November 14–20, 2007, Number 168
Hola, Buongiorno
This week's article comes from the terminal of Fiumicino International Airport just outside of Rome, Italy. My tour of the classical European cities, Paris, Barcelona, and Rome, has come to an end but the memories are just beginning to form. As I begin reflection, I find it funny that my trip could just as well be called a tour of classical churches; from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, to St. Peters Basilica in Rome. Each of these monumental places of worship are almost worth the trip by themselves. However, this trip has been much more than a sight seeing extravaganza, it has been an answer to my young hearted desires to experience the world. The more people I talk with the more confident and glad I am that I decided to make the necessary things happen to put this adventure together. Life comes quick, so I'm told. I'm still young at 23, but life is happening. I will soon be entering the workforce with a full time job, be married and I imagine kids will follow sometime after that. As busy as someone feels in college, it seems that busyness never decreases as life goes on. That busyness doesn't seem to leave much room for the dreams of someone to see the world, or at least part of it. That's why I took a risk and put up with the missed flights, canceled reservations, closed attractions, and lost luggage. I didn't want to be sitting at my job in ten years wishing so badly that I had done what I had always aspired to do. A great example of this comes to mind when I think about a fellow I lived with last year. His dream was to be a wildlife firefighter, and he decided to take action on this vision. Dropping everything and dedicating his time to landing a job on a crew somewhere, his efforts finally paid off and he soon was heading out west. As I periodically talked to him, he shared with me his adventures and his hardships. As of right now, he has decided to hang up his firefighting boots, as he found that it wasn't what he wanted to be doing for the rest of his life, and that's ok. His soul is more complete with the effort. He can reflect back and say, "I dreamt, I did, and I'm satisfied." I think to some degree or another that is true for all of us. I don't need to do any Columbus-like explorations, but I do have ambitions to see what I can of the world. Each of us have that dream tugging softly yet consistently at our insides, it's our responsibility to answer that nudging as best we can, for our own sake.
As I mentioned earlier, when traveling, I ran the risk of things going wrong, and guess what, they did. To put it bluntly and realistically, that's life. We only have so much control over the things that happen in our life, but what I'm finding is that we do have control over our reaction to those, sometimes, inconvenient occurrences. As I finally received my semi-lost luggage after a late arrival and a missed transfer flight, I began to formulate a thought. How different would I react in certain situations if I knew the outcome? If I knew that in the end everything would work out fine, would I be so tempted by annoyance? Or would I make the best of the situations and have faith that things, although maybe different from my ideal envision, would work out in the end. I said that things went wrong, and that is true, but everything also worked out just fine. I'm working on the I-hope-to-not-waste-life-with-a-bad-attitude way of looking at things. Challenging but I'm convinced it is worth it.
Since the last update, I've been to Barcelona and Rome. Both of which are absolutely spectacular cities. We'll start with Barcelona. A surprising mixture of Gothic and modernist architecture nestled between some mountainous terrain makes for an interesting sight seeing adventure. I only really got to spend two days in Barcelona, which, unfortunately, was not quite enough time to soak up all the one thousand year-old town had to offer. One of the most beautiful sights come from atop the nearby Montjuic, where the 1992 Olympic summer games were held. It was a breathtaking sight, to imagine the olympic athletes were participating in their relative sports with the panoramic overview of the cityscape as a background. Although almost fifteen years have passed since they took place, their impact is still being felt. Some of the other crazy attractions that Barcelona had to offer, besides its beautiful natural boundaries, were its unique artistic modernist architectural marvels. Most of which are birthed from famous Barcelonian Architect Antoni Gaudi. His mosaic Dr. Suess like creations adds speckles of brightness, and unexpected, yet pleasant, surprises among the traditional Spanish building norm. His main media for creation involved meticulously placed tiles of bright colors as well as wrought iron twisted creations. An odd but intriguing addition to what my traveling guidebook refers to as "Spains least Spanish city".
Now, onto the 2700 years of history wrapped up in the ancient city that is Rome. The unknown but wonderful thing about this city is its true abundance of history-rich ruins strewn everywhere across the city. The most well known, of these, is the great Colosseum. It is funny how lost it seemed to be to everyday life. There were a great number of spectators, but just feet away were busy intersections filled with Romans who probably don't give the Colosseum's existence a second thought. It is a mind boggling thought to attempt to recreate the scene surrounding this massive structure in its hay-day. In the Colosseum's backyard is what I think is an even more impressive excavation of roman history. I stood in awe at the archaic ruins that stood before me. I was even lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a worker meticulously removing sand from the buried stone structures with a sponge, and paintbrush. What they uncovered was truly unexplainable. A beautiful blueprint for a visual recreation of the city that now stands below the current Rome. It was interesting to note that all these ruins were a good twenty feet below the surface of where the new roads and buildings were created. Seems like the new city over two thousand years has been built and rebuilt on the top of the old city.
To bring things to a close, I'm going to end with a couple random snippets. The Italian food in Rome is as good as you would think it would be, and the gelato is a must have everyday treat. A precise map, and a good game plan are smart things to invest in. As a student traveler, my aim was to get as much bang for my buck. I was fairly successful, minus a couple hiccups here and there, but expect to spend a lot of money, and you will learn to live frugally. Things always seem to be a little more satisfying when you can have a great experience and know you found some good deals along the way.
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Adios, Arrivederci
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