Life After Italy (La Vita e Agrodolce)

Well I have been home for a month now and I am well over due to write a final posting of sorts. If you don’t feel like reading fine, here’s the summary it’s always nice to see friends and family but life is a lot more fun in Italy.

I know Jessica thinks I’m full of crap when I say this, but returning to the U.S. was big time culture shock. Mostly because there’s not much to do, especially when you are broke and consumed with Catholic guilt over the amount of money you just spent parading around Europe.

So instead of visiting my (well Michelangelo’s) David or walking around Florence, I spent a lot of time on the couch in the family room watching really horrible day time television alone. It was so depressing. Yeah it was nice to watch Golden Girls with a bowl of cheerios on the couch at 10 am once or twice; it was depressing when that started becoming a routine. The thing is though when you have no money to spend, there’s really not much of anything to do in Northern Virginia. So there’s not much incentive to actually get off the couch, except to maybe read a book (which was borrowed, not purchased, from the library).

I was very lucky, my old roommate from Mary Washington came up and stayed at the house for three days that first week I was home. Seeing Melissa was great, it was so nice to actually talk for the first time in months. Her visit delayed my I-miss-Italy depression a solid week. We went to Target and Old Navy and I bought random things I could actually afford and didn’t have to worry about converting the price in my head.

In the same vein my first two weeks back, I ate all the weird American foods I missed so dearly, even though they all seemed to make me feel a little queasy. I ate about a jar of kosher-dill pickles, three or four hot dogs, cheddar cheese, whoppie pies, and drank diet coke around the clock just because I could. I talked on my cell phone without trying to spit out everything I needed to say in under one minute to avoid an expensive phone bill.

By week three home my life was consumed by the anxiety of finding a summer job when our economy is down in the dumps. Another great “Welcome home Kari!” My days were spent essentially stalking Craigslist list for jobs—seriously, at least five times a day I scoped out “childcare,” “office/admin,” “part-time,” you name it, I searched it. I did get quite a few sub days at my mom’s school, each was its own fun/strange experience. I really loved being in first grade and kindergarten, and a few of the special needs kids really stole my heart. Tomorrow I will sub for the last time before summer vacation and next Monday I am starting my REAL SUMMER JOB! I’m working at an office as a summer intern of sorts, doing who knows what, but it’s close and pays well and I am very happy. Who knows maybe a summer blog will be started.

I guess that’s what I’ve been up to, not too much. I’m glad to see old friends, but I miss my new ones. I miss dancing, the closest thing I’ve done to clubbing in boring-S-A (U.S.A.) is Zumba, the latin-dance inspired workout class at the gym.

Oh and men! I have been asked if I miss the Italian men and to be honest I kinda do, they are certainly not perfect or all that dreamy but they are quite good at shelling out those compliments. In Florence even on my “I look like a train wreck” days, I still seemed to get a “Ciao bella!” on the streets walking to class or out at a bar. Here, if you have a bad day (or a good day for that matter), good luck getting a straight guy to tell you you’re pretty, or smart or funny for that matter. One day when I was shopping at Tyson’s alone after a job interview, I spotted a thirty-something guy checking me out and while usually I would be grossed out, I had an “awwwwwwww” moment and was taken back, if only for a second, to Florence.

Sometimes when I think back to my experiences, it all seems like one big dream. Do I wish I was in Italy, of course; if I was in Italy would I miss home, yeah. All I can say is that deciding to study abroad and making that a priority in college was the best decision I have ever made. Hopefully after graduating I will find a way to make it back to Europe and stay for a year or so. If not, I know in my heart that I will return to Italy again—hopefully many, many times.