Touchdown Firenze
There’s a grandeur in the streets that’s still echoed somehow, maybe from stones steeped in two thousand years of history and civilization. I don’t feel quite as able to be a scruffy college student here, although I can’t help being one anyway. But I crave the elegant leather boots that line the streets in window displays, and oh! the brand names of high fashion, they find their home here. It’s strange to call this home now, ten minutes from the Duomo, walking across the Piazza della Signoria by night, looking down the misty Arno and across the city spread out from the Piazzale de Michelangelo where yet another David stands guard. I fill my belly with way too much pasta and gelato, wash it down with wine. Tread soft across marble crypts in the basement of a church, sip a White Russian that costs 7 Euros too much, clutch my purse and hasten home hours past midnight as I briskly step by the gravestones in the Piazza Donatello.
I touched down in Firenze on Tuesday morning, after a hellish journey of mostly my own creation. A five-hour bus from PJ to Singapore, a drive to the airport at 4 a.m., a long flight to San Fransisco via Tokyo where I discovered that my flight to JFK had been canceled in anticipation of a massive snowstorm. On standby for a flight that night that I was sure I wouldn’t get on and confirmed for a flight the next afternoon that would have caused me to miss my connection to Italy, I spent a joyous 14 hours in SFO hanging out with a Korean guy who had been stranded in a similar plight. Thanks to a brilliant brainwave, we ended up heading out to Dulles, DC that night and on to La Guardia, making it into the Big Apple in good time for me to shuttle over to JFK and meet the group. I did, however, spend a 110 dollars on a hotel room that I never got to use, and missed out on some highly-anticipated company. Tragic. But we made it to Florence via Frankfurt in the end. After all that, my bags were delayed for two days. Denied even clean underwear, oh cruel Fates.
Is it strange that I do not feel that this is my place, among a group of students who should be like me (or perhaps more in truth, I like them) - studying the same things, having lived through the same years? It’s become too commonplace to me, I’ve learned to love the uncertainty and unknown. I can’t relate to homesickness and stress about host families or what classes to take or new roommates. The unfamiliar has become too familiar, perpetual movement has become home. It’s not worth worrying, and it’s not that I don’t care - I’ve just learned to love it all, live it all, the joy of life.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Italy. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
