Laundry

 My first blog comment mentioned "not a single laundry shot." sorry, Richard. I forgot to post my first Roman laundry shot.

 

April 2nd: Pizza and Churches

Today I had 2 themes: pizza and churches. My son, Noah, recommended I go into every church I came upon. Who knew there were so many churches in Rome!

Pizza for lunch was good, but pizza for dinner was excellent (Pizzeria La Boccaccia in Trastevere). They also served these little tasty treats of fried rice balls stuffed with tomato sauce and cheese, called arancini. 

 Basilica di Santa Sabina (linked)

 

Basilica di Santa Maria (linked)

 

Church of Saint Agnese in Agone (linked)

 

Basilica di Sant ‘Anastasia al Palatino (linked)

 

After only 2 days in Rome I have already gotten into a routine: morning walk, back to the Airbnb for a nap, then evening walk (not so different from my routine at home). In the afternoon I walked by the Colosseum and Victor Emanuel II Monument, both very impressive!

 

After sunset on the Tiber River

 

April 2nd: Day 2 - Looking Back

About a month ago I asked Pablo, my Airbnb host, if the apartment had a microwave and a coffee maker. He responded that there is not a microwave, but there is a coffee maker. Here is the coffee maker, which I am learning to use. My first attempt was not bad, but definitely a work in progress.

After my first day in Rome I wrote my family that Rome is definitely a place that you would want to share with someone. (luckily, I have my cousin and her boyfriend meeting me next week, and my son and daughter-in-law, Natan and Mia, meeting me the next week. Who knows, maybe my older son, Noah, will meet me as well, though he has not confirmed his plans yet.) I also realized that it takes some time to get into the mindset of traveling alone, which I have always loved to do. So, I decided to share an essay I wrote while I was the Global Studies coordinator at Evergreen School.

My love of travel and Evergreen’s Global Studies program

My name is Robert Lee-Engel. I am now a retired teacher, having spent 34 years at Evergreen School, a small private school in Shoreline, Washington, just north of Seattle. Throughout that time, I was involved in and then headed a Global Studies program for 8^th grade students. I was hired in 1987 to lead the first Global Studies trip to China. Evergreen’s Global Studies program is not about a foreign trip. It is a year-long intensive study of another country which culminates near the end of the school year in a four week “field-study” abroad. What the Global Studies program is really about is a year-long exploration of self. It is the study of a foreign country that provides the opportunity and enticement to challenge oneself: to challenge one’s “truths,” one’s assumptions, and, most importantly, the construct of self.  But more on that later.

I start the eighth grade Global Studies class each year with a short reading from Peking and Beyond, by Harrison Salisbury, about his first trip to China in 1977. He starts the book by relating his first impressions of Beijing, and reflects upon when the trip really began for him. He relates how this trip actually started many years earlier, when he was a six-year-old child exploring “the old Chinaman’s shop” in his neighborhood. This leads one to the awareness that there are two trips the same time – the physical one, and the internal, mental one. So I asked my students to reflect on when their Global Studies trip started for them. By the time my students enter the eighth-grade class, many of them had been at Evergreen for 10 years, starting in Preschool at 3 years old. Their participation in Global Studies Day (an all-day event created by the 8^th grade students upon their return to the United States in order to share their experience with the rest of the school) for years provided my incoming eighth grade students with great fodder to write about their excitement, fears, and anticipation of their upcoming eight grade global studies experience.

 

Then one year, I decided it was about time I answered that question for myself. But instead of answering the question, “When did my global Studies trip start,” I decided to explore a different question: Why do I have this insatiable desire to travel? And not just travel abroad, but travel without a plan, without a destination, without a reservation, without a guidebook.

 

When I was a child, my family used to go to Los Angeles a lot. My father would do business, and I would walk. For as long as I can remember, I have been a walker. My parents would put the phone number of the place we were staying in my pocket, along with a dime for the phone call, and I would walk. My goal was not just to walk; my passion was to get lost. I would walk and walk and walk. I did this for years. I remember once that I was so excited when I thought I was lost that I went into a grocery store and bought myself an ice cream as a treat to celebrate the event. And then, upon further reflection, I realized that the source of my wanderlust goes back even further.

I was maybe three or four years old. I was in a city park. Somehow, I got separated from my family. A police officer found me, or maybe he was a park ranger. I only remember a uniform. He carried me on his shoulders back to an office. I remember desks and workers. Then the officer gave me an ice cream. When my parents found me, I was happily eating.

Who knows what shapes a personality, a life’s course. Genetics plays a part, I am sure, as do life’s experiences. Sometimes choice is involved, sometimes random events that are out of one’s control. That was my earliest memory, but it may have been the most influential experience of my life.

I have been a traveler all my life, spending more than seven years abroad on a multitude of trips, three of them more than a year long. But it has not been just the excitement of travel that inspired me. It has been traveling alone. It has been getting lost. I have spent my life getting lost.

I have a favorite moment when traveling, a moment I would repeat again and again. It is that first moment in a new country. When you get off the airplane at the beginning of your journey. And you haven’t read a guidebook or booked a hotel room. And you don’t know where you are going or what you are going to do next. You take the airport bus to the center of town. It is at that moment, when you get off the bus. I stop, sit on my backpack, and breathe. At that moment, all paths are open. It reminds me of a line in a song, “You think you are lost. Look down. Look down. The next step you take is the path you are one.”

When I shared this essay about my love of travel with a class of students on the first day of school, one girl commented, “Maybe it is not getting lost you desired, but being found.”