primavera

on sunday at 6:30 my three friends and i left our hotel in nice for the bus station. 24 hours later we landed at our apartment. in the hours in between, when i wasn't on a bus, train, plane, floor of the rome airport, or sidewalk outside the palermo train station (so, like 2 minutes) i was frantically wondering how the hell i would take ten days, two continents, three countries, and countless babies in airports and assemble it into some sort of organized blog post. and even before i begin i have failed incredibly because there is simply no way. i did take roughly a thousand pictures (i...know), ride a camel, realize i want to spend a small part of my future in africa, sleep outside the Colosseum, ride a four-wheeled bike, sleep on a rock beach in nice, and meet at least a dozen people my age from all over the world--australia, new zealand, england, france, belgium, the us, denmark, russia, canada, and germany--who were living the life, having forgone university to backpack through europe, working at bars and hostels, playing guitar on the beach, solidifying my plan for at least a year out of college: buy a ticket to somewhere across the atlantic and live.

so i'm sitting here at school, exhausted and hungry and kind of tan (YES) and missing quick, the most incredible fast food place in france i'd say, and wondering what to write about. and all i can think about from the past ten days is the tiny girl i met on my flight from rome to nice. she was probably two and with her mother and her even tinier sister, and the mother was clearly stressed and i first saw them in line to check in, and the little girl wondered a little away from the mother and the mother grabbed her by the hood and smacked her across the shoulders, which made me almost want to cry but also kind of hate italians. because this girl was maybe the cutest little girl i had ever seen, and she had a bowl cut, and, you know, i sympathized, as anyone who looks at any baby pictures of my own can tell you. the little girl ended up across the aisle from me on the plane and we spent the better part of the 45-minute flight waving at each other over her stony-faced mother, who held the baby with one hand and used the other to methodically wrangle the little girl and prevent her from having any sort of fun. and then we ran into each other again at the baggage claim and she was toddling around near me so i bent down and asked her her name in my foolish accent: "come ti chiami?" or actually "cohhhmeee tee cheeeeeahhhmmmii?" and she got really closed to my ear and whispered, really slowly, "poppy..." and then an older man traveling with them grabbed her by the shoulder and steered her away. and that is all i can think of to write about. which is sad. and in no way sums up my spring break. but, i realize, my experience was full of little ones like that--little interactions, observances, etc., in no way all moving me to tears as that one had (except, okay, the 24-hour mega traveling frame which had be actually crying), in fact many of which made me fall in love even more with my surroundings, wherever i was: there was the little french girl in tunisia who wanted to take pictures with us; there was the time i was standing in an amphitheatre in the 4th holiest muslim city in the world and the call to prayer came on and i watched as masses of people stopped what they were doing and took their shoes off and entered the mosque; there were the two guys we met on the spanish steps who were dressed better than i ever will be; there was the mountain we climbed in nice and drank champagne at the top; there was the time i ran into a friend from school, my tiny school in northwest ohio that nobody has ever heard of, in the streets of old nice, even though she was studying in milan and i am studying in sicily and we just both happened to be in the same part of nice at the same time.
so really that is all i can offer...little glimpses into the past two weeks, and not much else, except to say that everything i did and ate and saw and everyone i talked to is somehow with me, if that doesn't sound too cliche and psuedo-romantic and stupid.

oh and, in nice i saw two dogs attached to each other by a long leash, walking each other, with no human in sight.