In Capri...
You know it’s been too long that you haven’t been blogging when you log into wordpress and don’t recognize the interface anymore. That is really sad.
As Steven Shaw said last fall, when he was helping me shape my blog during his Food Blogging class I took at the ICI, “What’s going to happen when you get back from Italy? If you only stay for three months, you are giving your blog an expiration date.”
I really didn’t have an answer. And I came back from Italy last month…and I still didn’t have an answer. Except that Italy will always live on in my heart. And that the only reason I wasn’t AS sad coming back home this time, compared to coming back home in 2009 from study abroad, was that I KNOW I’m going back. For a longer period. And I’m going to plan it very well.
But I’m not sure that I’m going to rush back RIGHT away. Because one thing I learned from my three months there was that it’s difficult to stay for a place for just three months. You make friends, you meet people…and then you have to leave them behind. One of the saddest things during my last week in Italy was saying goodbye to everyone: friends, locals, acquaintances. You can meet a lot of people in a small town in three months. And when I said goodbye, they were surprised that I was going away so soon, and my heart broke a little when they said, “Buon viaggio, ma non arrivederci.” Safe travels…not arrivederci, which means literally “see you again.” It’s just too sad to stay in a place–any place–for just three months.
And so, getting back to the title of this post–what will the blog be about when I’m not in Italy? It will be about Italian life in NYC, Italian products, Italian restaurants, Italian people. Because I am moving to New York for the summer at least and I am looking for a conversation partner and I will plan to eat as authentically Italian as possible.
I also have a bunch of photos and travel advice to put out from some of my memorable trips in the last couple of months in Italy, especially Verona and Naples & The Amalfi Coast.
Now that I have the wordpress app on my iphone, I should have no problem updating the blog…
Tomorrow is my move-in day to the apartment I am subletting in NYC. I think I first wanted to move to New York back in high school when I first read this:
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets… I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Here’s to great literature (especially great 20th-century American literature), following your dreams, taking risks, European expats, long languid summers, genius, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
When Nutmeg Met Basil 