Holiday Season in Italia (From a Friend Abroad)
It’s been four months since I’ve tasted authentic home-cooking made with grandfatherly love, three months since I’ve had any sort of annoying homework assignment that’s worth procrastinating for, two months since I’ve gotten lost trying to find my way through Venice, and two hours since I’ve stuffed myself full with pasta, strudel, and any sort of carb-loaded food imaginable. The Italian way of life is something I had romanticized and dreamt about for the last two years of my college life, and finally being here has given me the stark, naked, unadulterated reality of what this way of life really means. I’m not saying this experience for me in Italy is a big, fat, obnoxious nightmare, because it isn’t; I actually wouldn’t trade this experience for the world. It was a few nights ago when I had a night-time talk with my roomie when she mentioned to me how, in 30 years, we’d be considered old. Thirty years. . . man, that doesn’t even sound that far away anymore, especially when I compare it to my kindergarten days when I thought I’d never be as old as my parents, and high school was a fantasy land that big kids go when they get tired of playing with us little kids. Ever since then, I started to realize how the funny, too-crazy-to-make-up, almost-impossible-to-grasp experiences that have happened to me so far are the stories that I’ll be telling to my future children (if I end up having any) or, if we’re talking about the not-so-distant future, to my friends and my family when I get back to my land of burgers and BBQs. . . the big, beautiful, obesely supersized USA. That was why, last night, as I walked through the newly Christmas-decorated streets of Padova, my modernly old-fashioned Italian city, I stopped taking all the beautiful things around me for granted. I took everything in like a tourist that had one day in this city. I let the snowflake-shaped Christmas lights possess me with the holiday spirit in the best way possible and ate my chunk of elitist-restaurant tiramisu as if it had been my first course, and not that huge wheel of pumpkin, porcini pizza I had consumed just a few minutes before.
November 27, 2011
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