I need solitaire like a crack whore needs...uh...crack.
In between playing solitaire on the computer and other means of procrastinating on my 12-14 page research paper (in spanish, mind you), I came up with these vignettes, and for lack of anything else to do with them, am putting them here, in rough draft format. Comment, or not. All two and a half of you.
I first had peach iced tea in Italy, dazed from jetlag and being in my first "foreign" country, walking around upper Bergamo. I was sixteen. My tastes have not been the same since. I was amazed at its crispness, of the not-quite-tart "pesca" that seemed to carry me from Milan to Venice to Camogli, Florence, and back to Sotto il Monte, the little village near Bergamo, where I stayed. With that tea came my first tastes of freedom, independence, wanderlust, and self-assurance. There was far more than the microcosm I had left behind. I'd always had a hunch, but now I had proof. Irrefutable proof in the pictures I now see of a gawky, but well-postured blonde girl, ridiculously tall and pale (even though it was the tannest I'd ever been in my life) next to her proud but generous Italian hosts. She always has a dreamy, willing-to-be-amazazed at anything look in her eyes. I am, unfortunately, far less amazed at international travel these days. I probably need to go somewhere less developed to get my kicks. But I am lucky in that a Bon Jovi song, and art book, and especially a peach iced tea, can take me back, if only for a few seconds, to all those great firsts.
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I am now a snob when it comes to "Italian" food in America. No matter what the price of the dish, nothing tastes even remotely as fabulous as Nonna Gerbelli's lasagne. My boyfriend does a nice job of putting his Sicilian ancestry to good use in the kitchen, but it's still not the same. Maybe the "aqua frizzante" is missing. Or the bread. Or the wine. But for me the place is what is missing.
I came back from Europe and immediately fell into a reverse culture shock so strong that it kickstarted a depression that lasted three years. Much of it was probably situational; my parents had spoiled me by shooing me off to the Old World for a month, and in that time I partially learned a new and beautifully staccato language, got hit on by countless Italian men, discovered a love for travel and peach iced tea and art, and was constantly surrounded by cosmovisions that were not so different from mine for a change, more similar by far than anything back "home". Not to mention the ethnic diversity that I revelled, no, thrived in in cities like Zurich and Venice. I found a part of myself in that first trip abroad that I have yet to rediscover.
Is it, then, really any wonder that I got so devastated upon my return? I had missed the first day of my Junior year because I was busy at Verdi's opera "Nabucco" in Verona's coloseum. And to be thrown back in the sticks with no one to practice the language with, and surrounded by people who were considered well-travelled if they'd covered all six states that surround this one, to be back where not one of my peers thought I was beautiful (after all of Nonna's cheek pinching and praises and fattening up); it was a painful shock. I would stay up late at night watching PBS or the Travel Channel for some segment on Venice or Pisa, clutching my bowl of American ice cream, hoping by some magical means that my tears falling into it would make it taste even a little like helado. No avail.
It wasn't that I missed Italy itself so much, but I felt like I had only gotten the tiniest taste of what was beyond the US, and I was hankering for more; so much more. And it frustrated me that I did not know when I would be leaving the country again; much as it frustrates me at this very moment.
~M.
I first had peach iced tea in Italy, dazed from jetlag and being in my first "foreign" country, walking around upper Bergamo. I was sixteen. My tastes have not been the same since. I was amazed at its crispness, of the not-quite-tart "pesca" that seemed to carry me from Milan to Venice to Camogli, Florence, and back to Sotto il Monte, the little village near Bergamo, where I stayed. With that tea came my first tastes of freedom, independence, wanderlust, and self-assurance. There was far more than the microcosm I had left behind. I'd always had a hunch, but now I had proof. Irrefutable proof in the pictures I now see of a gawky, but well-postured blonde girl, ridiculously tall and pale (even though it was the tannest I'd ever been in my life) next to her proud but generous Italian hosts. She always has a dreamy, willing-to-be-amazazed at anything look in her eyes. I am, unfortunately, far less amazed at international travel these days. I probably need to go somewhere less developed to get my kicks. But I am lucky in that a Bon Jovi song, and art book, and especially a peach iced tea, can take me back, if only for a few seconds, to all those great firsts.
********************************************************************************************************
I am now a snob when it comes to "Italian" food in America. No matter what the price of the dish, nothing tastes even remotely as fabulous as Nonna Gerbelli's lasagne. My boyfriend does a nice job of putting his Sicilian ancestry to good use in the kitchen, but it's still not the same. Maybe the "aqua frizzante" is missing. Or the bread. Or the wine. But for me the place is what is missing.
I came back from Europe and immediately fell into a reverse culture shock so strong that it kickstarted a depression that lasted three years. Much of it was probably situational; my parents had spoiled me by shooing me off to the Old World for a month, and in that time I partially learned a new and beautifully staccato language, got hit on by countless Italian men, discovered a love for travel and peach iced tea and art, and was constantly surrounded by cosmovisions that were not so different from mine for a change, more similar by far than anything back "home". Not to mention the ethnic diversity that I revelled, no, thrived in in cities like Zurich and Venice. I found a part of myself in that first trip abroad that I have yet to rediscover.
Is it, then, really any wonder that I got so devastated upon my return? I had missed the first day of my Junior year because I was busy at Verdi's opera "Nabucco" in Verona's coloseum. And to be thrown back in the sticks with no one to practice the language with, and surrounded by people who were considered well-travelled if they'd covered all six states that surround this one, to be back where not one of my peers thought I was beautiful (after all of Nonna's cheek pinching and praises and fattening up); it was a painful shock. I would stay up late at night watching PBS or the Travel Channel for some segment on Venice or Pisa, clutching my bowl of American ice cream, hoping by some magical means that my tears falling into it would make it taste even a little like helado. No avail.
It wasn't that I missed Italy itself so much, but I felt like I had only gotten the tiniest taste of what was beyond the US, and I was hankering for more; so much more. And it frustrated me that I did not know when I would be leaving the country again; much as it frustrates me at this very moment.
~M.