Am I really living in Europe? The land where so many of us think things are better than they are in the States? The land of high fashion, fancy cars, expensive perfume, fabulous cheese, exquisite wine, leather that melts in your hands, chocolate that makes you melt, incredible (unbeatable, amazing, fabulous, perfect, wonderful, I've got to have every pair of) shoes? If all of this is true, I have to wonder why it's so hard to find a Diet Coke in a pizzeria.
I can understand why it wasn't available in Bolivia, Ethiopia and Mali. I accepted it and drank regular Coke. But this is Italy. Wouldn't you think a restaurant in Italy would have Diet Coke? I thought this might be the 'last straw' and I'd finally quit drinking it, but that hasn't happened yet.
My favorite pizza place, I'm embarrassed to admit, is called Punky Reggae Pub. I found it one morning while I was running. My friends had never been there. It's one of the few pizzerias I've found with any character. And I suppose it's probably not Italian character, but it's character nonetheless. Half of the floor is Mexican terracotta tiles. Maybe they're not Mexican (although the owner's favorite city in the world is Mexico City, so who knows?). The other half of the floor is beat up old wood. The tables and chairs are perfectly unmatched. For some reason the sparkly plastic snowflakes hanging from the light fixtures don't bother me. They make me think that I'm really going to like this place in the wintertime.
One wall is covered with snapshots. They're unframed and glued to the wall in one giant collage. Some are in color and some are in black and white. They're pictures of signs and fire hydrants and close-ups of toes and spice jars and coffee cups and bubbles. They're nothing extraordinary, but for some reason I can't stop looking at them and every Friday night I find one that I didn't see the week before.
At first my Friday night trips to the Punky Reggae Pub were an obligation. Soon after, I realized it was my favorite place. The obligation was that I had to consume my share of Diet Coke. It started as a joke. I told my friends that I'd brought a can of Diet Coke with me in my bag. I said I was going to order a regular Coke so that I'd still be paying for something, but then I was going to drink my Diet Coke and take the regular Coke home for someone else. It didn't seem that crazy to me, but they found it quite embarrassing.
Then I decided to tease them a little more. I told them I was going to ask the owner if he'd buy Diet Coke for me if I promised I'd come back often enough to drink it all. They didn't think I'd ask, but I did. And they certainly didn't think the he'd say yes, but he did.
The next Friday night I ordered a Diet Coke and he brought me a Coke Zero. In an effort to continue practicing my new found ability to go with the flow (as long as the flow is kind of going in the right (or should I say MY) direction), I decided NOT to ask why it was Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke. It's not 'The Real Thing' anyway, so what's the difference? I like the can better, too. Diet Coke cans currently have a caricature of a skinny girl, which only reminds me of something that I'm not. Coke Zero, instead, is a stylish black can with a red, green and white design. Instead of the Italian flag, all things red, green and white still make me think first of Christmas. The cans complement the snowflakes.
So, like The Rolling Stones say,"You can't always get what you want." (You're right, I had to check to see if it was really The Rolling Stones.) And I'm not sure what else they say, but it has always sounded to me like "but if you blah blah blah, you get what you need" and the words I've always sung are, "but if you try sometimes, you get what you need." If those aren't the lyrics, I think they should be. We should all try sometimes. But if at first we don't succeed, maybe we don't ALWAYS have to try, try again. My failure to get what I asked for opened the door to something new.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Bridging the Gap
It seems like I always had a million excuses NOT to write the blog, but I didn't think I'd get to the point where I'd find an excuse TO write it. Having a broken knee and a cast that goes from your crotch (is groin a better word?) to your ankle seems like a pretty good reason to start up again. And a prognosis of 29 more days (I've already survived 8) means you can check back in every now and then because I'll probably have a few more things to say.
The accident was scary enough to make me wet my pants. My first thought was that there was blood gushing from between my legs. My stomach and everything felt okay, but I was sure I must have been hit hard enough to cause internal bleeding (but if it was coming out between my legs then it wouldn't really be internal, would it?). Then somehow I calmed down enough to figure out that I'd wet my pants. The good news is, at least it didn't scare the crap out of me. (I suppose that might be better left out, but it made me laugh.)
Here's what happened. I was riding my bike home from an English lesson. I had just crossed the pedestrian only (and bikes, I think) old wooden bridge in Bassano. It's one of my favorite things to do. The pavement of the bridge is cobblestone and marble. The stones are so big and round that it's not easy to walk on them, especially for the beautiful Italian ladies in their beautiful Italian high heels. So, in addition to the cobblestones, they laid nice strips of marble to make the bridge a bit more user-friendly for the Bassanese and the American English teacher on her bike.
When I got to the other side of the bridge the street was crowded. It's a place that's always crowded. It's a meeting point for locals, a photo stop for tourists and the perfect place to stand in the road and have an apertif. It really feels like you're in the middle of a little piazza instead of in an intersection where an occasional car passes through. Unfortunately, I found myself there at the same time as the occasional car. I saw it coming in my direction and I was sure the driver also saw me. It only took a second, and a thud, to realize she didn't see me. That's when I wet my pants.
I untangled myself from my bike and stood up. It was like trying to stand up after a fall on the rope-tow when I was learning how to ski. You don't really know where to put your hands to push yourself up and your legs don't really work because they're attached to your skis. In this case I couldn't put my hands anywhere because I was covered in bike and it seemed like my legs (at least one anyway) didn't really work. You get the idea. All I knew was that I wanted to be up because I thought that if I was up, I wasn't dead.
I looked around and realized I was definitely the center of attention. Not in the way I like to be when I'm riding through a piazza in a mini-skirt licking a gelato. Everyone was staring, but no one was helping. (Then last week when I'd come upon a car accident-- before I closed my eyes and plugged my ears like I do if I think we're about to hit a squirrel--I learned that Italians don't get too close to accidents. I had my eyes opened long enough to see panicked people out of their cars, but no one near the body on the side of the road. According to my friends, which I realize is one very small slice of the way Italians think, no one gets involved for fear of being sued later.) So now I understand why no one was rushing to collect my personal items that had flown from my unbuckled leather bag in my wicker bike basket. The bungee to hold the bag in the basket doesn't really work if the bag isn't closed. The intersection was full of my stuff.
I saw my iPod in it's little felted bag that I bought at the Amnesty International shop in Paris and one of the tubes of my minty lipstuff that I got for Christmas last year and batteries that had blown out of my smashed bike light and a little piece of metal that I actually thought was a piece of the car that I'd broken with my leg and wanted to keep (only to realize later that it was part of my bike). I finally asked someone to collect my stuff and then someone finally asked me if I was okay.
Yes. I was okay. At the moment, I'd decided I was even okay enough to walk back across the bridge to make it easier for my friend to pick me up on the less congested side of town. Wasn't that nice of me? It was a beautiful night for a little walk with a broken knee. I appreciated the marble paths on the bridge even more. I remember looking dreamily
at a faded old building on the river, that I've looked at a hundred times, taken a hundred photos of and only recently found out that one of my students owns it. On the third floor there's a tiny little apartment with a tiny little balcony looking out at the river, the bridge and the 1000 year old town of Bassano. And there's a tiny little chance that I can rent it in January. For a minute I'd forgotten that I'd wet my pants, scuffed up my all-time favorite German shoes, destroyed my bike and was about to embark on the adventure of a journey through the Italian medical system. That's the magic of Italy. It's easy to forget about real life for awhile. But only for awhile.
The accident was scary enough to make me wet my pants. My first thought was that there was blood gushing from between my legs. My stomach and everything felt okay, but I was sure I must have been hit hard enough to cause internal bleeding (but if it was coming out between my legs then it wouldn't really be internal, would it?). Then somehow I calmed down enough to figure out that I'd wet my pants. The good news is, at least it didn't scare the crap out of me. (I suppose that might be better left out, but it made me laugh.)
Here's what happened. I was riding my bike home from an English lesson. I had just crossed the pedestrian only (and bikes, I think) old wooden bridge in Bassano. It's one of my favorite things to do. The pavement of the bridge is cobblestone and marble. The stones are so big and round that it's not easy to walk on them, especially for the beautiful Italian ladies in their beautiful Italian high heels. So, in addition to the cobblestones, they laid nice strips of marble to make the bridge a bit more user-friendly for the Bassanese and the American English teacher on her bike.
When I got to the other side of the bridge the street was crowded. It's a place that's always crowded. It's a meeting point for locals, a photo stop for tourists and the perfect place to stand in the road and have an apertif. It really feels like you're in the middle of a little piazza instead of in an intersection where an occasional car passes through. Unfortunately, I found myself there at the same time as the occasional car. I saw it coming in my direction and I was sure the driver also saw me. It only took a second, and a thud, to realize she didn't see me. That's when I wet my pants.
I untangled myself from my bike and stood up. It was like trying to stand up after a fall on the rope-tow when I was learning how to ski. You don't really know where to put your hands to push yourself up and your legs don't really work because they're attached to your skis. In this case I couldn't put my hands anywhere because I was covered in bike and it seemed like my legs (at least one anyway) didn't really work. You get the idea. All I knew was that I wanted to be up because I thought that if I was up, I wasn't dead.
I looked around and realized I was definitely the center of attention. Not in the way I like to be when I'm riding through a piazza in a mini-skirt licking a gelato. Everyone was staring, but no one was helping. (Then last week when I'd come upon a car accident-- before I closed my eyes and plugged my ears like I do if I think we're about to hit a squirrel--I learned that Italians don't get too close to accidents. I had my eyes opened long enough to see panicked people out of their cars, but no one near the body on the side of the road. According to my friends, which I realize is one very small slice of the way Italians think, no one gets involved for fear of being sued later.) So now I understand why no one was rushing to collect my personal items that had flown from my unbuckled leather bag in my wicker bike basket. The bungee to hold the bag in the basket doesn't really work if the bag isn't closed. The intersection was full of my stuff.
I saw my iPod in it's little felted bag that I bought at the Amnesty International shop in Paris and one of the tubes of my minty lipstuff that I got for Christmas last year and batteries that had blown out of my smashed bike light and a little piece of metal that I actually thought was a piece of the car that I'd broken with my leg and wanted to keep (only to realize later that it was part of my bike). I finally asked someone to collect my stuff and then someone finally asked me if I was okay.
Yes. I was okay. At the moment, I'd decided I was even okay enough to walk back across the bridge to make it easier for my friend to pick me up on the less congested side of town. Wasn't that nice of me? It was a beautiful night for a little walk with a broken knee. I appreciated the marble paths on the bridge even more. I remember looking dreamily
at a faded old building on the river, that I've looked at a hundred times, taken a hundred photos of and only recently found out that one of my students owns it. On the third floor there's a tiny little apartment with a tiny little balcony looking out at the river, the bridge and the 1000 year old town of Bassano. And there's a tiny little chance that I can rent it in January. For a minute I'd forgotten that I'd wet my pants, scuffed up my all-time favorite German shoes, destroyed my bike and was about to embark on the adventure of a journey through the Italian medical system. That's the magic of Italy. It's easy to forget about real life for awhile. But only for awhile.
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