, as we exited the shop she shouted back to the staff with whom she’s become well acquainted, “ti voglio bene!” This means, roughly translated, “I want the best for you,” and it’s a common saying here. I asked her, “What does that mean, why do you say that?” so she explained this to me – Americans have an obsession with the word “love.” We say we love a chair and we love our friends and we love our family and we love the way the new paint color looks on the walls, and we use the same word for all of it. It’s not that there aren’t an abundance of words in the English language to express a liking for something but rather that we often choose this word “love.” It is different in Italian, they understand that the feelings associated with certain objects and certain people are so different that it is just inaccurate to use the same word to explain them all.
I’ve taken pride, in the past, in the ease with which I can tell someone I love them, I pretty much say it to all of my friends and family, I say it about places and foods and books and the color grey. Maybe I shouldn’t. All of this sameness, perhaps eventually will dilute or disguise the real “amo,” the reserved love. Italy is a place that makes you really want to know that reserved love, and Italian is a language that forces you to dole it out with discernment. To decide what it is you truly reserve love for and then to say it with absolute clarity. This may be the most important thing one can do in their short lifetime.
My recent revelations have taught me just how wonderful and supportive people can be. It seems I’m not the only one to have reached a piazza in their lifetime. It is an ever-humbling journey to acknowledge your mistakes and then start to fix them and you really can’t fake this type of humility. More than anything I’m realizing the “amo” in my life. In the face of all these deeply humbling realizations I have such dear gratitude for the people who’ve reserved their most real love for me and who continue to stick by me. You are the reason that people invent expressions like “ti amo” in the first place. You all mean more than any words in any language could ever express.

My Piazza

September 29, 2011. 12:46. Astor Café in Firenze
Yesterday my Italian professor explained to my class that because we are young and American we are always thinking of the future and moving very fast. In the same sense he said, because he is old and Italian he moves slower and thinks often about the past. This is a fundamental difference between, not only, young folks and old folks but also between Americans and Italians. Americans are running; we are striving to create our empire, our history. We are but babies in the arena of world history, and they have a word for us here in Italy: “staccanovista,” which means workaholic. This word is comes from the story of a young Russian miner named Staccanovich. Staccanovich was a very strong, very driven young man and he would voluntarily skip meals and not sleep so that he could work 14-16 hours a day in the mines. (Sounds American enough to me.) My professor explained that when Italians go through life it is like they carry with them a ball and chain that is 2,500 years of history, they’ve already created their empire, fought countless wars and made masterpieces of architecture, literature and art. Their future, he said, may not hold a candle to their past and so they take ample amounts of time to reflect.
I cannot help but be impacted here. And when I say “impacted,” I mean like being hit with a sack of bricks. I cannot help but slow down. And when I say “slow down,” I mean stop. I cannot help but reflect. And when I say “reflect,” I mean question absolutely every minute aspect of who I am. Before coming to Italy I thought that I took time in my life, I thought I knew myself well, I thought I went slow enough to be conscious of my actions. However, I’ve come to Italy and quickly discovered how very young and very American I truly am. It’s difficult to explain the depth of this realization without becoming the type of person who exposes far too personal and private elements of their life on the Internet. I will say this much, Italy is teaching me that perhaps I have allowed my world to shape me far more than I have allowed myself the opportunity to shape my world. This is a hard pill to swallow; to discover that you’ve been passively accepting your life when you could have been active, decisive, influential and if there is an aspect of yourself (not your life, but yourself) that you are not happy with, no one forced you to be that way and the only person who is responsible for changing it is you.
Understandably, this all may seem a bit confusing and all too abstract. That’s because it is. In Florence and many other Italian cities, the streets are not neatly laid out in grids with numbered avenues like they are in the US. A narrow street will go on for a length of time until you reach an open square called a piazza. Several new streets will extend from the piazza either continuing or beginning anew. This is a good metaphor for my life right now. I’ve been on a bit of a narrow path for a while now, so long a while in fact that I’m not really sure of exactly who I am right now (or, dare I say, what I want). I am but young and American and my masterpiece is yet to be created. It’s time to take a moment, slow down and reflect; time to become a little bit older and a little bit Italian. I have reached a piazza.

Ready-Made Study Abroad

September 23, 2011. 22:55. My Apartment in Florence
I’ve come to understand that there are a variety of experiences one can choose to have while studying abroad. For example: there are women in my cooking class from Korea who chose to come to Italy and take classes in English (aka their second language) while also learning Italian (their 3rd language…in English). When it comes to housing, you can live with Italian families, or just other young adult Italians, or students from other American universities, or international European students, you can live in an apartment in the city or stay in a dorm on an enclosed campus. The world is your oyster, the options are endless here and we are constantly faced with the questions: Do you want to spend time with Americans and cultivate relationships within an American community abroad or, would you rather embrace the foreign element of your abroad experience? And once you figure that out, there’s the whole question of how you do it. I can respect and appreciate both options, I have met so many wonderful American students here and I don’t think I could even begin to comprehend taking all my courses in Italian. That being said, I’m interested in being in Italy and branching out (no, I’m not willing to stop at just taking the bus). I want to speak more Italian, I want to go places the tourists don’t and I constantly yearn to make my experience something unique. This requires a constant push out of my comfort zone. One such experience of this was the planning of my fall break.
There are countless student travel agencies in Florence willing to take lump sums of money and turn them into neatly organized travel arrangements complete with hotels, transportation and guided tours (they may even include breakfast) but personally I don’t want it. I want to get a little lost and find myself. I want to have things go a bit awry and then I want to fix them. I want an uncharted (and unchartered) adventure. It’s not as easy or as fun as it sounds to plan such a journey and at times I just want to say “screw it,” purchase the neatly packaged trip, hop on the air-conditioned coach bus with all the other American students and pretend I’m doing something new and different. I try to push beyond this though and I’ve spent ample amounts of time researching trains and hostels and such.
The other night after two hours of looking up train routes Lacey and I just needed a break. We headed down the street around 10pm for some much-needed gelato and on the way, bickered over trip details. We found ourselves in front the Santa Croce cathedral agreeing not to talk about it for the next ten minutes and just cool off. A street performer serenaded our cool silence from the opposite end of the piazza and we made our way over to the music. He played a soft and simple acoustic version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” I leaned, exhausted, against a pillar and shut my eyes for a second. I couldn’t help but smile though at the loveliness of the sound and when I opened my eyes, I caught Lacey’s smile as she turned to look back at me. It’s in these sweet little moments that you get a tiny glimpse of the big picture. In the words of Dave Matthews (he’s a brilliant man), “Turns out, it’s not where but who you're with that really matters… And if you hold on tight to what you think is your thing you may find you're missing all the rest.” I don’t mean to rag on the bus2alpers or the pub-crawlers or the cheeseburger-and-fry-eaters, we all have the right to embrace whatever experience we want… but hear me out.
The things that are here in Italy that we can also do in America… we can do them when we get back to America. And the people who offer to take you on those neatly guided trips won’t take you on any of the roads less traveled. We have a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have an experience that is different if we only reach out and take it.
Now, I commend you if you’ve managed to stay with me this whole time (this week I am having trouble finding the words to say what I need to say but bear with me). Here’s what I’m trying to express: it’s hard to be abroad no matter how you do it; it’s hard to be in a new culture with a new language and a world of new experiences. It’s easy to flock to the people and things that make you comfortable and it’s easy to travel if you want it to be. However, as uncomfortable as it might be – to get lost sometimes, to make conversation with new people in new languages, to do things that aren’t being done by everyone else, it’s certainly a new adventure. I don’t know if it’s a better path, but I do know that it will yield an experience distinct from the rather homogenized practice of studying abroad you read about in bus2alps brochures. I’m not an authority on the subject, I’m just speaking as a person in the middle of the whole mess and in the middle of what I imagine is a much bigger lesson than I can comprehend right now. This isn’t the end of the story.