The World is Very Fast

Just the highlights

There is no way to say it without everyone sounding spoiled, but we hear it from every expat family.  The kids are tired of travelling.  They want to stay home and go to a movie, not another church.  So when my daughter whined, "I don't want to go to Greece this weekend," I said, "That's fine because Rome is in Italy."

My memory of Rome from 23 years ago was a dirty mess of broken down buildings.  The Rome we saw this month is a clean and well preserved place of beauty.  Every block is another chunk of history, it's an outdoor museum.

And so we do the quick trip:  Coliseum, Jewish Ghetto, Pasta, Spanish Steps, Pasta, The Vatican, St. Peters, Pasta, Trevi Fountain, Gelato, AS Roma Soccer, Pasta, Home.

It’s nice not to travel in the Summer with the crowd and to see the Coliseum on a mild day in January where you don’t need sharp elbows to get a picture of your family and where you can hear your guide who isn’t screaming above the English/French/German/Chinese guides around you.

The pasta is better, the Chianti sweeter, the roads more narrow, the people happier.

The Vatican and the 500 steps to the top of St. Peters, learning about this Pope and his Prada slippers and his love of Orange Fanta made you feel you could know this man with a billion followers.  This person who lives in Rome where 99% of the people call themselves Catholic, and only 10% go to Church.

This town doesn’t use butter when it makes pasta and cheese is delivered when you ask for it.  They have non-dairy Gelato and 15,000 of the country’s 35,000 remaining Jews.

And while they all sound just like you expect, with heavy emphasis on the final syllable, and you swear you spotted various characters from the Godfather or the Sopranos, one of my favorite encounters was with a Bangladeshi street vendor who sold junk to my children.

“Where are you from?"

“I am from Washington, DC"

 He looked up at me with his gold teeth and smooth face that suggested he couldn’t be more than 25 years old. 

 "I am from Bangladesh.  You are from America.  And here we are.  The world is very fast.”