Living a Dream

We Americans have a bit of a reputation. We're loud, we're ignorant, and we often make sure everyone around us knows that we're loud and ignorant. On a beautiful April day, a group of family and I visited Pompeii. Like many, we were excited to see the ruins, impossibly preserved areas, and the casts of people who were perpetually stuck in their final moments. It was a very cool place. We did see all that and more, because Pompeii is huge. Most people head to the main points on the tourist map, but there are places where you could easily get lost and not see anyone for 10-15 minute on this particular day. At one point, near one of the main squares of Pompeii, an American woman stopped us and asked us to take a photo. She asked that we take it of her and her...boyfriend? Son? She appeared to be in her 40s and he appeared to be in his 20s, but they certainly didn't give off a mother-and-son vibe. After the photo - they posed in a way that gave no hint of their ...

If I can pare travel down into one thing and one thing only, it's that traveling successfully is a mindset. While going to cool places helps you enjoy it, you have to be OK with the fact that something will inevitably go wrong. Embrace it, or else you'll be pretty upset. Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong. Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this . It's ...

One thing I probably didn't do enough of while tutoring in Italy was to actually tell stories about tutoring in Italy. Of course there are plenty of posts about where we went and what we did in those places, but not much about the actual teaching, save the vespa disaster . Shortly after we arrived in Italy we started making flyers to advertise our services, and we proceeded to post them around the city (near schools, mostly). We received a few bites from these, including one from a woman named Flaminia*. She wanted to meet me to talk about a few things and she had specific questions in her attempt to learn English. I agreed to meet her at a bookstore which held a cafe in the basement and we began talking about what might be a good way to get her started with the language. She very quickly began asking me specific questions that I was completely unprepared for: Things like "how is my pronunciation?" or "When these 2 letters go together, how do I make that sound?...

Hey Mrs. D. It's been a while, I know. I'd be lying if I said I thought about you often, and I have no idea if this letter will find you doing well or not, but it came to me as I was walking home from a lesson. An English lesson. In Italy, where I'm teaching English lessons as a form of making a living. I have a bit of a bone to pick with you, Mrs. D. It's nothing personal (although you told me I'd never be a good writer, and I'd be happy to write you a letter that really shows emotion and conveys a central theme about whether or not I can write a letter that shows emotion and conveys a central theme), I just think you did a disservice by pounding the rules of grammar into our heads to such an insane degree. Yes, I realize it was funny to have to write "To plus a verb is an infinitive" a crazy amount of times as punishment for misinterpreting a verb form while diagramming sentences. And yes, I realize that that's a fairly important rule. But I ...

Welcome to your intro-to-Italian class, where in a few paragraphs I will tell you the worst word in the entire language. A lot of you probably don't know many words in Italian, and the ones you do are the super-simple ones like ciao, arrividerci, grazie, prego, or similar things. You might've even heard words like "capisce" in Italian movies (pronounced cah-peesh-ay, not cah-peesh, for the record), or "mamma mia" instead of "oh my god" or something like that. Well, all of those get used, and I'm going to tell you a little more. "Prego" means everything. It can mean any of the following things: you're welcome, can I help you? Sorry, please, go ahead, can you repeat that? and more. Mamma mia sounds like a joke the first time you hear it, but it's real. And of course, there are the hand-motions. These things are real, and they're used to a funny degree. When Italians almost get into car accidents (which is literally e...

I'm talking about little things, and you've all heard this before. Not just the little things spoken of by the greatest assortment of musical talent ever , nor the little things spoken of by the most accessibly human gangsters you've ever seen, or even the little things from the song by Bush. I'm talking about actual little things to do for people that make a difference to them. See, it's very easy to make a comment to someone or to give a little something that reminded you of someone, and it's even easier to receive such things. About a week ago, Jenna and I were out for a walk in the evening, conversing (as we do) in English. We passed an older man by himself who suddenly burst out in struggled-English with "Have a good....! Uhh! Aaahh! Happy Holidays!" We laughed and thanked him and returned the well-wishes. Our best guess is that this guy heard us speaking English and got excited because he knew a few things and how to say them, and amid h...

People have asked several times what it's currently like to live in Milan, and there are several answers I can give. Instead of answering them like a normal person (i.e. when people ask), I've been ignoring most of you for three solid months and will now unleash a brief and incomplete list of things that "define" what it's like to currently live in Milan. 1) Remember that scene in Beverly Hills Cop when Axel starts laughing at the two guys who walk past in their Michael Jackson jackets? It's like that. People all hear that Milan is a bigtime fashion city, and in a lot of cases it really doesn't matter. But nearly every day I will see someone who looks so ridiculous that I stifle laughter. There are lots of outfits that scream "prostitute" in America that apparently scream "I fit in" in Milan. It takes some getting used to. Also, saggy-butt parachute-style pants are honestly a thing over here. Young males wear them and don't see...

Roughly 100% of what I've seen from the internet this week has been bad news. I don't want to contribute to that flux. Chin up, world, we can't all be that bad. The fact that a lot of people are angry and protesting and showing that they actually give a shit shows that, well, people are angry and protesting and showing that they actually give a shit. Giving a shit is a great thing. Continue. Fight the fights that deserve to be fought. Being 4000 miles away from the US is weird, especially when I'm reading about the states all the time and what's going on there. I don't really want to write about the things I'm reading because everyone has, so I'll trust you (people who are so obscenely smart as to read things that *I* write) to make informed opinions about life and try not to generalize everyone and everything. Three things have happened to me that were really note-worthy this week and I'm gonna tell you about them now. Number 1: Someone asked ...

I like it here in Italy. I've written thousands of words into a pseudo-journal about what life here is actually like, not to mention the thousands and thousands of words about the traveling we've been doing on weekends (which is currently at 10 countries and 13 trips in 13 weekends, ho-hum). There are, however, some things that I cannot figure out, and I will tell you about one particular thing that happened to me today. I teach a class at a school in the suburbs. My commute includes two metro trains (like the el in Chicago), a regional train, and then a bus to the school. Three weeks ago, on a rainy day, I was waiting for the return bus to take me back to the train station in this suburb - called Monza, for what it's worth - so I could arrive at my next lesson that evening. As my bus pulled toward the stop where I waited, I stepped toward the curb in anticipation of, you know, getting on the bus. You can imagine my surprise when the driver looked at me and opted not to...

Have you guys ever read The Odyssey? You probably have. It's long, Greek, and there are about 75000 names used in it over the course of seemingly a thousand pages. You might also remember it for things like Calypso, a whirlpool, Polyphemus the cyclops, Sirens, and various people being murdered for various things, not to mention the tail-end of the Trojan War being recounted within its pages. The reason it might sound familiar but not-that-familiar is that most people seem to be reading this book between the ages of about 12 and 16. This is one of the most loaded books in the history of ever, and it's complicated enough just to follow the plot (Homer, the author, invented the concept of in medias res , where the story begins in the middle and jumps around a bit through flashbacks and such, a style now known as "The Tarantino" or as "the way that one guy makes those weird movies with lots of violence"), let alone follow all the names involved, the historical...

As a warning, I would've written this same thing before starting to teach, but it popped into my head today after a quick lesson with a youngster. Bear in mind that these lessons with kids are not as simple as they would be if we both spoke the same language, so the Italian-to-English hurdle surely gives rise to some less-than-ideal conditions for the kids, which makes them more apt to act out. I have parenting advice. I mean, I have for a while, and I have lots of pieces, and I know that I won't be the perfect parent (although I'll be a hell of a lot better than some of the monsters I've come across in my life), and I'm not pretending to have all of the answers. I'm shooting for one big one right now. Teach your effing kid to play fairly. If for no other reason than it preventing his or her English tutor from getting real pissy and writing a blog post immediately after a lesson. This little kid is actually really adorable. The first fifteen minutes was as...

As someone who goes into people's homes and does homework help and things like that, I guess I have a certain responsibility to be, you know, a good person. In most cases, this has gone swimmingly. In my short time teaching, I've been invited to Switzerland twice, I've been offered more food and drink than you can imagine, I've been given suggestions of vacations, I've been congratulated, hugged, kissed (the cheek-things that they do in Europe), and high-fived. I've been laughed at and laughed with. I've generally been pretty OK at this job. Last week I made a tactical error. I scared the living crap out of my student. I help him with his writing assignments, and last week's assignment was to write a short story about basically anything. He was given a few genres and we decided that crime stories would be too hard to write in 250 words, so we kicked around maybe a ghost story or a horror story. We played around with ideas and thought about how to...