Tuesday December 1, 2009
Italy, the Past, the Present, the Future, and Thanksgiving
I'm leaving for two weeks in Italy tomorrow. I spent several months there in the fall of 1996 when I was 19 and can't believe that thirteen years has passed since I was there - I remember so much of it so, so vividly: Bracciano, Roma, Manziana, Venice, Florence, Capri, my old crew, the sights, the people, the lovely Simona; the list goes on and on. I did a lot of walking the streets and sketching on that trip and some of those sketches can be seen here.
I've been thinking about the fact that when I was 19, I didn't have an email address, I didn't have a cell phone (no one had a cell phone!) and I didn't have a digital camera. I wrote letters, plugged lira and phone cards into payphones, and took two precious and expensive rolls of film over the course of those months. Before I left and when I came back, I worked in a restaurant, was broke and living in a dump, and borrowed the money to be able to go, which took years to pay back. Now, I'm trying to figure out if there are open Wi-Fi networks where I can use Skype and Facebook on my iPhone and keep in touch with my company via email regarding my job in a career which didn't even really exist then, which typically takes place in a high-rise in New York City(!), where I've now lived for five and a half years. I've got $4000 worth of Euros to hide, two plane tickets out of JFK, and two digital cameras with which my mom and I can take about ten thousand pictures. I never, ever imagined returning like this after such a long period of time, to a place and time which was, until then, the most significant event of my life thus far.
I'm looking forward to the culture shock, I'm looking forward to seeing what's changed, and I'm looking forward to getting taken out of my real life for a few weeks to gain some much needed perspective. I'm glad it's happening at the end of the year (and decade!) before my New Year's resolutions kick in and I'm glad I'll be coming home to friends in town and lovely plans for Christmas.
Looking back very briefly, I had a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner at Emily and Nabil's (pics are here) with a whole host of friends as well as various and sundry coffees and dinners with others. It was quite the long weekend (I talked about last year's here - everything was different then, too, and damn did the year since then seem to go by fast) and with the trip followed by the holidays, it seems like it's just going to keep going until the end of the year.