It’s no secret that I love Italy. I love gelato, I love pizza, I love the slow, laid back pace of life, I love the smell of the air, I really love wine, and I love that each and every city feels so incredibly different. But it’s also no secret that when I say “Italy”, I’m not including Rome. I love every single thing about Italy except its capital. It’s probably not acceptable to completely ignore the existence of such a historical city, but I do, and I’m not sorry. So when Semester at Sea announced that the replacement ports for Ghana and Senegal would be Civitavecchia, the port city of Rome, and Barcelona, I was a little bitter but since we had four days in Italy, I was already hard at work planning my trip back to Florence, where I could finally splurge and get a real Italian leather jacket. Ever since Sarah and I left Italy and the smell of genuine leather behind, I’ve been kicking myself for not investing in a good jacket.
But then Semester at Sea throws a giant wrench into my plans. The mandatory field lab for my class, Global Development, was originally scheduled for Ghana… ya know, where DEVELOPMENT IS NEEDED. But for obvious reasons, my poor professor was forced to come up with a plan B in an extremely developed first world country. So while I felt bad for him, I was a little busy throwing myself a pity party because the field lab was scheduled for the second day in Italy, which meant that I couldn’t go anywhere on day 1 or day 2, and day four I needed to be back by 4pm, so it was completely unreasonable for me to spend a few hundred dollars to sit on a train for 7 hours and spend a single night in Florence. Cue the violins.
Now reread the first sentence of this post. In case you haven’t picked up my point, I love Italy. And even though Rome was where everyone was headed, I found that I loved, and desperately needed, a few quiet days in the small port town of Civitavecchia. My field lab was based around visiting socially responsible entrepreneurs…. In this case a company that specializes in Organic olive oil and a vineyard that grows organic grapes. So yes, to answer your question, I did get to taste wine and olive oil and organic breads and cheeses and honey on a field trip. For free. (Aside from the massive cost of tuition, I suppose.) Needless to say, the excursion to the small Italian town of Vatrella, where there wasn’t a tourist or hotel or chain in sight, was just what I needed.
The next two days were spent with my roommate, wandering the streets, napping on the benches by the ocean, and sharing a bottle or two of wine. On the third night, we ate gelato, drank wine, and Facetimed our parents and friends from home for an hour, then bought another bottle and headed out to the ocean. We walked down the pier, sat on the edge, and talked for hours about anything and everything, all while drinking terribly cheap wine out of flimsy plastic cups and laughing at the absurdity of it all. It was in this moment, sitting on the edge of a pier in a small Italian town, with a bottle of wine and a girl who just a few months ago was a complete stranger to me, that I realized exactly what Semester at Sea is about. In a lot of ways, travelling is about seeing things, admiring monuments and appreciating cultures. But in many ways, travelling is about being content with not doing those things. Traveling is teaching me, the girl who had a color coded excel spreadsheet dictating her life, that it’s okay to sit down once in a while and look at the stars and drink wine with your best friend. It’s okay to stress about the future, but it’s also okay to forget about it for a minute. It was that lesson that Kelsey and I made a toast to before going to get food and, you guessed it, another glass of wine at a real restaurant.
Nothing really memorable happened the first day, however I feel inclined to describe an event that occurred the first night. On the first night, I had to be back to the ship by midnight since I had a field lab the next day. Though I was basically sober, I was babysitting a friend who wasn’t. By any means. She insisted on returning to the ship by walking along the water… Which I knew to be impossible since there was a dead end just before hitting the port. But regardless, I humored my new friend and walked along, the ocean on our left and a giant, ancient, Roman wall on our right. The wall was about 16 feet high total, but split in half by a small landing. When we reached the dead end, I refrained from saying “told you so” and turned to head back. After a few steps, I realized that my friend was no longer behind me. I turn to see her scaling the wall. Or, better, attempting to. She failed multiple times, and after a short argument, I agreed to hoist her up the first 8 feet and she agreed to pull me up. She failed at this, too, and I fell hard onto the rocks behind me, which left a bruise on the palm of my hand that made opening doors incredibly painful and led to 5 long days of reminding me how stupid I was. Anyway, she eventually hoisted me up, then we climbed the next 8 feet, and looked down to find the ship’s photographer on the other side of the wall, chuckling over how badly he wanted to be where we were while we desperately wanted to be where he was. Ironic. We had a nice, long chit chat about how far the drop was, and finally he helped me convince my friend that we had to go all the way back. Later that night she tried to climb a fence and it was at this point that I started ignoring her and running towards the ship to avoid dock time. So that, friends, is the story of how I attempted, in vain, to scale a 16 foot ancient Roman wall. I left with a few bruises and some sore limbs, but who else can say they did that? Probably not very many people because it was a very stupid thing to do.
But hey, as much as travelling is about “accepting yourself” and blah blah blah, it’s also about being stupid once in a while, laughing about it, and leaving with a good story.
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