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.