Musings on Life, Work, and Love
“He’s back!”
Japan. I can’t believe I’m here. Until now you were just the land of samurais, sake, and sushi. Godzilla and earthquakes. Walkmans, and six-sigma. Capitalist invaders (Rising Sun) who succumbed to a lost decade. Robot toilets.
You’re known for being disdainful of foreigners (gaijin), but you’ve been completely nice to me. You have TGI Friday’s, Starbucks, and Legends sports bar. Your toilets don’t make sense.
“Rome, if you want to…”
What makes a guy decide to travel the world for a year to learn three languages? Doesn’t everyone know that you can’t learn even a single language in a year?! Three is impossible! And you’ll be completely alone because you can’t make friends until you’re fluent. And your career! You’ll get passed over for promotions and probably never recover all that earning potential. It’s madness, I tell you! Madness!
Maybe all of my friends thought that way. At least they were kind enough to substitute something ambiguous like “it will be the trip of a lifetime” (which could be good or bad). When they said I had to do it while I could, I don’t know if they meant it was actually a good idea, or just something they knew I had to get out of my system.
Today I’m going to give credit (or blame) to some writers on the interwebs who inspired and educated me for this trip:
How weird is it that I’ve never met any of them? Or maybe it’s weird that I actually emailed with a couple of them. (I even wrote a guest post for one of them a long time ago.)
I thought long and hard about going back to school…
Monday I’m going back to school. Have pity on my teachers. I’m going to be quite the troublemaker.
Here’s what I want from the school
Structure
Guess who doesn’t work very hard without a schedule? Yeah, that would be me.
This blog post commemorates the Brill/Chance invasion of Paris in 2015…
I love visiting Paris. The three best parts are seeing the Eiffel Tower, speaking French, and looking at Monet’s paintings. I also really like the waiters. Ok, that’s four things. Cramming in Italian must be making me lose other skills. I mean, our brains have to get full at some point, right? Like when you can’t add any more songs to your iPhone?
So tall you can’t take a picture of the whole thing. (If you see one, it was photoshopped.)
It’s a joy to see the Eiffel tower. Not just up close. Everywhere you turn it pops up between buildings. (“Look, there’s the Eiffel Tower!”) The poor thing was supposed to be torn down after the world’s fair of 1890-something or other. Look, Italian has squeezed out my room for remembering dates.
Oh how I wanted to love Napoli. I wanted a dreamy week in the pizza capital of the world. I wanted to feel the ocean breeze while I sipped a crisp white wine. Basically I wanted an Italian Hawaii.
…or the French Riviera.
Napoli didn’t give a damn what I wanted. It wanted my money and it wanted me gone. Firenze welcomed me with open arms like we were friends forever. Napoli saw me as a nuisance, if it saw me at all. Nothing personal.
I’m having two problems right now in studying Italian. (Italian Version)
National Library
Ho due problemi in imparando Italiano. (English Version)
I Turisti
I hit 16 museums and attractions in the course of 4 days at the end of February. A friend came to visit for a week and that was a good excuse to overdose on culture. Which is exactly what we did, fueled by gelato and espresso.
When things don’t go your way…
I’ve traveled enough to have low expectations for physical mail overseas. Why is it easier to get a person across the Atlantic than it is to get a Fedex envelope? So I knew that trying to receive something here would be a plan of last resort. I hoped to go the entire trip without needing anything. I made it about a week.
Short version: