2009-09-16 - 10:39 a.m.
I'm back home after Austria and then Italy and much to say but, for now, just this. I felt like an American there, and I don't often feel that way: pointing at maps and asking for directions, wishing I could get coffee in a big fat cup instead of in a tiny one, feeling like everything I'd ever seen or touched or felt back home was ridiculously new and fresh and not old in any way, mixing my twenty-two Italian words with my thousands of English ones, feeling very happy that I understood some short and declarative German sentences, wishing the techno I was hearing was instead rock and roll, and wishing I had a scooter like they do in Rome because they seem like a pretty cool way to get around.
So, back home now for this American and still thinking of the Colosseum at night all golden and quiet, big dishes of pasta with thick sauce, bottles of Chianti on the balcony in Florence, picking up fruit from a vendor's stand in Venice and the old man there cursing me under his breath because I didn't know the rules about touching fruit, long and thin sausages in Vienna with mustard and shaved horseradish.
And, now, eleven-o'-clock staff meetings and rushed lesson plans.
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