<![CDATA[Have Son, Will Travel: <br />Life in the Veneto

<![CDATA[Have Son, Will Travel: <br />Life in the Veneto - Blog]]>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:57:15 -0500Weebly<![CDATA[Curiosity in Motion]]>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:00:54 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/09/curiosity-in-motion.html

My son, as I may have mentioned before, is I’m sure a lot like other boys his age (nearly 12) in that he likes to spend as much time as possible doing two things: playing soccer (insert sport of choice) and playing with his PS3 or computer games. Often trying to get him to do anything other than these things involves a form of very slow Chinese water torture (to be endured by me, not him). So it is with some degree of delight that this week I observed that Luc likes to get into the weightiest of topics at the strangest of times – always when we are biking in city streets, usually through challenging traffic, on the way to his soccer practice, which is at least 20 minutes each way.

On the way to practice the other day he posed the question: “Mom, what’s it like to be a woman?” which he has admittedly asked before. But after my initial glib response of “I don’t know because I’ve never been anything else,” he kept pressing for details. Now I know a window when I see one! I will certainly not ever miss the chance to help him grow into the progressive, aware, strong, and good man that I know he will become. So, this led to a discussion of what women’s place has historically been in the world and is today, in some places still.

I have to say it all came as quite a shock to him and in his lovely innocence he couldn’t begin to understand why a woman wouldn’t always have the same rights as a man, why they might get paid less for the same job, or why I have to be more careful going home at night by myself than he will ever have to as a grown man.

On the way back from practice the question was “Mom, what happens when we die?” which sparked a discussion on religion, what some people believe happens when you die, with each of us pitching our own pet theories on what awaits us all eventually, all the while dodging Italian drivers and navigating roundabouts.

I can’t quite figure out this predilection of his for heavy-duty conversations while in motion. It has happened before, sometimes in cars too, anything involving wheels apparently. But all I know is that his curiosity is alive and well and I’ll go with the probably still contrarian theory that gaming makes you smarter!

Check out these great TED talks on gaming:
Gabe Zichermann – How Games Make Kids Smarter
Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World

]]><![CDATA[Italy Shmitaly]]>Sat, 15 Sep 2012 08:58:58 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/09/italy-shmitaly.html

Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza

Who would have thought having a visa to live in Italy and trying to do everything by the book could be so time consuming and difficult? No wonder there is still a thriving black market and many people live under the radar. Every day it seems like there is a new government office to visit and some degree of bureaucratic labyrinth to navigate.

This week was no exception though we’ve been back here a month and a half now. Italy seems to operate in a continual catch-22 house of mirrors basis. Thing A can’t be accomplished until Thing B can be, which requires first, the completion of Thing A and let’s not forget the signing and stamping of at least 50 sheets of paper along the way.

My head literally hurts from trying to understand and be understood for hours a day.

The boy started full time Italian school this week and believe me, his head is hurting too. It’s middle school and the academics are pretty intense. There’s certainly no way he can keep up yet as his Italian is nowhere near fluent. We are going to have to hit the both the Italian and English books at home in order for him to not fall too far behind his grade level.

But on the other side of things, immersion is really the best way to learn and even though it can be frustrating and exhausting, it’s pretty cool to feel a foreign language just tumbling out of your mouth. As I think Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in "Eat Pray Love", there is no reason to learn Italian other than for the sheer beauty and appreciation of the language. And since it has always been my dream to be fluent in other languages, I might, be stint of sheer necessity, be on my way to realizing that!

]]><![CDATA[Late Summer Carnival in Vicenza]]>Sat, 08 Sep 2012 15:01:50 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/09/late-summer-carnival-in-vicenza.html

]]><![CDATA[Mega Gelato]]>Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:37:14 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/08/mega-gelato.html

Oh, why or why, does it have to be so good? Italy, are you just out to get me? I should seriously get a medal for the amount of discipline I exercise (is there a calorie burn in that?) on a daily basis as I walk past Mega Gelato and somehow manage not to stop in for a few scoops every time.

This little piece of heaven on the north side of Vicenza is run by the husband-wife team of Stefano and Jessica and they daily create such mouthwatering offerings as Ricotta & Fig, Crema Durando (orange cream & chocolate chunks), Menta (mint that taste like mint buttercreams melting in your mouth), or any of their insane variations involving nutella, coffee, and Baci chocolate, to name a few.

The list goes on and it is all made with incredibly fresh ingredients, no preservatives or artificial flavors, and using local fruit. This past spring, when we had to go back to the States for a couple of months, we stopped by to say goodbye and order a final ice cream. They were clearly sad to see us go. I actually hadn't realized, as they pointed out, that we had been in to see them and, you know, sample a few flavors, almost every day for the past 5 months. Yikes! Bad mother alert?? Nah! I decided we earned it. We bike and walk everywhere we have to go. Anyway, good customers get preferential leaving treatment. I'm going to have to leave more often. ;)

]]><![CDATA[Bookends of the Day: Coffee and Wine in Italy]]>Sat, 25 Aug 2012 19:16:02 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/08/bookends-of-the-day-coffee-and-wine-in-italy.html

un cafe lungo macchiato caldo nella tazza grande

I’m sure I’m not alone when I suggest that a day seems somehow incomplete without a cup of strong coffee in the morning, rounded out by a glass of red wine in the evening. Thank God I’m living in Italy where both are cheap and plentiful. As a writer on a budget, this seriously enhances my quality of life.

As many words as Eskimos have for snow, there are coffee drinks in Italy. OK, well maybe not quite as many, but more than you’d think. And none of the Starbucks variety, thankfully. I like my Starbucks back at home as much as the next person but there really is no place for it here – for good reason.

At the bar, which here means a café where you can get a little something to eat, wine, cocktails or coffee, it’s easy to feel a bit intimidated sauntering up to the serious-coffee-drinking marble counter where everyone stands to have a quick cup, before being on their way. I admit, I am a very experienced traveler, I even speak Italian, but I stuck to my safe and easy cappuccino for a long time, with the occasional wild and crazy café (espresso, with 2 sugars, Italian style) thrown in. Because frankly, there’s never a convenient sign to tell you all the different coffee drinks available (because everyone already knows) and let’s be honest, no one ever likes to look like they don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to ordering a cup of coffee.

1 litre of Malbech in a 2 litre bottle (and yes, I only bought 1!)

Chiara, my Italian teacher, recently gave me a little lesson in coffee drinking in Italy that I am eternally grateful for, although my addiction might get even worse. I’m not going to recreate a coffee drinking list that has already been done many times on other sites. In fact, this site has the best list I found with nifty photos too: www.msadventuresinitaly.com. But I will just say that my coffee of choice from now on is a Café Lungo Macchiato Caldo in tazza grande, which basically translates to a long espresso (not a double, long means the water just passes through the grinds longer), with a bit of hot milk in a big cup. Divine.

Moving on to the other bookend of the day, wine, you can of course choose from endless bottles of wonderful Italian wine, based on region and grape, at your local Enoteca or supermarket. But even there, it can get expensive for a good bottle of wine and it’s often hard to decipher whether what you’re buying might actually turn out to be any good or not. I have wasted too much money on mediocre bottles of wine, even here in Italy.

However, I recently discovered a shop that sells Vino Sfuso, which is basically wine pumped from the spigot into bring-your- own-jug, or bottle, right around the corner from where I live. Many locals buy their wine this way, as well as restaurant and bar owners who buy it and serve it as the house wine. It’s not the best in the world, but eminently drinkable and priced at an average of €1.50 per litre, it’s astonishingly cheap. And there is just something just so other wordly, especially for Americans or Brits, about taking your own bottle down to the shop and filling it up with wine. Potentially dangerous, but fun! And for those on a budget (other than writers), you cannot go wrong.

Cin cin!

]]><![CDATA[The Compass Poet: Part II]]>Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:44:13 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/08/the-compass-poet-part-ii.html

I recently discovered an essay my mother wrote for an anthology in the early 1980’s about the challenges of balancing late motherhood (I was born when she was 50, after having had three sons in her 30’s and thinking all childbearing was behind her), and what she viewed as both her wifely duties and civic commitments. The local anti-nuclear and feminist groups counted on her to lead the next march or campaign, or host the monthly potluck dinner. She had a great dedication to community activism but at times, felt trapped by responsibilities and either resented them or her own inability to say no to others, and yes to her writing.

Jean was the kind of woman that men, women and children easily fell in love with. She had an infectious charm and she epitomized the adage of ageing gracefully. She was talented at many things – cooking, sewing, organizing people into action, writing – which perhaps made it harder for her to focus on one thing as our culture so often wants us to do. With an innate sensuality, a mane of white hair and a throaty laugh that belied her 5’3” frame, she was everyone’s savior but her own. Our Thanksgiving dinner table invariably included an assortment of lonely hearts and stray souls. She came from a generation where the idea of putting your own needs before others was unheard of. Perhaps not that much has changed for many women.

Jean fiercely embraced the women’s movement when it came along, sensing that here finally was the rational and obvious explanation for why she hadn’t yet become fully realized as the writer she truly was. I accepted this dogma, as did the rest of us, my father albeit grudgingly. He was not a huge fan of her nights spent at women’s group meetings or the seemingly endless array of sisters who flocked to Jean’s apron strings for advice and mentorship. Most people saw her as a fascinating, gregarious and smart woman who had lived an interesting and exotic life setting up households in many foreign lands with my father whose work as a hydro-geologist took the family all over the world. However, She shrugged off her domestic and civic accomplishments, as proud as she was of her four children. As the mother of a daughter she had always longed for and thought she’d never have, she vacillated between adoring love and intense criticality, the latter, I came to conclude years later, belied her own inner poltergeists and unfulfilled creative potential.

It has been 20 years, nearly to the day, since her death at the age of 77 to pancreatic cancer. Perhaps because I am now in mid-life and still wrestling with my own self-actualization as a writer, I see her life somewhat differently than I used to. I am less willing to accept the idea that she was not able to accomplish what she had wanted to as a writer solely because she was caught up in the confines of family and societal expectations, but because, as Stephen Pressfield, author of The War of Art contends, she was one of the many victims that Resistance lays claim to. He writes, “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” The truth is you don’t need to be born in the wrong generation to have the deck stacked against you as a female artist. Nevertheless, it is all too easy to let life’s commitments win in the battle to do any kind of creative work on a regular, sustainable basis.

As any parent, or anybody with a life, will know, it is far too easy to let life’s other requirements take precedence. I know all about the routines writers are supposed to have bar none, but truth be told, I suck at getting up at 5am for regular every day butt-in-the-chair writing time. Or staying up late at the other end of the day for that matter. I am currently working on becoming a Writer-on-the-Fly. As a WOTF I will jot down snippets, notes and ideas whenever and wherever I am and attempt to knit them together into whole essays, novels and screenplays. It seems to be my only option because I will not let Resistance win. Had my mother been formally introduced to Resistance 20 odd years ago she might have rallied and found within her a new well of creativity to draw from. Or maybe not.

My mother might not have rallied to her writing again, but she went out like a lumberjack swinging, pissed as hell that she found herself dying when she felt like she had so much living yet to do. And I have delighted in the mysterious irony of one of Jean’s poems finding its way onto the back of a compass, even if it is for sale on Ebay or being haggled over in a distant souk. Somehow not knowing how it really got there seems so in keeping with the poem itself, and with her spirit. We all need a little mystery in our lives and when it turns up so unexpectedly, it is that much richer. There is also something so right in her words finding private little audiences in pockets around the world, as the holder of each compass for a moment ponders perhaps the direction of their lives or simply, which way north is. I picture her soul alighting upon the shoulder of each person who happens onto this compass with her poem, and Jean whispering in their ear: “Live your unlived life. Live it now.”

]]><![CDATA[The Compass Poet: Part I]]>Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:02:40 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/08/the-compass-poet-part-i.html

You can make out the words of her poem in this photo of the 'antique' compass.

I have never owned a compass, and I definitely don’t have a GPS, as I can usually rely on my innate sense of direction. Until recently when I came into possession of an antique compass unlike any other: it has a poem written by my late mother, a little known poet, engraved on the back of it. Only it was not a family heirloom passed down to me and no one in my family has any idea how the poem got there. And I bought it on Ebay. The story goes like this:

My oldest brother, Jon, is a sculptor, a builder of large-scale stainless steel, geometric shapes that stand stalwart and otherworldly in parks and public spaces around the globe. One in particular is more earthbound and is called, funnily enough, “Compass.” It is made of mirror polished stainless steel tubes with four different blocks of Wisconsin granite at each node. He tells me it was inspired in part by an ancient Chinese jade disc called “bi,” symbolizing unity, peace, and wholeness of heaven and earth. It was also inspired by the Lakota Sioux story of the discovery of the four directions of the compass, each direction designated by a large stone. The sculpture sits on a ridge in Milwaukee overlooking Brady Street Bridge and Lake Michigan.

On the piece Jon engraved a poem by our mother, Jean Barlow Hudson:

Inner and Outer Time
Inner time is limitless – from past lives
I can no longer remember, only feel.
Time flows,
And around me a continuum
Moves and swirls, engulfing me,
And moves majestically beyond
My inner sight or imagination.
This time is immense, a celestial sphere.
Yet it does not forget me, does not neglect me,
It embraces me. I am part of its verity.
It is part of mine.
My life flows, it flows.

Recently, Jon received an email from a stranger in Cambridge, England who introduced herself saying that she had been researching the author of an unknown poem she had found on the back of an antique compass in a market stall in Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. Her Google search led to the discovery that the poem was written by my mother and engraved on Jon’s sculpture in Milwaukee. It seems a guy in Milwaukee with a blog happened on the sculpture, liked her poem, and posted it on his site, crediting her as the author, which led to the woman in Cambridge finding my brother.

The mystery deepens. How did our late mother’s poem, appearing only so far as we know in our self-published family volume of a lifetime of her poetry years ago, end up on a seemingly antique compass in a marketplace in Zanzibar? It occurred to us that maybe she didn’t write the poem. It was easy to imagine a few favorite lines transcribed from some unknown poet getting shuffled in with her own papers. But my second brother, Tom, the editor, dug through original manuscripts to find an old type written copy from the 1940’s with her name on it. Tom was able to search digital catalogs to see if the poem turned up being credited to another author and it did not. Reassured at least that the poem had indeed been written by Jean, we set about to unravel the next unknown: how did it end up on a compass watch in Zanzibar?

We didn’t have to dig too far to discover that the exact same compass, as described by our lady in Cambridge, was for sale on Ebay. It was being sold from Ireland, Great Britain and Australia, all with my mother’s poem inscribed on the back of it. She would have felt more well read than in all her years of trying to get her work published. The ‘antique’ was actually a replica, now manufactured en masse by a company in India, of a Dolland watch, the esteemed London watchmaker founded in the 18th century. The Google search turned up further references to her poem, mostly from owners of the same watch who were curious to know the identity of the poem’s author. One poetry site suggested to an inquirer that that it might have been written by T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost. I can hear my mother chortling from the grave at the assigning of her work to these male luminaries of the page.

Fame and renown eluded my mother in her lifetime as a poet and novelist. She spent many years raising four children but started focusing more seriously on writing later in life. At the age of 63, she finally published her first novel, “Rivers of Time”, which was inspired by her years of living in Africa in the 1960’s and was an epic, exotic tale of international romance and self-discovery. The publisher sniffed romance, saw an older female author, and slapped a Harlequin-like cover on the book, thereby nearly ensuring a brief and only printing. It did however make the rounds of Hollywood at the time where the likes of Billy Dee Williams and Richard Gere considered buying the film rights. But the hubbub faded as fast as it crested and she went back to her typewriter, plotting out her next novel. She wrote two more that never found publication. The seemingly endless rejections wore her down and by the time I reached college she had given up and found a new vocation: Mayor of the village. In her reign as the first woman Mayor of our town she presided over traffic court, navigated small town inter-departmental politicking, purchased a Charter Arms .38 for protection and, her favorite part of the job, married couples.

Part II coming soon...

]]><![CDATA[Marseille, Rosé, and Fish Pedicures]]>Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:20:15 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/08/marseille-ros-and-fish-pedicures.html

The last few days I found myself in Marseille, France. No, I didn’t happen to wake up there after having my apertivo spiked at an Italian bar, I assure you. It was a planned detour, by train on the way back to Italy, after having delivered my son for a 2-week holiday with his father in the UK.

I was lured by the southern Mediterranean delights as laid out by my fellow traveler and blogger Tanja Bulatovic, enthusiastic advocate for the unsung arias of this notorious port city. The French government has been pumping money into Marseille’s regeneration as the city was chosen as the “European Capital of Culture” for 2013. Consequently, the famous Vieux Port is being dug up and a wide pedestrian plaza installed and facelift construction seems to be happening everywhere.

The grittiness of the city is still apparent but along with it comes an eclectic, diverse and funky vibe, no doubt a result of the mix of Arab, African, and French cultures co-existing. It reminded me a bit of New York in the 1980’s and early 90’s, before it was sanitized by the arrival of megastores like Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Gap, and Disney. And when there was the throb of anything can happen here and it was still a livable home for artists, actors, and the creative classes that could afford to live within the city limits. That said, Marseille has of course not completed escaped McDonalds and Starbucks, but here can still buy an apartment near the center of things for €100,000. If the government has its way, next year will change all that – or not.

I walked extensively around the Vieux Port, into the African market area, and the Panier, or painter’s, district with its hilly, narrow and windy streets full of craft and local artisan shops. I stopped in at the Moment Fish Spa for a ‘fish pedicure’, a slightly bizarre experience I’d always wanted to try. First, I had to wash my feet and legs thoroughly before I went to sit on a comfortable settee and settled my lower legs into a blue lit tank while dozens of Garra Rufa fish swarmed and began eating the dead skin off my feet. I resisted the first impulse to shriek loudly and kick the squirmy things off of me, and instead closed my eyes and tried to settle into the oddly tickling sensation of the fish nibbling. 15 minutes and 15 euros later my time was up and my feet were presumably softer and smoother. I’m slightly dubious though. The fish seemed to spend an awful lot of time feeding on the tops of my feet and not the heels or bottom that I wanted to kindly point them to as in need of much more attention.

I stayed at the low budget chain, Hotel B&B, which I learned had just built this brand new outpost within a 10 minute walk from the port. It was quite a deal and well worth it. Gleaming, modern rooms with air conditioning that actually worked and free wi-fi throughout the hotel, all for the online price of €39 a night. The rooms aren’t huge and there is nary a minibar in sight, but with good beds, down pillows, and helpful staff, I was not complaining.

I had really wanted to sample the famed Bouillabaisse while there, but I was informed it was more of a winter dish and at about €40 a pop, beyond my budget for this trip. I did manage to have a divine Salade de la Mer for lunch one day which consisted of smoked salmon, shrimp, octopus, sautéed fennel and green beans on a mixed of mixed greens, finished with a vinaigrette dressing. Heaven.

Best of all really was experiencing the wonderful French and Serbo-Australian hospitality of my friend Tanja and her husband. Copious amounts of dry rose on ice, the preferred Marseillaise summer drink, salads, bread, and cheeses were consumed. One evening we were joined by their friends Roger and Cathy, An Australian and French husband-wife team owner of an image bank that includes Roger’s incredible aquatic artwork. He is a well known painter of marine life in Australia, literally spending most of his life underwater. Lively discussions took place all evening as the bottles of rose accumulated. They vacillated from French to English and back again. I at least was able to keep up with my half of it.

Two days was hardly enough time to dig deep into what Marseille has to offer but I loved what I did find and plan to go back. And with swimming in the sea an option until late October and quick boat trips available to the outlying islands, I’m hoping that will be sooner than later. And my son L will no doubt be anxious to check out the Go-Karting, Ziplining, and kayaking available very near Marseille.

If you go:

Hotel B&B
Marseille Tourism Office
Moment Fish Spa
Marseille 2013
Tanja Bulatovic

]]><![CDATA[At the Pool...]]>Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:47:26 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/08/at-the-pool.html

We are back in Italy after a 3 month hiatus in the US to obtain my work visa. The Italian is rusty but words keep popping up that I'd forgotten I knew, so all is not lost. Nothing like try to learn a language to stretch brain muscles you never knew you had. Luc and I have spent the last several afternoons at Vicenza's Parco Aquatico. It is baking hot and there is really nothing else to do but hole up inside until it's time to make a beeline for the pool. Thank God there is one! In this case, quite a deluxe public version that makes our beloved local village pool in Ohio look like a neglected and distant aquatic cousin.

The Parco Aquatico has two ginormous twirly slides, a sculplturesque pool with fountains with underwater 'tanning beds' -- places to recline that I can only suppose are meant to increase your tan, a main pool with a huge floaty 'mountain' that kids can climb with ropes or handholds and slide down the front. The pool is so big there are always two lanes roped off for lap swimming cross the width of it, which is the same as the length of most pools I've been in.

Going to the pool here seems to be a an intergenerational affair as it is populated by people of all ages. The grounds are strewn with reclining chairs, umbrellas, a beach volleyball section, grassy area for pick-up soccer/football, a bar/cafe where you can order anything from lunch to a cocktail or cappucino, little kids play area and a ping pong table.

I was struck today by the number of old folks having long and rousing card games around tables, all of them as brown as nuts from no fear of sun worshipping. Then there are the young couples, their bodies entangled around each other's on the recliners, kids, teenagers, the 30's and 40's set, sans kids, you name it, all seem to be here. I would however be remiss not to add that visiting an Italian pool, or beach no doubt, is not for the faint of heart or overly body conscious. Not that everyone is a size 2 but they seem to wear it well, whatever their size, from flat brown to rounded bellies, all wearing the requisite bikinis, there is an astonishing amount of relative buffness. The surgeon's knife could play a part, but nevertheless one has to appreciate a culture where even much older women refuse to stop wearing bikinis and looking sexy despite skin and bodies that might be slowly losing ground to the battle with gravity.

There are no rest periods where all the kids are cleared out of the pool by the whistle for a 15 minute break but the poor lifeguards must patrol the sides of the pool on foot, strutting their Adonis and Athena-like frames and barking sharp orders when anyone breaks a pool rule. We have already been reprimanded a couple of times, not surprising given we have no real idea what the rules are -- they're certainly not posted anywhere. For Lucas it was for jumping off the side of the floaty mountain rather than sliding down the front, and for me it was for wearing training fins while swimming laps.

"Perche?" I asked.
"Because those are the rules of the pool," the guard answered, not very helpfully, in Italian.

But regardless, each outing is a much needed refreshing experience as the water is always just the right amount of cold in contrast to the intense dry heat of the air. Then we bike the mile home and practice our tightly orchestrated regime to get the bikes through the gate, down the path, get the door unlocked and get inside before being bitten by a thousand tiny mosquitoes that seem to live just in this green, shady corridor and that clearly lie in hungry wait for us. Then we are -- finally - home, safe in our cool top floor cocoon, until the next outing.

]]><![CDATA[On Writing and Leaving]]>Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:43:57 GMThttp://www.havesonwilltravel.com/1/post/2012/03/on-writing-and-leaving.html

With less than a week of living in Italy to go, I will leave you with some parting thoughts. While living here has been both wonderful and difficult in many ways; it is not a cliche to say that it is a place of stunning beauty that time almost forgot and also a place where the business of day to day living and working can be made pretty damn hard. But it has, I can say, also been a very good place to get a lot of writing done. I have finished one screenplay, started another, and am working on a young adult novel. And I cannot close this chapter on Italy without acknowledging that our time here would never have been possible without the incredible generosity and hospitality of my friend, Marta, and her family.

Of course it is not just the inspiring environs, but keeping to a writing schedule that has been key. However, while sitting in my usual coffee bar this morning, I realized that one of the other main reasons is that I can so easily tune out all the Italian I hear around me. There are no English conversations to distract me, the Italian melts into melodious white noise that I cease to hear after a while. And there is also the fact, that because I am pretty obviously a foreigner, a tourist, it gives me a free pass to sit alone in any café, bar, or restaurant, while writing and observing away. I just don't seem to become self-conscious about it the way I would if I were back home.

I have my usual haunts around town by now that I frequent. The staff all know me and greet me like a regular. I am probably thought of as that lonely-woman-with-no-friends who comes in and scribbles in a notebook for hours. All right, I have to confess, when I have had friends come for a visit, I do take them back to these places, with no doubt some subtext of wanting the staff to see that I’m really not so strange after all, I truly am a well adjusted, somewhat normal human being!

The other reason it has been good for my writing is that free, or even paid, wireless service in public places in Italy is still relatively uncommon, at least in this town. All the months I’ve been here I have not seen one – not one – person sitting in a café with a laptop. We are not in Starbucks territory. So this means I must leave the greatest distraction – the Internet at home. A beautiful thing.

On the subject of writing, whenever I hit the wall and find myself stuck, which is often enough, I always go back to the most amazing book I’ve ever read that deals with any act of creativity: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. If you aim to compose a song, build a house, or start a business, and get stuck or have any self-doubts, read this book. It always manages to give me hope that maybe, just maybe, if I keep showing up every morning, like punching in at the factory, something good will eventually come of my efforts.

I really didn’t know, when we left home last August, how long this venture would last. I’m amazed and pleased that we have nearly reached 8-months of European living. Unfortunately, we won’t make it to Spain this trip, but I have promised L that will be our next destination. And with his new background in Italian, picking up Spanish shouldn’t be too hard. L came home from school the other day and said “I love my school and my friends there!” I couldn’t believe my ears. An all-Italian, Catholic school. Who could have guessed this would be a good experience for him? I so wish I didn’t have to take him out before the end of the year, but unfortunately the laws of tourist visas are bigger than us. But he has made some very good friends and we will be back.

Now, it is on to London for a brief stop, and then we are Midwest Bound. It will be good to be on home ground for awhile and recharge our batteries with friends, family, and a bit of small town American living. And so it is that now I will put this blog to rest for a while. I imagine it will be reborn eventually, in perhaps a different form. I will spare you any caterpillar to butterfly analogies right about now. The reality is much more prosaic. The months ahead will hold many changes for my superboy traveler and I, and now is the time for me to focus on the tasks ahead: Writing. Living. Work.

Thank you for reading!
(L to R: my morning perch; taming the beast, otherwise known as Ralph; late afternoon in downtown Vicenza; a lizard).

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