Veni, Vidi, Vici--sort of

Ciao, tutti. Before I left for Italy I was told 3 things: 1, that the bathrooms would be unusable, 2, that I would want to eat gelato every day, and 3, that I would want to eat pizza every day. So I felt pretty prepared for all of those things to be true, but only 1.5 of them were.

Not only did we eat gelato every day, but we sometimes ate gelato several times a day, trying to get as much of it as we possibly could in 10 days. I had pizza 4 times, and while 2 of those times, the pizza was really good, it was never better than the best pizza I've eaten in the US, namely Big Ed's pizza in Oak Ridge, TN.

As for the bathrooms, I discovered a new European nemesis to add to cobblestone and the lack of water--Italian bathroom doors. Maybe I'm just uncoordinated and an idiot, but I got trapped in Italian bathrooms no fewer than three times in one week. The most terrible was the first time I got stuck. We were on the way from Venice to Lucca, and we stopped at a gas station to have lunch (I ate really good pasta with cheese and sausage and tried to eat a plate of broccoli, but it was drenched in oil as most vegetables we encountered on the trip were, so I couldn't eat that), and after lunch we went to use the bathroom before getting back to the bus. Now if you've been to Italy and/or France, you'll know what I'm talking about when I tell you that many of the bathrooms there have doors that extend from the ceiling to the floor, so when you close the door, you're in a tall box, completely closed in. I'm not claustrophobic, so it's not that big of a deal, but at this gas station, when I closed the door and realized that there were not enough Clorox wipes in my backpack (or in the world) to sanitize the toilet seat--correction, the toilet bowl, because there was no seat--I got claustrophobic REALLY FAST. I had to get the heck out of there, but when I tried to open the door, it was stuck. And I started to panic. I'm not kidding. When I finally did get the door open, my heart was pounding and my face was covered in sweat. I've tried to block it out, but I'm pretty sure I ended up using a handicapped bathroom that was only marginally cleaner. In any event, when I got back on the bus, I hand sanitized like the devil.

That was the worst bathroom experience I had. There was another super gross bathroom in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, but I manned up and used it. I do think, however, that the Italians should look into putting toilet seats back on the toilet bowls because the few I encountered without seats really traumatized me.

Aside from the occasionally gross bathrooms, though, I have very little to complain about when it comes to my experience in Italy, and I was all prepared to have lots of things to complain about. After all, in my Italian phrasebook, the one page I'd dog-eared before the trip was the How to Complain page--again, I'm not kidding.

Here are the things that bothered me about Italy:
1. too much graffiti--why people who live in such a beautiful place with so much history would want to vandalize it makes no sense, and if I were in charge, I'd clean it up!
2. water is SOOOO expensive at restaurants. They only serve bottled water, so you have to pay for it. According to John, our wonderful tour guide, Americans drink more water than any other group of people and consequently have to go to the bathroom more than any other group of people. Whatever. When it comes to water, the US wins. Hands down.

But mostly, I really loved Italy. We did fun things like take a bike ride around the town of Lucca. I'd been nervous about riding a bike after not having ridden since high school, but it turns out that riding a bike is a lot like riding a bike. We also took a cooking class where we made our own pesto pasta that was really yummy. The cities we visited were all amazing. My favorite was Venice. It looks just like it does in pictures and in movies. Plus, I had the greatest seafood risotto there and rode a water taxi and a gondola and randomly stood next to Adam Levine from Maroon 5. Florence was great, too. We saw the David (which is seriously cool), and we also saw Snooki from Jersey Shore a couple of times. And the elderly clerk at the front desk in our hotel asked me if I was Italian because I was pretty awesome at saying "cento due" (102) when asking for my room key back. No big deal.

Rome was fascinating to me. You just turn a corner, and boom, there's the Pantheon or boom, there's a random temple built for Jupiter or boom, there's Julius Caesar's grave. We walked out of the metro station on the first day, and literally stepped out in front of the Colosseum. I mean, it was RIGHT THERE. The next day we went to the Vatican. I didn't think I'd like it all that much because I'm not Catholic or religious, but the Vatican was awesome. St. Peter's Basilica is so beautiful. On our last day we went to Pompeii and it was SO interesting!

And of course there was the food. When it comes to pasta, the Italians don't mess around. They're like the French when it comes to bread. The worst pasta I ate in Italy was 1000 times better than the best pasta I'd ever eaten before going to Italy. I ate spaghetti a la amatriciana, along with lots of other kinds of pastas and gnocchi and risotto, too. OMG. I'm hungry just thinking about it all.

So anyway, we ate and sight-saw our way through Italy, and were feeling pretty great about having outsmarted pickpockets and having survived the heat and the Asian tourists, and then we got to the airport....

We left an hour late from Rome and flew on a plane that smelled of urine for almost 11 hours, only to arrive in O'Hare from Italy and have American Airlines cancel our connecting flight from O'Hare and then cancel our re-booked connecting flight the next morning. It's bad enough when your flight gets canceled and it's just you or you and a family member or two, but when you're traveling in a group of 18 people, it pretty much sucks, especially when by the time it's all said and done, you've been traveling for 43 hours with major jet lag. I expect that kind of thing from Delta Airlines, but apparently Delta isn't the only force of evil out there. Et tu, American?

In the end, we got home, some through Dallas, others via rental car from Louisville, and still others south by Southwest Airlines, our savior.

Now that I've had some time to decompress, I guess the question is will I ever go back to Italia? Well, I threw a Euro in the Fontana di Trevi, and the story is that throwing a coin in that fountain guarantees you will come back to Rome, so obviously I will go back someday. In the meantime, though, arrivederci, Italia, and hello, America. If you need me, I'll be sitting on my couch reading the next Gossip Girl book and trying to forget about how much I miss stracciatella gelato.