In time..

Starting my third month in Rome, I have to ask where does the time go? Last I knew I was on a plane dreaming of my new life in Italy, leaving everything and everyone I loved behind to embark on a life changing adventure, to breath free of the known, and embrace the unknown…and that was a year and three months ago.

I wish I could stop time, I don’t want to grow another year older, or miss another moment at home, but to experience a life in this world is unlike anything else I have ever known. For instance, everything is a bit scary, every action I make is uneasy, things are new, you feel things deeply and differently, you do things you would never do, you make friends with people you would never encounter otherwise, you experience life in a whole new manner, thus inevitably changing who you are…

This to me is Rome.

It’s an adventure with ups and downs, gives and takes, building life-long friendships, or feeling heartbreak: it’s actually truly living my life.

At times I feel guilty, I genuinely do. Here I am at 27 years-old (yes it’s old) spending my mornings with my girl friends drinking tea and eating cake, taking walks down one of the world best shopping streets, and enjoying four hour lunches that turn into dinners, while drinking bottles of red wine. I have this gift right now, I have the gift of true freedom, at the drop of a hat I can leave for the weekend to Milan, or meet a friend in Venice. When I think of what my life was before, working 80 hours a week, (which kept me out of trouble), but what was life? I was away from my family living in Orange County alone anyways. Working to pay rent, to buy more things, to somehow make it in this rat race of life…Italy is different. Italy is about life, passion; you work to live, not live to work. You have a coffee, and smell the coffee, and add sugar to the coffee, a touch of milk and then you drink your coffee there in that moment, you savor the flavor you feel the hot thick crema in the back of your throat, you truly enjoy and know the pleasure of that coffee. As American’s what do we do with our coffee? We take it to go. We grab it and go, we have places to be and work that must be done and we drink our coffee because we need our coffee.

And here lays the difference in life itself, are we made to take our coffee, or drink a coffee?

For now I’ll drink my coffee and savor every sip because it might just be the last time I will ever be able to drink a coffee in this way…

(the rest of the story...)

So there Tia and I were in Padova at 2:00am, looking for something to do, to our luck our new friends had found a little club called the ‘Q’, and off we went to dance the night away. After a few hours the men from the dirty south of Italy turned a bit too dirty, Tia and I had become a bit worried and quickly encountered ‘new friends’. The club closed at 4:00am leaving us 2 ½ hours before our train to Feltre left. We went sight seeing with our new friends all over Padova, seeing every Piazza and fountain in the city in the middle of the night. Making it back to the station in time for our train and blowing kisses to our new friends, we were off to see the world championship of bocce ball!

Snow White's Village

Feltre

Feltre is a storybook town with small stone streets and petite Snow White cottages lining the streets with wooden shutters, window flowers and potted plants. In the distance lies the world renowned Alps, with their snowcapped jagged edges and deep crevasses, the town felt like a dream. When Tia and I reached the hotel we were greeted by players from all over the world, all professional bocce players. I have to laugh; to me bocce ball is Sunday afternoons with my Nonno, playing outside their ranch in Ramona, California. Who would have thought this game could be taken so seriously? At any rate it was, and we got to experience it first hand; The World National Bocce Tournament in Feltre.