I’m fond of saying that I did not move away from New York, I broke up with it. And for several years afterward, when I would return, it knew I was there. There was a bitterness about it that exes can have – as if it were saying to me, “See, I’m getting along just fine without you. I don’t need you. Look at how I have barely noticed you’ve been gone.”
But this time, I found it had changed. Read more »
Living in Europe, I’m not often called upon to define, defend or describe that life. In Montpellier, everyone I know is living the same life. In Rome they’ve been witness to it literally since day one, and now I’m an established part of their lives.
The first time I came back to the States, the people I spoke to wanted to know all the details of my shiny new adventure. In subsequent visits, it still seemed like a novelty and there were questions about whether or not it was really going to “take.” But it’s been three years since the last time I was here, and seven years since I moved, seeing kith and kin has taken on a whole new vibe.
Like some sort of reverse canary in the coalmine, it’s almost as though now that I’ve made it work – really work, it’s my (not so) boring old daily life now – people are serious about wanting to know how they can do it, too.
But something else has been happening: It seems that, either directly or indirectly, I’ve been inspiring people. And in return, they’ve been inspiring me, too.
I’ll admit it; I was nervous about coming back. Even though it’s where I grew up, and where my family and most of my friends live, it had come to seem so far away.
America. It had even come to sound wistful when I said it aloud. The land of dreams. A place where, depending on whom you listened to, everything was falling apart; or a place where everything, after so long, finally was starting to come together.
Ms. Adventures in Italy, patron saint of Italiaphile foodies everywhere, recently wrote a comprehensive ebook of 101 American Foods to Try for her Italian friends. You can read it online (don’t worry, it’s in English) or download it at her blog post about it. I recently used this list as inspiration for my own list of foods that I must eat when I’m back in the States for a month soon. So, without further ado, feast your eyes and wear your eatin’ pants – here’s what I hope to have over the course of my trip.
A week from today, I’m heading back to the States for the first time in three years on a month-long visit with friends and family. This is the longest I’ve been away, and a significant percentage of the total seven years I’ve lived overseas. And I am bracing myself for a whole new level of reverse culture shock.
Reverse culture shock may seem like something expats made up in order to remind people back home that they lead an impossibly exotic life, but I can assure you from my own experience that it’s very real, completely involuntary, and can be hugely embarrassing.
This post has nothing to do with travel, but everything to do with blogging – and this here’s my blog, so what better place to talk about it? Mashable, a brilliant site that talks about many things that confuse me because I am an Internet dilettante, recently weighed in on the idea of sponsored tweets. It seems a company has figured out a way to make this work.
Read more »
A ray of sun falling across my face wakes me. I lie in bed and listen to my father get up first. He puts the coffee on, which smells so good, and he tiptoes out of the house to get the newspapers from Wawa. Then my mom gets up and has coffee and the TV goes on quietly. She starts frying bacon, and that is added to the coffee smell.
Then Aunt Marie gets up and they work on the huge jigsaw puzzle and smoke cigarettes and there’s a little more clanking when they decide to undo the dishwasher. Then Uncle Mike wakes up and goes from his bed to the living room floor and reads paperback novels. Sometimes he tells funny jokes, and sometimes he grabs us as we go by and tickles our legs.
My dad comes back from his little trip with newspapers, which have their own lovely smell, and Benny’s Bread with its intoxicating sourdough smell, and maybe some pastries. Then my room starts to come alive with Jase and Trin surfacing from their sleep, and we lie there a little while longer and giggle and plan our day, and then we go out and attack the kitchen and the day has begun.
Then there are the night times, when everybody comes over for dessert or coffee. All us kids are spread out on the living room floor watching the Phillies with the old uncles who are dozing in the chairs, and Richie Ashburn’s voice is summer, and all the aunts are sitting around the table drinking coffee and eating Entenmann’s. We are all sunburned and smell like the beach and soap. Sometimes an aunt invites you onto the couch and scratches your back, and sometimes an uncle calls you over and opens his wallet and gives you money for A La Mode.
We gather ourselves in a noisy bunch and go over barefoot to get our ice cream. Inside it is cold and the floor numbs our feet, and we order our current favorites and talk about our old favorites and the time Trin got sick from eating a whole banana split and the time Francine wouldn’t give me any of her marshmallow topping. We all miss Marny and Pop-Pop so much, but no one says that.
I have set my Gmail Web Clips to give me interesting travel news from a wide variety of sources. One of these sources is MSNBC. Also, please note I’m currently living in France. So when I see a Web Clip that states, “60 crew have swine flu on cruise ship off France” and the source is MSNBC.com, you can be damn sure I clicked on it.
And what is the headline I see on the news page?
“Crew members test negative for swine flu”
Shame on you, MSNBC. And shame on the press at large for using consistently inflammatory language in reporting on this pandemic.
That is all.
What am I about to show you has absolutely nothing to do with travel. But it is about living your dream, and sometimes you get your inspiration from the strangest places. If even one person who sees this video and reads the story behind it is inspired to change the course of their life, take a risk and realize whatever their dream is, then it’s been worth it.
This isn’t a Make-A-Wish thing, or a Springsteen/Cox-inspired audience grab; it was totally random, a girl at the right place at the right time. It’s a long song, and you might not like the music; but watch the whole thing – and if you aren’t choked up by the site of a girl living her dream in real time, you need to get some help.
The story behind it is after the jump.
OW
THE CUTE
MY EYES
IT’S BLINDING ME
Hotels are my passion. From Motel 6’s to five-star luxury resorts, I love everything about them.
I love maid service. I love room service. I love turndown service. I love having a drink in hotel lobby lounges, even if I am not staying there. I love hotel restaurants, with their overpriced comfort food and poor attempts at creative cuisine. I love the anonymity. I love checking for messages at the front desk. I love the consistency. I love unexpected surprises. I love indoor pools. I love reading the guest information folder. I love the stationery in the desk drawers, which always makes me want to write either winsome letters to long lost loves or coded messages of international intrigue.
Hotels are magic. When you’re staying in a hotel, your real life is on hold and very far away. You can be anyone you want while you’re staying in a hotel – or you can finally be yourself.
Read more »
Miss Expatria’s gentle readers already know of my fierce and abiding love for hotels. But today, I came across an interesting argument for vacation apartments – and this has prompted me to give full disclosure:
I LOVE HOTELS.
AND I ALSO LOVE VACATION APARTMENTS.
It’s like a mother’s love for her children – I love them both equally, and I’d defend either one of them to the death. For me, it comes down to why I have chosen to go on a particular vacation.
Read more »
When I was six years old, my parents and I moved to their favorite vacation spot on the Jersey Shore. Twenty-seven years later, I followed in their footsteps and moved to my favorite vacation spot – Rome. Four years later, I now live in the South of France among a group of people from around the world who followed this same urge.
My vacation advice is from the point of view of someone whose entire life could be loosely defined as a vacation. But, sometimes I forget that people did not grow up the way I did, and who do not live like I do now. So, with that in mind, I’d like to impart my know-it-all wisdom to those who live a lifetime in two weeks every year.
1. Stuff in other places doesn’t work like stuff does at home. Toll-free numbers don’t work. Your laptop plugs won’t work. Even with an electrical adapter, your hair dryer will knock out a city block. Air-conditioning is a luxury. Customer is not always king. Read more »
I am thinking of great hotel rooms in my time, in no order:
- Helmsley Middletown, NYC. My old company booked me in a room when they made me come to NY and I got upgraded to a suite, with a living room and everything. And there was my favorite Indian restaurant downstairs that delivered. I felt like a rock star, or a presidential candidate. I made my best friend Katie come and stay over and it was so glamorous.
- Kansas City Radisson. I wish I could find a link, because it was a big, old hotel, but it looks like it doesn’t exist anymore. Three of the moms went in on a connecting suite of rooms that had a living room in the middle. They wanted some semblance of orderly life for us. We would all eat cereal and watch Gidget every morning on the living room’s TV, which I remember being enormous in some kind of cabinet. It was the last of the great old hotels in the grand style. My dad came to visit us and he met someone in the elevator there who he fished with on our beach in OC. This is a common occurrence among the men in my family.
- Bellevue Stratford, Philly. We were originally booked at the Drake but it was dark and gloomy and my mom knew people would be coming to visit us since we were so close to home. The room at the Bellevue had an automatic shoe shiner and I remember it looking like Versailles, I remember the ceilings being so high. We used to order room service and it would come up covered in those silver domes and with china and silver and linen. The next city was Boston and the hotel was kind of a dive, and when we ordered room service it came from the diner and was in Styrofoam containers. My mom and I would look at each other and sigh.
- La Casa Sul Mare, Procida. All white stucco and light and space, with private terrace overlooking the bay and with a view of the fishing village and Capri beyond. Breakfast cost 1E and was brought to our room on a silver tray.
- Hotel Britannique, Paris. I stayed there for one glorious night before being stuck at the Ibis hotel at the airport for a week trying to get a flight home on standby during the end of the Tour de France, the beginning of August vacation, and BA going on strike. Oh and it was the hottest summer ever. Anyway, the Hotel Britannique has deep marble tubs and winsome balconies. Lovely.
- Hotel Niza, San Sebastian. I was taken up to my room and they opened the shutters and there was the most glorious view of the Bay of Biscay. I spent an entire afternoon laying on the bed looking out at the bay. This was also during my most glamorous, jet setting travel stint ever, featuring a drive to Biarritz just for lunch and a flight to London just for dinner and underwear shopping.
- Eurostars Grand Marina Hotel, Barcelona. A pillow menu, a bathroom bigger than my mother’s kitchen, a view of the cruise ships coming in from the sea, top shelf luxury all the way.
- Hotel West End, Nice. See that corner window, on the upper left, on the site? The one at the very top? Yeah. Mine. For a whole weekend. Got a great deal on that suite, and it was SWEET. Views to die for. Room service every day. Worth every centime.
On July 14, 2009, Italian bloggers will muzzle themselves in the Web as well as in Piazza Navona in Rome, at 7PM where they will meet to protest against an Italian government bill (the Alfano decree) introducing a number of new rules which will limit the freedom of expression in Italian internet.
The so-called “obligation to rectify” imposed to the manager of an information site (blogs, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc) clearly appears to be a pretext. In fact such imposition, in terms of bureaucratization of the network and of very heavy penalties for users, shall make of the new decree an Internet-killer.
The practical effects shall be to cause the independent sites and blogs to cease or materially reduce their publications. The apparent intent of introducing criteria of responsibility hides the attempt to make life difficult or impossible for bloggers and users of shared sites (for example: You Tube…).
The fact is that bloggers are already entirely liable, from a penal standpoint, in the event of crimes such as insults, defamation etc: there is no need to introduce unbearable penalties for “citizen-journalists” who do not intend to submit themselves to the bureaucracy and the burdens contemplated in the Alfano decree.
The plurality of information, regardless of the media, internet, newspapers, radio and tv networks etc, is a fundamental right of men and citizens, on which democracy and freedom are based. The Alfano decree is an attack to the freedom of all media, from the major newspapers to the smallest blog.
For this reason we invite all Italian blogs and sites to a day of silence, in the day in which newspapers and tv networks will also remain silent. It is a message of all operators in the media world, who jointly shout to the political world: “We do not want to be gagged”.
We therefore invite all citizens with a blog or a site to publish this logo and maintain it for the entire day of July 14.
Defending the press, the tv and radio networks, the journalists and the Web, we firmly defend the basic freedom of information and the future of our democracy.
Alessandro Gilioli
Guido Scorza
Enzo Di Frenna
Thanks to Divina Cucina and RomePhotoBlog for the heads up.
The Tour de France Team Time Trial Hits Montpellier, France Today… and I’m not ready for it.
He was also my cousin, and he will be missed by all who knew and loved him. For those of you who did not know him, I give you his own words, which I hope will inspire you to live the life you’ve imagined:
“Take a leap, go some place foreign where everything that crosses your eyes in a glance is new and different, where you don’t know what the signs say,” he once wrote to a friend. “Pack that life of yours up into a few duffel bags, turn up at the airport and just jump into a new life somewhere else. I promise you won’t regret it.”
Vincenzo invited me along one day for a walk with Pepino, treasured mascot of via del Mandrione. We ambled down a road we had driven many times, lined by the aqueduct on one side and tiny homes on the other. And then much to our surprise, the homes gave way to a beautiful public garden we had never noticed before.
While quiet night streets in America remind me of slasher films, those in Europe are just plain magical. The lamps bathe everything in a soft light that could tell a thousand stories.
Yeah, hi, me again with yet another photo post. Nighttime pictures of the City of Lights. Enjoy!
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