Local Tourist: All Roads Lead To Rome

The restaurant was dim and candlelit, the murmur of dinner chatter and strolling couples drifting in gently from the back street outside. The food was good, the occasional scrape of cutlery underscoring the unspoken poignancy of the night, and-- did I imagine it?-- I thought I caught a glimpse of a tear in the corner of his eye. Personally, I thought August was a little early for the restaurant to be playing Michael Bublé's Christmas standards, but nevertheless, it made Jordan and I's last dinner together very romantic.

Yes, our parting was sad. We remembered the highs-- climbing Mount Tegelberg in Neuschwanstein (literally high)--and the lows-- such as climbing Mount Tegelberg. Luckily, I caught Jordan's cold, so that a part of him would always remain with me.

Rome was something of a practicum for my efforts to really "see" things. Here, all the churches and artwork we had seen in Europe thus far culminated in the spectacular beat-you-soundly-about-the-face-with-its-staggering-grandeur St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican museum. Appropriately, on the day I went there with my hostelmates Dominic, Linda, and Nicole, I forgot to bring my camera.

While previously this might have been a crisis, it now seemed like a perfect opportunity to apply what I had been trying to learn since Paris, and to make the effort to fully take it all in, instead of assuming that taking a photo meant I had created a memory.

My neck is still aching from craning to see the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for an hour.

And if you're asking thinking, "Then where the hell are all these photos from?" bravo on a keen eye. I got them from Dominic, and if you're thinking that's a cop-out, maybe you're right. But hey, I needed something to keep you reading this entry, right?

In a shocking development, one of my greatest personal developments on this trip has been improving my infamous navigational skills. Apparently, I am great with a map. By the end of our stay in Rome, I had actually been elected chief navigator-- I knew where we were, and where we needed to go, where the metro station was, which line to take, and most importantly, how to find my way back to the gelaterie with 150 flavors. This idea would be unfathomable to my friends back home.

The metaphor of traveling as a journey of encountering yourself also took a rather literal turn when I came face-to-face with my 15 year-old doppelgänger from 400 years ago:

I mean, he's even playing a guitar.

After Jordan's departure, I was glad to hang out with Dominic, Linda, and Nicole, who were all very nice. Nicole was from the Netherlands, while Dominic and Linda were from Germany, and had been traveling for a year together picking berries in Australia while living out of a van. It got me thinking about the nature of the relationships we strike up while traveling. Most are fleeting-- transience is the constant companion of the road; travel is an endless series of farewells. Simply enjoying these relationships for what they are-- brief moments we can never return to-- can seem counterintuitive.

But once you get over that conceptual hump, you realize that enjoying the fleeting company of many can be rich in its own way. People and shared experiences become inextricably enmeshed in the memory of a place; a part of it. The irretrievability of the moment now adds to its dearness, rather than its poignancy.

For the most part, we're afraid to lose people; afraid of losing track and losing touch, and the weight of that begins to hold us down; our inertia builds up. As George Clooney says in Up In The Air, "Make no mistake, your relationships are the heaviest components in your life."

We come to feel bound to places, and this is one of the greatest challenges we face when setting out to travel: simply, allowing ourselves to see and believe it can be done. To really allow ourselves to be free.

Stray Observations:

Stairs are an incredible invention. Walking up stairs is so much easier than walking up an equivalent incline. I'll bet that before sliced bread was invented, people used to say, "This is the best thing since stairs."
Engrish is universal:

Jordan tried to explain to Nicole why this was funny to Anglophones, but to no avail.

I remember a discussion from one of my writing classes in university about whether or not there could be such a thing as a "born cliché," and I think that sitting on a plane listening to Enya while marvelling at how cool the clouds look must surely be one.