happy camper

PAULINA IS HERE AND EVERYTHING IS WONDERFUL
For those of you that don't know, my other half has come to visit me.  She arrived last Tuesday, and is the best thing that has ever happened to Rome ever.  I'm looking at you, Caesar.

I don't have a lot of time, since I'm having fun and stuff, so I'm gonna go ahead and incorporate my love of list-making by, once again, jotting down a few things that happened this week pre-London:

Edoardo got a microphone.  This is not okay.
Paulina hitched a ride to her hotel from a stranger by speaking almost french, after trudging through a field of horses and scaling a freeway in a thunderstorm.
She checked out of that hotel and crashed on my bed during an accidental 12 hour nap.  We have been alternating between the wood floor and my bed ever since.
I didn't want my host parents to know that I was hosting Paulina without their permission, so I forced Paulina to hide in my bedroom while we waited for the house to clear of any and all grandmas.  It worked fine until the maid needed to use my bathroom... I don't know why I do things.
While taking a walk through the park, Edoardo fell into his own stroller, locking his hips between the back wheels, forming somewhat of a human seesaw.  I pissed my pants.

On Thursday night, we ditched the klutz before his bedtime to catch a flight to London.

We grabbed dinner at the airport, where Paulina took a bite out of her cooked ham sandwich, made a disapproving face, flipped it around, and exchanged it for a new, unbitten, and uncooked sandwich.  To be fair, i also exchanged my good-for-nothing sandwich.  My passport was finally stamped by the important Roman at the Customs desk, who wasn't exactly thrilled to see that I was so surprised upon receiving a manual stamp.  And because neither of us bothered to check which airport we were flying into, we were forced to spontaneously spend the night at a Wifi-less Hilton (thanks Paris) near Stansted, hours from downtown London, catching a ride from an old survivor of throat cancer.  He and I spoke quite a bit, but between the accent and the hole in his neck, I can only guess that we got along famously.

After a chilling "December in The Worst New York" day, running from one pub to the next to avoid catching pneumonia, we spent the second sunny day accidentally walking in circles around the London eyeball.  After a meal I'll never forget at the "Udder Belly Festival" (burgers with fancy cheese that starts with an "s" idk), we ignored our better judgement and hopped on a duck boat tour.  Our flirty guide, sporting dad jeans and a beautiful face, blasted the James Bond theme song as our WWII veteran bus/boat/miracle drove into River Thames.  Paulina and I were easily the most engaged passengers, laughing at every over-rehearsed joke and never breaking eye contact in the hopes that, in an act of justice, he would tip the boat just enough to dump all the other tourists in the choppy water and whisk us away to a long and happy life of amphibian love.

Later that evening we were invited over to my favorite Jack's house for dinner with his family and it was perfect they are perfect- especially the dog, who left me with a layer of sticky love slob all over my neck.  We killed the rest of the night splitting pitchers of girly mixes at some loud bar club thing, dicking around with my camera, and trying not to stare at the black albino guy make out with every ~lAdY on tHe dAnce fLo0r~.

The friend who was supposed to host us Saturday night messaged me HOURS before meeting up and cancelled, leaving Paulina and I to panic and reach out to every london contact we had (this includes my friend's father's cousin).  Hotels were nearly all booked up, and the only rooms left cost over $400/night due to some big rugby match I don't know I don't watch sports.  We ended up staying with Paulina's kind-of-ex, who was incredibly kind and even spent the night on a friend's couch down the road so that we could have his bed.

After a well-balanced breakfast of barbecue roasted peanuts, I took off back to Rome, leaving Paulina in London to drink cheap beer, steal wifi, and dance with her pinky in the air until Tuesday night, when she returns back into my Italian-by-the-transitive-property arms for a ghost tour of the city.

I don't know.  This week acted as sort of a sassy smack in the face, reminding me of just how wonderful my friends are, waiting for me back at Columbia as soon as I get my shit together.  I gotta get my shit together.

Okay.  Wouldn't want this to get emotional, bye,
Kay

vencie schmenice

I went to Venice over the weekend.  Some of the time it felt like Disneyland and all of the time it smelled like salty laundry.  These are the things I remember:

Staring at my gelato cone face down in the concrete after I licked it too hard sorry.
Buying a "it's all gonna be okay" gelato in a cup.

Riding in an overpriced gondola solo.  My striped guy sang and whistled as people took pics I’m a star.

Getting lost (surprise), ripping my useless map in pieces, skyping my mom from an internet cafe, and ending up in yet another police officer’s presence.  This time, however, the cop called me a cab.

Staying the night in a campground with complimentary alcohol.

Hiding in my tent post-check-out because rain.

Spending my entire second day with a Brazilian girl I met on the bus, practicing her English.

Playing musical chairs on the train ride home trying to avoid the ticket man.

I spent the rest of my time in Canal World wandering in and out of souvenir shops looking for a Christmas ornament for my mother.  Supply is low in late May.

Love and hugs,
Kay

didn't fall in love though

I thought I should start this out by letting you all know that I watched 17 glorious hours of Mad Men this weekend.  Since Saturday morning I’ve learned that women are the lesser sex, scotch and business go hand in hand, and affairs are fine in moderation.  Also, Christina Hendricks is actually just Jessica Rabbit with more dimensions.  Dad, google Christina Hendricks.  

In my defense, I'm trying to save money.  Last weekend I spent every dollar I had on a trip to Paris, because I’m fancy, and I wanted to visit my buddy Andrew (better known as “Roo”) who’s studying abroad at Sciences Po. 

Because I’m 19 and I’d rather make faces in the mirror than plan, I checked the time of my flight only four hours before boarding.  Obviously I was running a bit late, so you can understand my frustration when the wicked Ryanair check-in clerk told me that because I had failed to print out my boarding pass before my arrival (my family doesn’t own a printer), she would have to charge me 70 euro, 70 EURO, that’s $90.81, to print out my ticket.  At the very least I expected my ticket to be a weighty gold bar dipped in unicorn blood, with some sort of key to heaven hooked on the corner.  Instead, it was just a sheet of 8x11 computer paper with a barcode.  I made sure to tell the blue collar devil incarnate that she was robbing me as she swiped my credit card and cackled with a mouth full of shadows.

I made my flight because I'm a wizard, but when I landed I realized that I had no idea where Andrew lived.  I never even bothered to ask.  I just assumed that when I stepped off the plane he would be waiting across the runway, lounging in a bed of baguettes making out with the ghost of Joan of Arc.   I was able to get a hold of Andrew via Facebook a couple of hours later in a Starbucks, after I had accidentally wandered into a fancy mall with chandeliers and suede trash cans.

I didn’t know (and still don’t, really) anything about French culture, so I wasn’t sure of what to expect other than glossy haired snoots in Chanel.   I was warned by stereotypes and well-traveled friends about Parisians’ attitudes toward Americans, and had decided upon using pretend sign language and smiles to get through the weekend without having any baristas roll their eyes at me.  I figured I could just memorize and execute the hand movements to Napolean Dynamite’s classroom performance of “The Rose” every time somebody looked me in the eye.

But communication was actually a non-issue, because I only spoke with three or four French people over the course of the entire weekend: two ponytailed cashiers, a broad-smiled metro ticket checker, and Franck.   Handsome Franck from Grands Boulevards caught me laughing to myself in the metro, and made sure to tell me in loud, slow English that I was giving myself away as a tourist because “the French do not smile here”.   He didn’t even mention the camera around my neck, map in my pocket, or the fear in my eyes.  He told me to “look bored and avoid eye contact”.  Flirty Franck went on to ask me if I was enjoying my trip, and if I wanted to give him any suggestions for his upcoming summer vacation to Los Angeles.  Nice guy.  Andrew later told me that smiling at another person on the subway is interpreted as a sort of “suggestion”, so considering the extent of my grinning ignorance I’m disappointed with the lack of Gastons and Jeans (and Francks, let's be honest) in my phonebook.

Franck-less, I was able to walk all around the city and shamelessly do some of the traditional tourist things like mispronounce “Notre Dame” and take pictures of Spanish couples in front of the Louvre.  Also, the Eiffel tower is BROWN.  Did you know that?  Am I the only one who didn’t know that?  

I had heard that the Not-So-Iron Lady did a cool sparkle trick every hour after sunset, so I took a seat on the lawn down below and started judging all the couples around me.  After witnessing a bearded 40-something tongue a woman’s ear, I switched my attention to my PDA-free camera.  While I flipped through old pictures to kill time, I was approached by 10-20 individual bangladeshi men selling wine and champagne.  I knew that swigging from the bottle solo could only lead to me improvising songs about my bitter opinions on love and marriage, so I refused.  I also quickly learned to deny their drinks in Italian, for English encouraged conversation and very personal questions regarding whether or not my boyfriend was coming any time soon. My go-to hair toss and response, “My boyfriendS should be here any minute, yes” was simply not as effective as italian spaghetti babble.

As wonderful as Paris was, my favorite part of each day was coming home to Roo, changing into my “comfy clothes”, gossiping about high school, ordering delivery sushi and watching Sex and the City it doesn’t get much better than that nope wow I adore him can you tell i just really need to wrap this up? bye.

I said bye,

Kay

look, mom!

LISTEN UP MY HOST FAMILY IS AWAY ON VACATION AT AN EGYPTIAN BEACH RESORT HA HA I HAVE AN ENTIRE APARTMENT TO MYSELF THIS IS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A GROWN UP

I’ve never really had a room larger than 5 square feet all to myself any night ever, so I’ve been taking full advantage of this probably-very-expensive space, doing things I never dreamed I would be doing until after my second divorce, when I finally resort teaching improv to rehab patients.  As it turns out, I’m pretty good at keeping my shit together when it doesn’t matter.  I wash my dishes directly after meals, wipe down the countertops just because, shut the curtains at night, lock the front doors…  I’m so adult that at this very moment I’m doing my laundry, specifically my linens and towels. LINENS AND TOWELS.  

Without the 3-5 pairs of judgmental Italian eyes around to stare at me cook eggs that “strange way” (scrambled, I scramble my eggs), I’ve been using this time to relax and *~~*~*be myself~***~*.   This means spending hours lying on the couch with my bare feet resting on a tower of couch pillows and watching a series of Justin Bieber music videos on full volume. Here are some gems I found in the comment section of “As Long As You Love Me”:

As noted in my previous post, these past few weeks have been really hard on me.  I’ve been somewhat of a sad monkey man, and haven’t really felt the desire to do much other than lie in bed, read Yelp reviews of McDonalds, and downvote comments from mustard-loving racists.  However, I was running out of things to talk about to my mom over Skype (our conversations were turning into forty minute opportunities for me to describe scenes from my favorite movies line-by-line), so on Sunday I forced myself out of the house to see Rome’s largest park, Villa Doria Pamphili.  I left around noon, not bothering to look up any specific directions, only to shove my well-worn map of the city in my pocket and test my sense of direction.  Obviously I got very lost on the way there and back, because that entire part of town on the map was covered by an advertisement for "Ciao Roma Open Tour Hop on and Hop Off Tour!"and my "sense of direction" is really just an unusual talent I have for finding the nearest 24 hour bakery.  

Though I eventually found my way to Pamphili through a series of lucky left turns, getting home wasn't nearly as successful.  You should know that Pamphili is huge, so the fact that it took me an hour to find an exit that didn't lead into a misty detergent-scented alley is only moderately pathetic.  I didn't have a watch, so I'm going to guess that somewhere between eight and thirty hours passed after escaping from the park before I found myself collapsed on the sidewalk, leaning limp-limbed against a Monday-Saturday bus stop in a neighborhood called "La Pisana".  Even then, as I threw off my shoes and emptied my backpack of it's contents onto the sidewalk, I knew that I was overreacting, but I was hungry and sweating through my t-shirt in places I still don't understand.  I had no cell phone and no cash- a cruel and absolutely effective way to keep myself from spending money. 

After I was through feeling sorry for myself, I wiped some snot on the bench beside me and continued to walk nowhere in particular.  I wandered into a little no-name park where there appeared to be one of those “You Are Here” maps by some volleyball courts, but I soon discovered that it was nothing more than a blank white sign covered in graffiti that read "the pills will control you".  Just when I was about to take shelter within the bushes and come to terms with my new identity as a homeless teen expat atheist with General Anxiety Disorder, a police car slowly entered the park’s gates, moving along the center path on patrol. 

I quickly patted myself down, making sure I wasn't carrying anything illegal like drug-dusted firearms or a human finger wrapped in pornography, and then ran up to the driver’s window and asked the officer if he spoke English.  When he told me didn’t, I looked him straight in the face and immediately started crying, somehow never managing to break eye contact - the poor cop was terrified.  I handed him my map and made a series of “Where am I?” shoulder shrugs, then pointed to Piazzale Flaminio, which was already circled in pen, to indicate that’s where I needed to go, home.

Officer Rossi ended up giving me a ride home, because when he tried to give me directions to the nearest bus stop I just cried harder, and started using my map as a kleenex.  I rode 35 minutes to Piazzale Flaminio in the back seat of a cop car, winking at passerbys and blowing flirty kisses to neighboring vehicles.  I figured the dried mascara tracks on my cheeks gave me an edge.  He dropped me off directly in front of my apartment, taking only my first name, birthdate, and “California” for his records.  I mean I guess I'm in the clear.

I was beyond relieved to see the apartment, but within one minute of stepping through the front door I managed to set off the home security system, sounding alarms across the entire 5th floor of my building for five musical minutes.  The keypad denied every one of the codes that Margherita had given me, and none of the sidewalk people on their cigarette breaks responded to my desperate calls for help out the window.  Since Sunday, the housekeeper and I together have activated the alarm three more times - so we've agreed to take our chances and shut the system down for a few days.

Here's to hoping Roman robbers are are also enjoying the Egyptian sun,

Kay

P.S. Congrats on the new mattress mom wow sounds great