Fine
12/23/2008 12:33:41 PM

And here I am, home again. Four months of living in the heart of the Renaissance and suddenly I am sitting in my childhood home in the cornfields of Illinois. I've had a few surprises since I've been home, such as how tiny my church looks now (it looks like a shed after having la cattedrale for my home church for four months!), how funny American money looks and how I'm picking up on southern accents where I never heard them before. Driving still feels a little awkward, and I think it's going to take me a few weeks to stop gawking at the gas station signs - remember, gas was about $3.85/gallon when I left Salem, over $4 when I left Chicago. I've also had a few acute moments of sadness such as when Darren showed me his pictures of my Duomo from his trip to Firenze, and when I cooked a sauce with an oversized, flavorless onion and shriveled eggplant, obviously full of preservatives and such. But, all in all, I'm happy to be back with my family and friends.

Our travels home were...ridiculous. Because we had to turn our phones in early, we had no alarm clocks to wake us up for our train, so we were forced to stay awake all night. At 2am our time, 7pm Friday central time, we shut the door to Via dei Pepi 68 one more time and lugged our luggage to the train station. At 3am our train came, and still I did not sleep because our stop wasn't the last stop. We alighted at Roma Tiburtina and then caught another train to the airport, arriving at our very long check-in line at 7:30am for our 10am flight. There we were told that the flight our plane had previously been used for had gotten in four hours late due to the weather, so our flight was pushed back to 2pm. We were also told that since we would miss our connection to Chicago, American would put us up in hotels and feed us, and that that would be taken care of in New York.

So we waited, and because of general Italian work ethic we ended up boarding forty minutes late and getting in the air long past 2pm. Ten hours later, we stepped off the plane, picked up our luggage, waltzed through customs and arrived at the Baggage Re-Check counter, where about 100 people were waiting for hotel and food vouchers. We ended up in the line of the most incompetent woman ever who took about 20 minutes to process our stuff, and then went on to the next person before she was finished with us. While Amy waited for that, I noticed some very frustrated Italians from our flight who didn't speak English, and though it had been a few days since I'd conversed in Italian, I started to translate for some of them. I translated for one woman who'd missed a connection to Miami and was trying to get to Port au Prince and in doing so I talked to this woman from American Airlines. I asked her about the woman's situation and before I could even finish a sentence she was yelling at me. "I sent this woman to that woman over there who speaks spanish and she still didn't understand so I guess she's just not that smart! Nobody can do anything for her!" I spoke calmly and quietly, "Ma'am, this woman doesn't speak Spanish, she speaks Italian..." and before I could finish my thought she was screaming at me again about how the woman behind the counter speaks spanish. So I said, "She just needs to order a ticket for her flight." and the screaming started again "She can't do that! She has to come back tomorrow!" and I said, "Ma'am! We just ordered our tickets for tomorrow and got a hotel, why can't she?" This was met with more screaming and irrationality before she finally left. I went back over to my Italian woman who asked what she had said and I said "I don't even understand, and I speak English!"

After translating for her and a young Italian couple going to Cancun, Amy and I found ourselves in the backseat of a Dodge Charger in the snowy streets of New York City with four other people, plus one in the front seat, on our way to a hotel near LaGuardia, because the next flight to Chicago from JFK wasn't until late Sunday. We got four blissful hours of sleep Saturday night - my first since Thursday night - before waking up for our 7:50am flight to Chicago. Predictably, that got delayed by over an hour due to the icy runways and planes. Finally, at 11am on Sunday, (6pm Italy time), I ran into my mom's arms at the airport in a surreal moment. After lunch with my aunt and uncle, we drove home and got back to Salem at 7pm Salem time, 1am Monday Italy time. So, our travels took just about 48 hours, and I'd only gotten four hours of sleep from Thursday at 7:00am to 4am on Monday.

Now, I'm home recovering. The good thing about the sleep thing is that it made getting jet lag nearly impossible. The only identifiable jet lag that I have is that when I get tired at night, I get tired, and I get hungry at strange times - Italian meal times.

This will probably be my last post in this blog. For those of you who've been reading from Salem, Terre Haute, Seattle, St. Louis and wherever else, thanks for keeping up with me. I'll see you soon if I haven't seen you yet. For those of you who've been reading from the Codexed community, I'll be back on Codexed as soon as they start letting us get more than one username. To all of you, thanks for the comments and for suffering through the long posts. Questo blog e finito. Arrivederci!

|