Italian Thunder

I already remarked about how intense Greek thunder is, and Italian thunder is no different. It's equally intense, but the biggest difference is in the size of raindrops. The raindrops in Arizona range from the size of reset buttons you find in toys and electronics (you know, the ones you need a pencil or pin to push) to the carbonation inside soda. Italian raindrops range from the size of skittles to marbles. We have no one living above us in our apartment, so the entire night felt like we were under attack. These weren’t the gentle sounds of rain you find in cheesy CDs at craft stores; this was an extended drum solo CD being played simultaneously in 300 stereos at 40% volume.

I have slept through television noises, barking puppies, people knocking at my door, et cetera. But this boisterous storm woke me up at least three times during the night. I was cranky because of my disturbed sleep, but I couldn’t even imagine how upset I’d be if my laundry was drying in the patio, like Emily’s was. She had been trying to dry her clothes all week, but the humidity of Rome was keeping dry clothes from her as long as it could. And now, it rained all over her entire wardrobe.

She was up before me, and before I could complain about my restless sleep or empathize about her re-wet laundry, she breaks me.

“Wasn’t that just the most beautiful rainstorm?” she says, smiling widely.

“I couldn’t really sleep… and your laundry, that sucks Emily…”

“Oh it’s no big deal, that rainstorm was just. So. Beautiful.”

My shining light of optimism, she falls back into bed, still smiling.

I guess it was a beautiful storm after all. When else will I feel like a World War is taking place around me? 

Conversazione in italiano a suo "meglio"

When you try to translate Latin, it’s like a wrestling match. You tackle it, you twist it around, and you conquer it if you have been doing it long enough. Trying to speak Italian, on the other hand, is usually pretty straightforward (hand gestures fill in the spaces for words I don’t know yet). But sometimes, like the server at McDonalds found out today, speaking to me in Italian is like trying to tango with a baby deer.

(Note: The McDonalds here have a promotion going on right now where they give away these really cool cups if you buy a meal. I barely even eat at McDonalds in America, but I really wanted this cup, which is why I was here)

 “Vorrei numero sei… ma insalata. No, no fries. E l’aqua,” I say, squinting at the menu. The server looks like he knows what I'm talking about, but ends up putting fries and a coke in my order.

“Uh… no, no coke. Aqua,” I say, refusing to take the bag when he held it out to me.

“No coke? Perche?” 

(No coke? Why?)

“Non mi piace coke, vorrei aqua…” 

(I don’t like coke, I’d like water…)

He looks at me like I’m crazy, and gets me water instead of my coke. I then notice that he’s given me the green cup, but there’s a black one nearby that looks better. I already knew this would be choppy…

“Posso ho nero cup?” 

(I can I have black “cup”?)

He takes out the green cup and gives me the black one.

“E insalata” (and salad)

“No fries?”

“No, no fries.”

“Sono deliziosi!” 

(They’re really good!)

“Ho mangiato fries, vorrei insalata.” 

(I have ate fries, I’d like salad)

Avete mangiato! That’s how you say it! Too bad I remember this when it's too late.

“Signorina, i fries sono buoni!” 

(Madam, the fries are really good!)

Apparently, no one gets a salad here. Figures though, who goes to McDonalds for a salad? The line behind me was getting really long, and I had the cup I wanted, so I just took the fries, thanked him, and headed home.

Practice is good for me though, right? Giusto?

The Vatican Museum; Ceilings

“Oh this is a French style, from the time of George the… something,” I say, taking an interest to the ceiling in the tapestry room at the Vatican Museum. It looks just like a particular French style of interior design I like (enough to recognize it when I see it, but not enough to be able to classify it) which usually has walls that are pastel shades of light blue or light pink (sometimes light yellow, but rarely so) with white borders and outlines on top. I think it’s simple and clean, but my architect-friends and design-friends usually find it disgustingly posh.

“George the something,” Ben repeats, mockingly.

“I don’t know what specific style, but the relief-sculpture-thing they do is really pretty,” I elaborate, only managing to make myself sound that much less like I knew what I was talking about.

“They’re all paintings,” Cherylene says, reading out of Rick Steves’ pocket Guide to Rome.

“Wait, what?” I take a closer look at the ceiling. “What?! WHAT?!”

People begin staring, so I turn off my vocal cords.

“WHAT?! WHAAAAT?!”  I continue to whisper-shout, walking down the hallway, ignoring the tapestries and keeping my eye on the ceiling that is so precise, so immaculately painted that it appears 3-dimenstional.

“WHAAAAAAAAAAT?! This is amazing! Why do our ceilings suck?!”

I’ve seen intricately planned ceilings, like at the Pantheon. I’ve seen ornate ceilings, like the ones in various churches and basilicas scattered throughout Rome. I’ve seen gilded ceilings and shiny ceilings and ceilings that would make the sky envious. But I have never seen a ceiling like the one I am looking at now.

Ever.

Then, when I thought I had seen the ultimate ceiling, I saw the ultimate of ultimate ceilings. The optimus maximus ceiling. The end all, be all of ceilings.

“Oh my god I can’t believe we’re looking at the Sistine Chapel!” Cherylene says, “My neck hurts, I wish we could just lay down…”

“Why don’t we?”

“Grishma, we can’t lay down here…”

I’m unsatisfied by her response. “When else are you going to be here?”

“With my future husband, he’ll need to see this.”

“But… but now. Right now. This moment. Take it. Take it, Cherylene,” I say, already sitting down. I can be very persuasive when the mood strikes.

As we descend onto the floor, time and us untangle. Like fish deciding to leave the ocean-currents, we sink out of time as we know it. Feet, so many feet and legs are walking around our sprawled bodies at a thousand miles an hour. My eyes don’t leave the roof of the chapel, lingering on each panel and studying it's colors, it's style. Almost 7 years pass, and I have finally gotten my fill of the ceiling above me. As we shuffle together and rise, melting back into time as we knew it 7 years ago, we were happy to find that only 19 minutes had passed.

My future house will have intricately-planned ceilings.

la nostra famiglia italiana

“Okay, who’s good at eyeing measurements?” Adam says, holding up a box of muffin mix.

“I’ll do it,” I spoke up, having baked a fair share of confectionaries over the years.

“We need 100 milligrams of water.”

“Milligrams? I can do pints… or cups, or—”

He had already moved on to assist some others with the bruschetta. I look around the kitchen for full bottles of liquids. After sifting through the shelves, I settle on a bottle containing 250 milliliters of olive oil. A few squints of the eye and sips of water later, I think I have the right amount.

“Here,” I say, watching as Adam was trying to eye 70 milligrams of butter from a stick containing 2 grams.

Visitors in London try to fit as many people into phone booths as they can. Visitors in Rome, it seems, try to fit as many people into a kitchen. There are 4 of us near the stove—two making pasta sauce, one heating butter, one boiling pasta—3 near a table assembling bruschetta and slipping pans into the oven, 2 cutting vegetables and making the salad, 2 drinking wine and offering to help when needed, and a few doing homework one room over.

“Hot butter, coming through!” Adam says, weaving around the stations of preparation through this 4 by 11 foot kitchen, and pours it into the pot I was sifting the mix into.

We bake the muffin in a giant cake pan while we eat, la nostra famiglia italiana, and 20 minutes later, it looks disgusting. It’s burnt around the edges, raw in the middle, and bubbling in places.

No matter.

We all grab spoons and devour the dough in the middle, the cakey ring once the dough runs out, then the burnt edges once there’s nothing else left.

La nostra famiglia italiana would, like the muffin-cake, appear to be a hot mess if someone was inspecting it from afar. But once you have a taste, you realize that you wouldn't want it any other way.

Greece, Final Thoughts

It’s not often that my mind can relax at 4:37 am. 4:37 ams, if I’m awake to experience them, usually involve sinking eyes, coffee, open textbooks, and a steadily decreasing speed in my typing. This 4:37am, I am sitting inside a cold, ceramic tub in a decadent bathroom. A long day of travelling and hiking around Delphi had left me so exhausted that I fell asleep before sunset. I woke up early, and figured I’d just get started with my day.

The floors are tiled with veiny marble. The lights are reminiscent of an art gallery. There are 3 towels for each person. There is complementary shoe polish.

The walls are embroidered.

It’s chilly in the room, and I’m gradually increasing the water temperature from scalding to boiling. There is no shower curtain, so I can’t drench myself in a steaming spray of water without flooding the entire room. I can’t figure out how the drain in the bathtub works either, so a warm soak is out of the question. My only option is to leave the shower head running and hold it in place (leaving it unbridled would make it spray everywhere in fervor, also leaving the bathroom floor soaked).

So here I am, sitting cross-legged in a cold bathtub, at 4:37am, my arms and back covered in goosebumps. I’ve strategically nuzzled the shower-head in the joint of my right knee, my calf and thigh holding it in place. The head is pointing towards my torso to provide maximum area of warmth. A few tiny spouts of scorching water are hitting the inside of my thigh, slowly cooking them. “Scalding…” I mutter, “just like Blanche likes her baths.”

If she can do it, I can too.

Think warm thoughts.

I’m inside an oven… basting myself in soapy water.

Ugh, gross.

I’m relaxing beach-side, sunlight flooding into my every pore.

Better…

But no matter how hard I try, I am cold. I accept my fate and begin shampooing my hair. The shampoo smells musky, like old perfume. I wouldn’t have expected anything else from such a posh facility.

Something about this doesn’t feel Greek. It’s in Greece, sure, but this isn’t Greece. Greece is graffiti and litter and grime and pollution. Greece is dust. Greece is minimal, basic. Greece is clear waters for miles, the only vivid color in the water coming from swimsuits. Greece is plain white walls, a small tv, a hard bed. This isn’t Greece… is it?

I decided to check.

This tub was made in Italy, according to the inscription near the tap. And the tap, the tap! It’s made in Germany! The glasses on the sink are made in France.

I am cold, wet, soapy and taking inventory of the conglomeration of posh items from all across Europe in this decadent bathroom.

And as I stand here, shivering in a symposium of bathroom appliances, my memories of Greece meshing together—ruins, beaches, ruins, ruins, ruins, beaches, ruins, gyros, ruins—the water trickling down my calves and pooling around my feet on this veiny marble floor, I only have one thing on my mind. 

Italy.

A presto, mio amore.

And goodbye, Greece.

Rebellion (or, Cape Sounion)

“This is what I imagined when I thought about Greece,” I say, gazing at the clear waters of the Aegean, my face pressed against the glass of the coach treading along to Cape Sounion. The bright magenta exterior of our bus is exactly the shade of printer ink. We are a giant, traveling ink cartridge.

Mountains—some the shade of okra, others more like stale cilantro leaves—burgeon from every side. To their probable dismay, they found it difficult to hold my attention. My eyes scan the pristine mountains as quickly as when I search for something specific through stacks of old papers. I search for the prize, the temple where one of the most famous ancient statues of Poseidon once stood, and no more than acknowledge the presence of natural beauty around me.

I could hear her sigh from Phoenix. My dear friend, a connoisseur of biology, would have spent more time analyzing the invasive plants in the ruins than the stones themselves. “There is so much intrigue in what’s living,” she always says, “there’s nothing quite like it”.

My brief knowledge of geology allows me to notice the folding layers of sedimentary rocks on the cliffs and off the shore. As we hike up to the temple itself, I’m a little disheartened when I notice it’s built on top of folding layers as well. “This is just waiting to sink into the water,” I think to myself, unwittingly reminding myself that, despite the endurance of all the monuments I’ve seen over the past week, they will eventually erase into nothingness, and no will be able to know of their majestic history outside of books. It was like noticing a loose strand around the hem of a dress, the trivial thread steals all attention away from the other fibers.

“Everything is temporary,” she told me as we sat outside her lab that winter afternoon. She was shaken up and upset, but her wisdom was unclouded. “You really have to embrace the present. You don’t know how long you have it. You have to enjoy it while you can,” she said. She was right in more ways than I realized.

The strand of melancholy breaks away, letting my eyes focus on the bigger picture. There is a thrill in this moment. In knowing that the temple standing before me, in its suburban-house-beige glory, is only here for a limited time. And I am lucky enough to experience looking at it before it erodes completely, or before the Greek government becomes so poor that they began selling these away to the highest bidder.

“Hey Cassie, you wanna get in trouble?” I say, approaching my roommate. I already knew we weren’t allowed to pose in front of monuments or statues because it was considered offensive (the screaming woman in the National Archaeological Museum made that extremely clear). But we were only here for an hour, and I had recently learned that Greece doesn’t deport anyone. So I figured… the most that could happen is that we’d get kicked out of the temple. 

This temple is only here for a limited time, I’m only here for a limited time. So with a big, metaphorical raise of my middle finger to the Greeks’ policy on posing, I stood in front of the temple, outstretched my arms, and took the stance of the famous statue of Poseidon that previously graced this Cliffside. 

The shutter clicks. 

The moment is captured. 

I am victor.