My parents and grandparents spent mad dollar for me to go on a school trip to Italy. I left January 4 and I arrived back in the US yesterday.
Buses in Rome mean business! Zach got his arm caught in the door when he got on too late. He wasn’t injured, just squeezed. They zoom around corners and the inside is an earthquake.
Beware of getting on the correct line at the correct location but in the wrong direction. This made Luci and I miss laughter yoga. :(
It’s possible to find good pizza in any large city, but pizza is weak most places in Venice. It’s as if they melt sandwhich cheese on an airline tortilla. Florence was better, Rome was very good. Pino’s Sandwiches has great tomatoes, and our hotel (Hotel Medici) had Pinsere next door and they cook all pizza to order in a real pizza oven.
Pinsere also has innovative combos:
The strangers you see at the airport are just like the people in your circle of friends. Really! Unless I am actively forcing myself to remember that, I get the delusion that the people I know and interact with are extraordinary and different from the rest of the world.
I already wrote about Keiko. She is a Japanese elementary school teacher I met in the Amsterdam airport. We talked for two hours and walked and drank hot drinks.
While riding the water bus to the Venice train station, I tried talking to a woman in the seat next to me.
“Ciao!”
“Ciao.”
“Do you speak english?”
“Yes a little bit. You have a question?”
“No, just making conversation.”
“Where is station?”
“Heheh, con-ver-say-shun?”
:)
Then a business man who could speak english turned around. We agreed that Venice pizza is weak and he recommended that I check out the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, which I did:
My girlfriend had some wasabi almonds for the trip.
“Want an almond?”
“Haha wasabi almonds, only in America.”
I was looking for someone to interview about being a street salesperson. I forgot about it till the last day and only asked one person!
“How good is your english?”
“Yes.”
I met a person at the Paris airport who was from New York but had family in Bamako and was travelling there.
“Where is Bamako?”
“This line right here.”
“No, where in the world?”
“You don’t know where Bamako is?! West Africa. Where are you from?”
“The US. Kentucky.”
“Yes New York, Kentucky, Miami, these are different countries!”
Public Domain Dedication.